Google has finally went cool and hip with their custom 404, playing catch up to Twitter and the likes, creating their own Google Broken Robot. Try it out, go to google.com/rustybrick. Twitter has the fail whale..

Today the Japanese are celebrating the annual Japanese Doll Festival, a tradition during which families — especially those with young daughters — pray for the happiness and healthy growth of girls. Google Japan is likewise celebrating, having posted a special Doodle.

The Telegraph reports Google has given Yelp an ultimatum, either give us your reviews or we will stop listing you in our search engine. Yelp’s CEO said: We are unhappy with the way Google uses our users’ review on its Places page. However..

Below are Search Engine Land’s 10 most popular stories from February 2011: Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results New York Times Exposes J.C. Penney Link Scheme That Causes Plummeting Rankings in Google Google Forecloses On Content Farms With “Farmer” Algorithm Update Google Logo… Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article

As search industry analysts continue to review the fallout from last week’s Google Farmer update, we’re getting new snapshots of what sites were hurt and which ones have survived the crosshairs of Google’s latest algorithm change. One such analysis from SearchMetrics confirms much… Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today…

Posted by randfish By now, everyone in the SEO world is aware of the algorithmic update Google launched last Wednesday, February 23rd. Several posts on the topic are worth reading, including Danny Sullivan’s take , Aaron Wall’s assesment ,

Earlier, we wrote about a Wired article that looked at how the Cult Of Mac web site had regained traffic lost after Google’s recent Farmer Update algorithm change. A fix just for Cult Of Mac? A fix to the algorithm

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