Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web….

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web.

The experience of viewing place photos in Google Maps got a little easier this week. Google has announced that it’s now showing certain place images in a photo album

Google’s been under fire in various quarters, including the New York Times, that it should open up about how its ranking algorithm works. I think offering the exact formula would be difficult plus potentially give away trade secrets.

Bing has announced they have added transit directions in 11 cities. Transit directions can be used to determine the best way to get from point A to point B via bus, subway, or local rail. Bing released this feature for Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New Jersey, New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington *** Read the full post by clicking on the headline above ***

Personalized search has been a major annoyance to search marketers who have hard time finding out which of search results are ranked only “for them” and which ones are seen by other searchers as well. There are few options available to Google like a Ghost and recently I have come across another interesting alternative that may come in handy for search marketers who love to experiment.

Google Instant launched over a week ago now and I wanted to reach out to our readers who run AdWords campaigns. As you know, Google Instant changes the way Google shows your AdWords ads

There are a number of critical articles, even complaints, coming out of yesterday’s Yahoo press event featuring new Chief Product Officer Blake Irving. The main portion of the event had Irving and CTO Raymie Strata discussing Yahoo strategy and reiterating that Yahoo wasn’t simply a media company but a company with deep technology as well

People often argue if Google can really automate the process of detecting if a site has paid links or not.

Gawker broke a story named Google Engineer Stalked Teens, Spied on Chats. I’ll quote the beginning… David Barksdale, a 27-year-old former Google engineer, repeatedly took advantage of his position as a member of an elite technical group at the company..