Industry News

Search Engine Land’s SMX Social Media Marketing is just a month away, coming to Las Vegas on Dec. 5 & 6. Our closing keynote features Vic Gundotra, Senior Vice President of Engineering for Google+.

Vic oversees all of Google’s social efforts, and he’ll be bringing conference attendees up-to-speed on all the progress that Google+ has made over the past year plus perhaps give some hints on what’s next with the service.

You won’t want to miss the keynote, which happens on Dec. 6. Nor will...

Who’s winning in today’s US presidential election between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney? Who’s ahead for the many House of Representatives and US Senate seats that are up for grabs? Who won in the many state and local elections happening? The major search engines of Google, Bing and Yahoo have you covered with answers.

Bing

At Bing, a search for “election results” will bring up a small box with the latest in the presidential race:



Clicking on the main “Presidential election...

Did you feel it yesterday? Some did, a slight shaking in the Google results. Yes, it was real. Google’s confirmed to us that a Panda Update happened yesterday.

Google said that worldwide, the update will impact about 0.4% of queries that a regular user might notice. For those searching in the United States in English, the percentage is higher. 1.1%, Google says.

This marks the 21st confirmed Panda Update by Google and stays in keeping with the roughly 4-6 week release schedule. Here are...

It’s Election Day in the United States, and Google is marking the occasion with a special ballot box logo. It’s more than a pretty picture, however. The logo also helps people find their local polling place.

Click on the logo, and you’ll get a prompt to enter your address and find your voting place: That, in turn, leads to the special Google elections page where your voting place will be shown, along with other information that’s accessible:   Related Articles Google Launches US Election...

Do a search for “Obama,” and you might find your subsequent queries for things like “medicare” seemingly personalized based on your initial Obama search. Do the same for Romney, it is doesn’t happen. Is Google biased toward Obama, as some are now writing? No. Is it the “filter bubble” of personalization out of control? Perhaps not. In fact, it doesn’t even appear to be personalization at all.

The news of how searching for Obama can influence your subsequent search results came out in a Wall...

Not happy with just running an interactive Halloween logo today, Google also has an “easter egg” surprise. Searches for some horror movies bring up sleeping bats that fly away with a click.

For example, here’s what appears in a search for “Nightmare On Elm Street,” over the knowledge graph box about the movie: Click on the bats, and they fly away:



These also appear for other films like “The Shining,” “Halloween 1978″ and Aliens, as you can see below:

 Here’s a video of the bats...