Pandia presents the search engine news of the week and looks at a site that promises a Google blackout on January 1st 2008.

We guess you could call it a creative publicity stunt. Still, if it is The Google Blackout Page is a creepy one.

The site presents a black page with a seven digit countdown. Yes that is all, a number changing every second.

Searchviews has found that the numbers refers to the number of seconds remaining to January 1st 2008.

Moreover, when Searchviews turned off javascript they found a new series of numbers and symbols: 37* 25? 38?, -122* 5? 57?, the coordinates for Google?s Mountain View office.

It is all very da Vinci code, the idea being — we assume — to expect a Google shutdown on January 1st: a hacker attack, maybe, or a bomb?

We believe it is a bad taste PR stunt.

Pandia this week

Top 10 Useful Web Sites (Pandia’ favorites right now)
Chinese attack on Western search engines (The Dalai Lama scares the Chinese)
Is Dogpile really a better search site than Google? (Nah, we don’t think so)

Search engine headlines from around the Web

Larry Page & Sergey Brin Video Interview
James Fallows' Zeitgeist interview with the Google co-founders made its way onto YouTube. (SE Land Oct 19 2007)

Yahoo! Chief Marketing Officer Cammie Dunaway Resigns!
Chief Marketing Officer and head of Yahoo! Customer Experience Division leaves (Unofficial SEO Oct 20 2007)

Disable Specific Google Sitelinks
Now you can disable specific sitelinks (the navigational links displayed below a site in search results) (Blogoscoped Oct 18 2007)

(more…)

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