Search Bistro have released some very interesting documents over the last few week. One in particular, a Spam guide for Google raters which includes ways to spot if a website is spam. The document only covers basic methods of spamming techniques but what I found more interesting was the explanation of what sites are considered spam;

"At first cut it may look like yet another thin affiliate doorway to Amazon or B&N, but bookfinder4u.com is providing a value-added service to visitors by offering a comparison of prices between different online merchants. Ultimately you will be taken to Ecampus.com, Half.com, Amazon or another affiliate online bookseller, but the fact that they have their own price comparison infrastructure is the differentiator."

This topic is covered at a thread on the Digital Point forums.

MyWeb from Yahoo now include two extra links in the search results pages (see below)



The two extra buttons are "Save" and "Block" seem to appear for all results whether you have signed up for MyWeb or not. I'm wondering whether Yahoo will plan to give some extra ranking to sites that many users have saved, likewise will a site fall in the rankings if many users block a particular site? I think there could be serious gaming going on if this were the case to artificially increase ranking or decrease a competitors site.

The new MSN Search Toolbar is now out of its beta stage and the new version turns IE into a tabbed browsing interface. For those who've never heard of tabbed browsing or haven't switched over to Firefox or Opera yet it's definitely worth a try, you'll never go back.



However, the new tabbed interface for IE (with the toolbar installed) I found very buggy, it's just not as smooth as Firefox or Opera (the screen flickered between switching tabs and new tabs) and seems like a 3rd party add-on as opposed to an official release. But if you must use IE then this is probably the best you'll get for a while.

One site using Google Maps has received a polite message to remove its contents from Google. A thread on Google Blogoscoped covers this. I remember visiting this Wallpaper site recently, now it just contains the removal message Google sent them.

This is the first time I've heard that Google have requested the removal of such a site using a Google map hack. There are many more and one even got a mention on Google's official blog - will they all be heading the same way?

Google have changed their logo for today to honour Frank Lloyd Wright. When you click on the logo, in the usual fashion it performs a Google search relating to the daily event - in this case Frank Lloyd Wright. Noticeably the first result www.franklloydwright.org hasn't been working for the past 10 hours at least - perhaps a sharp increase in hits is to blame!

As Goog's share price approaches close to $300 and with predictions for the shares prices to rise well over this figure this article talks about how Google has "took over the top spot as the most highly valued media company this week, surpassing Time Warner in just 10 months of trading as a public company".

Good news for Google but can they hold this position?

Here is another rather cool website referring to Google maps. With the rather amusing tagline "why bother seeing the world for real?" Google Sightseeing is a collection of interesting findings including mistakes, impressive scenes and some more mistakes ;)

Too much for me to mention here take a look.

Microsoft have been working on Wallop for some time, however recently it's been opened to a few testers (thanks to Barry from Search Engine Roundtable for my invite) and I have recently been able to test it.



The main function of Wallop is to allow sharing of media between friends - friendship groups are all linked graphically. To get an idea of how groups are visually represented - take a look at Microsoft's Social Computing Group page. Wallop is like Yahoo's recently talked about Yahoo 360 - also invitation only at present.

One of the most interesting features about Wallop is the interface - almost everything you click on (even drag over) is animated in some way. Although not obvious from the screenshot above the entire front-end is built in Flash and works quite well. There were numerous occasions where I right-clicked on items expecting more menus to pop-up like a standard application! It's not often I see interfaces like this in a browser and it does take a bit of getting used to.

Whether it'll take off or not it's an interesting service and worth a try, if you email me I should be able to give an invite if you're quick!

Over at WebMaster World GoogleGuy updates us with progress of the latest update Bourbon. There should be some more changes shortly, here's what he said;

"Okay, a bunch of reinclusions (and the responses to some spam complaints) went out today, along with some improvements to one of the first two things that went out with Bourbon. I also believe that we completed a binary push this weekend that has hooks for the last part of Bourbon. We'll turn on one datacenter, and then the rest of the datacenters over the course of the next week or so. After the other changes that went out, this last change should be less noticeable..."

Espotting has announced it will be changing it's name to MIVA, the change should be complete by the end of June. Read the FAQ here which includes the new logo.

A thread on WebMaster World covers this news.

Start.com is a new service from Microsoft - a personalised Homepage, similar to what MyYahoo is offering at the moment. The preview version is a slightly strange as you have to answer five questions to process to the beta, if you don't want to answer them you can always skip straight to the preview. Start.com features integration from MSN Search, stock and weather modules, news feeds, and keeps track of your search history.



Although this could shape in to a nice service there were loads to bugs with the beta, firstly I couldn't get into work properly in Firefox (perhaps this was indented). Also the rss feeds caused errors and when dragging the tabs about - a nice feature - didn't always work correctly.