The issue of whether Google’s indexing of news sites constitutes copyright infringement is likely to receive more attention following a report that Google has entered into licensing agreements with several large UK news groups, similar to the licensing deals that Google has made with the Associated Press in the U.S. and Agence France-Presse in France. [...]

“Googling a person” has been part of the vernacular for some time now, but Google’s control over identity has become so powerful that it’s now influencing baby naming choices — at least that’s the hook in this WSJ piece on Google and identity:

So when Ms. Wilson, now 32, was pregnant with her first child, she [...]

Microsoft released a research report about the scourge of search engine spam (via NYT).

Nick Wilson has an excellent podcast on the topic, in which he observes that Google is perversely incented NOT to clear up spam in its search results because it actually makes money off of those spam sites by supplying the ads.
Nick also [...]

There is a very real body of knowledge about how to manage search that is not fairly characterized as gaming of the system.
There are some very smart people who are masters of this knowledge base.
There are many SEOs who, in addition to possessing this knowledge, appear to be very honest brokers. (See this post for [...]

UDPATE #2: My last word on SEO, at least for a while, is here: What I Learned About SEO
UPDATE: I promised Aaron Wall, my favorite SEO who makes it impossible for me to stand by any negative stereotypes of SEO, that I would update this post if he added a good explanation in the comments, [...]

So here’s another example of what gives SEO a bad name — UPDATE: correction, it appears to be an example of Google’s bad results, which some (like me) might mistakenly blame on SEO. I was checking out search traffic for Publishing 2.0, and noticed that my Online Publishing category was a #9 result for “online [...]

When a controversy foments to the point where both sides are shouting at the top of their lungs and can’t even hear each other, the truth is typically somewhere between the two extremes. Such is the case it seems with search engine optimization, or SEO. Jason Calacanis thinks that SEO is bullshit and that 90% [...]