Weekly Rap-up of Search Industry News – 11/13 – 11/17

A summary of search related news items that occurred this week including Google’s ongoing copyright issues, news that the Google/YouTube deal closes, Matt Cutt’s take on static IPs verses virtual hosting, Danny Sullivan’s announces his new venture when he leaves Search Engine watch at the end of this month and finally Jim and Mary Boykin give birth to a son.

• Google’s Ongoing Copyright Issues - Danny Sullivan has put together a post on Google and all the copyright issues they face. He takes a look at the important difference between indexing and reprinting, how robots.txt already provides a permissions system and why Google should stop scanning in-copyright books. It is a lengthy read but well worthwhile.
  
• He concludes by listing four things he’d like to see put into place – 1.) wide-spread acceptance of robots.txt or a similar systems as a means for giving or denying inclusion into crawler-based search engines, 2.) search engines to require content owners to specifically opt-in to touchy areas such as image search, image thumbnail usage and cached pages, 3.) Google to drop scanning of in-copyright books without permission and finally 4.) a new system to be developed with the search engines and a broad range of publishers for online indexing.

• Google / YouTube Deal Closes – Google closes YouTube deal sooner than many expected it would. TechCrunch reports that the final price included $15 million in cash, 3,217,560 shares of Google Class A Common Stock, along with an additional 442,210 shares of restricted stock and warrants. The number of shares was determined by dividing the acquisition price, $1.65 billion, by an average value of Google stock over the last thirty days (this is a standard way of handling public company acquisitions). 12.5% of the stock is being held in escrow for one year.

• Static IP Verses Virtual Hosting – Matt Cutts reaffirms that there is no difference in the way Google handles web sites with a dedicated IP address verses sites that are virtually hosted. With a static IP, one web site is assigned to that IP whereas in a virtual situation, hundreds of sites could be assigned to that one IP. He is dealing with the common misconception that having multiple sites hosted on the same IP address will in some way affect the PageRank of those sites. He states, “There is no PageRank difference whatsoever between these two cases (virtual hosting vs. a dedicated IP).” So there you have it. Another myth that can be put to rest.

• Danny Sullivan To Launch a New Search News Blog – During his keynote at this years PubCon in Las Vegas, Danny finally reveals the new home where he will continue to write on the industry of search – Search Engine Land. As many know, Danny leaves Search Engine Watch on November 30th, 2006 and had announced earlier this year that he would be starting a new resource where he can continue to do what he has done so well for the past ten years. Joining him will be Chris Sherman and Barry Schwartz, both of whom currently write for Search Engine Watch. Does this mean that Chris and Barry are leaving SEW as well? Haven’t any rumors yet so I guess we will have to just wait and see.

• A New Addition to the Boykin Clan – Jim and his wife have given birth to a boy, Nathaniel Thomas Scott Boykin who weighs in at 8 pounds 9 1/2 oz and measures 21 1/2 inches. In typical “We Build Pages” fashion, Jim has already created a web site for his son. Congratulations to both of you!