5 Google alternatives in Europe
State of Search: Google is the dominant force in Europe—there is no other search engine which even comes close to Google’s market share. I think everybody will agree when I say that Europe could use some competition for Google. Bing should be the designated search engine to become that big competitor, but for now that is not the case.

Thirty Free Image Resources on the Web
About: Looking for free images? Here are thirty sites where you can find completely free images, available for use on your blog or web site. All of these sites offer royalty free images for your use (be sure to check each site for specific guidelines that they request you follow in order to use their images).

Google Shopper For iPhone is a Great Personal Shopping Assistant
Google Tutor: Android users got Google Shopper in November last year. The wait wasn’t too long for iPhone users. Last month, Google introduced the Google Shopper for iPhone, a neat personal shopping assistant.

Privacy Groups Cheer FTC’s Action Over Google Buzz
Inside Google: Privacy advocates cheered on Wednesday in response to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s crackdown on Google over privacy violations it called deceptive and potentially illegal resulting from the bungled launch of the Buzz social networking and microblogging service. More here and here.

Google Will Face Privacy Audits For The Next 20 Long Years (GOOG)
SF Gate: Google has reached a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over Buzz, a social blogging service that the company introduced through Gmail last year. As part of the deal, Google will be subjected to regular, independent privacy audits for the next 20 years.

Meet +1: Google’s Answer To The Facebook Like Button
SE Land: Nearly a year after Facebook Like buttons spread out across the web, Google has announced its own rival, the +1 button. It launches today as part of Google’s search engine, allowing you to “+1? the search results and ads that you like. See also SE Watch.

Google +1, will it succeed? The experts don’t agree
State of Search: With the launch of “+1? Google seems to have made another step in the revealing of their social layers. This one without a doubt is one of the bigger changes so far…we also asked several experts in the industry to shine their light on the matter.

April Fools Day around the Web
Wendy Boswell: A lot of people love having a little fun on this popular holiday; here are a few of my favorite April Fools Day jokes I’ve found on the Web. See also Marketing Pilgrim, SE Land and the Google Blog.

Schmidt & Privacy: Google Anyone Other Than Me
SE Land: Today, in a review of Steven Levy’s new book In The Plex, the New York Times highlighted an excerpt where Google CEO and soon to be Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt asked Google to remove search results about a political donation he had made.

Bing shows off HTML5: getting closer?
Liveside: Microsoft Advertising held its “Imagine 2011” event in Redmond this week, bringing together advertisers and industry insiders to talk about the future of Microsoft and advertising. Included were talks by Steve Ballmer, Online Services President Qi Lu, and Yusuf Mehdi, who showed off Bing, including a snippet of HTML5 enabled Bing.

Official: Google Stops The Music Search
SE Land: Google’s Music Search put songs, albums and artists front and center above Google’s regular search results. Google suggested it would help the music industry by making it easier for searchers to ‘find and discover’ music, and to find sites to “preview and purchase” songs. They did that through partnerships with several then-popular music websites but, as TechCrunch suggested…, several of those sites are now gone.

Microsoft to Google: stop copying us!
techradar: Fans of irony rejoice: Microsoft wants Google investigated for anti-competitive behaviour…According to Microsoft, Google gets better access to [Youtube] content than anybody else…Microsoft also claims that Google gives preferential treatment to its pals. Android and iPhones get full access to YouTube’s features; Windows Phone doesn’t. See also: Microsoft Complaint Outlines 6 Reasons Why Google is a Monopoly.

Talking Twin Babies Babble about Google’s +1 (Subtitles/Translation)
BoomTown: Babbling babies take on Google.

Bing Tests New Homepage Layout
SE Watch: Rather than having the vertical links to Images, Videos, etc. at left on top of their background picture, in this test Bing has moved those links to the top of the screen and arranged them horizontally (but thankfully doesn’t follow Google’s lead with a “More” pulldown).

Google Not Planning To Release Mobile Face Recognition: Update
SE Land:Google made the following statement: ‘As we’ve said for over a year, we won’t add face recognition to Goggles unless we can figure out a strong privacy model for it. We haven’t figured it out.’

Baidu deletes 2.8m online works due to copyright tussle
BBC: Chinese search engine Baidu has deleted 2.8m works from its online library, Baidu Wenku, in an attempt to settle a copyright dispute with writers.

Google Talk Guru Brings Search To Instant Messaging
SE Land: Google Talk Guru is a new experiment that tries to turn the instant messaging interface into a search engine of sorts. It is an experimental service that allows people to get information like sports results, weather forecasts, definitions etc via chat. It was just added to Google Labs today, and is very much a lab-level project.