This Week’s Industry News

Compiled By Rocket Clicks Staff

The (Pretty Much) Undeletable Evercookie

The evercookie API is the perfect caricature of the motto its developer, Samy Kamkar, lives by: “Think bad, do good.”

The evercookie places a virtually undeletable cookie in your browser that stores information eight separate ways, and can even transfer to other browsers on the same system. But Kamkar’s ulterior motive behind this “virus” cookie is to show how browser security is far behind privacy invaders.

“I hope evercookie simply demonstrates to people what types of methods are being employed to track them and to decide whether or not they want to prevent those methods,” he said. “evercookie took less than a day to create for me as a security hobbyist, so I can only imagine the technology that funded developers are producing.”

Kamkar also said he isn’t tracking anyone personally, and evercookie is more a way to prove his point than violate privacy. If you’re interested in downloading it, visit Kamkar’s site and enjoy the evercookie for the rest of your computer’s life.

Source: BoingBoing

Google Wins YouTube Copyright Case In Spain

Last Thursday, a Spanish federal court ruled that the policing of copyright infringing videos on YouTube (owned by Google) is the responsibility of the copyright owner. This is a judgment that mirrored a United State court decision earlier this year, after a three year fight between Google and Viacom.

This protection in the U.S. was made possible by a “safe harbor” clause in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which protects service providers from copyright violations as long as they deal with the infringement accordingly when it is brought to their attention.

Source: CNN Business

Google Will Distribute Mobile Devices To Compete In Check-In Market

In an effort to compete with location-based services like Foursquare and Facebook Places, Google is poised to roll out a device that allows customers to check in at various small businesses, and potentially use Google Checkout to purchase items at these places.

Google is set to distribute 8 million of these devices to small businesses around the country for free, but it’s possible that they will start charging once the service becomes popular.

Source: Search Engine Journal

Google TV Users Will See Google Ads In Search Results

Although Google is holding off on this for a year, the technology giant announced it will be selling ad space in Google TV search results as consumers look for what they want to watch. It’s a safe bet that more than just keyword matching will go into which ads are shown to which viewers.

Source: Search Engine Land

Bing Adds Suggested Tweeps To Follow In Social Search Results

Bing Social Search now includes a list on the right hand side of the page consisting of people or organization accounts you may be interested in following on Twitter, based on your search query.

To some extent, the program works better than Twitter’s own search interface, but it remains somewhat of a work in progress with larger scale queries, as searches for Google and Twitter bring up affiliated or branch accounts instead of the company’s main account page.

Source: Search Engine Land

Bing Wants To Reward You For Searching!

Haven’t you ever wished you could be rewarded monetarily or with material goods for using a search engine? With Bing Rewards, the company is now offering users the opportunity to earn redeemable credits for searching through Bing.

From Bing’s Community Blog:
“Bing Rewards is a great way to get rewarded for doing what you love to do online—searching, exploring, and discovering. And while you can redeem credits for cool stuff, you can also use your earned credits to give back – allowing you to donate your credits to education charities.”

Just by signing up and using Bing, you have the opportunity to win an Xbox, Zune, various gift cards, or the chance to donate money to Teach For America and DonorsChoose.org. This is definitely an interesting move by Bing, but nonetheless a smart one based off the fact that Bing Rewards costs virtually nothing (thank you tax write offs!) compared to the return on potential users.

Source: Bing Community Blog

Yahoo! Search Suggestions Become A Little More Localized

An enhanced Yahoo! Search Assist is now making search suggestions, as you type your query, based off of your geographical location. For example, if you live in Pittsburgh and type “port au” one of the top suggestions becomes “Pittsburgh port authority.”

Source: Yahoo! Search Blog

It’s OK…I’ve Got A License To Blog

Apparently, if you are a Saudi Arabian citizen and wish to blog, you need to obtain a license from the government to do so. The reasoning behind this move by the Saudi Information and Culture Ministry is that it will supposedly reduce libel and defamation. The move is absolutely, 100% completely NOT intended to restrict the freedom of speech, according to the agency.

I think Saudi Arabia’s history of Internet censorship speaks for itself on this issue.

Source: Tech Crunch

Notable Commentary

For The Tech-Geek In All Of Us

Google Instant Analysis Two Weeks Into Its Existence

Remember when people were proclaiming the death of SEO as we know it like doomsday “prophets” wearing cardboard signs? Well there have been a few changes in search trends, but certainly not enough to press the SEO panic button. This SEOMoz post has some good analysis on how Google Instant has changed things.

Analysis By: Rand Fishkin, SEOMoz

Personal Shopping With A Mobile Phone

People are going to their phones to shop, but many retailers still don’t have a mobile online presence. Just a little food for thought.

Analysis By: Heidi Spector, Google Retail Blog

Google Is Saving $100 Million With The Launch Of Instant

There’s talk on Search Engine Land that Google Instant was Google’s marketing response to Bing’s $100 million advertising campaign. Google was able to use the change to get massive amounts of press coverage, without having to spend a cent on advertising. The analysis goes into how Instant was a reaction to Bing’s branding of a “decision engine” that was designed to find better information for searchers faster. The article concludes with a little bit about the affect of Instant on PPC, but it’s so short that it really doesn’t muster a separate entry in the PPC area.

Analysis By: Matt Van Wagner, Search Engine Land

Identity Management Through Social Networks

Identity management through social networks is a rapidly rising trend, and this post from Read Write Web explains this growing interest fairly well and why businesses see social networks as a great resource.

Analysis By: Alex Williams, Read Write Web