Ask.com’s CEO, Jim Lanzone responded to my recent article “Yahoo Reinvents An Old Wheel: Paid Inclusion Gets a Facelift” reconfirming his belief that paid inclusion is hypocritical. The following is Jim Lanzone’s comment to me which was confirmed authentic by Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land:

Hi Ross. Just came across this today on Bloglines.

Three years later, I’m still against paid inclusion, because I still think it is hypocritical to charge for something we need to do anyway to be the best search service we can be. I also think it’s a dis-service to our users to blur the line that much between paid content and editorial content. Read more…

The Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild is none too happy with Google’s plan to indiscriminately scan, index, and allow the searching of millions of books from libraries the world over and Microsoft is capitalizing on this rare chink in Google’s armor.

Copyrighters are claiming infringement because Google is making advertising revenue from the results of book searches in the Google Book Search system. Here are all of Google’s arguments that I found: Read more…

Imagine what your life would be like if your annual salary was only a dollar. What would you do with your check? Perhaps buy a chocolate bar? Well, for the third consecutive year Google top dogs Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt will each earn exactly that for 2007, a measly single dollar. Yahoo’s chief executive, Terry Semel, will also see a 1 dollar salary for 2007. Read more…

Last year they lost their case against Chinese search company Baidu.com, and this year they are at it again with a suit against Alibaba, the company which runs Yahoo China.

Plaintiffs Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, and EMI have filed suit against Alibaba for the equivalent of $710,000 (RMB 5.5 million) in damages. They claim that Yahoo China is infringing on their Copyrights.

The complaint evolves around the music search at Yahoo China allowing users to find and listen to music the vast majority of which is pirated.

I have seen many articles and the like discussing proper use of the Robots Meta tag. It almost seems common knowledge of the purpose of this tag, but every now and then you find some confusion over its purpose and how it works.

Recently Vanessa Fox over at the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog posted exactly how Googlebot interprets this tag, and what it will do if it finds tags conflicting with the robots.txt file.

For anyone who has any level of confusion over the robots meta tag, this is a great, explanative 5 minute read.