Pandia takes a look at this week’s search engine headlines and discusses the benefit of attending search engine conferences.

In-house SEO expert: “Eh, would it be possible for me to attend the next Pubconference in Las Vegas?”

Boss: “Pub conference in Las Vegas? Hm. Let me see? You want me to pay you to drink beer and gamble with half naked girls in Las Vegas?”

In-house SEO expert: “Well, not exactly, you see the Pubconference is a venue for Internet Marketers where they can learn the latest about search engine marketing…”

Boss: “… and drink beer at the pub. I get it! Don’t you have work to do?”

Whatever you do, don’t tell your boss about Pubcon! Call it the Webmaster World Internet Marketing conference, if you have to, but she will never understand the part about the pub.

Between you and me, however, the pub (or bar) conversation is actually the most important part of any search engine marketing conference, because that is the place where you get access to all the secrets and that’s where you find all those important contacts.

This week we have presented some of the most important Internet marketing conferences around:

Webmaster World Pubcon Las Vegas 2007
On the next Search Engine Strategies conferences
SMX search engine marketing conferences in Europe and the US (Now updated with South American events!)
Internet Marketing Conference in Stockholm November 29-30

This week we have also written about:

LibraryThing, the MySpace of books
SEMPO to survey search engine marketing salaries
Top 5 sites with Web 2.0 social media coverage

Search engine headlines around the Web

And here are some of the articles we have found interesting this week:

Google PageRank Update This Weekend? Backlinks and PageRank Changes Reported
Google seems to have updated its back-link tracking tool in the Google Webmaster Tools suite (SE Journal Oct 5 2007)

IAB/PwC Reports New Heights, Slower Growth in Online Ad Revenues
Online ad revenues grew 26.4 percent during the first six months of 2007 (ClickZ Oct 5 2007)

Yahoo! OneSearch Integrates Wikipedia And Now Tells Flight Timings!
Flight status, times, gates, etc., are all accessible on your mobile. (Unofficial SEO Oct 6 2007)

Microsoft Introduces HealthVault, Online Health Info Storage
The HealthVault is an online information storage facility designed to offer users' medical information. (Unofficial SEO Oct 6 2007)

Yahoo! Shortcuts Now Changes To Yahoo! Sponsored Shortcut
Yahoo! is clearly marking these types of advertisements with the word “sponsored". (Unofficial SEO Oct 6 2007)

Google Transit Graduates from Labs
In Google Maps you'll now have the option of seeing how to get to a place using public transportation. (Google Lat Long Blog Oct 3 2007)

Live Search Maps: the best is yet to come
Some major improvements in traffic and driving directions are one set of impressive new features that will be showing up soon. (LiveSide Oct 4 2007)

Google says closing gap with China rival
Baidu led China's market in the second quarter with a 58.1 percent share (Boston.com Oct 4 2007)

Top Five Foreign Travel Search Engines to Fuel Your Budget Travel
What I've found is that with a little bit of patience and clever planning, one can frequently find competitive fares by searching on foreign sites. (Gadling Oct 5 2007)

The Top 10 Stealth Search Engines
Search engines that are in Stealth Mode, Pre-Launch, Private Alpha or Beta Trials (Alt Search Engines Oct 5 2007)

SEO Myth: All Reciprocal Links Are Bad
This is a natural process of the web and search engines are smart enough to understand that. (SearchRank Oct 4 2007)

Google Mines Mobile Queries, Finds Longer Strings, More Searches, And More Clicks
25 percent of searchers are for adult content (Search Engine Land Oct 5 2007)

Would You Rent Your Rooftop to Google To Show Ads Upon?
Google discusses the idea of putting ads into the Google Maps themselves (SEO by the Sea Oct 4 2007)

It's Official: WiseNut is No More
Looksmart's WiseNut search engine is gone (Resourceshelf Oct 1 2007)

Yahoo to unveil refined search engine
Yahoo plans to unveil a revamped search engine that it says delivers faster, more relevant and engaging results than market leader Google (Newsday/LA Times Oct 2 2007)

Google Pulls AdWords Advertising From Orkut
A Brazilian nonprofit group filed complaints that Google’s Orkut was home to child pornography and other illegal content (SE Journal Oct 3 2007)

Microsoft buys online shopper Jellyfish.com
Jellyfish.com, a Middleton online discount shopping site that went live just over a year ago, has been purchased by Microsoft (Wisconsin State Journal via Roundtable Oct 2 2007)

Future for Kelkoo with Yahoo! Cloudy
Yahoo! is considering divesting Kelkoo, the European shopping comparison engine (SE Watch Oct 3 2007)

New Google Photo Blog!
"A picture is worth a thousand words, but sometimes there's still more to say." (Unofficial SEO Oct 3 2007)

You can help to build a musical search engine!
Listen Game is a game that lets you tell others what you think about music. (Alt Search Engines Oct 2 2007)

Search Engine for Radio Stations
You can browse or do keyword searches with the new search engine iheard (Researchbuzz Oct 2 2007)

Google updates
Google finally appears to have fixed the search by date function (P Bradley Oct 3 2007)

Google Desktop is inflating your RSS subscribers
Web clips autodiscovers RSS feeds and ads them from any site you visit. (Google Tutor Oct 3 2007)

The Best Damn On-Page Optimization Process Checklist, Period
SE Guide; It all starts with keyword research. (Oct 2 2007)