Google gave an all-new definition to the word ‘Stealth’. According to Search Engine Land, Google while keeping an extremely low profile launched an all-new service called Google Merchant Search. This service is aimed primarily at providing secured loans from financial service providers. Google Merchant Search as of now is in ‘Beta’ mode and is available only on the ‘google.co.uk’ domain. Also, the Merchant Search results aren’t available on all searches.

More information for Google Merchant Search is available at ‘Google Merchant Search FAQs’. Here are some of the most critical facts to know about the Merchant Search:

According to news.com, Google Fellow Jeff Dean, at the Google I/O Conference took the opportunity to lift the veil of secrecy surrounding Google Data Centers and gave an enlightening sneak peak into Google data center operations. Google has 36 data centers across the globe. Google keeps 40 servers in each rack, where Google has 150 racks per data center. Google never really reveals its server arsenal, but Jeff can safely and logically assume that with 150 racks per data center, it would be anywhere in the vicinity of more than 200,000 servers and increasing.

These days, the only word that is on every Webmaster’s lips is ‘Ranking’. The importance of ranking has been realized and people are striving to improve their website rankings in SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) now more than ever. Various methods and techniques are currently in use in an effort to optimize their websites for improved rankings. Recently, an experiment has been carried out by Tom Nash   with the same criteria in mind. He is a software architect who likes to tinker and experiment with technology and methodologies. His aim is to learn and explore new ways to accomplish the sole goal of improving website rankings. Now, Tim has come out with the preliminary results of his experiment and he clearly states that this endeavor is only intended to improve the ratings and nothing beyond that. His experiment includes two of his clients’ websites. Both these websites are from UK and only clickthroughs from google.co.uk and not.com were monitored for the results. Let’s see what the results have been so far:

Earlier this month, the worst case of linkbaiting reared its ugly head that took the Internet demi-gods by surprise and created a controversy of mammoth proportions. There was a story (fake one) that was posted on a website with the title, ‘13 Year Old Steals Dad’s Credit Card to Buy Hookers’. A local news station somehow picked up this story and the story spread like wildfire, with reputed national television news networks picking up the story as well. It was also distributed by numerous social activity websites. Due to the ferocity of the publicity, the website from where the story originated, was able to gather over 1,500 inbound links in less than a week. Indeed, there is no such thing as ‘bad publicity’.

Recently, Google had announced the launch of ‘Safe Browsing Diagnostic’, an online diagnostic page that, would provide detailed information about Google’s automatic detection and investigations. This service is now operational and is providing users with near accurate data findings.

If you need to know the status of any website, that you wish to test, then all you have to do is to prefix “google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=" before the domain name. You can even visit http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2008-05-23-n62.html to use the simplified version of this malware detection tool. You will be presented with an overview page that would make you aware of potential threats such as trojans or exploits that might be embedded in the website. There are also instances, when website might turn up entirely clean.

Google had been testing a new search related technology, thereby enabling its crawlers to explore some HTML forms in an attempt to discover new web pages and URLs which have not yet been found and indexed. However, Michael VanDeMar at Smackdown has found a flaw in Google’s new crawling format due to which certain pages are being indexed that are not supposed to be. Here is a look at links that have been indexed. Please note, that these pages have an almost similar format:

http://smackdown.blogsblogsblogs.com/index.php?s=lube

http://smackdown.blogsblogsblogs.com/index.php?s=bestest

http://smackdown.blogsblogsblogs.com/index.php?s=scanned

According to the latest Search Engine Results released by ComScore for the United States, for April 2008, Google Sites extended its share of core searches to 61.6 %, up from 59.8 % the previous month. Yahoo! Sites ranked second with 20.4 %, followed by Microsoft Sites with 9.1 %, AOL LLC with 4.6 % and Ask Network with just 4.3 %.

Webmaster World  is also running a thread in relation to the new ComScore results. Here are some interesting excerpts:

“I wonder about the "quality" of those searches on each of the search engines. Ask, for example, is going to target younger women. If successful, that would be high quality for many marketers.

Yahoo! has joined forces with McAfee in an effort to provide a cleaner and a safer online experience to the users who run search queries using Yahoo! Search Engine. According to Yahoo! Search Blog  Yahoo! has announced the release of ‘SearchScan’. This feature which has been released in the ‘BETA’ mode will flag URLs in Yahoo! SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) that are deemed as ‘risky’ by McAfee database. This feature will act as a shield to protect users against spyware and other malicious software that might get downloaded on their computers. Additionally, it will assist users in identifying those websites that practice spammy email tactics, in an effort to extract personal and financial user information. ‘SearchScan’ uses the McAfee’s SiteAdvisor technology and at present this service is available only in the U.S., Canada, UK, France, Italy, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, and Spain.

Microsoft has conceded from its bid to take over Yahoo! Inc. According to NYT , in a meeting that took place in Seattle, Washington, Yahoo! rejected Microsoft’s bid of $33 a share which roughly comes to a total of $47.5 billion. The new bid by Microsoft of $33 a share was a jump of $5 billion since its original bid. Yahoo! CEO (Chief Executive Officer) Jerry Yang during the course of the meeting, made it explicitly clear that Yahoo! would not settle for any bid lower than $37 a share. Furthermore, Yahoo was concerned that the buyout might pose problems with the regulators and wanted a higher offer, in case the concern turned into crisis. The new bid by Microsoft was perceived by many analysts as a move to avoid a hostile takeover of Yahoo! which would have been quite an unpleasant experience for Microsoft as well.

Landing Page Load Time is the amount of time taken by keywords with landing pages to load. Now this factor will be displayed in the Keyword Analysis Page of the Google AdWords accounts. According to Google AdWords Blog, this factor will play a crucial part in a Webmaster’s Quality Scores. The slower a landing page loads, lower the Quality Scores will go and faster a page loads, higher the quality scores will go.