Pandia presents the search engine news of the week and looks at a site that promises a Google blackout on January 1st 2008.

We guess you could call it a creative publicity stunt. Still, if it is The Google Blackout Page is a creepy one.

The site presents a black page with a seven digit countdown. Yes that is all, a number changing every second.

Searchviews has found that the numbers refers to the number of seconds remaining to January 1st 2008.

Moreover, when Searchviews turned off javascript they found a new series of numbers and symbols: 37* 25′ 38″, -122* 5′ 57″, the coordinates for Google’s Mountain View office.

It is all very da Vinci code, the idea being — we assume — to expect a Google shutdown on January 1st: a hacker attack, maybe, or a bomb?

We believe it is a bad taste PR stunt.

Pandia this week

Top 10 Useful Web Sites (Pandia’ favorites right now)
Chinese attack on Western search engines (The Dalai Lama scares the Chinese)
Is Dogpile really a better search site than Google? (Nah, we don’t think so)

Search engine headlines from around the Web

Larry Page & Sergey Brin Video Interview
James Fallows' Zeitgeist interview with the Google co-founders made its way onto YouTube. (SE Land Oct 19 2007)

Yahoo! Chief Marketing Officer Cammie Dunaway Resigns!
Chief Marketing Officer and head of Yahoo! Customer Experience Division leaves (Unofficial SEO Oct 20 2007)

Disable Specific Google Sitelinks
Now you can disable specific sitelinks (the navigational links displayed below a site in search results) (Blogoscoped Oct 18 2007)

Google Health To Launch In Early 2008
Search Engine Land Oct 18 2007.

Wikipedia Spam Resulting in Google & Yahoo Penalties
If you spam Wikipedia results, your site can end up in a penalty in both Google and Yahoo search engines. (Search Engine Journal Oct 18 2007)

Confirmed: Google Sitelinks Grow To Eight Links
Sometimes Google will add several links to a search result? Now there will be more, Search Engine Land reports (Oct 18 2007)

Using Yahoo Search Suggest for Keyword Research
I think it's defensible to suggest that the listings are ordered based on popularity. (SEO Speedwagon Oct 19 2007)

Microsoft unveils free services
Microsoft will begin offering consumers free 411 information, mobile maps containing real-time traffic information and more (LA DailyNews Oct 16 2007)

Screenshots Out for Microsoft Office Live Workspace
Online collaboration suite that integrates with Office (Read/Write Oct 17 2007)

Radar’s Twine: A semantic complement to Google
A user uploads a text document to their Twine account. Twine then parses the document to find the words with meaning — names, places, concepts and so forth. Those terms become tags, which the person can use to access related information. (Venturebeat Oc

Cyberwar: China Declares War On Western Search Sites
China has unilaterally blocked all three major search engines in China and is redirecting all requests to Baidu. (TechCrunch Oct 18 2007)

Baidu hijacking traffic from Major Search Engine?
Chinese ISP redirects search queries that goes to Google Blogsearch, Live.com and Yahoo to Chinese Baidu. (Reaper X)

Dogpile Ranks Highest in Customer Satisfaction among Search Engines for a Second Consecutive Year
Dogpile improves by 14 points since 2006 to earn a score of 818 on a 1,000-point scale. (JD Power Oct 17 2007)

Google quarterly profit swells 46 percent
Google reported on Thursday a 46 percent rise in profit that topped Wall Street expectations (ZD Oct 18 2007)

NoFollow is for Blog Spam…no Paid Text Links, wait…Paid Ads…
Aww Heck, Just Stop Linking and Let Calacanis Decide the Rankings (Jennifer Laycock gets it off her chest Oct 12 2007)

Gmail To Increase Email Capacity With New Counter Algorithm
Gmail will offer 4.2GB free storage by the 23rd of this month (Search Engine Land Oct 12 2007)

Paid Links Simply Aren’t Going Anywhere
Google has become so intent on penalizing those buying and selling links that they are requesting users to report any knowledge of them. (SE Journal Oct 12 2007)