Techcrunch reports that CitizenHawk recently raised a $3M round.

Search Engine Roundtable reports that some Adwords advertisers have begun to see Google enforcing their new display url policy. The report is based on a WebmasterWorld thread in which two advertisers report enforcement.

Thomas O'Toole reviews a recent decision by the District Court in the Punch Clock v Smart Software Development case. The two websites in question (punchclock.com & punch-clock.com).

In June of 2007, a group of plaintiffs filed a class-action cybersquatting lawsuit against domain parking companies and Google (for providing the ads to the domain parking companies). As Eric Goldman states in his initial 07 analysis "I believe this is the first lawsuit against Google for its domainer relationships."

The 11th Circuit Court (GA) recently ruled that the use of trademarked terms in meta tags represents an infringing action, supporting a decision made by a district court.

Google recently announced that while it will jettison Performics search marketing division, it will keep the Performics affiliate network.

On May 5, Google will allow trademark bidding in the UK and Ireland.

On April 1st, Google will begin enforcing consistency between the landing page URL and the display URL.

While this scam has been occurring for nearly 6 months, the scammers seem to have stepped up their efforts recently.

Last week, BrandVerity entered closed Alpha. We have a handful of alpha testers up and running and we are conducting daily monitoring of their search terms.