Google has started the year by encouraging us to take more notice of our friends while simultaneously upsetting some of its other <cough> ‘friends’.

The launch of Search Plus Your World on Tuesday makes sense of some of the moves we’ve seen over the past few months, notably the creation of the Google+ network and encrypted search via SSL connections. Read more on The week in Search… Plus Your World…

Random start:

We’ve spent a lot of this year talking about Pandas.

What will we be talking about this time next year? I’d like to think it will be Racoons or tricycles or sink plungers

If you have any thoughts send them by postcard please to stefan@propellernet.co.uk

Read more on The week in search… the year of the……

So, Cyber Monday has been and gone – but not forgotten, unless you’re using Bing that is.

Danny Sullivan over at Search Engine Land picked up on the fact that the site of the trade organisation that came up with the concept quite literally got lost on Bing. Read more on The week in search – this is my truth tell me yours…

So Yahoo Site Explorer finally closed its doors this week. I guess this makes SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer the new power broker of back link data for the growing SEO community.

If I could buy shares I’d probably take a punt.

The bigger question is whether the wider digital marketing community is aware of the reputation metrics being captured by tools like Open Site Explorer? Read more on The Week in search…Yahoo Site Explorer closes and SEO objectives…

There seems to be a spate of terminal illness hitting the search marketing industry recently. Last week, I wrote that SEO is dead, but search marketing is alive and kicking.

This week, I read that link building is dead and has been usurped by social sharing.

In his article, Debanjan Ghosh, states that inbound links are worthless unless they’re on the top authority websites in your niche and says he no longer builds links into his sites. He would rather have “50 likes and 50 retweets than 100 links from junk sites like article directories and bookmarking sites”. Read more on The week in search… Does social spell the end for link building?…

Search engine optimisation is dead. Long live search marketing.

I admit I’m playing fast and loose here with some fairly well established terminology but I’m feeling controversial today. And, to a certain extent, it’s Erin Everhart’s fault. Read more on The week in search… SEO is dead…

Forget doing barrel rolls… And the fact that Sir Martin Sorrell has told us “not to underestimate the power of Google or online”…

This is old news and, for my money, the big announcement of the week in search is all about keeping things fresh. Read more on The week in search… keeping things fresh…

It’s more than a week since Google announced it will be encrypting searches made by logged-in users, but the debate about what this means for natural search rumbles (rather loudly) on. Read more on The week in search… Google’s flawed logic…

After seeing two demonstrations of Google Voice Search in two weeks (one successful, one not so – presenter to phone: “Where is the beach?” Phone to presenter: “Where is the b****?”) it seems the battle has been joined between Google and Apple (Siri).

Only it seems like Siri is, for the time being at least, the fluffer for Google Search with Siri becoming a simple interface between user and Google. It could even be that Siri drives Google searches on the iPhone, which must make Google happy. Read more on The week in search…my money is on Google Voice…