In this week’s Search In Pictures, here are the latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more.

Google México Campus Party:

One Republic at Google:

Y! Logo Flowers:

Our Vanessa Fox Running the Pineapple 5K (hope she doesn’t kill me for this):

We have covered many of the search ad keyword lawsuits aimed between competitors or directly at the search engines in the past. Nowadays, it seems like a new suit around this topic is filed weekly. Typically these suits go after trademark violations and the like, but a new suit is focusing on a privacy legality.

Suit over search-engine keywords tries new angle from the Associated Press reports Habush Habush & Rottier is suing Cannon & Dunphy for buying their name on Google and Bing. Habush Habush & Rottier is taking the privacy angle, where in Wisconsin there is the “right-to-privacy statute” that prohibits the use of any living person’s name for advertising purposes without the person’s consent. Yes, both firms are based in Wisconsin.

Robert Habush, the president of Habush Habush & Rottier said:

We believe this is deceptive, confusing and misleading. If Bill Cannon thinks this is a correct way to do business he needs to have his moral compass taken to the repair shop.

Cannon told the AP:

This is equally available to Habush if he weren’t so cheap to bid on his own name.

I am no legal expert, but this case does seem unique from all the other legal cases on search ads.

The Google Mobile Blog announced that Google News on the iPhone, Android and other smart phone devices has a new design. The new design looks more like the desktop version of Google News with minor changes to make it fit better on the smartphone screens.

The new design has more stories and images, has personalization features, search and a neat “jump” to section feature. Here are screen captures:

The Google Webmaster Central blog has two excellent write ups on mobile SEO concerns and techniques. One is named Help Google index your mobile site and the other is named Running desktop and mobile versions of your site.

The reason for the two different articles is that often webmasters consider smart phone enabled sites as strictly mobile sites, but there are many mobile phones that have web browsers that don’t provide the rich experience that an iPhone or Android device do. If a webmaster wants to optimize their site for those devices and submit this type of content to Google, they can by learning how to create mobile friendly web pages for those devices and submitting a mobile sitemap.

At the same time, many webmasters prefer to not have a new URL for the same page based on accessing it on a desktop, iPhone or old-style mobile browser. Google’s second blog post explains how you can use the useragent to display a different stylesheet for showing the same content, in a different layout, for mobile devices and desktop devices. Google offered a diagram explaining how to do this without being considered cloaking:

To be honest, the best practices in this area are not 100% clear to me and I don’t think it is 100% clear to Google either. There are just too many ways to handle mobile devices, with so many different mobile browsers to use, plus handling printer friendly pages, desktop based pages, Internet Explorer versus Firefox or Safari and Chrome. Building out web sites that also comply with Google’s guidelines is complex, especially in the mobile front. These mobile blog posts from Google are useful but I, as do many, still have questions about handling this properly from a search spider perspective.

I actually have a clear write up on how I handled this for my corporate site on the Search Engine Roundtable, but like I said, there are multiple ways to achieve a mobile friendly site and comply with Google’s guidelines.

This morning, I reported on and noticed yellow stars on Google AdSense ads — these ads were named “featured ads.” I honestly didn’t believe it. I thought maybe this was some type of AdSense hack that placed gold stars on the ads. I just received confirmation from a Google representative that these ads are, indeed, real.

Here is a picture of the ad:

Google told me: “We are currently running a limited test in which a small number of users are seeing ads that are marked based on signals related to quality and relevance. This experiment is part of our ongoing efforts to help users find what they’re looking for, and we’re closely monitoring feedback.”

This sounds like Google is showing a star near ads that are contextually more relevant than the others. I asked Google for confirmation on that point.

Clearly, many AdSense publishers will find these ads hypocritical, since Google disallows images placed near ads. But at the same time, I doubt publishers will mind Google placing these stars on the ads, since it will lead to higher clicks and more money for the publisher.

comScore released its October 2009 search share numbers and Google has passed 65% search market share, holding 65.4% share in October, up 0.5% from the previous month. comScore also claims that Microsoft Bing also gained 0.5% share, reaching 9.9%, while Yahoo dropped 0.8% to 18.0% from the previous month.

Nielsen also released its October 2009 stats, showing Google has a 66.1% share, Yahoo has a 15.4% and Microsoft Bing has a 9.7% share. I was unable to find Nielsen’s September report (did they publish one?) but I did find their August report which showed Bing had 10.7% share. In this case, Bing actually decreased in share by 1%, according to Nielsen.

As we always say, looking at these search share reports month-to-month is not always a good indication of the competitive landscape. I am sure Danny will be publishing a more comprehensive report, aggregating all this data, and fleshing out the true look at growth and decline amongst the various search engines.

Back in October I reported on Google mass banning AdWords advertisers, unfortunately then, the feedback from Google on the reason was very limited. Today, I spoke with Nick Fox, Google’s Business Product Management Director for AdWords, about new changes taking place today and tomorrow related to advertiser bans.

Starting tonight, Google will begin permanently banning advertisers at an increased rate. The bans will not be at the site level, but rather the account level. In the past, Google banned specific sites from advertising in AdWords. Now, if an advertiser is permanently banned, their account and any new account will be banned from participating in AdWords. How does Google know if an advertiser is banned and just sets up a brand new account? Fox told me they have pretty good ways to detect this, but would not give me those details.

The increased rate of account bans did start back in October, Fox told me. He said, expect to see more account bans tonight and tomorrow. But this time, the bans will differ in two ways:

(1) They are permanent account bans, as explained above. (2) The communication process will be much clearer.

Google will begin to notify advertisers that they have been permanently banned. They will receive an email with details of this ban and the email will explain how to appeal the ban. I am told that banned advertisers can reply to the email to start the “appeals process.” Every reply should get a response from a dedicated Google representative.

Over the course of the next day or so, many new advertisers will be banned and I am told to expect to hear some vocal disgruntled advertisers. I asked Nick Fox how many advertisers are we talking about, he declined to answer that but he did say it is a “tiny minority” of their customers.

Why is Google stepping this up now? I believe that there are more online scams and frauds taking place now, than ever before. Google has been getting better at detecting these types of scams both algorithmically and by human detection since 2005 and they are now able to offer better enforcement and more comprehensive enforcement of their existing policies.

Again, expect a new wave of complaints from advertisers over the next day or two.

What about those who were banned back in October through today? I asked Fox if they will be getting emails with how they can appeal those account bans? Fox told me he is not sure, but he will get back to me on if they will be sending those advertisers emails.

Over the weekend, I received several emails, noticed dozens of Tweets, saw several forum posts and noticed for myself that Google Social Search experimental search feature went offline.

If you have opt in to the Social Search feature at google.com/experimental you will notice an error on your Google searches that reads, “The experiment you’re trying to access is no longer available. Go to experiments overview.”

Google has confirmed this is a temporary issue and that a fix will be in place sometime today or tomorrow. Here is Google’s official statement on this matter:

The Google Social Search experiment is temporarily down. We are working on it and expect to restore access sometime Monday or Tuesday.

Google Sidewiki launched in September, giving Google Toolbar users the ability to comment on your web site in a new way. Tracking those comments meant you had to have the Google Toolbar installed and check those comments manually. That is no longer true.

The SEO Mofo blog, in their post How to Monitor Google Sidewiki Comments, explains how to track new comments left for any particular site. Check it out.

At PubCon, Matt Cutts from Google said there is strong lobbying in Google to introduce a new ranking factor into the algorithm. The new ranking factor has to do with how fast a site or page loads. Matt described this as one of his ‘what to expect in 2010′ bullet points in his presentation yesterday evening in Las Vegas.

He explained that Google’s co-founders want searching to be real fast, as if you are flipping through a magazine. Part of this is making sure faster web pages rank better than slower ones. Matt explained that page speed is a factor in the search ad AdWords quality score and there is currently a strong push to make it a factor in the organic ranking algorithm. Matt basically implied that in 2010, it will be one additional factor.

Let’s keep in mind two things:

(1) There are over 200 ranking factors in the algorithm and each are weighted differently. If I had to guess, page speed would not be a tremendously weighed factor, unless the site takes 90 seconds to load.

(2) I monitor complaints from the AdWords (and organic) side of webmasters and virtually no one complains that their quality score is low because of having a slow site. I would have to assume the same speed criteria would be applied from the quality score page speed requirements to the organic side of things. So if advertisers rarely, if never, complain about it – one would assume non-advertisers would also not complain much about that as a reason for their site’s poor ranking.

To hear more from Matt on this topic, see the second half of this WebProNews video with Mike McDonald: