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Nikki Catsouras has achieved Internet immortality. She was an 18-year-old college freshman living in California with her parents and two sisters in 2006.

Nikki Catsouras loved to shoot videos on her camera, according to ABC News, and ironically, it a camera would memorialize Nikki’s life and death as a gruesome and macabre joke on the Internet.

Photos of Nikki Catsouras in death are now the top search results in Google. Even Wikipedia has a page dedicated to the gory car crash.

Search engines, in our view, are neither good nor evil. How people use search engines determines whether the engines benefit society.

So when the Nikki Catsouras story broke today, we weren’t surprised. It’s not the first time MySpace or other social media sites have been caught up in seamy stories.

She borrowed the keys to her father’s Porsche 911 Carrera, a car that goes zero to 60 miles an hour in less than five seconds. She had never driven the Porsche before.

According to state highway patrol reports, at approximately 1:45 p.m. last Halloween, Nikki Catsouras was traveling 100 mph on State Route 241, near Lake Forest, Calif., when she clipped another car and lost control, going across lanes over the median and slamming into a concrete tollbooth. She was killed instantly.

“Her head was more or less cut in two and sort of cleaved and then smashed. It’s nothing that anyone should ever have to see,” said Michael Fertik, the founder of ReputationDefender, a company that helps clients such as the Catsouras family remove items from the Internet. The Catsouras family was told they should never see the photos from the scene of the horrendous accident.

As the Catsouras family was grieving for their daughter, the accident scene photos showing Nikki’s mutilated body suddenly appeared on the Internet.

A fake MySpace page was created, which at first looked like a tribute to Catsouras but also led to the horrific photos.

The pictures, taken by California Highway Patrol (CHiPs) officers and e-mailed outside the department, became so prevalent that Lesli Catsouras stopped checking her e-mail. Nikki’s younger sisters were forbidden to use the Internet, and 16-year-old Danielle was taken out of school to be home schooled for fear her peers might confront her with the photos.

A lawsuit against the California Highway Patrol for allegedly releasing the accident scene pictures has been filed by the parents of Nikki Catsouras.

Of course, not only search engines and the Internet spread stories like this one. ABC News has a Primetime special on the Nikki Catsouras story tonight.

Google search results photos and images after the jump:

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Local.com has announced a new advertising partnership with White Directory Publishers, a division of Hearst Holdings. Through the agreement, Local.com will be able to sell its online display advertising inventory to White Directory’s national sales channel. The ads will appear on Local.com as well as White Directory Publisher’s Talkingphonebook.com and Area-wide.com sites.

“This partnership allows Local.com to reach out to large businesses with regional presence through a leading feet-on-the-street sales force,” said Peter Hutto, Local.com vice president, business development and sales. “This partnership will give Local.com better reach into the small business market, and provide White Directory with a large online distribution channel for their advertisers.”

“This is a tremendous opportunity for national advertisers to extend their reach to local consumers on one of the leading local search sites that consistently ranks in the Top 100 in traffic generated,” said David Bowling, director of national sales for White Directory Publishers. “This is an innovative approach to the sales and targeting of display ads to local consumers by national advertisers with local points of presence.”

Related Reading:
Local.com Renews With Yahoo As Search Partner
Local.com to Distribute Superpages Ads
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Hearst to Acquire Social Shopping Site Kaboodle

Google has a slew of announcements about its advertising products, including AdSense, AdWords, and DoubleClick.

First up, AdSense is no longer accepting referrals. They’re advising users to remove the code from their sites, but to save the data collected through the referrals. Meanwhile, AdWords is phasing out the AdWords Pay-Per-Action program. Both programs have the last week of August as the expiration date.

Users of AdSense Referrals and AdWords PPA are being pointed to the Google Affiliate Network, formerly known as DoubleClick Performics. Performics was previously both an affiliate network and a search marketing company. Google divested itself of the Performics search marketing business for the obvious conflict of interest. The affiliate portion of the business is what is being rebranded.

Advertisers will be able to set CPAs for campaigns or design custom payments to affiliates. Publishers must apply and be accepted to the program, similar to the application for Adsense.

Finally, while the three remain separate programs for now, an integration could be in the future. Trevor Claiborne, writing on the Inside AdWords blog, “The Inside Adwords blog The Google Affiliate Network is currently a separate product from AdWords and AdSense.” (emphasis mine) That sounds like a hint of things to come, don’t you think?

Yahoo has announced its latest search index update. So, if you see a change up in your rankings, now you know why. But earlier news of new crawling abilities for Adobe Flash don’t appear to be part of this update. Instead, expect to see those updates in the future.

“Yahoo! is committed to supporting webmaster needs with plans to support searchable SWF and is working with Adobe to determine the best possible implementation,” said Sean Suchter, vice president Yahoo! Search Technology Engineering.

Yahoo’s last update occurred on May 28, 2008.

Are you seeing any changes in your Yahoo rankings? Let us know in the comments.

For years SEOs have been about the inability of search engines to crawl flash pages. But now Adobe is making an effort to keep Flash in the web development toolbox. They’ve announced the provision of Flash technology to Google and Yahoo in order to facilitate the indexing of sites and pages created with Flash.

“Until now it has been extremely challenging to search the millions of RIAs and dynamic content on the Web, so we are leading the charge in improving search of content that runs in Adobe Flash Player,” said David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president of the Platform Business Unit at Adobe. “We are initially working with Google and Yahoo! to significantly improve search of this rich content on the Web, and we intend to broaden the availability of this capability to benefit all content publishers, developers and end users.”

Over at the Google Webmaster Central Blog, an FAQ was posted offering up more details about the update. Here are some highlights:

• Google will now be able to better crawl the text content of SWF files. The content includes buttons, menus, self-contained websites developed in Flash and “everything in between.”
• Google can use the text it crawls to provide a descriptive “snippet” for its search results.
• Links included in Flash content will also be crawled.
• If your Flash file is loaded by JavaScript, Google won’t be able to read it
• If your Flash file loads an HTML file, an XML file or another SWF file, Google will index that separately from the original Flash file.

Google says it can’t crawl images, videos or FLV files because they do not contain text content.

What do you think about search engines crawling Flash? Are you more inclined to use Flash on your sites now? Leave your reaction in the comments!

Many SEO agencies are running out of ways to draw in large clients, especially when so many offer little to no value over the next agency. This dilemma has given birth to new “special services,” which can set an agency apart. In today’s Enterprise Search Marketing column, “Some New SEO Services Not So “Special”,” Aaron Shear warns enterprise clients to beware, as there are some unscrupulous agencies using these in ways that can sometimes be a threat to your rankings.

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Journalists are a dying breed. Newspapers face death by Internet. In today’s Search Engine WarGames column, “Newspapers Bleed Red Ink: Death by Internet,” Kevin Heisler suggests that it’s time to rethink journalism as a career choice.

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The latest in a series of site reviews, this week’s subject is a travel site that already has three of the key ingredients to success: Web site depth, links to the site, and age of domain. In today’s Organic Search Engine Optimization column, “SEO Quarterly Web Site Review: Villas of Distinction,” Mark Jackson notes that the site is nice, but with just a little bit of attention to some details, it could generate a lot more organic search engine traffic.

» Full story

Mike Moran is leaving IBM after 30 years to take a position in the newly created role of Chief Strategist at social media marketing agency, Converseon. Moran will be involved in the development of Conversation Miner as well as provide consulting to Converseon clients.

“We’re thrilled to have Mike join us,” said Rob Key, Converseon CEO. “He brings to the table the perfect combination of industry-leading expertise with hands-on knowledge of how to internally adopt and promote these practices within complex, enterprise environments. As we often say, social media can be technically relatively simple, but culturally quite difficult. His experience will be invaluable as we help leading brands develop and execute innovative social media campaigns. He will also play a key role in consolidating Converseon’s position as a leading social media marketing and consulting agency offering end-to-end services, from listening to engaging to measuring.”

While at IBM, Moran led several search technology projects including IBM’s OmniFind search and text analytics products, the first commercial linguistic search engine, and automatic categorization technology for business search at ibm.com. He has been granted multiple patents and is the author of Do It Wrong Quickly: How the Web Changes the Old Marketing Rules.

“With their focus on pushing the edges of innovation in reputation management, search marketing and social media, Converseon is the ideal fit for me,” said Mike Moran. “I look forward to working with their standout team and clients.”

Google Maps has signed a five year agreement with Netherlands-based digital mapping company, Tele Atlas. Google will now have access to Tele Atlas’ content for over 200 countries for current and future projects, including Google Earth and mobile applications.

“Google’s innovation and leadership is undisputed, and we are proud to have the opportunity to be the map foundation for one of the world’s most progressive web companies,” said Bill Henry, CEO of Tele Atlas. “This agreement is important too because it gives us access to input from a significant online community of map users, whose feedback can help us keep our maps fresh and accurate.”

“Geospatial data enhances global search significantly by organizing data and delivering results based on location,” said John Hanke, director of Google Earth and Google Maps. “Tele Atlas’ map quality and the company’s innovative approach to business were the key drivers for our decision.”

Related Reading:
Google Maps Adds Richer Data to Search
Google Launches Google Map Maker
Google Opens Location-Aware Application to 3rd Party Developers
Google Maps for Mobile Adds Public Transportation Directions
Google Launches Google Earth API and Browser Plug-in