Pandia takes a look a this week’s search engine headlines and presents Mixx, a newcomer to the social web scene.

Techcrunch reports that many contributors to the social web “submit-and-vote-for-articles” site digg are frustrated with the current culture and practices. Many of them are therefore looking for a new home on the Web.

Some go to propeller (previously known as the Netscape home page), others to reddit — both useful tools for following current news and blog trends. Others are going to a new social web sites called Mixx.

Mixx is, indeed, very similar to digg, and focuses on submissions of — and discussions about — popular web stories, photos and videos. The news items are sorted into categories like news, business, entertainment, sports, tech and more, giving the site a wider coverage than digg as regards topics.

The interface is simplistic, elegant and easy to read.

The category system makes it easy to find stories on the topic of your interest. It is strange that there is no top-category for the Internet or web life, however, although you may use tags to identify sub-topics. Google is, of course, one of the most popular tags. It seems you will have to follow several search engine related tags to cover all search engine related stories.

If you sign up, you are asked to set up your own Mixx home page, where you may choose which categories to display. And here you may actually select “Internet” as one of the sub-categories under “Tech”. You are also asked to identify other topics (i.e. tags) of interest. Each category and each tag gets its own section on your Mixx home page.

Do take it for a spin! Mixx’ current PR strategy of presenting itself as the new digg seems to be working, and given a sufficient number of active members this site may become an important tool for news research and intelligence.

And now, the latest buzz from the search engine scene:

JotSpot to replace Google Pages soon?
JotSpot - the wiki service Google acquired on October 31st last year - is back (ZD Nov 24 2007)

Google picked up tab for its love-in with Cameron
Internet giant paid for UK Conservative leader's jaunt to California conference (Guardian Nov 25 2007)

A publisher's view of Library 2.0
Phil Bradley follows the JIBS conference (Nov 21 2007)

Take a journey through the universe of Nuroa!
Search engine for information about real estate (AltSearchEngines Nov 22 2007)

Cookin’ With Yahoo
Yahoo wants to help you out with its newly-announced search shortcut for recipes. (Researchbuzz Nov 22 2007)

8 Great Paid Search Engines Beyond Google, Yahoo, Ask.com and MSN
Loren Baker on MIVA, GoClick, Superpages and more (SE Journal Nov 21 2007)

Google Custom Search Goes International
Unofficial SEO Nov 22 2007

Google Replaces "Video" Link with "Products" Link on Main Page
SEO Roundtable Nov 23 2007

SMX London 2007 Conference Notes
Marketing Pilgrim is following Danny Sullivan's London venue (Nov 23 2007)

Update On One Of Google’s Paid Links Info Pages?
Selling links that pass PageRank is now in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines (Blogoscoped Nov 22 2007)

Google widens lead on Yahoo, Microsoft
Google increased its share of the US internet search engine market in October (MacWorld Nov 22 2007)