A ship’s anchor cut through two international submarine cables Wednesday, causing severe Internet outages throughout the Middle East and dramatically reducing bandwidth to India.

Press reports indicated that India’s bandwidth has been cut in half, raising the prospect of dramatically curtailed communications between businesses in the United States and Europe and call centers in Bangalore and other Indian high-tech cities.

Estimates on how long it will take to repair the cables vary, said Stephan Beckert, an analyst at Washington-based TeleGeography, in a telephone interview. “I’ve heard four days and I’ve heard two weeks,” he said.

Repairs won’t take longer than that since the cuts are close together and only 12 miles from Alexandria, Egypt, he added.

India Will Stay Online

The cut cables are the FLAG Europe-Asia cable, operated by FLAG Telecom, and SeaMeWe-4 (South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe-4), a consortium cable owned by 15 telecommunications companies.

Together, these cables carry 75 percent of premium traffic between Western Europe to the Middle East, and from there to India. Until the cables are repaired, there are workarounds, Beckert said. The SeaMeWe-4 cable is still operational, he added.

The bottom line, Beckert said, is that service to India will not be cut off, although it will be curtailed until the cables are repaired. The situation may improve before the cables are fully repaired as data is rerouted.

No Need for Change

“This was a bit of a fluke,” Beckert said. “Cables get cut all the time; generally it’s not that big a deal.” This incident damages two of the three Europe-Middle East cables, damaging backup as well as primary cables.

What does this event say about the vulnerability of the global communications infrastructure? “Not much,” Becker said. “There are several cables under construction now, which should bring additional redundancy to the region. There is no fundamental need for changing the…

If you register for Search Engine Strategies London by Friday, February 1, 2008, you can save £100 with the early bird special. (Which as everyone on this side of the pond knows is worth almost $200, as everyone on the other side of the Chunnel knows is worth €134, or as everyone North of Hadrian’s Wall knows is worth a 750 ml. bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue Label.)

Now, if you haven’t decided to attend “The Premier Event for Search Engine Marketing & Optimization” yet, check out the conference at a glance, which has been updated since I wrote Its “Horses for Courses” at SES London back on January 8.

Fredrick Marckini

There will be an opening keynote by Fredrick Marckini, Chief Global Search Officer, Isobar. Fredrick founded iProspect in 1996 and is recognized as a leading expert in the field of search engine marketing. He has authored three of the SEM industry’s earliest books, including Secrets To Achieving Top-10 Positions (1997), Achieving Top-10 Rankings in Internet Search Engines (1998), and Search Engine Positioning (2001). Fredrick is considered one of the pioneers of search engine marketing and was named to BtoB Magazine’s Top 100 Marketers in both 2005 and 2006.

Fredrick was a founding Board Member of the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO), where I worked with him during the non-profit organization’s early years. He’s also from the Boston area, as am I. So, it will be a little “roundabout” to go all the way to England to see someone I know from New England. But, hey, search is that kind of industry.

Other additions to the Search Engine Strategies London conference agenda are two sessions in the Kelsey Group Local Track on Tuesday, February 19. One is entitled, Local Search 2.0, and the other is entitled, Mobile Local Search: A Moving Target.

While I should disclose that SES London is a client, others agree that this is a must-attend event. For example, Lyndsay Menzies, Managing Director UK, bigmouthmedia, says, “If you live and breathe search, or just want to know more about it, then Search Engine Strategies is for you. SES is a great show for anyone who wants to hear experts share their knowledge, find out about the latest developments and future technologies, and hone their search expertise.”

In an interview with VentureBeat, Google VP Marissa Mayer says that social search is one avenue Google is pursuing to improve relevance in future iterations of its search engine. The algorithms could incorporate search history from a searcher’s Gmail contacts, or input from human experts, as startups like Mahalo, Search Wikia, Collarity and Eurekster are doing (in different ways).

Some ways to incorporate social data into search results that Mayer mentioned include:

1. Labeling or annotating search results, similar to the way social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us and StumbleUpon let users add comments and tags to sites they find.
2. Show results from “users like you,” the technique used expertly by Amazon.com to help shoppers discover new products they may not have even known they wanted.
3. Using aggregate search histories of friends (or Gmail contacts) to influence search results

When asked what Google will look like ten years from now, Mayer replied, “I think one way it will be better is in understanding more about you and understanding more about your social context: Who your friends are, what you like to do, where you are. It’s hard to imagine that the search engine ten years from now isn’t advised by those things.”

Social search is expected by many to define the next generation of search. According to search historian Danny Sullivan, search 1.0 used on-page elements to rank pages, search 2.0 added external linking, and search 3.0 is the current state, with universal search and blended search. Search 4.0 will incorporate these social factors.

So far, we’ve shared some New Years resolutions, and predictions from several search marketers and social media marketers. I asked many of those same marketers what they would most like to see from search engines in 2008. Yesterday, we ran part one, and today we share even more wish lists from search marketers in “Search Marketers’ Wish Lists, Part 2.”

Local search guru Andrew Shotland of Local Onliner fame reported Pat Marshall’s move from Superpages to archrival Yellowbook back in July 2007. As the CNMO (Chief New Media Officer) Marshall assumed operating responsibility for Yellow Book’s new media products, including yellowbook.com and search engine advertising. Shotland noted that YellowBook’s website wasn’t really a priority at the company, and one line of business where Idearc had a strong lead.

So how’s he doing? The chart on the left shows traffic through Oct, 2007. Here are the comScore numbers for December:

Yellow Book Network jumped 137 percent to 10.4 million visitors. Visits to Yellowbook.com network sites tripled (up 207 percent to 4.6 million visitors) with the acquisition of a new property.

Yellowbook can’t rest on its laurels. AT&T’s Yellowpages.com has replaced Yahoo Local Search for AT&T’s broadband and Internet customers. (Shotland also reported YellowPages.com recently told analysts it expects to attract two billion searches in 2008, and three billion by 2010.)

Yellowpages.com Network grew by 51 percent to more than 24 million visitors in December, 2007.

Mike Boland of The Kelsey Group explained in SEW Experts why Google, Yahoo, and MSN need to take the IYP threat seriously. Verizon’s also reportedly competing with Google for the $4.7 billion C-block for 700 mhz wireless spectrum, according to Saul Hansell of The New York Times.

For search marketers, their clients, and small and medium sized enterprises, that means online-offline integrated search advertising.