Loladex is a local search application that runs within Facebook and taps into your contacts' recommendations to rank results. The engine crawls through some 16 million business listings, including restaurant info from OpenTable, and combines voting and notification features to create a highly social, local search experience. A search for "Japanese restaurant," for example, would yield results that were rated positively or negatively by your friends, by their friends (people two degrees away from you), and by other Loladex users. "It is a more refined Yelp, in that people you know have more influence on results than people …

Once a Web site has been pulled from the search engine indexes, business will likely grind to a halt--even if the company behind the site has significant brand equity. Recovering fast is key to avoid a massive loss of revenue, particularly for e-tailers, so Tamar Weinberg enlisted the help of the SEO Roundtable community to offer some tips for getting re-indexed. First, make sure your robots.txt file is being used correctly, as it could be denying the engines' spiders entry. Also, try using Google Webmaster Tools to check for any red flags, and run a link analysis tool …

PPC campaigns and Fox's "American Idol" have a lot in common, according to Jenn Weeks. Think about it. "Idol" contestants have to use a combination of factors like strong vocals, charisma and stage presence to win over the judges in the early rounds--while advertisers have to win over vendors like Google and Yahoo through factors like keyword and landing page relevance, ad copy and bid prices. Once they've cleared the first hurdle, "Idol" contestants then have to snag the public vote by choosing the right songs and connecting with the audience--and PPC advertisers have to snag searchers' clicks …

You may be a seasoned search pro, but if you're like Mark Jackson, you may have trouble following through on a project to completion, managing the multitude of granular details or just focusing on one campaign at a time. If that sounds like you, then Jackson says you might have Adult ADD--and if you're the leader of an in-house search department, then you'll need to develop a team that complements your strengths and weaknesses to ensure search marketing success. Every team needs a visionary--someone who has hands-on experience and can lay out the tasks that each member of …

That is, if Microsoft and Yahoo take a good, hard look at their respective paid search marketing platforms. In fact, David Rodnitsky says that a future Microhoo's best bet for becoming a search pro's dream would be to scrap both companies' ad management platforms altogether--starting from scratch to create a more formidable AdWords challenger. Rodnitsky pulls no punches, admitting that search marketers will increase their overall spend with Microhoo if/when the acquisition gets approved--but only if the new ad management platform is better than the sum of its parts. "Let's be really clear and a little bit crass …

Paying attention to details like ad relevance, clickable area and Quality Scores may hurt Google in the end--at least according to Cowen & Co. analyst Jim Friedland, who spoke up about the giant's ad platform tweaks during an SES NY session last week. Friedland was concerned that while Google's Quality Score changes would lead to higher ROI for advertisers, the resulting overall slowdown in clicks would continue to undercut any of the subsequent pricing benefits. Friedland was also concerned about Google's struggles to monetize the MySpace inventory that it's still obligated to shill for News Corp. But David …

KidZui is the latest Web application (actually, it's a browser) designed to offer kids a safe subsection of the Internet where they can roam freely. According to Walt Mossberg, San Diego-based KidZui has aggregated more than 500,000 kid-friendly sites, photos and videos, and ranked them appropriately by age using a team of about 200 parents and teachers. When it comes to search, KidZui lets youngsters start with a specific keyword, and the platform "offers a list of related terms as well, to guide further exploration," Mossberg says. There's no access to the main Google or Yahoo …