• The SEC launches an informal inquiry after finding out that Google failed to register 23 million shares and 5.6 million options.
• Google Settles a patent dispute with Yahoo!. Google issues Yahoo! 2.7 million shares, worth more than 300 million and as a result is expecting a 3rd quarter loss.
• Possible violation of the SEC quiet period restrictions with the latest Playboy magazine interview. The SEC extends the quiet period from the time the company files a registration statement with the SEC until they declare the registration statement effective. During this timeframe, the federal securities laws limit what information a company and related parties can make available to the public.

Just this month alone resulted in a few road blocks that Google has to deal with. Also, Google plans on using Dutch Auction. In theory, buyers pay more for stock in Dutch auction IPOs than in ordinary IPOs, which means more money will go to the firm that is selling shares. With the two tier system they have in place, the shares they are selling will only count as one vote, where as the other shares will have 10 times the voting power. This is good for Google as it will leave the majority of the power with them.

Next, Googles latest algorithm update has been causing an uproar amongst website owners and internet marketing consultants these past few days. With PageRank missing on some home pages, old copies of various pages of web sites showed up in Googles cached version of their pages, just to name a few items that are being raised in the various search engine forums. Some possible issues that could have been responsible for this latest update was the research paper released from Microsoft hinting at how they plan on improving on PageRank and HITS. Also, with the Google contest that took place recently positioning the term Nigritude Ultramarine, had to spark off interest as it was easy for people to manipulate the results and bring their listings to the the top of the search engine rankings.

This certainly has been an interesting month with regards to Google and it will be interesting to see how everything unravels.

For more information on MSNs latest research please see Block-level Link Analysis. It is a great read and if this is just a glimpse into what the new MSN has in store, the search engine wars will certainly continue at full speed. I for one will be very interested as many others will, to see how good and spam free the new MSN results will be. I just hope MSN is able to filter out spam better than it currently does with its hotmail program.

Gerard Manning
Search Marketing Consultant
Manning Search Marketing