Wednesday Grok: Apple and Samsung, Google SEO tweaks and the BlackBerry London

Check out the Google spider bait in today's headline — Grok is catching on fast. If you see a lawyer smiling this week, blame Apple and Samsung. The two companies continue enriching the legal fraternity, this time over the more recent dispute about the iPhone 4S.

Computerworld reports, "Samsung has experienced a minor victory today as a Federal Court granted an application for an early final hearing in its case against Apple, with a three-week case being set for March 2012 and a specific date to be fixed this Friday."

As Apple was trying to delay the injunction until August, the result is seen as a win for its rival — a rare legal victory for the company which has been gazumped by Apple in pretty much all the legal manoeuvrings until now.

The Australian notes in a story headlined, "Apple Hearing moved to next year", which you can cut and paste into Google to avoid its paywall, that Samsung agreed to alter its injunction with the end result being Apple can keep happily peddling its battery sapping paper weight for another five months unencumbered.

Meanwhile, the SMH notes Samsung claims the whole tit for tat is Apple's fault, a case of it being far too trigger happy for everyone's good, well for Samsung’s good presumably.

Samsung's lawyer told the court that his client had an informal policy of not suing Apple, right up until the moment Apple sued Samsung for patent infringement in California. Anybody with children knows that this is an argument going nowhere.

Google lets SEO nerds under a hood, just a bit

According to the Reuters, Google has lifted the veil, at least to a small extent on how it ranks sites. In a recent report, Reuters wrote, "While less than revelatory, the details published on Google's official blog mark a departure for the internet search leader, as antitrust regulators investigate claims that the company's search process might be biased toward its own business and operations." While Google has previously described some of the more than 500 changes to its search algorithm it makes every year, this latest explanation contains more details than usual. The SMH also includes a link to the changes here.

Google's market share is constantly under scrutiny for signs of weakness. However, the latest ComScore rankings saw the company rise slightly in the US market at the expense of Microsoft's Bing. A report in The Register says that according to ComScore, "Bing is struggling to add users – despite Microsoft's expensive efforts to make the search engine a serious contender against the Chocolate Factory." No, we don't understand the reference to the Chocolate Factory either, but we assume they mean Google.

Sneak peak at the BlackBerry London

Ignored now for more time than what’s comfortable for any operator in the fashion conscious smartphone market, BlackBerry is taking a leaf from Apple's book, "leaking" a photo of its next generation device called the BlackBerry London. Ok, apart from the fact that the name is so inappropriate given BlackBerry's role in fuelling the London riots with its proprietary network, what do we know about it? Not much, according to Business Insider, which has the snap. It’s "a touch screen-only device that runs the same OS as the BlackBerry PlayBook. It's also supposedly thinner than the iPhone 4."

Oh, and its branding is appallingly cynical. #fail

Andrew Birmingham is the CEO of Silicon Gully Investments, and the proud owner of a prepaid second hand iPhone3GS but he loved his first Blackberry more. Follow him on Twitter @ag_birmingham

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