Excuse me, sir… would you happen to know the date? Why yes… yes I would! It’s Link Love Friday!

Why not start things off with a little spintastic rambling from Google. In response to claims that Google employees don’t use the company’s Docs & Spreadsheets application, The Official Google Docs & Spreadsheets Blog published a touching story about how the tool has made everyone at Google’s life much easier. Apparently some big-mouthed Googler told a journalist that Mountain View was very much a Microsoft Office company… and that Docs & Spreadsheets was mainly used to share those MS Office creations. Now Google says that it’s employees have created over 370,000 and create 3,000 new ones a day. The company employs about 13,000 people around the world. And you’re telling me that “everyone” at Google uses Docs & Spreadsheets every day? That means, in total, each employee has created less than 30 documents… and less than 25% of them create a new document on any given day. I wonder how many Word documents they create each day…

Speaking of Google, The Economist is apparently afraid of Big G… and so is everyone else. There’s nothing in the article that hasn’t been said a million times in the past. Yes… they know everything about your search habits. Yes… they know what websites you’re reading, where you’re going on vacation, and when you plan to see your shrink next. I’m sure they even sit around with pizza and have email-reading parties (that’s sarcasm, by the way). I’ve had my own “Google’s big and scary” moments in the past. But I’d like to know when people plan to do something about that fear… instead of just talk about it? If half of the people who claim to be scared of Google actually stopped using it we’d see an impact. Wait. What’s that? You mean the other search engines do the same thing? Darn. That ruins the whole conspiracy theory.

Just when you thought I couldn’t talk about Google any more, the company announced today that it was planning to start reducing the amount of duplicated news stories found in Google News. Instead of posting links to 5,469 versions of the same Associated Press story on 5,469 different websites, Google will attempt to display the original source (if that source hosts its own content). The company hopes that this will allow more commentary and different perspectives on each story float to the top of the pool. Oh… and about those wire services that don’t host their own stories… don’t worry. Google is going to host them. Get out! You didn’t know Google was hosting service?! Neither did I! In all seriousness, though, I’m actually pretty excited about this change. It should make weeding through the hordes news stories much easier.

Ok… I lied. I have one more Google-ish thing. But it’s not directly Google related. It has to do with Matt Cutts. And nofollow. Ah yes… the dreaded nofollow. According to Cutts, nofollow not only tells Google to not pass PageRank, but it also drops the link it’s attached to from Google’s radar… to the point where Google doesn’t even use nofollowed links for discovery purposes. He then goes on to say that he thinks saying webmasters “should” be using nofollow is a bit strong. Instead, he basically says ‘eh… it’s there… take it or leave it… we don’t care’ (that’s paraphrased, obviously).

The big search companies weren’t the only ones prettifying their offerings this week, either. Both SEOBook and SEOmoz updated their free search engine optimization tool pages. SEOBook offers what you could almost call a directory of in-house and external SEO tools organized into a couple of categories. SEOmoz offers a suite of free tools to perform some basic SEO tasks. Premium members get more… but they pay for premium membership. Since I don’t pay for SEO tools, I haven’t the foggiest idea what’s behind Door #moz… but I’ve heard it’s pretty decent stuff.

Speaking of tools, Search Engine Journal pointed me to a site that’s supposed to tell you what percentage of a website is listed in the Google Supplemental Index. But wait… didn’t Google get rid of the Supplemental Index? No… not exactly. If you remember correctly, they simply dropped the supplemental label applied to search results. The index is alive and kicking and folks have been trying to figure out how to get a peak at their supplementals since the label was dropped. Unfortunately… Matt and I both gave this tool a run and we agree - it’s not remotely accurate. Matt’s exact words were “not even close”. And I don’t guess we’re alone. Several comments left over at SEJ would seem to suggest that others are finding it pretty inaccurate too. Sorry “Supplemental Index Ratio Calculator” guys… try again.

That’s all she wrote for the work week. Those of us in The States will enjoy a long weekend in observance of Labor Day. The rest of the world… well… you’ll be working on Monday. Sorry.

Have a great weekend!