Season’s greetings from Pandia, and — of course — the main search engine headlines of the week.

We wish our readers a great holiday!

Nominate the funniest search oriented articles of the year!

Mike Blumenthal over at Understanding Google Maps & Yahoo Local Search is now accepting nominations for the 2007 top 10 list of the bizarre, funny and/or otherwise irrelevant (or irreverent) blog entries in the search world.

The comment field of the blog post already contains quite a few links to posts on the sunny side of searching and search engine marketing.

More search engine news and articles:

Find news stories easier in Google News
One feature that particularly pleased me was the ability to add partial possible news sources and Google brings back all the possible results. (Google Tutor Dec 23 2007)

The Two Flavors of Google
BusinessWeek on Google using its computer cloud for outfarming supercomputing. This is a very interesting article, that Pandia will come back to later on. (Dec 13 2007 via Battelle)

Microsoft Launches Affiliate Program
Microsoft has launched a new affiliate program for paid search ads (Microsoft adCenter) and their security and PC backup service Windows Live OneCare. (Marketing Pilgrim Dec 20 2007)

FTC’s Xmas Gift To Google: Approval Of DoubleClick Acquisition
The US Federal Trade Commission has granted its approval for Google to purchase DoubleClick. (SE Land Dec 20 2007)

Google, Yahoo, & Microsoft To Pay $31.5M For Illegal Gambling Ads
The big three search engine companies settled with the US Justice Department to pay $31.5 million to educate that online gambling is illegal in the United States. (SE Land Dec 20 2007)

IBM Gives the Gift of Free E-Mail Search
IBM’s Almaden Research Center is cooking up new search software that unearths the most relevant information in a search query to help people find information buried in their e-mail applications. (ExtremeTech Dec 20 2007)

2007 In Numbers: iGoogle Google’s Homegrown Star Performer This Year
According to figures from comScore Google traffic increased 22.42% this year across its main web properties (TechCrunch Dec 22 2007)

Group says Yahoo China loses piracy suit
A Beijing appeals court on Thursday upheld a ruling against Yahoo China over its search engine’s links to outside Web sites that carried illegally copied music (Yahoo! Dec 21 2007)

Scoop: Google Responds To Rep. Joe Barton’s 24 Privacy Questions
US Representative Joe Barton sent Google a letter with 24 questions relating to privacy — along with a week to answer them (Search Engine Land Dec 22 2007)

Technorati Bans WordPress Gurus
Mike Abundo will never use Technorati again (Dec 23 2007)

Zuula : One Site to Search Them All
Zuula is a meta search engine that presents information from multiple engines in a neat tabbed format. (SE Journal Dec 17 2007)

Matt Cutts Video on ALT attributes
Google’s Matt Cutts outlines the basics about how ALT tags should be used, and why they are helpful. (Search Engine Watch Blog Dec 18 2007)

Q&A: Peter Norvig - The evolution of Web search.
As director of research at Google, Peter Norvig is intimately involved in the attempt to manage the world’s information. (Technology Review Jan/Feb 2008)

Yahoo! Researchers Awarded Top Honors
Three world-renowned scientists from Yahoo! Research have been recognized for their achievements in fields key to developing the next-generation of Internet experiences (Media Newsline Dec 19 2007)

What Started The Downfall of Digg
It’s been a long time since I visited or cared about Digg. (Shoemoney Dec 19 2007)

Taking feeds out of our web search results
Feeds increase the likelihood that users see duplicate search results. (Google Webmaster Central Dec 19 2007)

Natural Language Search Not a Priority for Google
Peter Norvig, the director of research at Google, shot down the idea of implementing natural language search capabilities at Google (SE Journal Dec 19 2007)

How propaganda shapes SEO theory
Name-calling - “Spammer”, “black hat”, “unethical SEO”, “crooks” — all of these expressions have been used to describe either the entire SEO industry or just select individuals and/or companies. (SEO Theory Dec 19 2007)

IEEE Spectrum R&D 100 (Top R&D Spenders), Google at #79 on List
Google does not seem to be a big R&D spender (Resourceshelf Dec 20 2007)

The Google Homepage FAQ
Everything you always wanted to know about the Google homepage but were afraid to ask (Blogoscoped Dec 19)