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

From Search Engine Land:

• Search Month: European Edition

  There’s a lot going on in the European search market. Starting today we will bring you a monthly update on Search Engine Land of European search news, with related links to the stories. Here’s what happened in August.
  Google on fire. There was lots of buzz on Twitter when Google’s UK headquarters caught fire. The Googlers [...]

• Is Google Using A Privacy Double Standard?

  There is a much longer post to be written on Google’s privacy policies and its history of combatting or complying with government requests for information and those of third parties using the courts to get access to user data. But I’ll take two recent items to illustrate the complexity and potential contradictions here.
  Google was just [...]

• Google Giving Stock Tips With Domestic Trends

  The Google Blog announced a new trends project named within Google Finance named Google Domestic Trends. In short, Google tracks searches on Google.com and then groups those search volume metrics into industry sectors. Google will then plot the search volume by several industry sectors on a trends graph and allow you to then [...]

• Google China’s President, Kai-Fu Lee, Resigns To Pursue New Ventures

  Google Executive to Quit from the Wall Street Journal reports Kai-Fu Lee, the president of Google’s China operations is leaving the company. Kai-Fu Lee has helped Google gain market share in China but still is a weak second to Baidu, which has 76% share in China, whereas Google has about 20%.
  Lee left Microsoft [...]

• Right vs. Left: Two Approaches To Understanding

  This past week, I was fortunate to be able to interview Penn State professor Jim Jansen about some of the work he’s been doing. I had hoped to get the interview transcript back in time for this column, but unfortunately the timing didn’t work with the deadlines (that will be the next column). My conversation [...]

• Link Diagnosis Launches New Tool: A Review

  Link Diagnosis, one of the most well-known link analysis tools around, has new owners, a new look, and some fairly substantial changes under the hood. But are all the changes an improvement? Well, after testing a beta version for a few days, and now using the new site that launched today, my answer is [...]

Search News From Around The Web:

Applications & Portal Features

• Four new themes, Official Gmail Blog
• How I cross-site scripted Twitter in 15 minutes, and why you shouldn’t store important data on 37signals’ applications, Brian Mastenbrook

Business Issues

• Google CEO Eric Schmidt On The Future Of Search: “Connect It Straight To Your Brain”, TechCrunch
• Yahoo Insiders Take $2,159 Out For Every $1 They Spend On Stock, paidContent.org

Local, Maps & Mobile

• Get on the (Google) Map!, Inside AdWords
• Imagery & resources for LA wildfires, Google LatLong
• MapPoint 2010 Released, Bing Maps Blog
• Some News from Android Market, Android Developers Blog

Link Building

• Linking Badly? There Is a Tool to Check That, Search Engine Roundtable

Searching

• Wolfram|Alpha for Calculus Students, Wolfram|Alpha Blog
• Quintura Releases Search Cloud With Pop Up Search Results, Quintura blog

SEO & SEM

• Eagle SEO, BruceClay.com
• Search Engine Optimization for Bing, Bing Webmaster Blog
• Absolute URLs – Better Safe Than Sorry?, SEO.com
• How to Ghost-Google: Searching Google without Google to Know about You, SEO Smarty
• Relevance Versus G-Relevance, AdWords Help Experts
• September 2009 Google Webmaster Report, Search Engine Roundtable
• Whiteboard Friday – Email Marketing & SEO, SEOmoz

Video, Music & Image Search

• A Simple Design for Google Video, Google Operating System