What the search engine news scene has brought to our attention this week:

• Likaholix Wants to Know What You Like

  Likaholix is a new website by two ex-Google employees, Bindu Reddy and Arvind Sundararajan. (G Blogoscoped March 4 2009)

• Google’s Schmidt: I Didn’t Diss Twitter

  Eric Schmidt explained on CNBC tonight that he didn’t mean to insult Twitter when he said it was a poor-man’s email system. (Silicon Alley Insider March 4 2009)

• Get Ready For A Better Experience With Google Health!

  Feature allows users to share their medical records with their trusted network of individuals. (PageTraffic March 5 2009)

• When Search Spam Gets Evil: “Craphat”

  Spam beyond white hat and black hat SEO (SE Roundtable March 5 2009)

• Google Launches TipJar, a Yahoo Answer-Like Money Saving Tips Site

  TipJar is powered by Google Moderator, a tool which started as an experiment for the Google App Engine. (SE Journal March 5 2009)

• Is Google Rewiring Our Brains?

  Research on how internet searching activated different parts of the brain (SE Land March 6 2009)

• Why Google & Twitter Need to Ditch “Nofollow” for All Our Sakes!

  With the nofollow tag added to every single link shared in Twitter, Google’s spider–even if it could keep up with Twitter’s flow of content–is strictly forbidden from following those links. (Marketing Pilgrim March 6 2009)

• Google Adds Recent Earthquake Info to Search Results

  If you do a search for “earthquakes” on Google, now you’ll get info on the most recent earthquake activity (SEW March 6 2009)

• Yahoo! Releases Inquisitor for the iPhone

  Last year, Yahoo! acquired the assets for search suggestion plugin Inquisitor. (SEW March 6 2009)

• Live Search Cashback Icon Now on MSN Toolbar

  What’s good about this Cashback icon is the fact that it gleams whenever you have encountered an item in your search results which has a cashback offering. (SE Journal March 5 2009)

• Potential Trouble for LexisNexis and Westlaw

  LexisNexis gives you acces to legal documents for a fee. Senator Lieberman wants it to be free (Beyond Search March 2 2009)

• First screenshot of Microsoft’s Kumo

  From this screenshot (and two others I have seen), it appears the biggest change in Kumo is the way that it shows in the first results the query narrowed by a couple of different things the searcher might be looking for. (Beyond Binary March 1 2009)

• Understanding Intentions and Microsoft Search Personalization

  Microsoft Kumo will use search history to identify best hits (SEO by the Sea March 6 2009)

• Live Search to get new features…oh and a new brand, too

  Kumo.com, the Japanese term for “cloud” (or spider, depending) might be slated to become the new brand for Live Search. (LiveSide March 1 2009)

• 100 Best Web Tools for Your Self Improvement

  Just because you feel like you don’t have time to work on your productivity, budget or goals doesn’t mean you have an excuse to put off organizing and improving your life. (Online Universities)

• Twitter: We Can Do What Google Can’t

  It’s because of the potential it sees in search that the Twitter co-founders walked away from a $500 million offer from Facebook (Advertising Age March 3 2009)

• Why Googlers Are Leaving to Start Social Sites (And Invites to One of Them)

  The reason former Googlers focus on community-oriented is because they know that it is very difficult to take on Google on a pure technology play (Mashable March 4 2009)

• Deep Peep

  This search engine is designed to cater to the needs of casual Web users in search of online databases (Beyond Search March 7 2009)

• Why I Sued Google (and Won)

  Aaron Greenspan found his AdSense account closed down but got no explanation from Google (Huffington March 6 2009)

Google’s Matt Cutts tries to the latest change in Google’s ranking. Matt argues that this is not so much a matter of giving brands a special treatment in the algorithm. Here are a couple of comments.We have included the video below.

• Google Confirms Algorithm “Change” But Down Plays Brand Push”

  Matt Cutts makes another video about an algorithm change (SE Roundtable March 5 2009)

• Dear Monica, We Changed our Algo – Google’s Matt Cutts

  The upshot, as I interpret the back-and-forth between experts like Aaron Wall and experts at Google, is that Google does find it difficult to accurately assign trust and authority across this vast digital universe. (Traffick March 5 2009)