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This industry is in a constant state of flux, both in the new technology and even in the amount of news that there is.  Just yesterday I was struggling to write a daily roundup and today I have more than I know what do with including some Google rumors, how President Bush is trying to stop a new TLD from moving forward, and what plans may be in the work for Fox owner News Corp.

It always amazes me how much power George Bush thinks he has, yet every time I say “I’d be surprised if that happens” it does.  Now the President is putting pressure on ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) the body which regulates domain name management among other things, to hold off on the new .XXX top level domain until “the impact of pornography on families and children” is further scrutinized.  Doesn’t he realize that by instituting such a domain naming scheme that it could be helping reduce the access to pornography our children see?  I guess he’s never done a Google image search with safe search turned off.

Speaking of Google, a report out of the LATimes.com says that Google is planning on spending even more money on infrastructure in the coming year.  Spending will rise to over $700 million, up from the forecast $600 million.  Could this be because Google may be interested in providing free wi-fi?

In other Google news, it appears that new pricing changes are happening in the AdWords department.  A post at SEO Roundtable summarizing a thread from the popular WebMasterWorld forums which shows that Google is indeed testing some new features.

The folks at MSN Search are following Firefox’s lead by offering what they call plugins to the MSN Search toolbar.  These plugins are similar to the Firefox extensions which make the browser so popular.  The first plugins available from MSN include a weather plugin , but we expect to see more plugins over time, likely copies of the most popular Firefox extensions.

Is the end of Blinkx desktop search near?  I hope not, but apparently News Corp is in the hunt for a search engine and the rumor is that Blinkx is the most likely target because of its ability to index media.  Would this mean that the great strides Blinkx has made in the Desktop Search arena would be over?  It’s too soon to say, but my bet is that their focus will be improving the web search to try and compete with the bigger players.  Therefore desktop search would be on the back burner.

A few days ago I posted about how Yahoo! is trumpeting about its new, larger index.  One that claims to be about twice the size of Google.  Of course the people over at Google have been disputing Yahoo!s claim.  Now it appears they may have some grounds.  Researchers at the University of Illinois claim that through performing searches on Yahoo! they have proven that the index isn’t as big as Yahoo! claims.  Now if you are tired of hearing about the whole size debate, and could care less whose is bigger, perhaps you should check out Danny Sullivan’s rant over at Searchenginewatch.com.  He makes some very good points about how size doesn’t matter if the results suck (to put it bluntly).

Finally today, a new low for search engine spammers that call themselves marketers.  A report on Boingboing exposes a really poor search marketing tactic used by (or on behalf of) the BBC.  Apparently they have admitted to modifying Wikipedia entries to help build links to their site.  “That includes planting of viral information in entries, modification of entries to point to new promotional sites or “leaks” embedded in entries to test diffusion of information.”

Now I just gotta say – there are much better and more ethical ways to get good quality links for your site.  If you pull stuff like this you just make legitimate linking worse for the rest of us.  And since we all know the value of a good link, we take it very seriously when we see something like this.  To me, this type of tactic is the same as an ambulance chasing lawyer – it gives everyone in the industry a bad name.