fantomNews™ — the ultimate know

Due to maintenance work fantomNews will not be blogging at our customary rate today and possibly for a few days to come.

Google’s launch of what’s persistently being called MyGoogle across the board already, in spite of all their effort to make their own preconfigured name “Fusion” stick, proves once more that their current PR department is little but a disaster waiting to happen. The general reaction is somewhat less than enthused.

Our list of SEO / SEM blogs has now expanded to 203 entries - the most extensive on the Net. It will soon be available as an SQL database with enhanced searchability.

Lost Clicks offers help for people who want to join in a class action against click fraud, suing the search engines for collecting fees for PPC advertising they’re not actually providing.

Still searching for your midlife crisis? Maybe this site will help.

The Search Engine Wars have flared up full scale again: the contenders vying for the attention of shareholders, investment consultants and search marketers alike, it is not surprising to see them flaunt their index size figures all over the place - and once more truth constitutes the first victim. What’s more, these shamelessly skewed statistics are bound to dramatically impact all search and web analytics including those conducted for search engine optimization purposes.

MetaFoxx is an innovative search engine offering features such as search via your browser’s address bar and alternate query suggestions.

If you’re into serious “black hat” stuff, don’t miss out on this excellent overview of tools. They’re certainly more fun (and way more effective) than sanctimoniously generating “organic” content spam by the ton.

Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineWatch points to fantomNews and our monster list of SEO / SEM blogs alongside with some others you should also check out.

The SEO industry is maturing. This fun typology is an indicative example. How long now till we’ll see the Social Studies dweeps descending upon us with their scoreboards?

Remember search engine voyeur pages, displaying in realtime what people were actually searching for? They were all the rage in the end-nineties but have generally been dropped since. Now, DogPile’s rejuvenated the concept.

Vertical search extreme: this engine allows you to search for open source program code, helping you avoid reinventing the wheel or running afoul of existing copyrights.

Tim Yang reports on his recent e-mail exchange with a representative of an Indian ad clicking syndicate. While his contact proved fairly clueless, it does constitute a clear indication that the concept is trickling down into mainstream petty crime.

Investors beware: if this should turn into a massive trend, it could seriously impact Google’s business – here’s one PR 7 blogger who is not prepared to take any more crap from them.

Maybe some of the posters on this thread are right in that it’s time to stand up against Google’s less than favorable terms touching upon their AdSense program.