In addition to today’s Internet Marketing Monitor coverage, we felt these stories were worth pulling out of the multitude of news items for May 25, 2007:

EU data-privacy officials probing Google [The Associated Press]

In a nutshell, a European Union privacy panel is requesting information from Google on how it handles the information it collects from Internet users. From what I can tell this is simply a check-up to make sure Google is in compliance with EU regulations. I hate how much information Google collects on uses. BUT… I’d rather Google have that information than other companies. So far they’ve done a decent job of keeping that information locked down. And heck… they went to court against the government to keep from having to turn over user records. That gets a few points in my book.

MyBlogLog Brands All Social Media Optimizers As Schmoes [Search Engine Land]

MBL is the perpetual “DOH!” company. They announced a new new tagging feature that lets people tag blogs and profiles. That’s all good and fine. But in the blog post that announced the new feature, MBL said this:

“Spam - If you think someone is spamming you, tag it out loud! Internally, we like to call a user who games the system a SchMOe (Social Media Optimizer).”

Good one, MBL. I think I know what you were trying to say there. But is that really the best way to say it? SMO is not spam and it’s more than a little funny that a site that probably gets a lot of traffic thanks to the work of SMOs would say something like that. Oh well. Not surprised. The folks at MBL have made a habit of putting their feet in their mouths.

comScore Releases April U.S. Search Engine Rankings [comScore]

It should come as no real surprise how the SEs ranked: Google… Yahoo… Microsoft… Ask… AOL. Yep… just the the month before. The differences in rankings by different companies is perplexing. If there wasn’t such a big gap I wouldn’t pay any mind. But these are pretty significant differences.

The Final Days of Google [I, Cringely]

Cringely tells an interesting story about Google’s eventual self-destruction. I won’t give out the details here because it makes for a very interesting read. But he’s got a good point. A lot of people look for the company to beat Google in an outside company. Maybe Google is its own worst enemy?

Another week has come and gone.  I hope you all have a great weekend… and we’ll see you again on Monday!