Google announced it is dropping the Tags feature for its Places product - a feature they were selling to small businesses to promote their location and products or services through Google Maps. The unfortunate thing is the disconnect did not show any Google team unity and has left people wondering what to do.

Google Doodles are done to honor an event - a historical persons birthday such as locomotive engine inventor Richard Trevithick's 240th earlier this week or the 50th anniversary of manned space flight . But the Doodle on the New Zealand search engine homepage has a picture about Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin never went to New Zealand and has no family ties to the country. The Doodle is not being shown in nearby Australia or the US or the UK for that matter.

Richard Trevithick British inventor of the first functioning steam locomotive received a Google Doodle for his 240th birthday. Trevithick was born in 13 April 1771 and died 22 April 1833. Click to read the rest of this post.

The popularity of Google Doodles has not been overlooked by Bing and Ask, both engines are buying low costing paid search traffic for Yuri Gagarin figuring the people who click thru may stay and use Bing News or Ask.com. Click to read the rest of this post.

The Google Doodle honoring the first manned space flight by Yuri Gagarin brings back memories of the Space Race between the US and the Soviet Union during the Cold War of the last century, but also could be seen as a mirror to the new Search Race that national search engines from the United States, Russia and China are now competing in. Russia and China are two of the few countries that do not have Google as their dominant search engine.

Whilst the space race may be over, 50 years ago the race to get a man in space was a hot topic and Russia's Yuri Gagarin first manned space mission was global front page news. Google honors the achievement with a worldwide Google Doodle April 12. Click to read the rest of this post.

Digital company Aish.com has created a clever view of the exodus with Moses if done in the digital age. It is a comedic look at how we use the web to find our ways. Click to read the rest of this post.

The Italian court had recently "found that Yahoo was liable for contributory copyright infringement for listing links to websites that hosted the film "About Elly" by director Asghar Farhadi." PCWorld reported . But Yahoo has stated they will appeal the decision. and won't remove the links unless the company loses the case. The Italian courts seem to be chasing the search engines out of their country . As we reported yesterday: Click to read the rest of this post.

Seems Google is getting information about senior employees being recruited by Twitter, in order to make counter offers, TechCrunch reported. Google offered about $150 million to keep two senior product managers offered the chief product role at Twitter earlier this year )though Business Insider claims those numbers are "tens of millions of dollars off" - but huge numbers regardless of the exact dollar figures(. Click to read the rest of this post.

Yesterday's post on Google's Inside AdWords blog gave a heavy pitch for offline sales from the impact of AdWords - the short video seems more like a 'get rich quick' infomercial than an informed case study. Click to read the rest of this post.

Google and Yahoo have felt the sting of the Italian courts recently and the numerous problems the engines seem to be having in the country almost suggests search engines are not welcome. Or maybe the search engines will just decide the effort is not worth the return and filter Italy like Google did to the search results in China. Google was found liable for defamation of a person from their autocomplete - which is a reflection of what people are searching for,

Wanting to keep the tech industry in town, the city of San Francisco Board of Supervisors with an 8-3 vote approved a proposed tax break for growing companies, but especially Twitter, if the companies move or stay in the Mid-Market and Tenderloin districts west of downtown. Twitter will not have to pay city taxes for new employees hired over the next 6 years, The company has about 650 employees at the facilities in the area but are looking to hire as many as 2,

As of now the Google AdWords API does not support Position Preference and the option will be retired completely by early May, Inside Adwords reported. And Hal Varian, Google's chief economist, said people are too focused on position when they should be tracking conversion. "What matters is how the keyword performs in terms of clicks and cost, not where it ends up on the page," he noted,

Larry Page took over CEO duties at Google again yesterday and a busy day it was for the creator of the confusingly-named Page Rank. As numerous analysts have pointed out, Sergey Brin and Larry Page have come a long way from founding the dominant search engine and that outgoing CEO Eric Schmidt provided 11 years of exceptional service helping build the company in to the major business it is today. Schmidt officially stood done yesterday,

One hopes the new tagging element rolled out by Google this week is really not their interpretation of social networking and just another attempt to get its users to do some of their heavy lifting. No doubt the popularity of Facebook's Like button and the ever present Tweet This buttons on most sites' content pages these days motivated Google, but the limitations of how it is passed around shows the hole in Google's social networking efforts.

Google settled its case with the FTC over the forced joining to Buzz for a brief period after its launch last year, they now have to have users sign up for the product. Google "will have to "obtain express affirmative consent" from users before sharing with any third parties. That means sticking information in front of user's face telling him or her what information will be shared, who it will go to, and what the purpose of the sharing is.

Apart from Plus1, Google has been busy this week rolling out a number of feature additions including contextually targeted content advertising and a refresher of language targeting were two that should be noted. " Many of you use contextual targeting on the Google Display Network to reach potential customers as they read web content directly related to your products or services. To date,

Anyone who has walked in to a high school science classroom across the globe remembers the first time they saw a Bunsen burner - one of the first awestruck moments of our youth - the stuff of every mad scientist movie we had watched as kids was there sitting at our desks. In recognition of Robert Bunsen's 200th birthday, Google has honored the inventor with a Doodle - March 31st - and is showing on the Google homepage for countries where it is already that day.

The launch of Disco - Google Slide's group messaging app for smartphones seems like another social tool from the company denying its importance. Not that this one rocks the space and have people running to install. "Called Disco, the minimalistic app offers group text messaging like Facebook's Beluga, GroupMe and several others.... Users create a single number that everyone in their group can message to reach all other members of that group," eWeek noted.

If you have a YouTube account and it is not tied to a Google account you may not be able to log in in a few weeks, according to the YouTube blog . All YouTube accounts have to be tied to a Google account. Whether this is to help improve the service, or a tie to their non existent Social Circles, or a consolidation motivated by tracking to avoid any potential privacy issues later has yet to be determined.