Google squared and rich snippets – there was plenty of coverage of Google’s ‘Searchology’ last week, I personally enjoyed this one from ‘ol Matt.

Getting the most from Google’s new features – staying track with the now famous Searchology session, I’d also like to highlight fellow warrior Monica Wright’s post – some good tips (although its early days for these new features).

Link building secrets – not to be confused with the ‘art of fighting without fighting’, Debra exposes a closely guarded link building ‘secret’ that … well… is more than meets the eye.

How Link Building for SEO is Like Picking Up a Girl – speaking of links, complete with a link-baity title, Todd has a bookmark/link-worthy post that runs through the many facets of modern link building.

Google malformed Title’s - It seems Shaun ( a worthy SEO researcher) found an interesting case of Google using a H6 as the SERP title… kind of odd I must say.

Realtors Revolt – another hot story making the rounds was about Realtors taking a poke at Google and their response. One of the better coverage spots was over at BC – (take it away Virginia) -

Application focus – this process is when search engines look at signals from places other than the web – Ann dons her tin foil and looks at potential avenues.

What?! A Search-Hostile Site That Still Ranks Well – interesting post that looks at the confusion of a site that shouldn’t be ranking

Golden rules of link bait – I also really enjoyed Edward’s post that covers the basics, in a very complete resource worth bookmarking.

The behaviour building blocks – understanding user behaviour is a huge part of IR these days and we can even use it to better understand our own users… find out how;

SEO interview questions – this is an impressive list of more than 80 questions which can be used to interview potential SEO staffers. While some are debatable, and excellent list none-the-less.

The grumbler exploit – hacking is a new part of SEO that we all need to be aware of. If it is injecting hidden links or malware (which can get you de-indexed) you simply must have measures in place – here’s a recent exploit.

Hacking Google – and I ain’t talking Google Dorks… seems this time Google really was hacked.

Search Stuff

The Recipe search engine - a really powerful search engine, which lets you look for recipes in a wide variety of ways.

Similar sites – I didn’t find the SERPs all that earth shaking, but an interesting concept non the less. A search engine that returns ‘similar sites’ to a given URL entered.

Google Paid Search Evaluators – Bill had a review of a patent on human search evaluators.

Jewellery search engine - jewellery deal locator. that specializes in finding the best jewellery deals on the exact jewellery a searcher inputs.

The inference engine - computer-based prediction of aesthetic quality for color natural photographic pictures. (i.e. an image search engine with aesthetic ratings)

Videos

Google Search Options – this video looks at some of the changes announced at the recent Searchology session.

Information Retrieval and Text Mining - an overview of applications of machine learning and statistics to problems in information retrieval and text mining.

Latent Semantic Indexing and more – A video from Stanford on Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) Implementation, Independent Component Analysis (ICA) – good for the SOSG peeps out there.

Google Chrome TV Spot – for those that missed it.

Weapons

Google Webmaster Tools update – the gang at WMT launched a new interface and Peter over at SEO Book had a nice round up.

Top Page Analysis meets HttpFox - This tip combines two SEO tools to make one awesome SEO weapon. SEOmoz’s “Top pages on Domain” and HttpFox, a server header analyser plugin for Firefox.

Another Cool Backlink Checker: Page Inlink Analyzer – Ann had another backlink analysis tool that looks like it might come in handy.

Advanced segment for ecommerce – some interesting toys for those Google Analytic geeks that are dealing with ecommerce sites.

Google - Domain-Specific Sentiment Classification

Yahoo - Link-based spam detection

Yahoo – Associating documents with classifications and ranking documents based on classification weights

Yahoo - Generating diversified vertical search listings

Microsoft – Link discovery from web scripts