Just saw this at Google Official Blog:
The personalized homepage has a new directory with more content and more ways to browse, search and add it to your Google homepage. A lot of content owners have been asking for ways to drive adoption of their feeds and modules. One option is the "Add to Google" button you can add to your website as a way to quickly connect fans to your content.
If you think that it was only Google who tried to fool its visitors with Google Aliens and Google Romance, then guys you absolutely know nothing about the whole matter. Apart from Google, it is said that other search engines played tricks on the visitors as well. A detailed study on the whole scenario is discussed underneath.
Google April Fools With Love
GoogleBot has said to delete almost all the pages of the Webmaster World site. How? Here is the story. It said that the Webmaster Site was reconstructed a few months back putting all the content into a database driven solution. But, the main mistake was made when, while publishing the new site, an employee of Webmaster World left the "Edit" link open on the frontend, where GoogleBot can easily reach it. It is presumed that the site was not protected with a password and therefore became victim of GoogleBot. Visit The Daily WTF forum for a complete picture.
A recent news in the SEO world has come up which says that Google Local Business Ads launches their new Beta version. This act is a result of dual effort by Google Adwords and Google Local, who plans to implement new strategies to bring response driven advertising to Google Local Business Ads.
According to DigitalPoint Forums, Yahoo! has been updating Yahoo! Image Search index. So, get ready to have a new stock of fresh images. This would make Yahoo! Image Search more compatible.
So, experience a whole new world of Yahoo! Image Search which would provide you with more search guidelines.
For further discussion refer to DigitalPoint Forums.
Google redesigned their Personalized Homepage. Now, get your homepage content chooser with new look. Well, the little blue box at the top of your personalized homepage has disappeared. It has been replaced by simple text line which would lead you to a new content chooser.
It would make your search easy as you can view all the modules (categorized), and directly add RSS or module URLs via the advanced options.
Russell Beattie reports that MSN local has added "Send To Mobile" feature. This feature has been added to your business listing. With the help of this feature you can send the search results to your mobile phone right from the Web page. MSN is quite late on this as Yahoo! has launched almost same feature, "Send to Phone feature Yahoo!" a year ago.
Yahoo! may face legal action by the family of Shi Tao, a Chinese journalist. Tao has been accused of leaking confidential government information to others via his Yahoo! Mail account. Tao's family said that he has been jailed for ten years for leaking these secrets. Yahoo! Mail had to surrender all the email records of Shi Tao to the Chinese authorities because mail servers come under Chinese jurisdiction. Tao had distributed a confidential Chinese government order even after he received a prior warning by the government.
Zhang Yu, representing the family of Shi Tao told Forbes that they were considering taking Yahoo! Hong Kong Holdings to court either here or in the United States.
'We believe what (Yahoo!) did was illegal so we are considering taking Yahoo! to court,' Zhang told reporters, adding that Yahoo! had refused to discuss the matter with him.
Pro-democracy legislator and lawyer Albert Ho showed a copy of the court verdict issued by a court in the central Chinese province of Hunan.
The document said: 'Yahoo! Hong Kong Holdings provided materials that confirmed the user's information.' It also gave the IP address of Shi's computer and his work phone number and address.
Seth Finkelstein offers a few methods by which you can increase your chances of showing up for a stock search in the blog post section of Google Finance. Nothing much to do, just use the full name of your company in your blog title and next time see your company included on the page.