At the end of last year, I predicted that mobile would drive local search growth in 2010. With smartphone use on the rise—specifically among iPhone, BlackBerry and Android-powered devices. I was confident that local search providers and advertisers would increasingly embrace opportunities in the space.

Posted by randfish Yesterday, Perfect Market , a company that “helps publishers create value from their online content with little effort and no risk 1 ” released a study that’s been getting quite a bit of attention. The study analyzes the relative traffic value per visit of several types of content , coming to the conclusion 2 that ” while the Lindsay Lohan sentencing and other celebrity coverage drove significant online traffic for major news publishers, articles about unemployment benefits, the Gulf oil spill, mortgage rates and other serious topics were the top-earning news topics based on advertising revenue per page view.

While many news organizations chase traffic by matching their news coverage to what’s listed as “hot” on Google Trends, Twitter, and elsewhere, a new report says hard news coverage actually makes the most money for major news publishers. Perfect Market, a company that works with publishers to help them make more money from search engine visitors, *** Read the full post by clicking on the headline above ***

Google is frequently showing special logos for notable and famous people’s birthdays. Starting yesterday, Google announced they will begin showing a special logo for your birthday – yes, even if you are not rich and famous

Posted by Tom_C 1) Regex for Counting ” ” and “/” Regex is teh awesome. I don’t claim to be amazing at it but there are a few common regex strings I use all the time in my analysis.

I read in The Boston Globe this morning that Boston Red Sox owner John Henry has “stretched his sports empire across the Atlantic” by “completing what amounted to a hostile takeover of Liverpool FC, one of the cornerstone teams of the English Premier League.” Bollocks. Click to read the rest of this post..

Posted by randfish As many of you likely noticed, Linkscape updated its index on Thursday night. New data is now available in the SEOmoz Firefox and Google Chrome toolbars , Open Site Explorer , the classic Linkscape tool and many of our other SEO tools . This update was, sadly, just over 2 weeks off schedule, primarily due to some hardware failures at Amazon’s EC2 where we run processing on our large link graph to produce the metrics and views for the API.

Calling it the unfolding of a new era of social search, Bing this week revealed big changes to their search results . Bing and Facebook are teaming up to better personalize search results, to essentially serve everyone a different search experience, based on the Likes of their Facebook friends. Facebook open graph data is likely to have its biggest impact on Bing’s local search results

Today at YouTube, I had a chance to play briefly with YouTube Leanback, best described as a way to channel surf YouTube on your regular TV. It was pretty cool

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web….