Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web. From Search Engine Land: Texas Attorney General Investigating Google & Antitrust Issues Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott is conducting an investigation into Google’s business practices as they relate to search listings, in particular whether Google is manipulating its *** Read the full post by clicking on the headline above ***

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….

This week’s video is a bit longer than most, but that is okay, next week there won’t be a video recap. Bing seemed to update their search ranking algorithm this week.

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott is conducting an investigation into Google’s business practices as they relate to search listings, in particular whether Google is manipulating its paid and editorial results in a way that violates antitrust laws. We received a tip about the investigation this week, and Google confirmed today that an investigation started in July. *** Read the full post by clicking on the headline above ***

A German court has found YouTube liable for copyright damages after one of its users uploaded copyrighted music videos. A Google spokesperson tells the AP that it’s evaluating the court’s decision and will appeal. The case stems around a YouTube user who uploaded several videos of singer Sarah Brightman

Yesterday I posted about a video being shown on a jumbotron in Times Square that showed Google CEO Eric Schmidt as a privacy peeping Tom; gathering information from unsuspecting children as he offered them “free” ice cream in his Google ice cream truck. Well Business Insider made an interesting discover today that calls out Consumer Watchdog for their hypocrisy

Google Maps for Mobile has a new feature that could help you get exactly where you want to be. Earlier this summer they introduced Expendable Map Ads that appeared in both applications and mobile web. This app provided a banner from paid advertisers that once clicked on, a user would see a map with options to call the business or get directions to it.

Google has decided to give it’s privacy policy a little bit of a makeover. According to the Google Blog they are not changing any policies, just combining some of its more redundant product-specific policies and making their main policy a bit easier for users to understand. Some of the policies to get combined with each other are: Gmail, Calendar, Talk and Docs, since contacts are shared between all of these platforms

In Part 1, we looked at query operators for refining our searches. Now for Part 2, let’s look at parameters that we can add/modify in the URL of the the Google SERP (search engine results page.) The operators listed in Part 1 should suffice for most searches

Earlier this summer Google rolled out Expandable Map Ads for mobile devices. These ads appear on the mobile web and in apps