On US presidential candidates flocking to Google and much more.

The Pandia team is back. We had a wonderful holiday in Thailand, spending one hectic week in Bangkok and two more peaceful ones in Koh Samui. And yes, that is Susanne to the left.

But now we are back in Norway, preparing a new search engine season. Stay prepared for more useful articles on how to cope in the world of web searching.

We will also continue our surveillance of the search engine scene.

We have spent some hours catching up with this week’s news and here are some of the headlines that caught our eyes:

Top 10 Web Analytics Blogs
The most popular web analytics blog at the moment (Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik July 27 2007 via SE Guide)

Robots Exclusion Protocol: now with even more flexibility
Dan Crow of Google announces that Google now supports a unavailable_after web page expiration metatag (Google Blog July 27 2007)

Live Search Now Supporting Sitemaps Autodiscovery Via Robots.txt File
Microsoft will only use your sitemaps file if it is listed in your robots.txt file. (Search Engine Land July 25 2007)

Three new features in Live Search Images
Three new features that help you find faces, portraits and black and white images (Live Search Blog July 27 2007)

Microsoft Aiming For A Bigger Share Of Online Advertising
Unofficial SEO Blog July 28 2007.

Google Web History and Search Personalization
Google provides a history of the web sites that you visit (Google Tutor July 23 2007)

Internet leader Google prime stop for presidential hopefuls
Internet giant Google is becoming a prime stop on the 2008 presidential campaign as candidates seek to burnish themselves with net-wise credentials (Physorg July 29 2007)

Google Drops Supplemental Results Query Command
Search Engine Roundtable (July 27 2007)

Digg fires Google for online ads
Digg, the reader-powered news site, fires Google as its online advertising partner in favor of Microsoft (Anchorage July 25 2007)

Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Hosting Extremist Sites
David Utter on western companies hosting Islamist/Jihadi websites (webpronews July 23 2007)

Implementing your Search Strategy for the Latino Market
Search engine marketing for the US Hispanic and Latin American search markets (SE Watch July 24 2007)

Search Engine Optimization Tricks for WordPress
Google's Matt Cutts gives some advice to bloggers (Bruce Clay July 24 2007)

Google 'the most improved brand'
Google is the brand that has gained the most in value over the past year, according a survey of global brands. (BBC July 27 2007)

Google Plans YouTube Antipiracy Tool for September
Google is working "very intensely" on a video recognition technology (PC World July 27 2007)

Who’s Reading the Google Blogs?
The Official Google Blog has over 440.000 readers. (ResearchBuzz July 27 2007)

The Internet Has Crashed
Some weekend humor from Maniac World.