This is a great article on how an improvement of Google will allow them to continue to dominate for quite a long time!

Google Search has been recently challenged on four things by competitors Microsoft’s Bing, Twitter, Yahoo and Facebook:

Real Time Search.

Microsoft’s Bing proving to be something of almost an equal level to Google Search.

Partnership between Yahoo and Microsoft on Search.

Facebook’s interest in Real Time Search.

Google Caffeine is an attempt in the right direction by Google to answer to these challenges.

via Advantage: Google Caffeine.

Consumers are not just researching, many have already begun purchasing. In fact, over a third of respondents (36%) said they have already begun making holiday purchases. This demonstrates that consumer are not waiting for the traditional kick off to the season, many are already spending time online researching gift ideas and heading into the store or to your site to make that special purchase.

via Google Retail Blog: Consumer Pulse Check: Shoppers Ready for the Holidays.

For the SEO people of the world, this is kinda neat…

Timeline of Search Engine History | Search Engine Journal.

Not sure how many things Facebook is going to let us Tag… think they are running out of ideas… we’ll see how well this works…

Facebook to Let Users Tag Friends in Status Messages – Science News | Science & Technology | Technology News – FOXNews.com.

I still don’t think this will save the newspaper industry… sorry…

For quite some time now, the newspaper industry s struggling for a better subscription payment system that can handle online transactions  effectively.  Until now, online newspaper are still in a dilemma in trying to create this system. Thanks to Google, newspaper publisher may soon use Google Checkout which is extending its functionality  by coming out with a micropayment system.The NewMan Journalism Lab is reporitng that Google has submitted a proposal outlining Google’s “vision of a premium content system”. This shall include subscription across multiple news sites, syndication on third-party sites, search accessability and other payment options, such as the a micropayment system. Google is also advocating the open web benefits.

The micropayment system would also include transaction cost, and credit card  fees. Google also plans to share the revenues its generates from Google Checkout  similar to have Apple’s iTunes store are doing it.

via Can Google Save Newspapers with Google Checkout? | Search Engine Journal.

YouTube – Does Google value its own links for PageRank?.

Short answer – YUP.

A followup from Google themselves about what happened with Gmail yesterday!

Official Gmail Blog: More on today’s Gmail issue.

Straight from the horse’s mouth

Official Gmail Blog: Today’s Gmail problems.

It does happen… Gmail is indeed down right now…

502 Server Error.