News roundup 1

Economy

The big news during the week was the rejection of the EU constitution by French voters, closely followed by the Dutch rejection of the same treaty. This has led to the UK delaying the implementation of their own referendum on the topic.

The Euro fell both before and after the poll results were known, in a market environment where there is already concern about economic growth in Europe.

The overall result means that politicians will have to go back to their electorate and start actually selling the benefits of closer European integration - a topic they have failed miserably to do so far, with the European parliament generally perceived to be aloof and unaccountable to national citizens.

Google

A busy week for Google - first of all, it failed to report on PageRank for the entire opening weekend.

Then Google began another update - this one named “Bourbon” - and GoogleGuy provided a warning at WebmasterWorld about mixed SERPs over the coming few days. At the same time, Google also modified its webmaster guidelines.

Oh, and Henk Van Es blew the lid off Google’s secret project for evaluating Google’s ranking results, with the implied suggestion that rankings were being actively modified by a global team of human reviewers. Apparently, affiliate sites are “offensive” - unless they are Google partners. Although human editing of SERPs was vehemently denied by Googlyguy, it’s hard not to interpret Google losing touch with any implied original ideal of sorting information on an entirely objective mathematical basis.

Barry Schwartz also suggests that Google are secretly indexing every domain registered for the internet…

Adult entertainment

One of the big shockers for the business world was the announced API of two internet poker companies - each of which could outrank many popular company names in terms of market capitalisation.

On top of that, ICANN approved the use of .xxx domain names - which has led to some suggestions that this could be a backdoor to regulating the industry.