Here’s a roundup of today’s other search news and headlines from around the web, sorted by category. Click to read the rest of this post…

Quarterly reports are to companies what New Year’s Day is to people: a chance to make new goals, review your progress so far, and have an extra drink.

Google announced it is dropping the Tags feature for its Places product – a feature they were selling to small businesses to promote their location and products or services through Google Maps. The unfortunate thing is the disconnect did not show any Google team unity and has left people wondering what to do. If you have been using this beta test product you may have received an email (hopefully they did that – I do not use so did not get one) about the service being discontinued

In the U.S, more than half of all mobile phone subscribers will be using a smartphone. The expanding presence of smartphones is forcing data coverage lower, the hardware is becoming more accessible, the operating systems are becoming friendlier and more secure, battery life is (slowly) increasing; there are mounds of reasons to make the switch

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

To date Google has not used the mobile handset UDID “device identifier” to target mobile advertising via its AdSense for mobile and AdMob networks. For several reasons that have to do with ad performance, Google has decided to use the device identifier going forward.

Google just released an update to their iPhone Search App that has a couple bug fixes but more importantly, it now supports Google Doodles. Now when you open the Google iPhone app, it will display the Google logo of the day. So if you opened it today, you would see the Charlie Chaplin Google logo…

PPC is as significant as ever, the SEM industry is stronger than ever and projected to grow 16 percent this year, and the Microsoft-Yahoo Search Alliance was well-received.

Will older publication dates for your articles and blog posts bring down your rankings in Google? Not likely say forum members who say there isn’t much correlation with dates and lower rankings in the recent Panda Update.

In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more.