Here are some recent search engine stories we have found interesting.

let’s start with the prolific Matt Cutts of Goolge. It does help a little bit to have your keyword in your URL when ranking in Google, he says in this video:

What does this mean for your SEO efforts? Well, we don’t lose our sleep over the fact that Pandia is at pandia.com instead of search-engine-seomething-or-the-other.com. After all, Google, Yahoo, Amazon do the same for sensible branding reasons.

We have set up our publishing tool to include keywords in the file names, though!

And in other news:

• Search Google Images By Color

  Google Image search can now be restricted to return results of a specific color. (Blogoscoped Mar 21 2009)

• Why Microsoft Continues to Chase Internet Search

  Mr. Ballmer wants to be in search because that’s where the money is. (The New York Times Mar 20 2009)

• webKruz visual search engine

  webKruz is a visual search engine – run your search and it will produce a tag cloud, arrange results into categories and then display sites as thumbnails that you can scroll across the screen. (P Bradley Mar 21 2009)

• Google Confirms Treating / and /index.html The Same

  Google will typically treat the home page of a site, i.e. /, the same if it were / or /index.html and likely index.php or any other extension. (SE Roundtable Mar 18 2009)

• Google Confirms Bug in AdWords Tool

  he complaint is that broad terms are being included in the AdWords keyword tool search. (PageTraffic Mar 21 2009)

• Getting Links AND Content From Flickr

  If you can take a great photo, you can use Flickr to build inbound links and get your photos showing up in places like Consumerist and Epicenter. (SE Land Mar 20 2009)

• Microsoft’s Ballmer Signals Renewed Interest In Yahoo

  CEO says there is “a good opportunity” for the two companies to complete a search deal. (Information Week Mar 19 2009)

• Yahoo Image Search Shows Off New Filters

  Need a photo of a certain size? Yahoo will toss the usual small, medium, large, and wallpaper options at you. (WebProNews Mar 19 2009)

• Gmail Labs Rolls Out “Undo Send”

  Feature lets users undo sent email which are not supposed to be sent yet, or emails which contain errors. (SE Journal Mar 19 2009)

• Search Suggestions in Yahoo! Images are just Brilliant

  For instance, when I searched for images of domino’s pizza on Yahoo, the suggestions included McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, Burger King, KFC and Subway (Digital Inspiration Mar 20 2009)

• Microsoft Search News Out of IE 8 and MIX09

  Once you’ve installed IE 8 and the accelerator, all you have to do is highlight a word on a page you’re viewing, click on the arrow that appears and click on the option you want. (SEW Mar 20 2009)

• Oh No He Didn’t! Ballmer Disses Yahoo!, Apple, Google

  Steve Ballmer? He doesn’t want to be “the Jerry Yang Web search.” Ouch. (XChange Mar 20 2009)

• Middlespot Is An Alternative Visual Search Engine

  Another startup taking a crack at making the web search experience more visual, joining the likes of SearchMe, Snap and Viewzi. (TechCrunch Mar 21 2009)

• Google removes sex and sick images from street view

  The company said that it has removed several images, including the one which showed a man leaving a sex shop in central London (IT Examiner Mar 22 2009)

• Google Voice Chatter Could Be a Legal Nightmare

  Google’s new telephone service, Google Voice, is making observers nervous. Wiretapping laws could be violated (CIO Mar 13 2009)

• Sony, Google Team to Take on the Kindle

  Sony and Google announced on Thursday a deal whereby 500,000 public domain books from Google’s book digitization project will now be available for free for the Sony Reader (Realtechnews Mar 19 2009)

• Google Experiments with JavaScript

  The first release of Google’s web browser came with a brand new JavaScript engine that was a lot faster than those of its competitors (CS Newa Mar 21 2009)

• Google forced to pull Street View images in the UK

  Users identify themselves in pictures (Informatics Mar 19 2009)