The Search Engine Strategies session on Universal and Blended Search was the highlight of the day at SES on Monday. A great panel made up of a cross section of industry luminaries made for stimulating and varied discussion of one of the biggest things to launch in search for years. Panelist Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR suggested that Universal search is a huge development and rivals the Google Florida update.

The Florida Attorney General’s Office has reached an agreement with America Online concerning the erroneous billing of 6,000 customers in Florida. Attorney General Charlie Crist’s Economic Crime Division began investigating AOL in September of 2005 after receiving over 1,000 complaints from consumers.

Hewlett-Packard’s Technology Forum was scheduled to begin in New Orleans this week, but has been rescheduled for obvious reasons.

St. Petersburg police charge a 41 year-old man with unauthorized access to a computer network.

Meteorologic models indicate Hurricane Dennis will steer away from central Florida and move up the Gulf of Mexico.

People in southern Florida got the best view in the U.S. of last night’s partial solar eclipse.

It has been a full year since the infamous Florida Update rewrote Google’s rankings with a massive pre-Christmas purge of previously well placed sites.

I reported recently on a Google ranking phenomenon in which newly listed sites rank well for two to three weeks and then drop completely out of the top 1000. Often these newly dropped sites have high page rank and don’t show for even the least competitive of terms. Discuss the Sandbox Effect in WebProWorld.

The past year has been one of major transition in the search engine industry. Changes to the landscape have been enormous with mergers, acquisitions, and the easing of several formerly big-players out of the sector or, in the case of AltaVista, Lycos and LookSmart, into the minor leagues. We’ve seen new technologies and revenue models being tested by search firms, along with fresh promises of personalized ad-delivery through contextual placement. While there is no end in sight for changes in this evolving medium, this is a good time to examine the impact of such upheaval on the state of website marketing and search engine placement.

You spent a ton of time getting your website just right for Google. And now your site has sunk to the very bottom of the results for several key phrases.

It has been exactly one month since Google introduced its infamous Florida Update. As the Florida Update has brought about the largest and most comprehensive shake-up of Google’s listings ever, it has generated a great deal of interest around the world and genuine panic for the literally millions of webmasters who’s sites have been adversely affected by the change. The following article is a compilation of our writings about the Florida Update since November 17th, the first Monday after the shift.