Three informations that were too long for Twitter but too short of their own blogposting: Fairrank has sued Thomas Bindl. It seems that some postings were made on OmTalk.com that did not sit well with Fairrank. It seems that the immediate removal of the postings in question where not enough for Fairrank, seeing how they are also seeking a cease and desist declaration so that something like this will not happen again in the future. Even though, in a forum, this is something that can not be done without a preemptive censoring, it does not stop Fairrank to file suit for exactly this to happen. The thing that causes me to go speechless in this and similar cases is the understanding of the Internet by those filing the suits. I truly believe that successful and solid SEO work necessitates that you “live the Internet”, where 'digital natives' is a term that is been used repeatedly in this context lately. In my eyes, these two things are mutually exclusive – those who are trying to get rid of perceived negative comments by way of court are often turning a blind eye to the actual trigger of such posts and look for the fault in others instead of with themselves. While at the same time, there is enough to be done: I am not able to see right away, how putting links to other customers and your own agency-website on a customers site can be in accordance with the Google Webmaster Guidelines, for example . . .

SearchEngineLands headguru Danny Sullivan published a posting on the relationship between Google and Newspapers on his private blog that is worth reading. He goes into how far Google has already accommodated the publishing houses demands (for example through ACAP, which is sort of an extended robots.txt or systems like “First Click Free”) and how those are demanding more admissions by pointing to their “quality content”. The article is basically about the opinion that publishing houses can not blame Google for the fact that their traditional business model does not work anymore. An interesting read and we will probably start hearing something similar in Germany shortly.

While Google's German market share has remained noticeably above the 90-percent-mark for years, the situation is somewhat more interesting in the USA. A while ago, Yahoo and Microsoft were noticeably stronger, though now they are steadily losing market-shares as shown by the recent Hitwise numbers (PDF). Google gained 8 percent between Mai of 2008 and 2009 while Yahoo and Microsoft lost 19% and 17% respectively during the same time. It is questionable how Google is using their market domination of the search-area to gain market-shares in other areas. For the first time, ComScore lists Google Maps as having more visitors than the longstanding top dog MapQuest – and that is due to Googles increased implementation of the Maps-integration through their Universal Search.