Google’s Pacman icon game is Javascript-based and can actually be played live. Visit www.Google.com and wait for the Pacman icon game to fully load.

Blogoscoped provides more explanations on this Pacman game and Pacman’s history.

Below is the extended search box. The size of the search box increases when you enter a very long search query. This allows users to see his/her entire search query when it is longer than the size of the normal search box.

The introduction of Related Searches and Related Phrases are certainly for increasing stickiness. Stickiness is the number of page views generated on a single visit to a site. For instance, a user visited a web site and viewed 20 pages before he/she exits the site altogether, the stickiness he/she generated for the website is 20.

Google first introduced Sitelinks close to the end of 2006, but also introduced Site Search recently. Sitelinks below the top natural search result are links relevant to the top domain, in which they are either sub-domains of the top domain, or they are popular web pages within the domain. With Sitelinks, users do not have to scroll down the SERP.

Site Search can improve user stickiness on Google’s web search. After running a search on a brand, users are given another opportunity to search within that’s brand’s domain.

On Google China (Guge)’s home page, several graphical links pointing to popular Google vertical sites in China have been added. Back in the beginning of 2007, Baidu’s homepage decided to go for a cleaner and simplier approach.

• Videos: video.google.cn
• Images: images.google.cn
• News: news.google.cn
• Ditu (Maps): ditu.google.cn
• Blog Search: blogsearch.google.cn
• Rebang (Zeitgeist): www.google.cn/rebang
• Daohang (Directory start page): daohang.google.cn

With paid search most of us as advertisers usually concern about click fraud. Google has 2 types of PPC networks: “Sponsored Links” for the Search Network and “Ads by Google” for the Content Network.

Both of the text ad formats have had their clickable area reduced. Before the change, the entire area (including the background area) of these ads were clickable. For the top ads of the Sponsored Links on top of the organic search results, the clickable area has been reduced to only the headlines. For the text ads in the Content Network, only the headlines and the display URLs are clickable. The major purpose of this change was to reduce accidental clicks by users’ mistakes, but it has also certainly improved user experience.

Another change is the inclusion of the “Previous” and “Next” button feature, which allows users to browse through all contextual ads within one ad unit.

With this iGoogle Hong Kong homepage, the search box is located at the top. Right below the search box there is an option for users to switch between English and Chinese Traditional languages. The page consists of 5 sections in boxes:

• News
• Trends
• Personal tools (including links to Gmail, Calendar and Picasa)
• Frequently-used tools (including translation and currency converter)
• New tools

Hong Kong has over 7 million populations in which over 80% are Internet users. The new home page is believed to take advantage of the faster broadband speed. Also, it will better suit the user preferences and local cultures of having a more “portal-like” homepage over the usual Google clean design.

Similar iGoogle homepages have also been concurrently launched in Taiwan and Korea, to take advantage of higher broadband speeds and the local cultures.

Over 75% of US paid search marketing spend will be going to Google in 2007, according to a recent report released by eMarketer. Its share of US paid search advertising spend in the previous years from 2004:

• 32.8% in 2004
• 65.8% in 2005
• 73.8% in 2006
• 75.6% in 2007 (Prediction)

Google has also become the most valuable brand in the world which is worth $66.4 billion, according to annual statistics published yesterday. In the Brandz list of the Top 100 Most Powerful Brands compiled by Milward Brown, Google went from last year’s 7th spot to overtake General Electric (2nd place), Microsoft (3rd place), and Coca-Cola (4th place).

Google bought YouTube last year and is buying DoubleClick which was initially believed to be a Microsoft purchase.

The only negative factor that may affect Google is going to be the launch of AOL search marketplace, a white-label PPC marketing platform based on the backend of Adwords. Vinny Lingham has a detailed analysis about how the deal will affect both Google and PPC advertisers.

Shortly, news results will no longer be inserted into web pages using a OneBox format. Instead, they will be blended into the regular search results (we can’t yet show you how this looks, because the changes are still going live — more on this below).

News results will appear anywhere in a search result page, and links to different sources will be clustered together, similar to how stories are grouped in Google News. Thumbnail images related to the news will also appear next to these results.

These will be the implications:

• Webmaster or SEO experts optimizing for higher rankings in the SERP will have a tougher time, if their keywords happen to be competing with news which will be mixed in the main web search results.
• Some news finders may find this change useful as they will not longer have to use Google News but can simply search for news topics in Google’s web search results. Others non-news finders may find it disastrous as they will have to find a way to filter news results from web search results.

Starting today, YouTube video results will appear in the Google Video search index: when users click on YouTube thumbnails, they will be taken to YouTube.com to experience the videos. Over time, Google Video will become even more comprehensive as it evolves into a service where users can search for the world’s online video content, irrespective of where it may be hosted.

From this move, it is expected that Google Video Search will be taking the role as a search engine for video files, rather than another online video portal that is competing with its own acquired property YouTube. On top of that, Google is planning to include video files from other web sources on its Video Search.

Earlier the same week Google announced via its Inside Adsense Blog that it will also provide a few selected group of webmasters to test Adsense video content on their websites.

Afterall in reality, it’s about time Google starts experimenting possible models in monetizing the combination of its video search technologies and Youtube.

YouTube is currently the number one online video portal and was acquired by Google in 2006 for 1.65 billion dollar.

We do not simply retrieve the most frequently-searched terms for the period – the truth is, they don’t change that much from year to year. This list would be predominated by very generic searches, such as ebay, dictionary, yellow pages, games, maps.

To come up with this list, we looked at several thousand of 2006’s most popular searches, and ranked them based on how much their popularity increased compared to 2005. Our “what is” and “who is” lists are not necessarily the absolute most frequent searches, but rather those that best represent the passing year.

Google.com – Top Searches in 2006

1. bebo
2. myspace
3. world cup
4. metacafe
5. radioblog
6. wikipedia
7. video
8. rebelde
9. mininova
10. wiki

Google News – Top Searches in 2006

1. paris hilton
2. orlando bloom
3. cancer
4. podcasting
5. hurricane katrina
6. bankruptcy
7. martina hingis
8. autism
9. 2006 nfl draft
10. celebrity big brother 2006

Within the 2006 Year-End Google Zeitgeist lists, there are lists that consist of the following words in the search queries:

• Who is
• What is
• How to
• Define
• Where is
• Wedding
• Divorce
• Obituary
• Showtimes
• Tickets
• Jerseys
• Retire

Earlier, Microsoft’s Live Search also revealed its lists of 2006 top 10 searches.

It is estimated that Google’s US advertising revenue will increase by 65% from last year, while Google’s nearest rival Yahoo! will have a 17.5% growth over the same period.

eMarketer senior analyst David Hallerman commented, “By gobbling up YouTube, Google acknowledged that even though paid search gives it a robust revenue stream, that alone won’t be enough to compete against Yahoo!, MSN and other major players in the years to come.”

Surely, after Google’s acquisition of YouTube, its ad revenue will only go one way!

I believe this is a great acquisition of Google. With YouTube as a portal, Google will have full confidence in growing its business on video paid search. Google can now put behind it the miss opportunity of acquiring MySpace awhile ago when it has the chance.

However, it has been signs that Google will focus on video search, as it is one of its more successful vertical search projects. I remember Google used to have a Froogle link on its homepage, but awhile ago it has been replaced by the video search link.

YouTube was launched in February 2005 and in a time it has occupied 45.46% of the video download market share in terms of site visits. According to a Hitwise report in August, the video download market share in terms of visits looks like:

• YouTube: 45.46%
• MySpace Videos: 22.99%
• Google Video: 10.25%
• Yahoo! Video: 6.06%
• MSN Video: 5.92%
• Others: 9.32%

Currently over 100 million videos are downloaded from YouTube on a daily basis, which are mostly short videos created by users.

The second “G” has been changed to an “8″, though there are only 5 candles on the cake.

Here is what Google announced on one of its official blogs:

We processed 1,011,582,453,213 words of running text and are publishing the counts for all 1,146,580,664 five-word sequences that appear at least 40 times. There are 13,653,070 unique words, after discarding words that appear less than 200 times.

Watch for an announcement at the LDC, who will be distributing it soon, and then order your set of 6 DVDs.

Interbrand takes lots of ingredients into account when ranking the world’s most valuable brands. To even qualify for the list, each brand must derive about a third of its earnings outside its home country, be recognizable outside of its base of customers, and have publicly available marketing and financial data.

Based on reports from analysts at J.P. Morgan Chase, Citigroup, and Morgan Stanley, Interbrand projects five years of earnings and sales for the brand. It then deducts operating costs, taxes, and a charge for the capital employed to arrive at the intangible earnings. The company strips out intangibles such as patents and management strength to assess what portion of those earnings can be attributed to the brand.

Finally, the brand’s strength is assessed to determine the risk profile of those earnings forecasts. Considerations include market leadership, stability, and global reach—or the ability to cross both geographic and cultural borders. That generates a discount rate, which is applied to brand earnings to get a net present value.

• It will take Google 300 years to put the entire world’s information online.
• Google reckons only 10% of the world’s information is online.
• Google believes up to 20% of the online content changes every month.
• Google uses over 300 factors to rank websites which includes PageRank.
• According to Google, 20-25% of the search queries are unique.
• The index of Google is 3 times larger than Yahoo’s index or MSN’s index.
• In Google, thousands of computers are involved in processing a single search query.
• 70% of Google engineers are working on search-related problems.
• Google uses over 200 signals for Pagerank.
• A lot of Googlers work on automatic translation tools.

1. How good a match ads may be to the content on pages they are served upon through a program like Adsense

2. A process for improving the targeting of ads

3. Real time transportation data for travelers

4. An exploration of ad layouts

5. An automated advertising approval process

6. Reasons for location-based businesses to use local area advertising including an improved pay per call process

7. How the most authoritative local search results are identified

8. The use of visual gap segmentation to separate information on different parts of pages with implications beyond local search

9. Ties business locations with regional areas

10. A method for reducing ambiguity in geographic location

11. Deciding whether regular or local results might be shown when at least one query term might be geographical in nature

12. Assigning confidence scores between business identity and location information on a page