Here is this week’s news from the world of search engines.

Google Won’t Pause New Privacy Policy – Should They Have To?
SE Watch: In a lengthy response to EU regulators who had asked Google to hold off on implementing the new policy, Google makes clear the policy will take effect March 1, as planned.

Ex-Googler Laments the New Google
Beyond Search: Nelson of Nelson’s Weblog is “No Longer Loving Google, Inc.” Sour grapes? Perhaps not, as the ex-Google employee maintains he has defended the company many times since 2006.
What changed? The write up explains:

“This last month has been particularly hard for Google lovers. I took the company’s side in the Kenya mobile fiasco up until the company admitted that, indeed, employees were lying to steal customers from Mocality. Then the big stories about Google Search+ and Google’s new privacy policy. I think one is actively bad and the other is mostly harmless, but both changes are so complex and unpleasantly self-motivated it makes me sad. So now when I read about a friend getting terminated from AdSense with no explanation I just get a headache.”

Google Fined in France Because Google Maps is Free
SE Watch: A commercial court in Paris has ordered Google France and parent company Google Inc. to pay €500,000 ($660,000) in damages to Bottin Cartographes after finding the company guilty of unfair competition.

Creative Commons Search Engine
P Bradley: Need CC images, text, audio or sounds? Try the Search.Creativecommons engine.

Google “Myth Busts” Microsoft’s Privacy Claims
Marketing Land: That didn’t take long. Google has reacted to Microsoft’s ad campaign that slams Google’s forthcoming privacy policy changes with a mythbusting blog post.

Google Earth 6.2: It’s a beautiful world
Google Blog: We’re taking bird’s eye view to a whole new level with the latest version of Google Earth, released today. With Google Earth 6.2, we’re bringing you the most beautiful Google Earth yet, with more seamless imagery and a new search interface.

Google’s Privacy Dilemma: Damned If They Do; Damned They Don’t
Innovation Policy Blog: A few days ago, I received an email from an advocacy group alerting me to the fact that Google was causing trouble again on the consumer privacy front. Like any good Internet populist, I immediately went to sharpen my pitchfork and grab a torch to join the masses in public outrage. Unfortunately, my pitchfork was broken and I was all out of torches.

Russian Search Engine Yandex Extends Map Capabilities To 4 More Continents
SE Watch: Yandex, the leading search engine in Russia, has expanded its mapping capabilities by purchasing a license for digital maps from NAVTEQ, the leading location provider service. In yet another move expanding their worldwide search services, Yandex has purchased a license for highly detailed maps of Europe, North America, Australia, and developed countries in Asia to expand their Yandex.Maps product.

Matt Cutts Convinces Some South Korean Govt. Websites To Stop Blocking Googlebot
SE Land: According to the Wall Street Journal, Cutts is in South Korea this week and, in a presentation Monday night for about 80 government officials, webmasters, lawyers and journalists, managed to singlehandedly convince some government reps to let Googlebot crawl and index their websites.

DocJax
P Bradley: Docjax.com is a file based search engine, covering ebooks, xls, ppt an pdf files. It also proudly says that it provides access to 159,647+ free e-books and documents for downloading.

Online news portals get credibility boost from trusted sources
Eurekalert: When readers access a story from a credible news source they trust through an online portal, they also tend to trust the portal, said S. Shyam Sundar, Distinguished Professor of Communications and co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory. Most of these portals use computers, not people, to automatically sort and post stories.

Twitter – World’s Fastest Growing Search Engine!
smedio: Twitter receives a whopping 800 million search queries everyday. Prorate that for a month and it comes out to nearly 24 billion queries per month. That’s a hell lot of search traffic. In fact, it’s more than the combined search traffic of Yahoo and Bing.

Czech Republic Gives Google Green Light To Resume Street View
SE Land: Google will take photos closer to ground level to avoid photographing personal property over fences/walls. Google will give Czech citizens a method to demand that their property be removed from Street View.

An alternative to Google: DuckDuckGo
About: DuckDuckGo is a useful search engine with quite a few different search tools and features that can make your searches efficient, powerful, and relevant.

DropBox files may be indexed by Google
Google translation of post on the Norwegian site DinSide.

See also our search marketing news wrap-up!