Microsoft and Google are licking their wounds after the two Goliaths took a tumble in the US equities market.

Every now and then, laws paved with good intentions backfire spectacularly and end up somewhere else entirely, as Spain is just about to discover. A new copyright law, which is scheduled to be ratified in January, has prompted Google to pull Google News from Spain: never before has the search-and-advertising behemoth withdrawn the service from a country.

Well, there’s been a lot of discussion out there in Webmasterland after Google belatedly confirmed that it had indeed pushed out a Penguin update on Black Friday weekend, of all times. But how has this slow, ongoing rollout played out globally? SEO expert Philip Petrescu has pulled some interesting bits of data together.

It couldn’t be true, could it? Google couldn’t really have pushed out a Penguin refresh that hit on Black Friday weekend of all times, could they? They’ve repeatedly insisted that they refrain from pushing major updates during busy holiday periods. So the strange search patterns that webmasters were noticing over the weekend must have been down to something else, right? A mistake or some peculiar bug maybe?

Remember when Google faced a barrage of criticism over its “Search Plus Your World” feature back in 2012? OK, maybe not – the row has died down now. However, the search giant seems to have taken the criticisms to heart (it was roundly accused of promoting its own content in search results ahead of potentially better results). German-based tech journalist Bernd Rubel was the first to spot a new development last week: Google’s Knowledge Graph now links to other social networks besides Google+.

Now here’s a little something to blow your mind: Google has developed new image recognition software that doesn’t just represent an object in the image as text (e.g., a motorcyclist) but actually tells you in a sentence what’s going on in any piece of image content it processes. Actual example: “A person riding a motorcycle on a dirt road” to describe an image of … you guessed it, a person riding a motorcycle along a dirt road). Its added verbs to the standard (and not especially useful) repertoire of nouns.

It’s official. Penguin 3.0 is being rolled out over the next few weeks.

Google’s new “Knowledge Vault” might have begun as a whimper (a quiet announcement in a talk by Google’s Kevin Murphy at the CIKM Conference last October), but it might be about to make a large bang.

Google, it seems, has sent ripples of incipient panic through the global fund management sector after commissioning research on how it could enter the asset management industry.

Watch out, there’s a (newly updated) Panda about: Google’s latest iteration of its Panda algorithm (4.1) to be more precise. And in under a week of its rollout, it’s already dealt a savage mauling to some forms of online content.