Palin was using her Yahoo email, gov.sarah@yahoo.com, for important US government business, instead of the secure emails given to her by the government. As her password for this email account, rather than using some carefully chosen algorithmic password, Palin was using the name of the place where she met her husband. Very secure indeed.

As this sort of information is public knowledge, college student David Kernell took a stab and tried her Yahoo email account, successfully being able to access it. He then changed her password and posted screenshots of some of her emails on a message board for his friends to see.

For this prank Kernell is now facing 20 years in prison, as ‘hacking’ into a government email account is taken very seriously in the US.

Palin commented on the trial on Facebook, comparing the incident to Watergate – though we don’t remember Richard Nixon haven’t a ridiculously simple password on his emails:

My family and I are thankful that the jury thoroughly and carefully weighed the evidence and issued a just verdict.

Violating the law, or simply invading someone’s privacy for political gain, has long been repugnant to Americans’ sense of fair play.

As Watergate taught us, we rightfully reject illegally breaking into candidates’ private communications for political intrigue in an attempt to derail an election.

As well as the prospect of 20 years in jail, Kernell also faces fines of £66,000 for computer fraud and a further £165,000 for obstruction of justice.

Yahoo! has secured the UK online rights to Premier League highlights, including the rights to dish out to third parties as it sees fit, until 2013. Beginning when the new season starts in August, after the World Cup in South Africa, Yahoo! will show five minute highlights of each Premier League game.

Yahoo.com has a similar deal in the USA with the rights to show highlights of basketball and ice hockey matches. The current owners of the rights, Virgin, will see their deal come to an end as the season draws to a close next weekend.

The deal shouldn’t affect the TV highlights programs screened by Sky and the BBC as Yahoo! cannot make its online highlights available until midnight on Sunday following weekend fixtures. Highlights of midweek games will be available on the same day however.

The Premier League’s Richard Scudamore commented:

The way fans access Barclays Premier League action is growing ever more diverse and sophisticated.

The online highlights package is an important medium for supporters of all our clubs to be able to follow match action.

So from next season you’ll be able to see scenes like Fernando Torres (pictured) skipping past Manchester United’s Vidic at Old Trafford to score, as he did last season in the 4-1 victory for Liverpool.

So, what are we talking about? We’re talking about longtail search and how the different search engines deal with requests such as this. More and more searches on the Internet these days are longtail, with people looking for specific answers to specific problems. The best search engines are the ones that offer answers to these problems, and the ones that don’t are, well, fairly useless.

With that in mind we asked Google, Yahoo and Bing the same question to see how they offered to help. We asked each search engine the following:

How do I change the headlights in a 1984 Ford Escort?

Here is what they had to say for themselves.

Yahoo took our search query, ignored the actual question part of it and just offered up websites about the Ford Escort. Websites such as wikicars.org and escortfocus.com were Yahoo’s best effort at answering our question. As you will agree, fairly useless. We didn’t ask for a history lesson on the Ford Escort, we asked how to change the headlights. Thanks for nothing Yahoo.

We then moved on to Bing and asked it the same question. Bing at least heard the word ‘headlights’, but had no idea why we’d mentioned them. Bing offered up ciao.co.uk as its first two results. Obviously Bing though we needed to read some reviews on the Ford Escort and possible see some price comparisons for buying one. Nice effort Bing, but again utterly useless.

Then we asked Google. Google, unlike the other two search engines, actually listened to our query and understood that were looking for advice on ‘changing the headlights’. Google offered up two results that quickly led to the correct information.

So who would you ask for advice on something specific such as changing the headlights on a Ford Escort? Would you ask the search engine that offered a history lesson on the Ford Escort, the search engine that offered some reviews on the Ford Escort, or the search engine that offered to tell you how to change the headlights?

This is why Google is the most used search engine, it works.

Luckily UK taxes don’t extend to Google and Facebook, but officials in France are looking at taxing revenues earned by these companies online, if that is even possible. The French government wants to tax ad revenues that companies such as Google, Facebook and Yahoo earn online through their advertisements, but only in France.

The government believes that the money they earn from taxing Google and co could be used to provide funds for alternatives to users finding films, music and books online.

However, just how the tax could be implemented is hard to say, as critics of the idea have already expressed.

Nicolas Sarkozy, the president of France, has implemented tough crackdowns on those who download illegal content online. France has also decided to challenge Google with its digital books plans by launching a system of its own, costing £700 million of public money in France.

Naturally, Google isn’t too keen on the idea and Google France’s Olivier Esper believes that a tax could even be counterproductive:

We don’t think introducing an additional tax on internet advertising is the right way forward as it could slow down innovation.

The better way to support content creation is to find new business models that help consumers find great content and rewards artists and publishers for their work.

Google updates its index frequently throughout the day, so depending on what time you look at your rankings, and depending on where you look from, your rankings could be different at different times of the day. Where you look from is important, because Google uses many data centres to provide its results, so if you perform a search from one computer, at the same time that a colleague on a different IP address performs a search from another, the rankings could very well be different.

Does this mean you should check your rankings several times a day, and from multiple computers? No, definitely not.

Checking your SEO rankings is like cooking. You know it takes time, you know you have to be patient, yet sometimes you just can’t help yourself by sneaking a peek in the oven to check the progress.

Just as those TV adverts for pensions and investments warn you, your rankings can go up as well as down, so checking regularly will just drive you crazy. At StuckOn, we monitor rankings every week and we publish reports every month. This allows enough time for SEO, content and other factors to take effect.

There’s nothing wrong with checking your rankings every day, you just need to be aware that with the rate of fluctuation from Google (and especially Yahoo) that you may see quite a difference looking at your rankings so often.

Despite his success, Defoe was quick to thank those who helped him become the prolific goal-scorer that he is today; namely Alan Shearer, Andy Cole and Tottenham legend Clive Allen… at least, videos of them on YouTube.

Just like Newcastle United’s Argentine striker Jonas Gutierrez, Defoe has been scouring YouTube, not on a fact finding mission about opponents, but in search of inspiration.

Defoe has watched goals by the greats of the game, including Clive Allen, on YouTube to inspire his own performances on the pitch, and he says it worked against Wigan:

Every day in training for about 20 minutes a few of the boys stay behind with Les Ferdinand and Clive Allen. I watched some of Clive’s goals the other day on YouTube and it’s important to do that to learn.

And to be mentioned in the same breath as Cole and Shearer is brilliant. You mention names like Andy Cole, I have his video at home. Same with Alan Shearer. I still go on YouTube and watch their goals.

A lot of young footballers can learn a lot from YouTube, as Jermain Defoe has done, although it might be best if Aston Villa’s players don’t spend too long watching clips of Spurs’ 9-1 drubbing of Wigan before tonight’s game.

Here are some of the biggest mistakes ever made in the history of Internet, though most of them seemed like a good idea at the time.

ITV purchases Friends Reunited for £175 million
Just four years ago the TV channel ITV spent an incredulous £175 million buying the social networking website Friends Reunited, just as Facebook launched. Even at the time this seemed a lot of money for a website with a modest audience, limited features and an already ageing userbase.

Unsurprisingly, as Friends Reunited refused to switch from its paid subscription model (losing all but the very computer illiterate of its users to Facebook) the value of the website plummeted to the point where the TV channel sold it earlier this year for just £25 million, making a grand loss of £150 million.

Just why did ITV believe they could venture into online marketing? Their own website shows just how far behind they are without spending £175 million on a white elephant.

Cuil (and other Google killers)
This isn’t so much about Cuil as it is about search engines that try to take on Google with no real understanding of why Google has become so successful (and yes, you can shove Bing in with this if you like).

A few years ago it seemed as though every fortnight we’d be presented with a new ‘Google Killer’ that was supposed to revolutionise the way we searched for things on the Internet, only to find that all of the money spent on them merely produced some attractive new feature(s) and some press releases. Once users looked at them they found that the search results were less than ideal, which is, after all, the whole point behind a search engine.

Thankfully the Google Killers are few and far between now, having mostly all died out. Heck, even Yahoo and Microsoft have admitted they can’t go it alone so how is a new Cuil going to cope?

Speaking of Yahoo…

Yahoo!
Not, not Yahoo doing anything in particular, just Yahoo in general. Yahoo has been responsible for perhaps the two biggest mistakes of all time. You’d think they’d have learned?

First of all, way back in 2001 (doesn’t seem that long ago does it?) Yahoo passed on a deal to buy Google. Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, believed their new company with the colourful logo was worth $1 billion. Yahoo’s Terry Semel on the other hand, did not. Semel was proved wrong almost immediately as the value of Google increased to $3 billion inside seven days, and Yahoo had an option on buying the fledgling company for under $5 billion.

Semel however didn’t think Google was worth anywhere near that and decided against any investment in the sort of business decision that would have left the gang in Dragon’s Den fuming.

The Google brand alone is believed to be worth over $38 billion today, even in our current repressed financial marketplace.

As if this mistake wasn’t bad enough, Yahoo had to go one better when they turned down a fair at the time (very high with hindsight) offer from Microsoft to buy them out. Yahoo’s directors refused to sell at $31 per share, which placed the value of Yahoo at $46 billion in February last year. That’s a lot.

Yahoo’s share price as of yesterday was just over $17; if only Yahoo had sold when the price was right?

Time Warner and AOL merger
This one is a real story of riches to rags as AOL went from a value of $160 billion in 2000, to just $20 billion in 2006, and less than $5 billion today.

Ouch.

Time Warner and AOL merged at the start of the millennium to create an all-encompassing super company that controlled TV, film, magazines and Internet. AOL was worth $160 billion (more than the 82 year old Warner Brothers) despite being just a few years old itself.

The marriage made in heaven quickly headed for the divorce courts as AOL Time Warner became just Time Warner after three years, and after six years AOL received investment from Google to the tune of $1 billion for 5%, placing its new value at $20 billion.

AOL is now worth less than $5 billion, dwarfing the money lost by ITV on Friends Reunited.

As the Internet grows and fortunes are made and lost, you can be sure that more mistakes of epic proportions have yet to be made by companies and, who knows, maybe Yahoo will surpass itself with a third gargantuan cock up that makes its previous two mistakes seem trivial in comparison.

Yahoo, we’re watching!

However, Yahoo (fresh from selling their soul to Satan) claim that their new search product (which hasn’t launched yet, so we can’t test its level of failure) will result in better searches for people than those found in Google.

Yahoo claims that when you’re looking for someone of note, presumably Katie Price or Britney Spears, you’ll be presented with such gems as their social networking pages on Twitter and Facebook, official sites, YouTube videos and other sites that Yahoo deems to be more important than Google’s algorithm.

Larry Cornett, the VP of search at Yahoo, claims:

This design is going to transform the way you use the Web.

Erm… unlikely, but let’s see how he backs this up:

It will make it easier and faster for you to find the things that matter most to you.

Searching for people has been Google’s domain; we are going to take that away from them. When we launch this, you are going to come to Yahoo! to search for people.

To be honest I, like most other people, won’t go to Yahoo to search for people. I’ll be using Google because it’ll offer up websites that are relevant to the search, rather than Frankenstein’s monster that is ‘Yahooing Live’, which offers what it’s been pre-programmed to offer because it can’t run a decent algorithm.