Vanessa Fox covered how Google was content spamming their own index with Google Translate pages. She discovered it via a tweet from @rishil.

Facebook has come under some criticism over the past two years for using user information in advertising – ads containing users’ pictures , selling of information , and now their newly launched “Sponsored Stories:.

Google announced they are “retiring” their Google Real Estate Search feature, which was launched back in July 2009. Google said the service will go offline on February 10, 2011. They cite the reason for killing off this search service is partly due to “low usage..

In October 2009, Google announced their social search feature and it got a ton of buzz. A few months later they rolled it into the main stream search results via the left hand navigation and a social box element…

This week I am a bit under the weather, but I produced my weekly search & SEO recap. Google vowed to target low quality content..

We just got invited to Google’s upcoming Honeycomb (Android 3.0) event and tablet coming out party on February 2 at Google HQ: There will be demos, presumably of several tablets, at the event. We’ve seen the screens and videos.

Google and the Connecticut-led coalition of 40 US states will avoid court and begin negotiations that are aimed at settling issues related to Google’s collection of personal data over unsecured WiFi networks. In a press release issued today (PDF), newly-elected Connecticut Attorney General… Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Google has had its share of negative press coverage over the past year. And one of the questions that reporters always ask is: how will this scandal or that investigation impact the perception or usage of Google in the market? In other words, does something like the WiFi privacy scandal in Europe…

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…

Using its own tag line Taco Bell has gone outside the bun to counter claims in a class action lawsuit over the labeling and contents of its ingredients, using full page print ads in major newspapers and addressing the issue with social media. Click to read the rest of this post…