Plus! Gaming the quiet period, Google vs scrapers, and why Facebook’s “places” surrender could be bad news for Foursquare..

Google Brand Affinity Update

Score one more point for Google’s love of brands: they’re now citing recent searches in new search results. In other words, if you search for “airline tickets” and see a big-brand result, and then do a narrow search for “things to do in portland,” the sites that showed up in your previous search will have a better chance of showing up in the new search. Since big brands are more likely to show up in general, this is yet another move from Google in favor of big brands and incumbents.

Groupon Games the “Quiet Period”

The SEC-mandated “Quiet Period” just doesn’t work any more. There are plenty of reasons to think so, but large, semi-private companies have forced the issue: as Groupon approaches its IPO, internal communications are very likely to get leaked—when their 10,000+ employees all get the same email, it’s basically public information already. That’s the problem that Henry Blodget is writing about when he argues that Groupon’s CEO (or board) leaked an article to Kara Swisher (an article that, incidentally, responded to one of Blodget’s earlier posts).

The quiet period still doesn’t serve a purpose, but it’s going to be impossible for companies not to violate it. Groupon will not be the last company to grow so fast, so it won’t be the last company where thousands of people who’ve worked there for just a few months (i.e. not long enough to establish strong ties to the company) get an email like this. If the SEC doesn’t get rid of the quiet period, it’s going to make companies even more reluctant to IPO once they’re bigger: it makes IPOs slightly more costly and inconvenient, which is already part of the problem.

Bazaarvoice Files to Go Public

Bazaarvoice is an enterprise social commerce site. Very enterprise, in fact; per this TechCrunch piece on their IPO, their customers include 24 of the Fortune 100. This could be the ideal kind of IPO (for sellers, at least): it’s “Enterprise” enough to produce revenue, but “social” enough to justify losses ($20mm last fiscal year, growing faster than revenues, but mostly due to a surge in marketing).

What’s Facebook’s “Places” Game?

Last week, Facebook curtailed their “places” feature. Then they ended their ‘deals’ feature. But at least in Europe, there’s evidence that their places feature is beating Foursquare. This fits in with our thesis from last week: Facebook wants to make places a part of status updates, in pretty much the same way that hashtags, links, and timestamps are. Not every status update needs a place attached, but “place” updates that don’t encompass a status update are boring.

If they pull this off, it’s bad news for Foursquare. At that point, Foursquare’s best bet would be a sale to Twitter. Twitter would need them (since they have a granular database of places) and Foursquare would need Twitter (since nobody uses Foursquare for non-local status updates yet).

Large-Cap Stock Drops 6% from Record High During One Month, on Low Volume

Okay, so the headline isn’t so exciting that way. The usually excellent Dan Primack of Fortune basically wrote that article, though, asking if Facebook is losing its value since it’s dropped from $84bn in June and July to $79.2bn now.

This is un-news. It would be news if Facebook’s price only went up: since the price is all optimism now, it would imply that Facebook is an even bigger deal than the wildest optimists thought. It’s fair to point out that insiders are net sellers here, and that buyers have less information than sellers. But insiders have one huge motivation to sell: most of them have the vast majority of their net worth tied up in a single illiquid stock. Even Facebook super-bulls like Peter Thiel has sold a big fraction of his stake.

Meanwhile, here’s a high-level view of why Facebook should get into search. Facebook won’t be finished until search is a seamless part of the experience, and it’s a part of search. But that doesn’t have to happen in house: Facebook is pretty busy being Facebook right now, and they don’t seem to have the bandwidth to be Bing, too.

Is Google Targeting Scrapers Next?

Google is pushing for more information on scraper sites. Scrapers are almost always a tax on more established sites, so this will have a largely positive effect on basically any recognizable site (and it should raise the average quality of AdSense clicks, too).