The French and German governments have both issued statements recently advising their citizens to stop using Internet Explorer 6. It advises users to move to another browser, such as Mozilla's Firefox or Google's Chrome, or upgrade Internet Explorer to versions 7 or 8. The UK government is under pressure to issue the same warning but has yet to do so.

Google has released its annual Zeitgeist giving insights into the collective search trends of internet users in 2009. A clear trend has been the rise of social media sites with Facebook, Tuenti (a Spanish version of the former) and Twitter making up three of the top four places, topped only by Michael Jackson.

Google have been releasing their annual Zeitgeist since 2001. While Yahoo and Bing also release similar reports, the huge market share of Google makes their report all the more important.

Those with an eye for detail may have noticed a change that Google has rolled out this week on its search result pages. Google are replacing some of the green URLs (a URL is the web address) of search results with something new: hierarchical links.

There are a few problems with showing URLs in search results. When a bit of thought has been put into how a site's URLs should be formatted, they can be descriptive and helpful to the seacher. But often they are too long to display fully, or too cryptic to provide any extra information about that search result.

Microsoft's search engine Bing (previously known as Live and before that as MSN) is to display results from Wolfram Alpha, greatly enhancing its functionality. This will certainly boosts its appeal and help it catch up with the mammoth Google. While Google controls a massive 70% of the market, Bing is its fastest growing competitor.

News out this week highlighted the importance of finding the right partner for your internet marketing and search engine optimisation (SEO). The consequences of making the wrong decision and hiring someone who turns out to use techniques, known in the trade as blackhat practises, can have dire consequences. Blackhat techniques include keyword stuffing, the use of doorway pages, invisible text, multiple domains, duplicated content and many others, in an attempt to trick search engines to place websites higher up the results.