Here’s this week’s glance into the world of search and search engines:

• Twitter’s New Rumored Business: Improving Google and Microsoft’s Search Engines

  Twitter is talking to both Google and Microsoft about licensing deals that would allow them to integrate Twitter data into their search engines. (Mashable Oct 8 2009)

• Google Wave: first impressions

  Wave is meant to be the ability to share documents and files instinctively, but this doesn’t seem to work properly at the moment. (new media wave Oct 9 2009)

• Brin Defends Book Search Settlement; Google & Plaintiffs Get One Month To Revise It

  The clock is ticking: Google and the parties involved in the Book Search lawsuit settlement have one month from today — until November 9 — to revise the settlement (SE Land Oct 9 2009)

• New in Google Squared: quality improvements, sorting and exporting

  In addition to improving the information in Squared results, we’ve also added the ability to sort columns, so you can rank, group and compare items. (Google Blog Oct 9 2009)

• StumbleUpon Recasts Itself As A Social Search Engine “Between Google And Twitter.”

  About 8 million people a month use StumbleUpon to bookmark and share the best sites on the Web. (TechCrunch Oct 8 2009)

• Google Begins Fixing Usenet Archive

  Google has pulled its Google Groups development team out of the basement broom closet and begun patching up its long-broken Usenet library (Wired Oct 8 2009)

• A Library to Last Forever

  Google’s Sergey Brin defends the Google Book deal in the New York Times (Oct 8 2009)

• Flu Wars: Microsoft’s New H1N1 Site, Google Flu Trends Expands

  Microsoft and Google are both promoting their flu sites this week (SE Watch Oct 8 2009)

• Google keeping unblurred images for a year

  In a post about European Street View issues the Google Europe policy team addressed this issue saying they keep the urn-blurred images in their database (SearchCowboys Oct 8 2009)

• Is Twitter Working a Deal with Google and Microsoft?

  There are reports saying that Twitter is actually in advanced talks with Microsoft and Google separately over a possible data-mining deals (SE Journal Oct 8 2009)

• Join the Minimalist Google Homepage Prototype

  To join this prototype, you can go to google.com and type the following into the address bar…(Blogoscoped Oct 8 2009)

• The Meta Keywords Tag is Still Dead!

  At SMX East this week, Cris Pierry, the Senior Director of Yahoo! Search, surprised everyone by saying that Yahoo! had stopped supporting the Meta Keywords Tag several months ago. (SE Watch Oct 7 2009)

• Reviewing Some Bad Google Search Results With Sergey Brin

  First, I showed him the results for search engine on Google that I joked about yesterday. Seriously, Dogpile ranks first? (SE Land Oct 7 2009)

• Quickly view formatted PDFs in your search results

  Google Blog: We’ve added new links to “Quick View” PDFs in your browser with the formatting intact (Oct 7 2009)

• Bing Enables Voice Search to Sprint Intrepid

  Bing has teamed up with Sprint Mobile to bring voice-recognition search feature to one of Sprint’s not so well know mobile phone (SE Journal Oct 7 2009)

• The Next Wave of Search

  Yahoo! Search Advertising Enhancements That Deliver (Yahoo Search Marketing Blog Oct 5 2009)

• Google Street View for Canada, Czech Republic

  Google has launched Street View imagery for Canada and the Czech Republic. (Google Blogoscoped Oct 7 2009)

• Google Takes 71% of U.S. Searches

  Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com accounted for, 8.96%, 16.38% and 2.56% respectively. (SE Journal Oct 6 2009)

• Reunifying duplicate content on your website

  Having duplicate content on your website is generally not problematic, though it can make it harder for search engines to crawl and index the content. (Google Webmaster Central Oct 6 2009)

• Google to Apple: Can You Hear Me Now?

  Google’s Android phone technology is going where no iPhone has gone before–to the Verizon network. (Marketing Pilgrim Oct 6 2009)

• Google’s Experimental Homepage Fades To A Single Word

  Google is bucket testing a new effect that hides everything on the Google homepage aside from the search box and Google’s logo, only revealing the rest of the navigation elements with a nifty fade effect when you move your mouse. (TechCrunch Oct 5 2009)

• Google Soon To Allow Cross Domain Canonical Tag: This Is Big

  This means, if you have two sites (probably verified under the same webmaster tools account), you will be able to tell Google, all links pointing to domain A should point to domain B. (SE Roundtable Oct 6 2009)

• Ask Launches New “Deals” Vertical Within Search

  Ask launches a deals vertical (”Ask Deals“) within search that seeks to be that comprehensive source of coupons and offers from a wide range of sources. (SE Land Oct 6 2009)

• How to Find Timely Sensational Content on Wikipedia

  Tracking Wikipedia edits may be another way to keep an eye on hot trends and spot questionable content (for your link bait inspiration for example). (SE Journal Oct 3 2009)

• Yahoo ponders the meaning of search

  Yoelle Maarek, a search expert who recently joined Yahoo Labs to lead its Haifa, Israel, office, argues that the action these days is on the presentation side. (cnet Oct 9 2009)

• Google Squared Gets Enhanced

  Google Squared is a Google Labs project that pulls data from various Web searches and gives you the results on a grid. (About Oct 9 2009)

• Private clouds

  On getting your “private cloud” — having an elastic, self-service computing infrastructure in place for use within an organization. (Borud Oct 2009)

• Yahoo: What’s For Sale, What’s Not, And What Could Be

  Silicon Alley Insider discusses what Yahoo will keep and what it may sell (Oct 6 2009)

• Introducing the Bing Reference Homepage

  Have you ever wanted to delve deeper into the Bing homepage, and learn even more about the daily image? (Bing Community Oct 7 2009)

• Inside the Google News algorithm

  Articles are ranked based on originality, freshness, quality, expertise of source and incoming links (Computerworld Oct 5 2009)

• Microsoft Bing Joins Google in Voice Search

  We’ve watched the Bing team, supported by a multimillion-dollar marketing push, pump out innovation after innovation since its June launch (Google Watch Oct 7 2009)

• Exalead and Documentum Connect

  Exalead CloudView provides indexing and searching services for Documentum databases. (Beyond Search Oct 7 2009)

• Why Google isn’t evil

  How Google.org is using its algorithms to save the world (techradar Oct 3 2009)

• Microsoft Gun Shy over Search

  When I read “Microsoft’s Ballmer Says Search Buys Unlikely“, I asked myself, “Is Microsoft taking the first tentative steps toward a truce with Google? (Beyond Search Oct 6 2009)

• Three ways to do an advanced image search

  If you’ve ever searched for an image, you’ve probably been at least a little frustrated with the quality of your results. (About Oct 5 2009)

Matt Cutts on the robots.txt file and indexing

Some complain that even if they set up a robots.txt file banning Google from indexing a file, Google will still include that file in search results.

Google’s Matt Cutts explains why: