Later today, Demand Media will report its first-quarter earnings, its second outing after its IPO earlier this year.

Wall Street is expecting the company to report about $69.6 million in revenue for the three months, with 4 cents a share in profits.

But what most will be paying more mind to will be what the online content company’s top execs–especially CEO Richard Rosenblatt–have to say about the impact of search algorithm updates at Google to its various Web offerings.

Codenamed “Panda,” the effort by the Silicon Valley search giant is aimed at improving results by getting rid of poorly conceived content.

And, indeed, the tweaks have been chewing away at a range of Web sites–such as those owned by Demand–which rely heavily on search engine optimization to bring in huge traffic.

One big hit for Demand, due to Panda, has been to its flagship eHow site.

All the mishegas has hurt the Santa Monica, Calif., company’s stock. It’s down just over 30 percent since its public offering in late January, as bearish investors fret over the implications of Panda.

That said, Demand shares were up more than six percent yesterday, to close at $15.75. And some think the recent stock fall has been overblown.

However the winds blow, Rosenblatt must play it cool, since he cannot spook Wall Street, but also does not want to indicate to Google that its efforts are not effective either.

Tune in after 1 pm PT today to get the first-quarter results, and even more at Demand’s 2 pm conference call with analysts, where BoomTown will translate it all for you.

Until then, please enjoy the movie trailer for “Kung Fu Panda 2,” which opens May 26:

In the No. 1 spot was the California District Court ruling on gay-marriage voter initiative Proposition 8. Uploaded by GoodAsYou.org shortly after the ruling came out in August, the document was Scribd’s most viral ever. The start-up provided a timeline showing how it was spread (image embedded; click to enlarge).

We should note that Scribd did not provide a list of docs ranked by number of views. CEO Trip Adler said such a list would be dominated by random items that have good search engine optimization, like a scan of an Indian phone book that has long been one of Scribd’s most-viewed documents of all time. Scribd, which now has 60 million monthly uniques, attributes much of its growth to its improvement of social sharing features.

The No. 2 most-shared doc on Scribd in 2010 was the surprising claim of proof of the computer science problem P ? NP from earlier this year. Uploaded by Vinay Deolalikar of HP Research Labs in August, the paper seemed to show that a class of computationally intensive problems could not be solved using simple algorithms.

In the third spot was the Republican political platform “GOP Pledge to America,” uploaded in September by CBS News. The draft lays out policy principles on the economy, healthcare and national security.

I find it interesting that Scribd’s most social documents are more often notable for newsworthiness than timelessness. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit heard oral arguments earlier this month appealing the Prop 8 decision that was posted on Scribd. And as for P ? NP, while many computer scientists believe the claim in the paper on Scribd is correct, the proof itself is not seen as conclusive.

The rest of Scribd’s 2010 social docs list is a similar mix of newsworthy documents and research, as well as a little levity, including a list of 25 macaroni-and-cheese recipes.

1. California Prop 8 Ruling (Good As You)
2. PNP 12 pt (Angelica Lim)
3. GOP Pledge to America (CBS News)
4. Scribd in HTML5 (Scribd)
5. A Statement to the Viewers of Countdown (Brian Stelter)
6. Marijuana Is Safer (Chelsea Green)
7. Cognitive Biases–A Visual Study Guide (Efern211)
8. Using Facebook to Move Your Business Forward (Facebook)
9. 25 Mac & Cheese Recipes (Gooseberry Patch)
10. Influence and Passivity in Social Media (Hewlett-Packard)

25 Mac & Cheese Recipes by Gooseberry Patch

Conclusions: It’s really cool! And also, it’s totally, definitely, going to kill someone!

Exactly who that will be is unclear: Maybe it will be Microsoft’s (MSFT) Bing! Maybe it will be Twitter, which is supposed to be “real time,” too! Or maybe it will be the dark arts of search-engine optimization!

Maybe! Or maybe it will be more like Apple’s (AAPL) Ping, which was declared a MySpace Music killer before Steve Jobs finished presenting it last week. Now that people have actually used Ping, though, it seems less homicidal and more benign/inept.

In any case, one thing Google Instant won’t do is make any significant impact on Google’s P&L. So says J.P. Morgan’s (JPM) Imran Khan, in a note he just published (almost instantly!). His big takeaways:

It won’t make Google (GOOG)  any more money, in the near-term:

We think this new product will have little to no impact on monetization rates. We see this product as an improvement to user functionality and think that its impact on advertisers will be limited. All of the ads typically associated with the suggested search appear as normal as the query is being entered. No changes have been made to serving or ranking. Although the constant updates to the results page may result in more ads served as a person types a query, this should only impact CTRs not the number of clicks as a user will not likely click on an ad until the appropriate results appear.

But it won’t cost Google anything, either:

Management expects the impact on costs to be in line with their existing search cost growth curve. Engineers adjusted the product to have as minimal an impact on servers and data centers as possible. Management expects the impact to be in line with the existing search cost growth curve.

But! If people like it (it really is cool), and that prompts them to search more, then that’s a good thing for Google, long-term.

OK! Back to the killing fields!

That’s the result of a small but consequential move Apple (AAPL) made last fall when it began showing Web searchers full-fledged previews of the stuff it sells at its online stores instead of directing them immediately to the store itself.

The biggest impact appears to be on the 140,000 apps Apple sells, which seem to be getting increased visibility from Apple’s links. So says Weldon Dodd, who has put together an interesting study of apps and search results over at The Apple Blog.

For most of Apple’s best-selling apps, Dodd found, Apple’s preview links are likely to turn up on the first page of Google (GOOG) results, and usually much higher up than the developers’ own pages.

So Apple, in effect, is performing search engine optimization on behalf of its developers. That’s the good news. The bad news is that developers don’t have control over or insight into the process. Which means it’s that much harder for them to direct traffic in a retail environment that’s already tightly policed by Apple.

[Image credit: Stig Nygaard]

Hackers are taking advantage of bracket-related Web surfing and initiating some madness of their own, with tactics as sneaky as spreading malicious software through March Madness blog posts.

Online security company Websense discovered two March Madness-related malware scams earlier this week, one in the form of URLs posted in blog comments that took users to a phony anti-virus scanning site, and another as a search engine optimization scam that infected basketball-related terms and pushed them to the top in Google (GOOG).

It’s a clever and common tactic, particularly for an event like the NCAA tournament, which has fans checking sports sites, blogs and mobile devices for updates on their favorite teams. Websense’s chief technology officer, Dan Hubbard, says that hackers try to capitalize on popular events or stories on the Internet, whether it’s a major athletic event such as the Olympics, the recent presidential election, or a celebrity breakup that drives Web traffic. Users need to be wary of links to fake anti-virus scanners that urge installation. “Just because something comes up on your screen and tells you to install it doesn’t mean you have to actually do it,” he says. “That’s a really hard message to get across to the consumers.”

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Is Google making us stupid?

The answer to that question, recently posed by Nick Carr in The Atlantic, is a resounding yes. At least in the case of Sun Sentinel publisher Tribune.

How else to explain the company’s claim that Google is largely to blame for the six-year-old news story that gutted the United Airlines share price this week?

In a statement issued Wednesday, Tribune (TXA) said that Google’s indexing of the article, “United Airlines Files for Bankruptcy,” on Google News made the story appear new, even though it was originally published on Dec. 10, 2002.

At 1:36:57 a.m. EDT, September 7, (10:36:57 p.m. PDT, September 6), our records show that the Google search agent–known as “Googlebot”–crawled the story on Sun Sentinel’s website. Our records also show that the Google search agent had previously crawled this same story numerous times, including as recently as last week. Shortly after Googlebot crawled the Sun Sentinel site this time, however, a link to the story appeared on Google News, with a date of Sept. 6, 2008, provided by Google. At 1:39:59 a.m. EDT, September 7 (10:39:59 p.m. PDT, September 6), our records show the story on the Sun Sentinel website received its first referral from Google News.

Apparently, sometime Monday morning, the story was made available to subscribers of Bloomberg News.

As we said yesterday, the December 10, 2002, story contains information that would clearly lead a reader to the conclusion that it was related to events in 2002. In addition, the comments posted along with the story are dated 2002. It appears that no one who passed this story along actually bothered to read the story itself.”

Apparently not. Certainly the Income Securities Advisors employee who published the story to the Bloomberg financial news service didn’t. Because if he did, he surely would have noticed the original publication date in the article’s dateline, right?

Wrong. Turns out the article did not have a dateline or an original publication date. There was, however, a date above the article at the top of the Web page on which it appeared: “September 7, 2008.” Add to this the fact that the article had been given eight different URLs and one of them was listed in the most-viewed section of the Sun Sentinel’s Web site and, well … clearly, this was all Google’s fault.

Please.

Publishing a news story at multiple URLs without a proper publication date in the era of search engine optimization, or SEO, seems just a bit irresponsible for a major news organization doesn’t it? Perhaps not as irresponsible as publishing that story to a financial newswire without reading it or, you know, confirming it–but irresponsible nonetheless.

The SEC is looking into the matter.

[Image Credit: blogstorm]

A 23-year-old programmer is facing three years in prison after he Google-bombed the Web site of Polish President Lech Kaczy?ski, making it Google Polska’s top result for a search on “kutas,” the Polish word for penis. Said the programmer, “I just wanted to verify my skills and check if the software works.”

A sophomoric prank to be sure, but one that did not go over well with an administration that views insults to a head of state as a prosecutable offense. “This is not a matter of freedom of speech,” said Andrzej Holdys, a regional prosecutor in the southern town of Cieszyn, where the programmer lives. “If somebody uses a derogatory word to libel the head of state, then it’s a clear insult which violates the law.”