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Earlier this year, Yahoo acquired the Inquisitor plugin, which is a search suggestion plugin for Safari. A few months later they updated it, but it still remained for the Safari browser.

Now, the plugin is available for Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers.

Included with the release are algorithm enhancements, and IE users will get a bookmark-based retrieval feature.

Writing on the Yahoo Search blog, Ariel Seidman says “Beyond these enhancements, the focus of Inquisitor, regardless of browser platforms, remains squarely on providing you with instant web results that get you to your destination faster, the best query formulation assistance and a richer, more personalized search experience. Now you don’t have to decide between your favorite browser and your favorite search experience - you can have both.”

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Teddie Cowell over at Neutralize (*\*) just emailed me about a new bit of research that’s just been posted on the Search Engine War Blog which shows Diggers are more likely to Digg YouTube than any other domain. Using data from SocialBlade.com, MarkeD took a quick look at the last 5,000 front page stories on Digg. YouTube was the top domain, followed by Ars Technica, The New York Times, BBC News, and The Huffington Post.

So, what can search engine marketers do with this new data? Well, you can start creating YouTube videos. But, with more than 65,000 videos being added to YouTube per day, you need to do more than just post a video to YouTube.

Now, the magic formula hasn’t been patented yet, but we’ve tried some things that try to meet the “man bites dog” definition of news. For example, at SES New York, we asked exhibitors to give us their “escalator pitch.” This was much shorter than their “elevator pitch” — especially considering the frequent delays waiting for elevators in the Hilton New York.

Some of these escalator pitches worked better than others. One of the most popular was the Sendori Escalator Pitch, SES NY 2008, which had 768 views as of this afternoon.

Sendori Escalator Pitch, SES NY 2008

On the other hand, the “Global Strategies Escalator Pitch, SES NY 2008″ only had two views as of this afternoon.

Global Strategies Escalator Pitch, SES NY 2008

And Bill Hunt, the CEO of Global Strategies International, is a friend! So, what can a say. So, things work and some don’t. All you can do is create content. If it gets Dugg, cool. If it doesn’t, well, it doesn’t.

As Chris Boggs recently observed, “Social Media: One Size Does NOT Fit All.”

Albert Michaels, a Senior Account Executive at Moniker, discusses his company’s suite of domain asset management services at SES London 2008. Moniker Online Services, LLC is a leading provider of domain name registration, management, and monetization services for individuals and businesses that wish to have a unique address and branded identity on the Internet.

Moniker will also be exhibiting at SES New York 2008. It is also one of the sponsors of the WebmasterRadio.FM / SEARCHBASH. To ensure that you get in the door, stop by the Ask Sponsored Listings, Bruce Clay, Moniker.com, or WebmasterRadio.FM booths.

Albert Michaels, Moniker, at SES London 2008

In addition to getting into the party, you might also want to check out the serious stuff in Moniker’s booth. It is the first and only provider of Domain Asset Management, a complete set of business services that provide companies a single-point-of-access to help manage and maximize the value of their domains. These services include name creation, registration, acquisition, portfolio management, appraisal and escrow services, traffic monetization and after-market sales — all backed by unsurpassed customer service and security. With more than a decade of experience, Moniker is a top 10 domain registrar, holds the industry’s highest customer retention rate, and pioneered the industry’s first domain appraisal formula. It is considered the industry’s premier marketplace to buy and sell domain names.

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Dr. Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist and occasional Freakonomics Blog guest blogger, posted “Why data matters” on the official Google blog, cross-posted on the Google Public Policy Blog.

Varian explains that Web search algorithms are improved by the “wisdom of the crowds” drawn from the “logs of billions of previous search queries.” That makes the general public - and government officials - nervous about privacy.

Varian tutors us in PageRank simplified and discusses link building in an ideal world - one where The New York Times and The Wall St. Journal, for example, would link to other sites generously:

“If I have six links pointing to me from sites such as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and the House of Representatives, that carries more weight than 20 links from my old college buddies who happen to have web pages.”

The House of Representatives? Sounds more like Charlie Wilson’s War.

SEOs, contact your local Congressional Representative for paid links - paid for with your hard-earned tax dollars.

The reality: when Dr. Varian was interviewed, The New York Times Freakonomics Blog linked to Google.org, Google green energy, Dr. Varian’s position auction paper (pdf); BBC News on Moore’s Law; Paul Seabright (Professor of Economics, University of Toulouse, France); Dr. Varian’s NY Times energy article; another Freakonomics blog post; WebMD, Revolution Health, and Paul Anderson, Professor of Security Engineering, University of Cambridge.

That’s the way major media outlets and journalists typically link: to each other; to corporate sites; to universities. It’s an elite, exclusive club. Nick Carr’s “digital elite.”

That isn’t to say Dr. Varian can’t tell a good story. He reveals how Larry and Sergey trying to license their PageRank algorithm to “some of the newly formed web search engines.”

No names named. None of the nascent search engines were interested. Since they couldn’t sell their algorithm, Brin and Page decided to start a search engine themselves. (Note to VCs: Don’t try this business model at home.)

Google has since added more than 200 additional “signals” to the algorithms that determine the relevance of websites to a user’s query. We are the signals.

All the background info leads to one conclusion: Google needs your data. Google wants you to take a leap of faith. Google must store and analyze search logs. They want us to believe, “Nobody does it better.”

Reminds me of Radiohead via Carly Simon:

“But like heaven above me, the spy who loved me/Is keeping all my secrets safe tonight. And nobody does it better/Sometimes I wish someone would/Nobody does it quite the way you do/Why’d you have to be so good.”

Dr. Varian suggests readers “Watch our videos to see exactly what data we store in our logs.”

Not everyone has time - or the inclination - to watch Google videos on YouTube.

What worries me: Google doesn’t understand us any better than we understand the mathematical formulas of search engine algorithms.

Search Engine WarGames won’t be fought between humans and machines.

Nick Carr put it best: “The erosion of the middle class may well accelerate, as the divide widens between a relatively small group of extraordinarily wealthy people - the digital elite - and a very large set of people who face eroding fortunes and a persistent struggle to make ends meet. In the YouTube economy, everyone is free to play, but only a few reap the rewards.”

Want a snapshot of the day’s search marketing news? Here we’ve collected today’s top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

From the SEW Blog:

• Yahoo Says, “You Like Me, Right Now, You Really Like Me”
  Like Sally Field, Yahoo recently felt the love and respect of “the academy” — Keynote Academy. They earned #1 Keynote rankings for “Search Assistance and Suggestions” and “Homepage Appeal.”
• The Tao of Crafting Strategic SEM Partnerships
  Every professional needs someone. This timeless axiom is especially relevant to both those who consume and those who provide search marketing services.
• Google’s Brin Calls a Microsoft-Yahoo Tie-up “Unnerving”
  Yesterday Google co-founder Sergey Brin described the Internet doomsday scenario if Microsoft wins its Yahoo takeover bid.
• SEW Experts: The Ginsu Guide to Search Analytics
  The ability to track online (and in many cases offline) advertising to offline conversions has been the biggest hurdle in measuring ROI for many Web-based or Web-involved businesses.
• SEW Experts: How to Market Your Search Engine Agency - Part 2
  Although we’re in the business of marketing, there are many different things to consider when writing your own marketing plan.
• SEW Experts: How Search Marketing Slays Seasonality in Travel
  The most sophisticated advertisers in online travel rely on years, even decades of data collection and analysis to formulate their marketing plans.

Click to read the rest of this post…

This morning over at Seattle-based blog SEOmoz, Rand Fishkin asks "What is an Algorithm? How does it apply to the Search Results at Google, Yahoo! & MSN/Live?" The post, How to Track the Evolution of Search Engine Algorithms & Why It’s Important to Do So, amounts to a free clinic regarding the "whys" and "hows" for professionals seeking to garner more organic search traffic.

"The vast majority of search marketers operating in the organic space at least lay claim to "following the latest algorithms" at the search engines, and in 90% of the client pitches I’ve ever heard (or made, for that matter), the subject comes up at least once. However, I think this is still a topic about which there’s not a lot of true understanding and for those new to the field, it’s probably the most daunting aspect of the work. So, to help ease some pain, I figured I’d address many of the most common questions about keeping up with the search engines’ ever-changing mathematical formulas that rank search results."
Rand Fishkin

The article gets to the algorithmic red meat: inherent trust in link metrics, domain trust over the importance of individual pages, temporal analysis of link growth, sandboxing of new websites, fixing blog comment spam, and Google’s recent crackdown on reciprocal tactics.

Okay, okay, so I’ve already weighed in on the question, “Is the Social Media Press Release a Meatball Sundae?” Last November, I provided four pieces of empirical evidence that demonstrated that social media press releases are the unfortunate result of mixing two good ideas.

Now, I’ve been asked to take a look at today’s announcement by Marketwire of Social Media 2.0, or what the newswire calls, “the industry’s most authentic and comprehensive social media newswire product.”

The Marketwire Tower in Second Life

According to Marketwire, “Social Media 2.0 advances today’s press release format, offers public relations professionals a multitude of content options, and distributes news in a variety of mediums to distribution channels beyond traditional media distribution networks.”

Now, you might think I’ve pre-judged Social Media 2.0. But, I haven’t.

As I wrote way back in May 2003, “Failure is an option.” SEO-PR’s initial efforts to create optimized press releases didn’t produce instant success. But, as I wrote almost five years ago, “It was our approach to PR measurement, which tracked precisely what worked and what didn’t work, (that) enabled all of us to discover the formula for long-term success.”

So, my initial take on Social Media 2.0 will be to test it, test it, and test it again. Believe it or not, I agree with Bob Geller, an SVP at Fusion Public Relations, who wrote in Flack’s Revenge, “At the end of the day, the %#@!!&& things either work or they don’t.”

Amen, brother.

So, here are some of the “exclusive features” of Social Media 2.0 that have caught my attention:
• Distribution to more than 1,200 in-network geographically targeted websites.
• Distribution to YouTube, iTunes, Second Life, Pheedo, Photobucket and Twitter.
• In-release performance statistics on search engine cataloging.
• Trackbacks for easy monitoring of online performance.
• Search engine, Technorati and Digg results.

In other words, there’s a nice mix of new distribution options and PR measurement tools. This will enable me to tell if “Social Media 2.0 offers increased social network visibility to a prospective audience of more than 200 million Internet users.” If it does, that would be very cool.

On the other hand, I’m still skeptical that “Social Media 2.0 transforms a press release into an authentic social media tool by enabling two-way conversation via an in-release comment box that feeds directly into a client-monitored online newsroom.”

Blogs do this exceptionally well. But most press releases – even many of ones that use the social media format – are written like essays, not interviews; broadcasts, not conversations; lectures, not discussions. So, while adding social media elements to blogs generally works, adding them to press releases typically haven’t up to now.

This, of course, can change.

As Kevin Dill, social and multimedia product manager, Marketwire, says in today’s announcement, “The social media release is an invitation for dialogue based on social media elements. Marketwire’s Social Media 2.0 expands upon that idea, taking that dialogue to the next level by allowing conversation to be initiated at the press release level.”

And, as Todd Defren, principal, SHIFT Communications, adds, “The democratization of news is the singular principle behind the Social Media News Release. By allowing anyone to access, re-purpose and engage directly with a newsmaker’s content, the SMNR empowers conversations between a company and its diverse user communities.”

So, if early versions of the social media press release were the unfortunate result of mixing two good ideas, let’s give Social Media 2.0 the benefit of the doubt. It deserves a “second life.”

How will we discover if Social Media 2.0 provides us with increased Internet visibility and greater search engine performance for our news? As I wrote back in May 2003, the only way to find out is to “Measure, measure, measure and measure some more.”

Or, as Bob Geller put it so eloquently last November: “At the end of the day, the %#@!!&& things either work or they don’t.”