Google has launched a new Webmaster Academy.

The objective is to teach webmasters about the Google search engine works and what you can do to make your site more visible in search results.

There are three sections. One is devoted to your life as a searcher, one to your role as a webmaster and one is for your inner company owner.

The site might be useful for librarians and experst who use Google for professional intelligence gathering as well, as it will give you some clues about what makes Google tick.

The “Academy” is presented as a kind of Q and A, where each headline give you a short description of the topic (let’s say “How to create good content”), a video maybe, and links to relevant online resources.

It looks useful to us, although the constant promotion of Google+ is starting to get on our nerves.

To our readers.

Pandia is a project we as editors have rund since 1998 on our spare time. It has been a labor of love, but we readily admit that it has not always been easy to combine with our offline life and our daytime jobs.

At the moment we find that we are not able to deliver the amount of original content our readers should expect from us. We have therefore decided to take a break while we consider the future of the site.

We might find ways of engaging other writers, or we may pass the torch to others interested in search and social media. We would prefer to keep the current content, however, and will not sell the domain to be used for other types of content.

Susanne and Per Koch

These days anyone can become a social curator, sharing links, sites and information with the rest of the world. Pandia takes a look at the best curation tools.

Digital curation is the selection, preservation, maintenance, collection and archiving of digital assets (according to Wikipedia). Curation used to be the domain of archivists and librarians. But the brunt of curation has moved over from the shelves and archives onto the Web.

These days your daughter and your grandmother might be doing it. And recently the Web has added a social aspect to curation: You don’t just collect and preserve information, you share your collections with the world. This is social curation and here is a look at the best social curation sites right now

The belle of the ball

Pinterest is the big thing in social curation right now. Numbers from Alexa suggest it has surpassed veterans such as Delicious and Reddit (below) in traffic. Pinterest is like a collection of online pin boards where you pin images that fascinate you.

But even though Pinterest has a visual and aesthetic focus, there is more to these “pins” than meet the eye. Each image links to the page or article where you found it and you can add a comment or excerpt when you save it to one or more of your pin boards.

So each pin is essentially a visual bookmark and the pin boards are tematic collections of such bookmarks, where you add context to the information you collect.

The social aspect means that your pins are public and others can comment on them, making each item a potential discussion forum. Other users can also add items as favorites (“like”) or add them to their own pin boards (“repin”). This way the item gathers even more context — a way to gather lots of potentially useful information.

Pinterest is not just a place to store information. It is also an excellent place to find information. You can browse the most recent pins in some 30 categories and re-pin what you like. Or you can find people who post information you are interested in and follow their activity or just the most relevant of their pin boards. There is even an RSS feed for each person.

For some reason there are not feeds for individual pin boards, though, which is a shame. Another problem is that the visual character of Pinterest makes search hard. The objects often have little meta data, which makes for inaccurate search. And even though I can find a lot of info by searching Pinterest as a whole, I can’t search my own pins. This is why I’m leaving Pinterest after three weeks.

Click here to read the rest of this article!

The latest search engine news from around the Web.

Bing And Google Gain Market Share While Yahoo Drops
Search Engine Watch/Comscore:
Google: 66.4 percent (vs. 65.4 percent a year ago)
Bing: 15.3 percent (vs. 13.6 percent a year ago)
Yahoo: 13.8 percent (vs. 16.1 percent a year ago)

With a New Design, Vevo Asks Music Video Fans to Stick Around
All Things D: When you log in to the site using your Facebook credentials, Vevo will have already “socialized” you — even if you’ve never used the site and none of your friends have, either.

Can’t Confirm That Quotation? Search Google Books
Mindshift: Luckily, traditional print materials (in the form of books) often include the kind of citation information you might need and Google Books allow you to search the full text of books.

ufind.it – The Ultimate Web Search Tool
P Bradley: This is a multi search engine, which pulls its results from a variety of search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Twitter and more.

PDF search and comments features added to Google Docs
Techworld: Users of the Google Docs office productivity suite will be able to do full-text searches within more documents in PDF format, expanding on a recent improvement to the suite’s PDF search capabilities.

Click here to read the rest of this article!

The latest headlines from the world of social media and social networking.

Facebook Introduces Interest Lists, ‘Your Own Personal Newspaper’
SEW: Facebook has announced the launch of Interest Lists, a new feature designed to help users curate the content of Pages and public figures in which they’re interested. The service promises to deliver the top posts from each interest group (list) in the user’s newsfeed.

How to Cross Post From Twitter to Your Facebook Page
Graywolf: I don’t believe all the social media gurus riding on unicorns who preach that social media is about the conversations man (best said in a hippie voice for dramatic effect). Social media is about giving you an alternate channel to connect with new or existing customers, demonstrate your expertise, solve problems, or promote products with the goal of providing customer service, building loyalty, and making sales.

How to Teach Your Boss About the Social World Outside of Facebook & Twitter
SE journal: Whether you’re selling a company Google+ page or trying to open your boss’s eyes to the joys of Pinterest, here’s your ultimate guide to explaining the likes of Tumblr and StumbleUpon to your technophobe boss.

Pinterest Phishing Expedition: Scammers Target Unsuspecting Pinterest Users
SE Journal: Scammers have descended on the popular network and are promising Pinterest users free gift cards and merchandise in exchange for re-pinning an image and completing an online “survey.”

New YouTube Features Add Efficiency to Video Viewing
Marketing Pilgrim: Whether you’re sneaking a peek ahead, scanning backwards, or using a thumbnail to find where you stopped watching a video, you’ll soon have three options to instantly look through YouTube videos.

Click here to read the rest of this article!

The latest search engine marketing and optimization news from around the Web.

The four faces of link building
State of Search: I always say linkbuilding is a profession of its own. It is hard work which not every SEO can do. And even with all the changes Google is making links will continue to play an important role in optimizing your website.

4 Reasons Your Boss Might Hate Your SEM Campaign
SE Land: Management doesn’t have time to study the details and aggregated reports can make great performance look mediocre or worse.

Are You Using the Right Keywords On Your Site? A Simple Three-Rule Test
Search Engine Journal: Just as there is no shortage of good keyword tools, there is also no shortage of metrics that you can use to determine the value of any given keyword.

Click here to read the rest of this article!

Sehrch is a new semantic search engine developed in the UK.

You can search their index by entering a regular query, like on Bing or Google, or you can benefit from their structured data by formulating advanced searches and get precise results.

What is Sehrch

Traditional search engines index documents like pages, images or videos. But documents do not offer much information that is understandable by machines. Sehrch gathers semantic web objects instead of documents.

An object can be for example a person, city or event. Objects have properties: a person has a name and date of birth, whereas an institution has a date of establishment. Objects can also relate to each other, for example one Person may be the parent of another Person.

Sehrch is a collection of such objects and has a kind of “conceptual awareness” by harmonizing, grouping or relating objects within the semantic web. There is no limit to the number of properties that can be stored for a given object.

Click here to read the rest of this article!

The latest news from the world of search engines.

Google and Cuil
Beyond Search: Founded in 2008 by two former Google employees and one from IBM, Cuil was forced to close its doors in 2010. Before the end, though, the company claimed to have indexed 120 billion pages; that’s more than Google had managed at the time. Now Google has bought the patents.

Google’s Eric Schmidt offers his vision of the future
memeburn: Google’s chairman Eric Schmidt took the stage at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona to talk about the role of technology in the “world we live in today” and how it will shape the societies of the future. Schmidt, for example, noted that the number of people who use smartphones is still very small, but “think how amazing the web is today with just 2-billion people” and what will happen when another 5-billion get online.

Google on Google’s new Privacy Policy
Google: We’ve included the key parts from more than 60 product-specific notices into our main Google Privacy Policy—so there’s no longer any need to be your own mini search engine if you want to work out what’s going on. Our Privacy Policy now explains, for the vast majority of our services, what data we’re collecting and how we may use it, in plain language.

Google Privacy Policy Strikes Out With EU, Others
Inside Google: The Web’s leading search company drew fire early Thursday from Consumer Watchdog, which called the plan to offer a unified privacy covering all of Google (GOOG) Web products nothing more than “a spy policy.”

Click here to read the rest of this article!