It's fascinating what people are creating with Google maps. Over at Slashdot it mentions that someone created a website which can actually display Crimes in Chicago using up-to-date crime data combined with the Google Maps interface. There is also the rather interesting Housing Maps which was recently mentioned on Google's own blog.

Now if only this stuff covered the UK...

It seems that PageRank is not showing for any given website for the past 12 hours. Could this be the end of PageRank for good or perhaps a sign of another PR update?

Threads at WebMaster World and SEO Chat are in discussion about this.

An interesting finding. During the latest PR update Google has clearly given no PageRank to the 'General Directory' category of Dmoz, Yahoo Directory and Google's own directory (not even cached).

At present, general directories rely heavily on linking between each other. But if none of them have any links from the top 3 major directories this could potentially "cut-off the power" which fuelled the network.

Google obviously wants to halt the major surge in general directories that exist at present, and perhaps most importantly the weight they are passing on to other sites. If you have relied heavily on directory links in the past this will most likely affect your ranking since most directories will now have less power.

The latest Google update (named Bourbon) has resulted in webmasters panicking since many sites seemed to have mysteriously fallen almost right out of the index. With many users sites (including one of mine) not appearing for even their company name - not matter how obscure. The question is when will the update settle and what will it leave?

Join those at Web Master World at Bourbon Update (It's a long read - now totalling over 130 pages!)

Welcome to Open Search Engine - the blog for all search engine news. I plan to keep this as up-to-date as I possibly can. With information that will hopefully interest anyone in the field of Search Engine Marketing.