Update 2:  Matt Cutts gave WebProNews another exclusive interview, in which he gave some more details about Caffeine (among other things. It’s only hitting one data center before the holidays, and it isn’t even live quite yet. Google will roll it out to more data centers in January.

Google has updated its Blog Search algorithm after postponing the update earlier in the month. Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable quotes Googler Jeremy Hylton who explains:

Digg is making updates to its promotional algorithm. The idea is to make the site more useful to more people. A select few have long had the most power over Digg’s content.

There is an interesting thread going on at the WebmasterWorld forum looking at whether or not Google favors forums in search results. Matt Cutts tells me that he can neither confirm nor deny this. The thread is started by someone with the handle "bouncybunny," who posts:

Once it was directories, then blogs, now forums… maybe.

I have no empirical evidence for this, but it seems to me that Google is increasingly returning results from forum posts…

Google only needs to run its "Googlebomb" algorithm once in a while. And just recently, one of these times emerged. You may have read about it. Obama was ranking for "failure".

He doesn’t rank for failure anymore, and that’s because Google ran the algorithm. Matt Cutts was kind enough to explain Google’s process for this type of thing:

Some people noticed Knol articles are already sometimes ranking very well in Google results, even though Google promised Knol articles wouldn’t get any artificial boost.

This article in Wired is a good read about Netflix’s competition to improve it’s movie recommendation engine.