Can't decide whether to watch a film? If you're searching online for a current film review, the Telegraph is winning the SEO battle.

There's a story in Australia that News Corp. is preparing to sue Google and Yahoo to stop both from linking to, and quoting News Corp content. It comes as Rupert Murdoch promises to start charging for online content across his company's news sites.

The suing story has prompted the usual hilarity, with comments such as if murdoch sues google & yahoo over news rather than use robots.txt file, it'll be a short, embarrassing lawsuit. But here's why Murdoch might have a case ...

Overall, Google drives the most US traffic to the nine UK national newspaper sites - 19.1%. News aggregator Drudgereport.com is the 2nd highest source of US traffic. Next is Yahoo at 5.2%, with Facebook 4th at 1.6%.

Figures from Compete.com, which tracks American internet use, show that, of the 4.7 million unique users that the Mail added from May to June, 1.2 million were from the USA, and foreign searches for Michael Jackson's kids also drove the Mail's growth.

The ABCe website demonstrates the importance of returning a proper 404 status code, as this search at google for abce demonstrates.

Google has updated its 'sprite' - the one image it uses to render all its graphics. If you're not sure what a sprite is, it's a way to speed up page loads by downloading just one image, and then using CSS to just show the relevant bit.

Trinity Mirror has stopped selling paid links without the nofollow tag. Christian Science Monitor has started.

For some reason, Google's showing a title of "BBC Sport - Cricket: Ashes 2005" for the BBC's cricket page, which is of course all about Ashes 2009.
This is despite Google's cached page having the correct ...

Is Trinity Mirror selling keyword-rich links on its ic Network without using the nofollow tag? Don't tell Google ...

Google's autosuggest feature has some interesting suggestons for Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Prince Charles, Michael Jackson and Jade Goody.

BNP wins were foreseen (predicted is probably an overstrong word) by the data from Google Insights from Search.

Google puts UKIP 13 points ahead of the Conservatives in the European elections. But Google has used the wrong search term - and the real, and worrying story, is that the BNP is ahead of everyone.

Microsoft seem to have reacted badly to my post on the usability of bing - someone left a comment defending it without revealing they were a Microsoft employee (which is illegal in the UK). And they've either manually deleted the post from the bing search results or it's taken them more than 4 days to index it ...!

bing is a usability disaster - confusing links allied to unusable functionality. And is it called bing or Bing - make your mind up Microsoft.

An explanation and test of google's treatment of javascript hidden links.

More examples of sites that appear in google news with headlines like 'Newsticker requires javascript' and 'Font size A A A'

Maybe Google really does need to get together with Twitter to improve its real-time search. Taking 15 days to recognise the Telegraph as the best current result for MPs expenses is a bit poor.

Wolfram Alpha - the new search engine that gives access to systematic knowledge (ie it's a big database of curated facts) - has been variously hailed as a google and wikipedia killer. I've found the Wolfram|Alpha killer - the UK Ask A Librarian site.

The Telegraph has now dropped to result number 8 in Google for a search on MPs expenses.

The results from Google if you search for MPs expenses are rubbish. Last week they had pages from the BBC first and the Telegraph 2nd - even though the Telegraph is the primary source of all this material. Today the results are even worse: they're absolute garbage.