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A while back, UTube.com ("the number one supplier of used Tube Machinery in the world," they claim) complained that people were mistakenly arriving at their site when they actually wanted to land on YouTube.com.

Is that a web 2.0 shadow?

Well, I guess the wave of laughter erupting after that didn't go by unnoticed, and UTube has now reconsidered... and is trying to monetize all that traffic, it seems (70,000 people per day, according to them), despite having gone to court suing YouTube earlier. Quote Mambo in the forum:[U]tube.com has taken advantage of the extra traffic, and has created an advertising-dominated search engine box, on the top of their main homepage.

The sponsored links are laid-out to look like videos, some with their own "ratings".There's a couple of search suggestions to get you started, like poker and ringtones. And when you click the UTube logo, you'll end up on a "what's hot" listing linking to searches for britney spears, nintendo wii and what-not. Here's the top search result for poker, along with the unrelated web cam girl and the fake rating (both appear on other ads, too):

I wonder if there'll be a round III in this battle...

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Philipp Lenssen from Germany, author of 55 Ways to Have Fun With Google, shares his views & news on the search industry in the daily Google Blogoscoped.