Till now Google Earth, Google Sky and Google Moon were the only applications that gave us a panoramic view of heavens and earth. However, that dominance has now been shattered by the launch of Microsoft’s Worldwide Telescope.

The Worldwide Telescope  is based on the Web 2.0 services created by Microsoft’s high performance Visual Experience Engine that enables unobtrusive pan and zoom functions into the vastness of the universe. Now, the entire universe is right there in front of us just a few clicks away. The Worldwide Telescope incorporates terabytes of enriched images of numerous celestial bodies and are arrayed in a way that places them in the interface according to their related actual positions in the sky.

The king of ‘Spam Killers’ Google’s Matt Cutts  gave a presentation at O’Reilly’s web conference, where he spoke extensively about the menace of Spam. The key areas he covered in his presentation were:

1. How Google tracks and detects Spam.

2. The sort of technology and systems to fight off Spam.

3. How a Webmaster can protect his websites from being attacked by Spam.

His presentation is available in a video format and in many circles, this video is being hailed as the ‘Best 10 Minute SEO Video’. Check it out!

Google has recently announced the launch of its social networking tool, aptly named ‘Friend Connect’. This feature will enable Webmasters to enable social networking features on their websites that would help grow their website traffic.

Friend Connect will enable non-social networking website to take upon the looks and features of a social networking website, without losing its basic structure and goals. The Webmasters need not perform any programming for this feature. Just by adding a snippet of code in their websites, they can avail the advantages of features such as user registration, invitations, members gallery, message posting, and reviews, as well as third-party applications built by the Open-Social developer community.

During the International World Wide Web Conference in Beijing, NYT  reported that Google has now begun testing a new algorithm that would perform exactly the same functions for images as the PageRank does for the text of a webpage. That means, it will be scanning images on the web for Image Ranking. This technology is known as ‘VisualRank’, which is a blend of image recognition softwares combined with other techniques to rank images.

There is a new addition to the wonders that keep appearing in Google’s SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). According to Search Engine Land, this wonder is the sudden appearance of elements in Google AdWord advertisements that Google use for evaluating quality scores. As of now these sudden appearances have been reported from google.de (mostly German Top Level Domains).

There are three parameters that are visible in the SERPs

1. Pscore

2. mCPC

3. Thresh

Most commonly, mCPC is being regarded as an abbreviation for ‘Minimum Click-Per-Cost’.

Some time ago, there had been reports by multiple users of massive ranking updates in Yahoo’s SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) due to a possible update. Now Yahoo! has announced that it is in the process of running a Search Index Update for its crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms. This could mean more erratic changes in the page rankings and page shuffling in the index.

Recently, many users had complained to Yahoo! regarding some issues with ‘Deletion of URLs’ in the Site Explorer. According to Yahoo!, this problem has now been resolved.

It has been almost a week and a half since Yahoo! had announced its intentions to test Google advertisements in Yahoo! SERPs (Search engine Result Page). Now according to Wall Street Journal  the tests have been declared successful and a possible Yahoo! Google partnership talks have begun.

This partnership would definitely let Yahoo! breathe a sigh of relief as it will now be able to face off against Microsoft’s $42 billion bid for a takeover. Both these Online Search giants will try to draft this potential alliance in such a way that they would enable them to avoid any legal implications. However, according to some experts, this deal under no circumstances would undermine Microsoft’s dominance if it decides to march towards a takeover. In such a scenario, Yahoo! will simply pull out of the Google partnership and merge with Microsoft.

An online video marketing message delivers the message quicker and has more impact on the audience than an advertisement seen in a newspaper or a magazine. It is able to put forward a company’s profile, products and services very effectively. Although, the television media is still prevalent in almost every geographical location, still the ever evolving online industry has opened many avenues for marketers and advertisers to reach out to the masses. The Online world has always been a platform for socialization, communication and other similar activities. However, nowadays its realm has expanded from corporations to households and has made the world an even smaller place.

If you enter a search query in the MSN Live Search, the chances are that you’ll find what you have been looking for, without having to go to multiple search result pages. However, Microsoft wishes to go beyond the simplified searches, in an effort to provide users with more relevant search results. MSN Live Search has been complimented with some new features. According to the Live Search Team,  the MSN Live Search has been given a beauty treatment with a new look and has been embedded with website suggestion feature. The Live Search now looks deeper into the results to find appropriate and relevant shortcuts within the web pages that show up as search results to suggest for a query.

According top Matt Cutts, Google is bringing the past to life. In January 2004, Google had introduced the WHOIS query, which displayed a domain’s date of creation and expiration, without mentioning name of the domain owner. WHOIS was coined as the shortest Google service ever. It appeared on the Google Search page on 7^th January 2004 and disappeared on 9^th January 2004.

However, Google has reintroduced this feature as ‘WHOIS OneBox‘. As of now Google has indicated that the domain data is being taken from the Domain Tools website with a direct link to the OneBox result title. However, many observers report that the WHOIS data doesn’t seem to be in real-time as predicted by Google. Therefore, it is speculated that Google might be caching the data to some other location.