In a post Friday on Google's blog, Amit Singhal, a top search executive, said Google's Web "search algorithms, " which determine how websites are ranked in search results, would now take into account the number of valid copyright removal notices that Google receives for a particular site.

WSJ: Google to Penalize Websites Flagged by Copyright Holders

The post on the official Google blog announcing the new extension, written by search czar Matt Cutts, would seem to give the lie to a claim by Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt that his company is not among the spam purveyors that Google is trying to filter out.

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Search expert John Battelle said in his blog post that social search would mean little until Facebook and Google settled their differences and offered consumers what they really wanted - Facebook data integrated with Google's search.

BBC: Screenshot of Google+

Google also likely will make blog content searchable by topic, thereby driving more Web traffic to Google's traditional search site.

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That would be protection from the reputation ruining that comes from someone tagging you in a nasty blog post and having it turn up as the first result in a Google search of your name, but also protecting people from themselves in this age of indiscreet Facebooking and Tweetaholicism.

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"It's clear to us that we do not want to be in the search engine marketing business, " Google spokesperson Tom Phillips wrote on Google's official blog.

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In a blog post (he he) Google announced it was discontinuing Google Listen, an application it launched in 2009 to search for and play pod casts.

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