August is holiday season in both Southern Europe and North America, which means that search engine news traffic slows down. Next week, however, we should be back to normal.

One of the most important news this week is probably Google’s implementation of Google Suggest on English language sites. Google will now suggest alternative search phrases as you type. This is not a Google invention, however. Ask and Yahoo! have implemented this feature a long time ago.

Another important milestone is Yahoo! abandoning Mash, its attempt at developing a social web site (after its Yahoo! 360 failure).

Given that Yahoo! did not manage to buy Facebook, this means that Yahoo! is unable to compete in this arena. This is a serious issue for a company which normally is very good at content production.

(Truth to be told, Google isn’t very good at this, either. Google’s Orkut is big in Brazil, but not elsewhere compared to Facebook and MySpace.)

More search engine articles from around the Web:

• Yahoo Sheds Some Skin, Drops Mash

  Yahoo’s bad luck in the social network arena continues: the latest casualty is “Mash,” which never left invite-only beta status since it was launched about a year ago. (Wired Aug 29 2008)

• 6 Unique Ways to Get Instant Links to Your Site

  Search Engine Guide Aug 25 2008

• SES San Jose 2008: Top 10 Stories

  The most important coverage of the SE Strategies conference (SE Watch Aug 26 2008)

• Google Now Searching For Synonyms

  Search Engine Land Aug 26 2008

• Is Google Moving Towards Becoming a Social Search Engine

  Google experiments with user voting (Search Engine Journal Aug 26 2008)

• Why You Shouldn’t Be Afraid to Link to Other Sites

  Seriously, share and share alike. How do you expect to make friends when you never share anything? (BigOak Aug 27 2008)

• Search & Internet Explorer 8

  Danny Sullivan has spent some time playing with the new search functionality and checking to see if Microsoft was going to try to stack the deck in its favor with the new browser. (Aug 27 2008)

• Google Coming Down Hard on Scrapers!

  It seems that Google is hell bent on its resolution to evade and block scrapers, by deliberately changing the search results in an effort to confuse the scrapers. (PageTraffic Aug 28 2008)

• Google Suggest to Change the Ways of Search Engine Optimization

  SEO Roundtable Aug 28 2008: On Sphinn, lots of debate is cropping up about how Google Suggest will change the face of SEM — for good.

• Why Google has lost its mojo — and why you should care

  Google has gone from innovative upstart to fat-and-happy industry leader in what seems like record time. (Computerworld Aug 25 2008)

• What Google’s improved Flash indexing means for your website

  Discussion on how Google handles Flash files (ongoing Aug 2008)

• Google & Yahoo Ad Deal Set for October Launch

  Search Engine Journal Aug 29 2008.

• The Google Alphabet, 2008 edition

  Google Suggest’s proposals for one letter queries (O’Reilly Radar Aug 26 2008)

• 24 Firefox Search Plugins You Need

  The following list contains useful search plugins that can speed up the information finding process tremendously. (AltSearchEngines Aug 25 2007)

• At a loss for words?

  Today we’re excited because Google Suggest will be “graduating” from Labs and available by default on the Google.com homepage. (Google Blog Aug 25 2008)

• Google Suggest - disabling

  If you don’t like the new Google Suggest feature which they’re rolling out now it’s easy enough to disable it. (Phil Bradley Aug 27 2008)

• Microsoft To Acquire Ciao For $486 Million

  Microsoft buys comparison shopping search engine (AltSearchEngines Aug 29 2008)

• Ask.com Celebrates Ask Kids Relaunch

  Ask Kids has a whole new look, with a completely customizable home page. (Ask Blog Aug 28 2008)

• ‘Google killer’ remains elusive

  Google is far from being unseated as the dominant player in the US search market. (DMNews Aug 29 2008)

• Google may let users comment on, rearrange search results

  Google Inc. is considering allowing users of its search engine to tinker with query results by re-ranking them and commenting on them. (Computerworld Aug 26 2008)