Link baiting entered a new area last week when Lyndon Antcliff had success with a fake story being picked up by some mainstream media sites as well as social news sites. Controversy erupted over the tactic, and now it likely will go into a second cycle after Google's Matt Cutts has suggested that Google might penalize pages that don't disclose stories are fake.

Lyndon Antcliff commented on statements that his fake news report is immoral:

I have little interest in discussing the ethics of linkbait, as far as I am concerned if it works and results are achieved then do it.

Writing fake news stories for link baiting purposes could be the latest form of spam the information industry will have to battle.

It is concerning that more and more members of our society abandon ethics in their job and instead adopt an attitude that the goal justifies the means. This is a worrying hollowing out of our culture where value is no longer something we share and strengthens us all. Creating fake news stories is nothing more than robbery - everyone is the poorer for your gain.

Are you here to make money by providing a valuable service to others, or are you here to make a quick buck by telling others a bunch of nonsense?

Search quality tzar Udi Manber peels back the curtain covering Google’s coveted search engine technology:

We also need to understand the queries people pose, which are on average fewer than three words, and map them to our understanding of all documents

PageRank is still in use today, but it is now a part of a much larger system.

Other parts include language models (the ability to handle phrases, synonyms, diacritics, spelling mistakes, and so on), query models (it’s not just the language, it’s how people use it today), time models (some queries are best answered with a 30-minutes old page, and some are better answered with a page that stood the test of time), and personalized models (not all people want the same thing).

…improve the user experience. This is not the main goal, it is the only goal.

There are automated evaluations every minute (to make sure nothing goes wrong), periodic evaluations of our overall quality, and, most importantly, evaluations of specific algorithmic improvements.

In 2007, we launched more than 450 new improvements, about 9 per week on the average.

…we made significant changes to the PageRank algorithm in January.

…we have a large set of volunteers from all parts of Google who speak different languages and help us improve search.

The UI team is helped by a team of usability experts who conduct user studies and evaluate new features. They travel all over the world, and they even go to people’s homes to see users in their natural habitat.

There is a whole team that concentrates on fighting webspam and other types of abuse…The team spots new spam trends and works to counter those trends in scalable ways; like all other teams, they do it internationally.

The major Microsoft Live Search announcement scheduled for tomorrow will be the official launch of a new product: Microsoft Live Search Cash Back.

Nielsen Online has announced its April 2008 search share data for the U.S. Let's dive right into the numbers:

Google - 62% market share, up 35.4% year-over-year
Yahoo - 17.5% market share, down 3.4% year-over-year
MSN/Live Search - 9.7% market share, up 30% year-over-year
AOL - 4.3% market share, down 5.1% year-over-year
Ask - 2.1 % market share, up 35.8% year-over-year

Google saw an estimated 5.1 billion searches, while Yahoo saw 1.4 billion and MSN saw nearly 800 million.