One of my favorite personal blog posts is about not trapping users’ data. In late 2006, Eric Schmidt declared “We would never trap user data.” Many of the major Google properties (search, Gmail, Calendar) make it trivial to export or download your data.

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

If organic search drives 90% of referrals, why does it only get 5% of marketing budgets?

Small businesses need to weigh cost versus benefit with every decision. That means for dollars and time. Spending time means spending money, especially if the time you spend takes you away from doing work, which also may mean hiring someone to do it for you.

It appears that Google has decided to remove PageRank from the Google Webmaster Tools. Surprisingly it hasn’t been removed from the Google Toolbar yet. I’m sure this is on it’s way though.

If you’ve ever heard or seen the phrase “Trustrank” before, it’s possible that whoever was writing about it, or referring to it was discussing a paper titled Combating Web Spam with TrustRank (pdf). While the paper was the joint work of researchers from Stanford University and Yahoo!, many writers have attributed it to Google since its publication date in 2004.

Some of the visitors to search engines are people looking for information. Other visitors may have other purposes for visiting search engines, and might not even be humans. Instead, those automated visitors may be attempting to check rankings of pages in search results, or conducting keyword research, or providing results for games, or even being used to identify sites to spam, or to alter click-through rates.

Too much time is often spent about the new features the various major search engines roll out or the latest deals they cut. Here at Search Engine Land, we can be as guilty of that as anyone. To correct it, I’ll be spending more and more time highlighting poor quality search results that I encounter, in hopes of nudging the industry to improve things.

With every industry, there is an underground of folks who find more pleasure in wrecking a good thing. Search engine marketing is no exception.

Last spring’s Daylight Savings Time post is increasing my current daily blog traffic by over 500%. Reason? Three of them, actually: 1.) Daylight savings time is near an end 2.) Everyone is googling the term to figure out which exact day that end is gonna fall on. 3.) The search engines aren’t differentiating between beginning and end when discussing Daylight Saving Time.