Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web:

From Search Engine Land:

• Court OKs Narrow Use of Competitor Trademarks in Search Ads & Meta Tags
  A U.S. District Court has ruled that the use of keyword-triggered ads and keyword metatags using trademarked terms cannot confuse consumers if the resulting ads/search results don’t display a competitor’s trademarks. This is a narrow ruling and doesn’t give search marketers carte-blanche to use trademarked terms. Rather, it means it’s OK to bid on a trademarked search term that triggers an ad that does not contain the trademark. Similarly, it’s OK to use trademarks in meta tags, as long as the trademarks don’t show up on search result pages. Eric Goldman over at the Technology and Marketing blog has more…
• Open Letter To Wikipedia Editors: Yes, Matt Cutts Is Notable
  Dear Wikipedia Editors: I came back from vacation today to discover that in (some of) your infinite crowd wisdom, apparently the page at Wikipedia about Google’s Matt Cutts might get deleted. Wow. It’s inept things like this that can instantly reduce any respect I have for Wikipedia that builds up over time….
• Advertisers Cutting Google AdWords Spending With Surge of Keyword Prices
  Most Google AdWords advertisers have been facing the problem of rising pay per click prices. But while in the past many advertisers have gone with the increased prices as the cost of doing business on AdWords, recently more advertisers have decided to significantly cut their AdWords spending because many of the keyword prices have resulted in advertisers being priced out of profitability. Marketwatch recently spoke with six advertisers who all spent between $4 million and $10 million in 2006 who plan to spend less in 2007….
• LinkedIn Answers Launched
  Now joining the questions answering game is LinkedIn, with its new LinkedIn Answers service, just two days old. Jason Calacanis pinged me about it just via instant message, saying he loves it. Sequoia Capital is an investor in LinkedIn — and Jason now works for Sequoia — so you can easily assume some interest in giving me a heads-up. But then again, I don’t disbelieve him saying he loves it. Jason pointed over to Who’s are the top 10 web designer in the world today? that he posted a day ago and says he got great answers. I couldn’t judge,…
• An Open Letter to Paid Search Networks
  Search marketer and "recovering attorney" Jeff Rohrs has published The Sausage Manifesto, an open letter to paid search providers asking critical questions about billing practices, transparency, click fraud and other issues. He asks a number of pointed questions, then lists eleven requests that he says failure to respond to could damage the industry. His requests: 1. Talk, Don’t Lecture 2. Appreciate Our Unique Circumstances 3. Invest in Proportion to the Problem 4. Acknowledge that Tracking Alone Is Not the Answer 5. Improve Click Quality Customer Service 6. Build a Click Quality Education Resource Center 7. Light a Fire Under the…
• Search Engine Land: December 2006 Statistics Review
  As promised, here’s the first in regular monthly updates on how Search Engine Land is growing. I hope the traffic statistics look will be both interesting to the curious and informative about how various places can turn into traffic generators. For December 2006, we had about 93,000 page views, or about 4,400 page views per day. Actually, those are "AdViews," the number of times ads were shown as reported by our ad serving software. We only began showing ads from December 11 onward, so I have to turn to our Google Analytics statistics to talk about the entire month. Let’s…
• Jimmy Wales Interviewed Live On BBC Radio Five Live
  Jimmy Wales was interviewed live on the BBC Simon Mayo programme this afternoon. It was an interesting conversation, mainly centred on the Wikipedia obviously, and geared towards an audience who wouldn’t be expected to know much about the subject. The interview started about 30 minutes into the programme and you should be able to catch it for a couple of days in the archive (linked from the webpage) before it disappears. I have done a quick attempted verbatim report on it in my weblog though cannot entirely vouch for its accuracy 100%, but it might be of some interest….
• Search Engine ChaCha Announces $6 Million Round
  Led by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos’ Bezos Expeditions, social search engine ChaCha announced that it had secured a $6 million funding round. ChaCha launched in Q3 last year and employs a network of live guides (college students, stay at home parents, retirees) to help answer user queries in real time in addition to providing traditional algorithmic search. Here’s my most recent write up on the engine from November. Given its network of distributed guides, ChaCha is one of the more interesting recent search launches. While it started out quite slowly, the service and functionality have been getting much better….
• Yahoo Introduces Yahoo Go 2.0, Mobile Search & Other Apps
  Last year at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Yahoo Chairman Terry Semel introduced Yahoo Go, an initiative seeking to push and integrate Yahoo content beyond the desktop on mobile devices and TV. According to the Wall Street Journal (subscription required) the company is going to introduce an upgraded version of Go for mobile today at this year’s CES (Postscript: Yahoo Go 2.0 is now up):…

Search News Headlines From Elsewhere:

• Google’s Media Ambassador: What About Us Sounds So Unfriendly?, PaidContent.org
• Yahoo China Portal to Be Reorganized, Associated Press
• Podcast: Google Starts 2007 Under Fire; Matt Cutts Says He’ll Leave Google (Someday); Google Jet Spotted & More, Daily SearchCast
• Craigslist Enlists Police, ISPs, and Community to Fight "Spamvertising", ClickZ
• 7 Search Predictions for 2007, iMedia Connection
• SEO: Art, Science, Bollocks Or What?, ClickZ
• SEM and SEO: Rocket Science or Just Plain Science? Part2, ClickZ
• Let’s Review: A Busy Day for Mobile Search, News from Yahoo & Google, Review of What Others Offer, ResourceShelf.com
• Samsung Phones, Bundled with Google Apps, Google Operating System
• Company XYZ Releases Google Killer, Google Blogoscoped
• Google’s Password Strength "API", Google Blogoscoped
• Playful perks propel Google to top of Fortune’s 100 best places to work, MarketWatch
• Google means gold for Golden State, Associated Press
• Ex-Googlers Speak Out, Google Blogoscoped
• The Future of SEO in a Personalized Search Interface, Out Of My Gord
• Fraudwall, an anti-click fraud company, raises millions, VentureBeat
• Eric Schmidt Videos on Innovation, Seo By The Sea
• Google Experiments With Utterly Old School Video Ads, Publishing 2.0
• Digg is New Media, Diggnation is Old Media, Micro Persuasion
• Banned on Digg? Try TinyURL to Bypass Digg Ban, Search Engine Journal
• There Is More to Digg than the Homepage, Pronet Advertising
• What To Do When Google Tells People Your Website Is Dangerous?, TechDirt
• Press releases return to AOL News, Search Engine Watch Blog
• Drive More Traffic to Your Maps API Site – Include KML Files in Your Sitemap, Official Google Blog
• Guide To Fixing Google Duplicate Content & Canonical URL Issues, Search Engine Roundtable
• Google to help build telescope, Associated Press
• Jon Schepke Back in Business with SIM Partners, Marketing Pilgrim
• SEO and Website Terminology: Clearing up Common Misnomers, Search Engine Roundtable
• Interview: Amanda Watlington on Second Life and Blogs, Online Marketing Blog
• Big Layoffs At Insider Pages, TechCrunch

Related Topics: SearchCap

About The Author: Danny Sullivan is editor-in-chief of Search Engine Land. He’s a widely cited authority on search engines and search marketing issues who has covered the space since 1996. Danny also oversees Search Engine Land’s SMX: Search Marketing Expo conference series. He maintains a personal blog called Daggle (and maintains his disclosures page there). He can be found on Facebook, Google + and microblogs on Twitter as @dannysullivan. See more articles by Danny Sullivan