Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO

I recorded this last week and I’m just now getting around to pushing it live. If you didn’t get to attend Search Engine Strategies San Jose, I’ll mention some of the stuff I saw.

Session 14: Recap of SES San Jose 2006:

A short review of news from SES San Jose, and some educational or funny moments.

Includes:
- Industry news
- People I got to meet and didn’t get to meet
- Some of the changes happening to people or companies recently
- Fun moments

I only talk about the high-order bits, but I hope you get a little bit of a feel for what the conference was like.

In the category of things that utterly suck, a plane crashed taking off from Lexington, KY yesterday, killing 49 of 50 people aboard the craft. It looks like the plane may have gone down the shorter runway:

Of the two runways at Blue Grass Airport, the main is 7,001 feet long, with 600 feet of safety area on each end. The general-aviation runway is 3,500 feet. The main runway was completely repaved last weekend. The only construction last week on the smaller runway was to tie it in to the main runway, according to airport officials.

I’ve got family in Lexington, but no one was flying that day. Names are starting to trickle out now. Lexington feels like a big city sometimes, but there’s only about 250,000 residents, so this is going to hit the city hard and leave long memories.

Some people have noticed that Yahoo!’s news search no longer shows blogsearch results alongside it. Normally I’d assume that if the blog search in News results disappeared, it meant one of two things: 1) Blog search was about to roll out as a separate product, or 2) maybe Yahoo! acquired their own blogsearch company? But downloadsquad has a different theory:

I received information that this move was the result of the rampant splog problem and only a trickle of click-through traffic. Thus the overhead to operate it wasn’t justified.

Does anyone know the skinny on Yahoo! blogsearch? Is it gone for good, rolling out into a separate product, or maybe making way for some acquired company?

I’ve been playing around with my blog template a little bit. At the top right is a logo from goopymart. Let me know what you think: should I go with nothing but text, or does a little picture or two spruce the blog up?

I hereby declare today a “Break out of your rut and play with a Web 2.0 start-up” day. Here are a few you may not have tried:

Congoo.
FireAnt.
Hula Project.
Inform.
Magnolia.
Newsvine.
Pegasus News.
Performancing.
ProjectSpaces.

Sure, we all know and love Techmeme, but what are the Web2.0 start-ups off the beaten path? What do they do, and why do you like them?