If you have not discovered this one already, you might want to take a look at Stephen Arnold’s relatively new blog over at Beyond Search.

Stephen Arnold is the man behind the report Google Version 2.0: The Calculating Predator. That report it is horribly expensive, and probably for industry experts and investors only. The blog, however, is free.

Like William Slawski over at SEO by the Sea, Arnold and his colleagues makes active use of Google patent data to understand the strategies of Google.

Although Arnold definitely belongs to the more technical oriented crowd of search technology enthusiasts — his main topics are knowledge management, enterprise search, search and retrieval, text mining, and content processing — regular searchers and researchers may also find his blog interesting.

He has a lot of contacts after 13 years in the Internet industry, which gives him access to info others may miss.

You can read more about Arnold over at his company site.