As Bruce Clay explained to WebProNews, the changes Panda brought were significant to the search industry. However, overall, he thinks the quality of Google’s search results have improved. That said, Clay told us that we likely haven’t seen the end of Panda and that it has the potential to get bigger and meaner.

Social media and local search also played important roles in search over the year. Although the advent of Google+ is obviously noteworthy, Clay said that it would become more integrated with search over time, especially in regards to local search.

Going forward, he believes that SEO will become much harder. In addition, he said that SEO, social, conversion rate optimization, PPC, and other search marketing elements will, instead of being separate areas of expertise, will all fall under the broad title of Internet marketing. In other words, SEOs will also have be experts in social media and vice versa.

How have the search events of 2011 impacted you and your business? Let us know.

As Chris Boggs, the President of SEMPO, told WebProNews, the main goal of the letter was to promote a free market approach to the Internet that would allow search engines to provide the best results with limited or no regulation. The organization wrote the letter in response to its members’ needs and the continuing call for regulation of Google.

Although SEMPO has not received a response from the FTC, it hopes that its message was heard. Boggs told us that it is willing to work with government agencies such as the FTC to help them better understand how search engines operate.

Keep watching WebProNews for the latest news in this developing story.

Forrester told WebProNews that people should be concerned with producing quality content because good content attracts both people and search engines. The people that like this content will amplify it, thus allowing the search engines to give the publisher authority.

Social media comes into the equation because it provides information to the engines, which gives them the ability to return more relevant results. Since most people refer to friends or family for advice before they make a purchase, integrating social into search results helps users make decisions faster.

For 5 years, WebProNews has partnered with BlogWorld and New Media Expo, the world’s first and largest new media conference, in an effort to broadcast how new media can grow your business, brand, and audience. Stay tuned to WebProNews for much more exclusive coverage.

Dani Horowitz, who runs the site, told us that her US traffic was cut in half as a result of the Panda Update. After looking closely at the situation, she believes that her site was hit because so many other sites syndicate her site’s content. In other words, these sites were hit because they were classified as content farms, but DaniWeb felt the impact as well since its backlinks lost value from these sites.

Fortunately, Horowitz is seeing some improvements to her site. She said she went into complete SEO and programmer mode which involved updating the entire url structure, removing tag clouds, using noindex and nofollow meta tags, making social buttons more obvious, and more. Although DaniWeb is not back to the point it was prior to Panda’s roll out, it is continuing to see positive progress.

“It can really improve the results for shopping queries and for anything where there’s a temporal component,” he said.

By incorporating Facebook Likes and now Facebook Comments into its search results, Blekko believes that it is being more aggressive than the other search engines in social. At this point, Google integrates Twitter, and Bing integrates Facebook Likes.

“When we look at Facebook data, we just think it’s extraordinarily interesting for ranking the Web,” Skrenta added.

Do you think that Blekko has the upper hand on Google and Bing in regards to social media?

At SXSW, WebProNews spoke with Stefan Weitz, a director with Bing, about this growth and what the search engine was doing to leverage it. According to him, the search industry is not a “zero-sum game.”

“For us to win, somebody else doesn’t have to lose,” he said.

In other words, he believes that all the search engines can expand on one idea and take it in new, and multiple, directions. Competition is tight, but as a result, it produces more new concepts and experiences. Bing, for example, has recently introduced several new projects. The search engine partnered with DealMap in order to bring great deals from popular sites such as Groupon and LivingSocial to users.

Bing has also launched Project Emporia that puts a new approach on personalization. The project is powered by its Matchbox technology and enables the engine to build profiles that offer better recommendations to users.

Weitz told us that Bing would continue to pursue these areas, along with social search, mobile search, and more, in order to provide a simpler and better user experience.

With all of its developments, do you think Bing will continue to gain Google’s market share?

For starters, he discussed the battle among the search engines. Although Yahoo and Microsoft have partnered in a joint search effort, Yahoo claims it is applying a different algorithm to Bing’s index, which would mean different search results for Yahoo users. Even if this is the case, Clay believes that users will continually shift toward Bing.

Ask is no longer a player in the search space, but Blekko is in. However, Clay does not believe that it will emerge as a strong competitor for Google or Bing.

Moving on to Google, the search veteran predicted that Google would become a local search engine in 2 years. Local is definitely on the rise, especially since more money can be made in it. For example, local regions can bid on national terms such as shoes. By doing this, they have the potential to increase their ROI. If this happens, they are more likely to spend more money on their PPC campaigns, which means more money for Google in the long run.

“You either play in the local space… or you’re not going to get clicks even if you’re #1,” Clay points out.

He also talks about Google News and how he believes that it will be as big as local is now. He even predicted that Google News would be a viable competitor to major news outlets such as CNN and Fox News.

“I don’t believe we’re going to get into a situation where Google’s going to pass on an opportunity to control the flow of news,” he said.

Getting into social media, Clay made the statement that likes are the new links. Because social is becoming such a big part of search, he believes that likes, referrals, and recommendations will be factored into the ranking algorithm that search engines use. If this happens, you can expect to see new forms of spam.

Only time will tell if these predictions will come about, but the one thing that is certain is that it’s going to be a very interesting time in the search industry.

Rich Skrenta and the team at Blekko developed the search engine with the goal of eliminating spam in search. In addition, they launched the Spam Clock to help raise awareness of the growing problem. He told WebProNews that the amount of spam was “proliferating.”

“There are about 100 billion urls on the Web today, and we think that the majority are actually spam,” he said.

In talking about the impact of spam on the Internet, Skrenta pointed out that, today, most urls are not created by people. Instead, machines create them, which means the costs associated are slim to none. As a result, he said, “We’ve seen an erosion of quality on certain verticals.”

He compares the problems of today to email spam and said that the Web needs to apply a filtering model to remove it.

Interestingly, the clock’s release has sparked a great deal of discussion in the tech community regarding spam and its impact on the Web and search. Here are a few of the stories that have resulted:

Spam Clock Tallies Junk on the Internet

Blekko Launches Spam Clock To Keep Pressure On Google

Spam Clock Illustrates the Problem of Link Relevancy for Google, Bing, and Other Search Engines

Although some of the reports of late have attacked Google, Skrenta said that the search giant is not completely responsible for the problem. The real issue is that, as the Web grows, it gets worse. For this reason, he believes that Google’s approach of using algorithms to detect the bad content is losing its effectiveness. The rise of content farms has added to this issue and makes the search results inaccurate.

Skrenta and Blekko think it is easier to identify the good content and separate it into verticals such as health and finance. He said that they want to create thousands of categories in order to “clean up the entirety of the query stream.”

One reason for this is Blekko’s recent introduction of the Spam Clock, which tracks the number of new spam pages created since January 1.  As you might remember, Blekko is the search engine that launched last November with the intent of eliminating spam with its slashtag technology. It released the Spam Clock earlier this month in hopes of raising awareness about the growing dangers of spam.

WebProNews spoke with Rich Skrenta, the CEO of Blekko, who told us that there are entities that are producing hundreds of thousands of spam pages simply because they can attract search traffic and make money.

“What we’re finding with the Web is that the amount of spam is just proliferating… It’s gotten to the point where the amount of good content on the Web is a small fraction of the total,” he said.

As this information has surfaced, many reports have come out that indicate how much of a problem spam is for Google. Andrew Goodman of Page Zero Media, who also wrote about the issue, told WPN that Web spam is actually part of a much greater problem that involves society’s reliance on Google for search.

He explained that Google uses a comprehensive model for search that factors in the user’s keywords, intent, personalization, and more, which he believes is “too difficult a task.”

“Where we get, I think, tighter relevance, is in curated results, is in directories, is in finding that one step down where someone has made the universe smaller,” he said.

Goodman went on to say that if Google were truly an “unbiased participant in this effort to reach a relevant stage,” it would do a better job of incorporating the tools that do curate and mediate content.

So, as spam continues to grow, what impact will it have on the future of the Web? Is it taking over the Web and taking Google out on its way? Or, do search engines need to adjust their search model?

One of these people is Tim Mayer, who had a long tenure at Yahoo holding titles such as VP of Search Products, VP of Search Business, and most recently, VP of North American Audience. WebProNews spoke with Mayer at PubCon Las Vegas to learn more about his intuitions and why he believes they will come true.

First of all, he believes that we are dealing with a much more competitive search environment. As Bing brings new innovations to game, Google responds with their own developments. The search industry has also recently seen changes to the search experience with the launch of Google Instant. In addition, Google has made dramatic changes to Local search.

“I think… very prominent changes are going to continue to happen throughout different verticals and have more interaction with the search experience in the future,” he said.

Mayer told WebProNews that he sees mobile search growing in the future. As he explains, 1 out of every 5 searches are expected to be mobile searches by 2012. He believes this will grow even more as mobile and tablets become more popular.

Incidentally, people use apps more often than they use the browser on these mobile devices. But when they do use the browser, their queries are much shorter. In a move that would better serve users, he said that voice interaction would continue to grow in the future.

Another area he sees growth in is with brands. In the past, many offline brands did not have an online presence. For this reason, users would go to places such as Yahoo to meet their needs. Today, however, most offline brands do have an online presence that users want to interact with, which gives an added value to vertical search engines such as YouTube and Amazon.

How do you see these areas growing in the future?

One of the biggest changes was the Yahoo-Microsoft search partnership. Although Yahoo still claims to be applying a slightly different algorithm to Bing‘s index, Clay believes that there will be a continual shift toward Bing. Google has steadily been a strong a leader in search, but the combined market share of Yahoo and Bing of approximately 30 percent is a powerful number that could cause some competition for the search giant.

When comparing the search engines to Web browsers, Clay said, “I think things shift, and I think that the leader is subject to change if they do things that the public doesn’t like.”

Another change that recently occurred was Ask’s decision to pull out of the search business. Clay pointed out that because Ask was not able to make an impact on the market, this decision would have a very minimal effect on the industry.

Although Ask is out, there is a new search engine on the scene called Blekko that wants to be part of the game. WebProNews recently spoke with its CEO and Co-founder Rich Skrenta who said that their goal was to the third search engine. While Clay believes Blekko is doing many things right, he doesn’t think that it will be the third search engine.

“You’d be a fool to ignore them. I just don’t know that a person that is a novice searcher is going to particularly know to go there,” he said.

He recommends waiting six months and seeing where it is at that point.

As new search engines emerge and join the battle, who will survive this search engine battle?

To learn more about Bruce Clay’s predictions, watch the full interview.

As part of this restructuring, Google moved the map to the right side of the search results. Incidentally, Combs and ionadas recently conducted a heat map study on local results and found that the map itself draws very little attention. It doesn’t receive clicks or even looks from users. Combs believes Google knows people aren’t looking at it and moved it to the right where the ads are usually located.

He also thinks that local is exploding and will continue to do so. Interestingly enough, Bruce Clay recently told WebProNews that Google would become a local search engine in 2 years.

Combs said the cynical part of him says that these changes Google has made are about driving more clicks on paid listings. He also adds that it will be harder for companies that do not have a local presence to come up in the search results.

“I think Google, to a certain extent, is at a disadvantage in that space because they don’t have the armies of people to help out small businesses,” said Combs.

In addition, companies such as Citysearch and Yellow Pages will have a harder time driving traffic. Combs goes on to say that the real question will be if someone will be able to monetize this.

Although there are a lot of unanswered questions about local, the one thing that is certain is that local is not going away.

What are your thoughts regarding these latest changes Google has made to local?

In this video, Clay suggests that likes, referrals, and recommendations will become major part of all the ranking algorithms used by search engines. You can see that the search engines are already very interested in this kind of social data, from Bing’s deal with Facebook to Google’s desire of Facebook’s data.

It’s going to be interesting to see just how big a role likes and other social interactions play in search overall, going forward. You can expect new kinds of spam and manipulation. Google and the other search engines will have their hands full trying to combat those hoping to game the system. The social networks will have their hands full as well.

Likes are already coveted by content providers all over the web. Listen to what Bruce Clay has to say about this and where the industry is heading.

To learn more about Bruce Clay’s predictions, watch the full interview.

He has recently conducted a lot of research pertaining to local. From it, he has found that 30 percent of all retailers show some type of local aspect in search results. He has also noticed that the search results vary when the location is changed even when the query is not location-specific.

“Clearly, Google is using the geolocation of the searcher to bias the search results,” he said.

Although these factors are important in this shift toward local, money seems to be the biggest motivator. For example, there are only so many people who can bid on a national term such shoes. However, every local region can bid on the term. If users geotarget, their ROI will increase. As people make more money following this principle, they will be more apt to spend further money on their PPC campaign, which, of course, means Google would make more money.

For all these reasons, Clay emphasizes the importance of getting involved in local.

“You either play in the local space… or you’re not going to get clicks even if you’re #1,” he points out.

As this shift occurs, he believes that there will be a massive influx of sites. In addition, he thinks that people will try to deceive SEOs, create new forms of spam, and more. In terms of brands, Clay said that people that have had a large brand presence would now realize that their brand would not be very effective with all the new local sites competing for the same generic brand.

He also adds, “The only way Google can maintain relevancy and allow those sites on the Web is to emphasize local even more.”

Do you agree with Bruce Clay’s prediction about Google turning into a local search engine?

To learn more about Bruce Clay’s predictions, watch the full interview.

As he explains, Blekko has a feature called slashtags that allows users to attach categories to search. These slashtags are designed to help keep spam out of Blekko, which is a common problem for search engines. In addition to the 200 slashtags that Blekko provides, users can create their own slashtags. Incidentally, users created more than 30,000 slashtags in the first week after the engine launched.

“We’re applying the Wikipedia model to search,” says Skrenta.

Blekko currently applies some of these slashtags to queries automatically to improve the quality of the results. The search engine hopes to implement this automated service at a greater level over time.

On the topic of Ask exiting the search business, Skrenta told us that he only sees 2 search engines: Google and Bing. He went on to say, “Our goal is to be the #3 search engine.”

In terms of SEO, Blekko is being completely open about all the data it collects from the Web. Skrenta says that users can go the site and type in, “website name/link” and see backlinks. Users can also do similar queries in order to gather new backlinks and RSS information.

At this point, Blekko is still receiving around 1 million searches each day, which Skrenta takes as a sign that the model is working.

Do you think Blekko will emerge as the 3rd search engine?