Here are some of the search engine news articles we found interesting this week:

• China to Google: No porn, or else

  Google has acknowledged that the Chinese government asked it to disable a search feature with the goal of censoring pornography (Cnet June 19 2009)

• Google’s censorship struggles continue in China

  On June 4, 2009, Google.cn blocked all searches for “Tiananmen Square,” even ones not related to the massacre that took place on that date in 1989. (Cnet June 16 2009)

• Google Street View Imagery Leads to Arrest

  Dutch twin brothers who mugged a teenager in the northern town of Groningen were arrested after being caught on camera by a car gathering images for Google’s online photo map service (Blogoscoped June 19 2009)

• Google Goes Rainbow For Gay-Related Searches

  Google is once again flying rainbow colors to support gay pride celebrations (SE Land June 19 2009)

• Google’s Matt Cutts on PageRank sculpting

  Probably the most popular way to envision PageRank is as a flow that happens between documents across outlinks. (June 15 2009)

• Does Lycos want to get back in the game?

  Lycos wants to re-launch their search services pretty fast (Search Cowboys June 17 2009)

• Google Fires Back At Bing, Launches “Explore Google Search”

  A new Explore Google Search page. (SE Land Jun 17 2009)

• Google News Hit By Spammers

  Articles redirect to affiliate pages (SE Roundtable June 17 2009)

• Microsoft tackles Richmond trio for ‘click fraud’

  Three Richmond residents have been sued by software giant Microsoft for “perpetrating a massive ‘click fraud’ scheme.” (Richmond Review June 17 2009)

• Google Germany to Erase Internal Unblurred Street View Data On Request

  Google Inc. is willing to concede to German demands the company erase photos for its panoramic mapping service (Google Blogoscoped June 18 2009)

• Microsoft’s Search Engine Optimization Advice for Bing

  Microsoft recently published a PDF about Search Engine Optimization called Bing: New Features Relevant to Webmasters. (SE Land Jun 18 2009)

• Bing Maps: A revealing discussion on Ch. 9

  The Bing Maps for Enterprise, previously known as Virtual Earth, is a team of some 600, with 260 developers (Liveside.net June 18 2009)

• Google adds Flash indexing with external resource loading

  This means that when a SWF file loads content from some other file—whether it’s text, HTML, XML, another SWF, etc.—we can index this external content too (Google Webmaster Central June 18 2009)

• Google Joins Twitter in Iran Election Buzz : Adds Persian Farsi Translation

  Google has added Persian (Farsi) translation to their Google Translate tool. (SE Journal June 19 2009)

• Google Flipper Is About To Jump Out Of The Water

  The project is a visual way to read Google News, or to flip through it, as it were. (TechCrunch june 18 2009)

• It Ain’t Over ’til the Fat Lady Bings

  Bing kicked off with a bang on June 1, doubling the number of unique visitors MSN/Windows Live received on the previous day and nearly overtaking Yahoo! Search for the No. 2 spot. (Nielsen Online June 16 2009)

• Google Trilogy Now Available

  Infonortics Ltd., a publisher in the United Kingdom, has announced “The Google Trilogy”. Stephen E. Arnold’s three monographs (June 17 2009)

• Scoopler: Social media engine

  It pulls live updates from Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Delicious ‘and more’ (P Bradley June 16 2009)

• What Intel Can Teach Google About the Cloud

  Internet bandwidth grows at an annual rate of 50 percent, compared with compute capacity, which grows at 60 percent, meaning that over a 10-year time period, computer power grows 100X, but bandwidth grows at 57X. (Gigaom June 14 2009)

• Topsy Lets You Mix Real Time in Your Search

  An indexer of data from the living social Web, which includes things like blogs, twitter Digg, etc. (ResearchBuzz June 20 2009)

• Google Preps Product Ads, Shows Us “What’s Here?” on Google Maps

  Google product ads will feature product specific information directly in the ad such as price and product image (Google Watch June 20 2009)

• Google Squared – great idea, but…

  In practice, once the excited searcher deviates from the carefully chosen examples Google offers things fall to pieces very quickly. (P Bradley June 20 2009)

• Hunch – a decision search engine that works

  “. I dutifully answered the questions (didn’t take long, no more than a couple of minutes) and then Hunch told me that it knew enough about me to start being helpful.” (P Bradley June 19 2009)

• Iranian Election Scandal Forces Facebook, Google to Translate Persian

  Google and Facebook have set the blogosphere afire with breathy promises of adding the Persian language, Farsi, to their list of translation services. (Google Watch June 18 2009)

• New Features on Google Books

  Google adds embedding, thumbnail view and makes it easier to see exactly where your search term appears within the book (Inside Google Book Search June 18 2009)

• Secrets of a nimble giant – Brin on Google

  How does a company with 20,000 staff manage to keep innovating? (Guardian June 17 2009)

• Steve Ballmer admits Microsoft’s biggest mistake

  “I would probably say I would start sooner on search” (TG Daily June 18 2009)

photo credit: phauly