As part of my weekly recap of the SEM forum coverage that takes place over at the Search Engine Roundtable, I will try to summarize, in blog format, the SEM weekly events as discussed over at the roundtable in a more detailed fashion. (long sentence…good thing this is a blog). :)

The week started off with AllTheWeb & AltaVista being stripped of their add URL pages, which soon led to Yahoo! Search powering AllTheWeb’s Search. But it wasn’t all sad news. Rumors spread that MSN was to be launched in July, we were only to find out later that the search talk from MSN was all “Should of…Could of…” chatter, when it was reported that MSN would not launch for about 12 months or so. The Search Engine Wars did not end there, Google launched a new design, and released a more personal approach to searching. Compare this new design with a image from the Google definitions post and you make the decision.

It was not all fun and games for Google. The Google API seemed to have been down for 36-48 hours, some guy tries to extort Google and Google, along with Yahoo and AOL get caught up in a libel suit. The ODP is discussed by Grumpus’s first post, unfortunately Google down plays the directory and the value of those links.

Yahoo! had its share of fun this week, with the launch of Yahoo Watch and the closure of Yasexhoo. Two posts on how backlinks make it way too easy to spam Yahoo. On the other side of the spectrum, we also discussed how to lower ones ranking in an engine.

On more of the paid side of the search engine field, I noticed normal banner ads taking the form of AdSense ads. Some article was published that said popup ads are now acceptable to the end user. Can adding Google AdSense to email get you in legal trouble? Well, now you know if you should take the risk, since Google added new enhanced AdSense reporting.

Several new tools were released this week; including tracking PageRank by keyword and now the ability to *kinda* predicted your future PageRank. DigitalPoint released Yahoo WebRank Tool for those toolbar haters. You can also now use the new Yahoo Ranking Report Tool by SEO Guy.

That covers this week at the Search Engine Roundtable.