A summary of search related news items that occurred this week including Vanessa Fox reviews the 2007 war on paid links, a new service called Twitter Stats allows you to graph your Twitter usage, human powered search engine ChaCha launches mobile text search, and finally, Jennifer Laycock recommend Firefox extension that will highlight links that are nofollowed.

Monday

• Review of the 2007 Paid Links War - The paid links and nofollow attribute debate was big in 2007. Google wants all paid links followed with the "nofollow" attribute while webmasters are fighting for their right to not have Google dictate how they run their web sites. Vanessa Fox takes a look at the latest round, plus recaps the year's "War On Paid Links" by Google as well as looks at where the other search engines stand on the subject.
  

• Happy New Year's Day - Sorry, did not track any stories on this day but rather spent much of the day watching Twilight Zone marathon on Sci-Fi Channel. ;-)

• Graph Your Twitter Usage With Twitter Stats - TechCrunch reports on a new service provided by Brad Kellett of Pantsland fame that allows you to track exactly how frequently you are using Twitter. Twitter Stats offers a key range of (as the name suggests) of Twitter statistics based on username. Once you enter a user name, you will see various graphs showing Tweets per hour, per day, per month, top @ replies and top overall @'s.
  

• ChaCha Launches Mobile Text Search  - Mashable reports that the human powered search engine, ChaCha, has launched mobile text search. In the same way that you can search on the web and wait around until a human answers your query, you can now do so on your cell phone via text messaging. While I see this as a somewhat more useful service than waiting for humans to answer my query via the web, is it really scalable? This also leads to the question, "Do people really want to wait for a response to their search query, whether that be performed through a computer or mobile device?" It is certainly not for me as I want answers to my queries in lighting mode.
  

• How To Tell if a Link is NoFollowed - It was a slow news day but I did find this interesting piece by Jennifer Laycock on how you can tell if a link is nofollowed. Of course you can do it the hard way by looking at the source code of the page to see if the following attribute (rel="nofollow") is included in between the opening and closing <a href> tags. Or you can download a nifty plug-in for Firefox called SearchStatus. Not only will it highlight links that are nofollowed, it allows you to view Google PageRank, Google Category, Alexa popularity ranking, Compete.com ranking, Alexa incoming links, Alexa related links and backward links from Google, Yahoo! and MSN for any web page you are viewing. I've installed it and tip my hat to Jenn for the recommendation.