Greg Yardley points out that Google’s next giving Ingenio, Who’s Calling, and others a run for their money in the Pay-Per-Call arena.

In a new twist on the performance-based pay-per-call advertising medium (that’s-a-lot-of-dashes), Google’s new service basically acts as a call bridge between the advertiser and the consumer.

Here’s how it works:
– Consumer does a search and sees a phone listing in the paid search results.
– Consumer clicks the telephone graphic, prompting the consumer for their phone number.
– Google then calls both the consumer and the advertiser, and bridges the call.

However, as Danny points out, there are still questions to be answered such as; Are ads sold on a cost-per-click basic or a pay-per-call basis? and Does Google foot the bill, or do advertisers pay some of the call?

So, on Monday, apparently, body snatchers stole Brett Tabke. Brett disallowed all spiders to crawl WebmasterWorld.com due to rogue spiders crawling 12 million pages of WebmasterWorld during the week of the WebmasterWorld search conference. Brett also says he spends 5-8 hours a week battling these rogue bots.

Search Engine Watch is reporting that WebmasterWorld is out of both Google and MSN Search results.

A robots.txt file disallowing all spiders + Two Days = Out of Google and MSN. That’s it.

Now, Danny says that there may be some manual factors at play here with Google, sleuthily pointing out “Interestingly, checking the Google Directory — which is powered by the Open Directory — there is no listing for WebmasterWorld in the same exact category as you’ll see at the Open Directory. It suggests that the robots.txt ban had the effect of pulling WebmasterWorld not only out of the Google web search results but Google Directory listings as well. That would be an entirely new thing I don’t recall hearing happening before.

Some of you may recall Ben Wills doing an excellent job helping me with my previous blog. Ben has agreed to post at MP and will be helping to “fill in the blanks” and bring a different perspective on search news.

Look for Ben’s posts soon.

Cnet reports on some new technologies that allow camera phone users to access image-recognition search engines. Cell phone owners are encouraged to take photos and send them to certain SMS addresses. Image recognition software then matches the image up to ad campaigns.

Advertisements began showing up in teen magazines in mid-October, asking readers to take a picture of a Coke can and send it to an SMS (Short Message Service) address to receive something back. Kids were sent a Java-based soccer game that they could play on the cell phone…people will also be able to use their cell phones to take a picture of a movie billboard, and then send the image to a special database that returns a film trailer, locates a theater showing the movie advertised on the billboard or allows the user to buy tickets to the movie.

ecommerce-guide.com has a breakdown of a recent Yahoo/Harris Interactive survey.

More than eight out of ten holiday shoppers (83 percent) said they would shop for holiday gifts online, and a similar number, 80 percent, said they are likely to purchase gifts online from small businesses…the nationwide survey polled 1,813 U.S. online adults who plan to do holiday shopping.

Danny has a long summary of what’s happening at Chicago’s Search Engine Strategies show and reminds us that tomorrow is the deadline to get the discounted registration price.

I’ll be there for the event, speaking on the topic of Reputation Monitoring and Management.

I’ve finally gotten around to testing Rollyo and I have been very impressed with how easy it is to use. I’ve created a search roll for Marketing Pilgrim and a second one that includes a number of other search engine related sites.