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By now everyone is probably familiar with Google’s battle against the Department of Justice to keep their search data private. While that issue has yet to be resolved it appears that a judge is now ordering Google to comply with a subpoena to hand over an individual’s entire Gmail account including all deleted messages. According to a recent news post on CNET News.com, the FTC intends to use the records to track down the defendant’s sizeable ($300 million) assets.

Cases of this nature continue to prove that there is a substantial amount of white collar crime taking place, and the criminals are not trying very hard to cover their tracks. With access to search data and email accounts, the Department of Justice has even more tools to track criminal activity. So, if you are using your Gmail account for criminal activity don’t bother deleting incriminating mail because it is still retrievable.

Lately there have been a few weddings crashed by the search engines or at least that’s who is catching the blame.

Last week there was a post on Tech Dirt about lost wedding gifts being blamed on search engines. Apparently random consumers were lead to online wedding registries by the search engines and they purchased products from them without realizing that they were in someone’s wedding registry. This, of course, interferes with the registry by removing the purchased items from the lists. I thought this was funny and didn’t give it much thought until I visited the Grey wolf blog.

There is a recent post on Grey Wolf’s blog about wedding gift registries that were getting used by criminals to figure out when newlyweds were going on their honeymoons and then burglarize the homes while the owners weren’t there. This is a much more serious issue.

First off, the search engines are not at fault. There is no way that SE engineers would have considered wedding registries when they built their search engines. It does, however, present an opportunity to the SEO community.

I am sure that with a little bit of thought an SEO could think of several types of websites that do not want to be found by the search engines, and use their knowledge of SEO to un-optimize these websites (provide private websites).

From an SEO standpoint, website developers may want to consider creating easy, almost cookie cutter, websites that are not indexed by search engines just for events like wedding registries. There seems to be a market for them.

Here are a couple of ways to avoid having your wedding registry invaded by strangers:
1. Use robots.txt when designing your site to prevent search engines from indexing your site.
2. Make it evident on each page that the site is for purchasing gifts for an individual wedding.
3. Put all registry information on password protected pages to ensure the SE spiders and hackers don’t get to them.

This morning, while I was learning about Google’s webpage creator (look out MySpace), I came across an interesting note by Chris Sherman. In his article he points out that Google encourages its engineers to spend one day a week working on non-job related projects. These “20% projects” are, apparently, the origin for many of the Google gadgets. What a great system!

Creativity is the blood of a successful organization, and Google’s “20% project” policy is a prime example of how a company can motivate its employees to keep the blood flowing. By allowing their employees to break away from their routines, they are giving them a chance to create cool gadgets and gain experience that they can apply to job related projects.

SEO is our main focus at Comit Technologies, but we are always coming up with new ideas for business opportunities. These ideas can be challenging and profitable, and they usually generate good SEO material (links, articles, etc.) as a byproduct. Our schedules are normally full, but we try our best each day to get together and devote a little time to our non-SEO related projects.

It is always good to look at the policies of successful companies and compare them with your own. Setting aside a few hours every week for pet projects doesn’t sound unreasonable. It obviously works for Google.