Google runs a program which was earlier known as DomainPark and currently goes by the name, AdSense for Domains. What it basically does is if you have an attractive domain with no content to feature, then this program lets you showcase lucrative ads on the page. This practice which is known as domaining is perfectly legal as most users tend to join words together and enter domain names to find any relevant information pertaining to that topic. The users are not really misled and the domainers stand to gain by earning money.

Many people would be of the opinion that domaining is equal to spamming but this is not entirely true. Along with all the legitimate stuff that happens on the internet, there are many spam tactics like typo traffic that is not very desirable. Typo domains simply cash in on another domain’s fame which is not very legit.

Domainers would want to argue that a typo domain is basically the user’s mistake like dialing a wrong phone number but I would say making money out of someone’s mistake is also a wrong thing to do. There have been objections raised arguing that this is not the wrongdoing of any domain owner but the fault lies on the part of the companies which are supplying these ads and thereby violating certain guidelines and policies.

At the end of it all, the user who typed in a wrong domain address never really gets directed to the real page he is looking for; instead he has to get contented with all the unnecessary ads which promise so many things and end up making big domain owners rich.

Microsoft reports that MSN currently has about 600 million uses globally making it larger than Yahoo. This website is a huge asset in many ways the most important of which is the fact that it drives approximately forty-five percent of all Bing queries. A glance at the new MSN portal is all that it takes to reveal the superiority of the new outlook and design of the webpage.

Users can log in and access their Facebook and Twitter accounts through the new MSN portal and the activity streams of both websites will be displayed at the lower right of the homepage. The local edition has also undergone a tremendous change with a range of local content like restaurants and hotels, entertainment, news, traffic and gas prices getting aggregated and displayed in a direct and easily accessible format complete with maps and local search functionality.

Microsoft decided to revamp the MSN portal based on user feedback and a growing sense that the old look was outdated and non functional. You can see a lot of personalization on MSN but not to the extent of Yahoo as Microsoft believes that very few users will be interested in such a high degree of personalization. The new portal is believed to roll out globally within a few months time and the look may vary slightly from country to country. The newly designed MSN portal will definitely be one to look out for in the coming months.

A small problem is that the Google thumbnails form a relatively small part of the webpage and are not really useful all the time to the user. Also, the thumbnails from the search results pages are always merged together, hence it takes a long time for the resulting image to load.

For example, if you search for information on U2, then all the search results will be displayed and the ‘page preview’ button can be found on the left hand side as an option under Standard view. If you click on this button, the thumbnails for that particular search result will be displayed directly on the search results page itself as a small column.

Page Previews is not a new concept at all to the search industry. It has been done before by Ask.com with the binoculars tool and has been in use for quite some time now. Another problem while using the Page Preview option of Google is that there are many Firefox add-ons that add many page previews to the search results displayed on Google webpage.

To summarize, there is nothing new and innovative about the new ‘Page Preview’ option of Google Search. It merely helps you to visualize thumbnails of each individual search result which opens as a small window and hence is not very helpful to the user.

Yahoo had announced earlier during this year that it planned to close down the domain GeoCities, a free web hosting service, on October 26th of this year. But most users were still able to access this site after this date too; finally Yahoo pulled the plug on GeoCities by the end of October. And along with it disappeared millions of WebPages, images, URL’s and everything else associated with the domain. But most importantly, millions of links have also vanished which is huge when seen from an SEO perspective but small in the web’s overall link graph.

Google was the first website among the three to remove GeoCities from its search index. A Google spokesperson reported on Friday that once the domain was shut down, the pages were fragmented and broken; so the company took immediate action to avoid users from landing on broken pages and not finding the right information.

Yahoo followed suit and zapped the domain by early morning on Friday and Bing removed GeoCities by the end of the weekend. It was also removed by Ask.com and AOL search by November 3rd from its indices. But the fact remains that the domain is still not completely buried and you could find a few websites still active if you use Yahoo search.

Some of these zombie GeoCities pages are www.geocities.com/bolerama/ and www.geocities.com/bradreviews/. You could also find a couple others which were tweeted by Range Online Media through Twitter. These seem to be GeoCities Plus sites which the user can still access but cannot use the tools required to manage the site.

Google always has its eyes out for new content as freshness is the key component for most users using search. Convention system does not always work as Google cannot detect pages which do not have links and these pages become invaluable to the site. The blog post that appeared recently discusses about using RSS and Atom feeds as Sitemaps even if the website owner has not submitted his pages through the Sitemap system. Other feed submission systems are also being scanned like Google Reader and ping services.

What the blog post does not say is if the feeds are being used solely for discovery of pages or if the content obtained from the feeds are used in place of crawling as well. Though the post is titled ‘discovery,’ it says that Google is able to get these pages into the index faster than using traditional crawling methods. Google Blogsearch had initially crawled feed content instead of actual webpages which caused partial indexing. If Google is to use the feed as a discovery method, then it must not be blocked by robots.txt

All those who are looking for a mortgage always want to know about a specific offer. What you want to know is the APR which is based on your specific set of circumstances. This feature is currently not provided on AdWords according to Nick Fox who is the Director of Business Product Management at Google.

When you use Comparison Ads and search for terms like mortgage, refinance or related words, Google throws up a special ad inviting you to view all the special offers displayed on its webpage. Though the product has been officially launched, it will be atleast be a week to see the tool fully deployed. But Comparison Ads could be visible in some states where the ads can find matching content.

Once the ad is displayed on the webpage, all the user needs to do is to click on it and will be directly taken to various and related mortgage offers by different lenders. The user can also filter search results based on loan amount, credit rating, income, state and country. Google is currently offering Comparison Ads only in the United States and that too not in every state.

Ads featured on this site are sold on a cost-per-lead basis. When a user clicks the ad, the information is sent to the advertiser and he is billed accordingly. No information about the user is given out and Google acts as a temporary bridge between the user and the advertiser. If the user is interested in forwarding the deal, it is entirely up to him to give his personal number and have the advertiser contact him or vice versa.

When asked whether other devices like G1, MyTouch3G and other non-Android 2.0 phones will be able to upgrade, Vic Gundotra who is the Vice President of Engineering at Google said that this decision lies entirely with the Android carriers. As per the reports, other smartphones should also be able to upgrade to get this new feature from Google.

The demonstration began with Gundotra providing some background information about Google Mobile Maps. He reported that ever since its launch four years ago, there has been billions of downloads and currently has about fifty million ‘active’ users on a global scale. Gundotra said this feature was added as this navigation layer was the most commonly requested one by most users.

This use of this feature will definitely gain momentum especially with the combination of other Google tools like search assets, voice interface and other Maps features. The fact that it comes free can only boost its use which could be quite a bad news for other GPS device manufacturers and subscription-navigation services.

A user can search manually or by voice in English on Google Navigation and this can be pretty fast on the Quick Search Box provided on the home screen of Android devices. Users can also carry out regular searches and then get turn-by-turn directions to the required destination through Navigation. This new offering from Google Navigation through Android can make both Maps and the device one very successful combination.

The data from iCrossing on search market share for the month of September showed Google to be a whooping 76.7 percent and Microsoft Bing moved upward from August at 8.2 percent. Yahoo Search has plummeted to a meager 11.1 percent while AOL and Ask are also going downhill.

iCrossing claims that this data is derived from the actual traffic that is received from all the search engines. This is picked up by the company’s analytics who keep a track across various enterprise level sites as opposed to all the online traffic on the World Wide Web.

The data from comScore reported Google to have 64.9 percent of the market shares and Yahoo at 18.8 percent while Bing is slightly higher at 9.4 percent. And the data from Hitwise for the month of September shows Google at 71.08 percent and Yahoo at 16.38 percent, while Bing is at 8.96 percent. You can note that there is quite a variation in the market shares of Yahoo when you compare the reports from iCrossing, comScore and Hitwise. But Bing seems to have a steady hand in the market from all the various reports that has come in. Ask and AOL showed a loss according to iCrossing but seems to be stable as per the reports from comScore and Hitwise.

Officials at Google confirmed the fact that unlike rumors indicate, Social Search is neither like Twitter Search nor real time search. This rumor started circulating after Bing announced a deal with Twitter to launch Bing Twitter Search which will allow users to search for tweets that match theirs in content or find other interesting links that have been tweeted.

Google also announced a deal with Twitter the very same day according to which they could tap into the vast amount of information present on Twitter and produce a new search engine either like Twitter or a real time based one. The very same day, it also announced the launch of Social Search which led to all the confusion.

So, the most important point for all users to note is that Google Social Search is not based on real time search and is a completely different type of search engine. This new tool is all about finding people you trust and visualizing content from them as your search results. That means, when you now search for particular information you can also see results that is from people who you trust and are connected socially.

The tool also displays the manner in which you are connected to the other users like Gmail or any other source. Google says that it uses normal ranking algorithm to pick content that gets displayed first on the page. This new venture from Google comes as a very interesting solution to the main problem that people face on search – trust.

Google reported that this new tool was bought out as the result of a product survey where most users requested a mobile version of Custom Search for these high-end mobile devices. Google will now be able to detect the mobile device that you are using to access the Custom Search engine and offer the mobile friendly version, when requested or necessary. In addition to that, the user can also host it himself and redirect the other users and also serve this new mobile version of the Custom search engine interface to other searchers.

This innovative tool from Google is a boon to all users who navigate the web using these smartphones. This unique Google-powered search box can be easily added to the Custom Search by all web site owners easily. What this means is that if you own a web site and have added this new Search box from Google, then the users who access your site using any smartphone like iPhone, iPod Touch, Android or Palm Pre will be automatically offered search results which are specially formatted for such devices.

The new mobile Custom Search Engine interface will definitely be a runaway success with all users who own smartphones as Google has activated a lot of interactive features like label tabs for navigation and promotions which can give the same look and feel of the typical web site. The company is also planning to add many more innovative features to this tool.

All those who want to try out this mobile version can look up the Google Custom Search Blog for more details on mobile configuration.