Google now offers animated ads in their adsense advertising program, As we all know google's adsense is one of the most successful business model of internet both to publishers ( website owners ) as well as google.

Google introduced image ads a year back and now they introduced animated image ads., This is what google says about their Animated image ads in adsense.



What are animated image ads? -->
We've recently expanded the image ads we offer to include animated image ads. Animated image ads will fit the file size requirements of static image ads and will need to abide by an additional set of editorial policies. We anticipate that this new type of image ad will attract additional advertisers, leading to more image ad inventory and an increased variety of ads that can appear on your pages.

pages.google.com is new google's page creator. Attractive web pages can be created without any programming or html knowledge.

See what google says about their page creator.



About Google Page Creator
Want to create an online photo tour of your vacation to Bali? An overview of the South American precipitation cycle for your science class? A shrine to your pet ferret?
Now's your chance. We're testing a new product that makes creating your own web pages as easy as creating a document in a word processor. Google Page Creator is a free tool that lets you create web pages right in your browser and publish them to the web with one click. There's no software to download and no web designer to hire. The pages you create are hosted on Google servers and are available at http://yourgmailusername.googlepages.com for the world to see.
At Google, we've found that listening to our users early helps us develop the best possible products. So we're giving our users a chance to play with Google Page Creator even though it's not yet fully baked, and we're counting on you to send us your feedback and suggestions. If you'd like to stay up to date on all the latest Google Page Creator happenings, sign up for our updates mailing list

I tried creating couple of web pages it looks pretty easy to use. We are able to navigate all options without any problems.

Initially the servers are a bit slow. Can understand since this is a new product and that too from google we can expect huge traffic to this service.

Google rocks with all their new products, So what next a web browser or an OS?? Microsoft beware with google.

Petitiononline.com has an interesting post about people voting for google to stop using word verification in its various services.

It says

"To: Google Inc.
We, the undersigned, ask Google Inc. to "do no evil" and follow their mission statement to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" by promptly adding accessibility to their visual word verification scheme so that the blind and visually impaired are allowed to fully participate in all products and services offered by the company on terms of equality with our sighted peers.
Sincerely, '

MSN search recently announced free prizes for people using msn search

According MSN search blog

Earlier this week we launched MSN Search and Win. It’s a contest that will be running through April and you have the opportunity to win some pretty great prizes. I like it because it’s easy. As you search on our main site (or through the flash interface) you have the ability to win prizes. If you’re not interested in the prizes then you can ignore the ads.Why are we doing it? Well there certainly are a number of people who have pondered our motives, but when it comes down to it we have made a lot of improvements over the past year with our algo so people should notice a difference in relevance and a marketing campaign like MSN Search and Win is a good way to encourage people to try us again so they can see the improvements for themselves.

Since you’ve all been doing extra searches on our site due to the contest I am sure that you’ve seen the new UI on MSN Search that we rolled out yesterday afternoon. We’ve traded in the blue for a steely grey. Other changes include a longer search box and hit highlighting in the title. On the first, we’ve listened to your feedback and on the second, trust us, it makes your job as a searcher easier. Thanks for the feedback and keep it coming. Personally, I like the change, but I’ll continue to search from live.com â€" I can’t do without my Seattle Traffic map.

To participate in search and win go here

http://www.msnsearchandwin.com

Yahoo has stepped forward and has planned to offer incentives for their email users who will use yahoo search has their primary search engines,

Incentives include:

"No Yahoo Mail ads.
• Unlimited Yahoo Mail storage, versus the one gigabyte now provided for free.
• Outlook Access to Yahoo Mail. Users could use Outlook or Outlook Express to manage their Yahoo Mail as well as download and read it while offline. This is not currently offered.
• Five free music downloads a month for playing on a PC or portable MP3 player.
• Discounted music subscriptions. Users would pay nothing for the first month of unlimited access to Yahoo Music Unlimited and $3.99 a month thereafter, rather than $6.99 a month for unlimited access.
• Donations to charity. Yahoo would give a percentage of revenues generated from user searches to nonprofit organizations of the users' choice.
• PC-to-phone calling credit. Users could receive $5 in calling credit per month for PC-to-phone calls over Yahoo Messenger with Voice, which costs 15 cents a minute.
• Netflix discount. Users could receive one month free Netflix DVD rentals and pay $10.99 thereafter, rather than $17.99 a month.
• Discounted Yahoo Personals subscription. Users could receive the first month free for joining Yahoo Personals and pay $19.95 thereafter, compared to the current cost of $24.95 a month.
• Frequent flyer miles. Users could earn 250 frequent flyer miles each month that could be transferred to most major airline mileage programs. "

Eff says no to google desktop,

this is what they say on their site,

"San Francisco - Google today announced a new "feature" of its Google Desktop software that greatly increases the risk to consumer privacy. If a consumer chooses to use it, the new "Search Across Computers" feature will store copies of the user's Word documents, PDFs, spreadsheets and other text-based documents on Google's own servers, to enable searching from any one of the user's computers. EFF urges consumers not to use this feature, because it will make their personal data more vulnerable to subpoenas from the government and possibly private litigants, while providing a convenient one-stop-shop for hackers who've obtained a user's Google password.
"Coming on the heels of serious consumer concern about government snooping into Google's search logs, it's shocking that Google expects its users to now trust it with the contents of their personal computers," said EFF Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston. "If you use the Search Across Computers feature and don't configure Google Desktop very carefullyâ€"and most people won'tâ€"Google will have copies of your tax returns, love letters, business records, financial and medical files, and whatever other text-based documents the Desktop software can index. The government could then demand these personal files with only a subpoena rather than the search warrant it would need to seize the same things from your home or business, and in many cases you wouldn't even be notified in time to challenge it. Other litigantsâ€"your spouse, your business partners or rivals, whoeverâ€"could also try to cut out the middleman (you) and subpoena Google for your files."
The privacy problem arises because the Electronic Communication Privacy Act of 1986, or ECPA, gives only limited privacy protection to emails and other files that are stored with online service providersâ€"much less privacy than the legal protections for the same information when it's on your computer at home. And even that lower level of legal protection could disappear if Google uses your data for marketing purposes. Google says it is not yet scanning the files it copies from your hard drive in order to serve targeted advertising, but it hasn't ruled out the possibility, and Google's current privacy policy appears to allow it.
"This Google product highlights a key privacy problem in the digital age," said Cindy Cohn, EFF's Legal Director. "Many Internet innovations involve storing personal files on a service provider's computer, but under outdated laws, consumers who want to use these new technologies have to surrender their privacy rights. If Google wants consumers to trust it to store copies of personal computer files, emails, search histories and chat logs, and still 'not be evil,' it should stand with EFF and demand that Congress update the privacy laws to better reflect life in the wired world."

http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2006_02.php#004400

Google's share took a nose dive after the delivered their revenue for third quarter current stats,

Last Trade: 382.47
Trade Time: 2:13PM ET
Change: 0.92 (0.24%)
Prev Close: 381.55
Open: 385.25
Bid: 382.17 x 800
Ask: 382.28 x 200
1y Target Est: 476.31

Day's Range: 379.56 - 389.90
52wk Range: 172.57 - 475.11
Volume: 6,853,227
Avg Vol (3m): 11,742,200
Market Cap: 113.04B
P/E (ttm): 76.17
EPS (ttm): 5.02
Div & Yield: N/A (N/A)

A spain based WiFi company has collected 18 million euros in investment from Skype, Google , Index Ventures and Sequoia Capital. Currently the company is based in madrid, the man behind this successful project is Martin Varsavasky,

Martin Varsavsky - the founder of the Spanish portal ya.com and the Spanish telco Jazztel - describes it as 'a global community of people who share WiFi connections'. In order to become a 'Fonero', as the company dubs it, you have to
install Fon's software in your (compatible) router, place it near a window and then share bandwidth with other users around the world. Essentially, the aim of Fon is to create a free WiFi roaming environment for those who contribute WiFi signals via a local ISP.

visit Fon website here: en.fon.com

CNN reports of a possible three dumentional map navigation system being built with the collabaration nvidia corp, google earth and Volkswagen

"The two companies are working with the graphics chipmaker Nvidia Corp.to build an in-car navigation map system and a three-dimensional display so passengers can recognize where they are in relation to the surrounding topography.
Volkswagen, working through its Electronics Research Laboratory in Palo Alto, California, in Silicon Valley, is working on other advancements, including automatic personalized information updates for the navigation systems."

Human rights group of china wants google not to censor search results, they
are very disappointed by google's recent move to provide censored results,

As Vnunet
reports this move by google can be because of greed to enter search market of
china, As many bloggers complain google has started deviating from its words
"Don't be evil" , Yahoo's hand over of search results to chinese goverment
led to the arrest of a chinese journalist, Microsoft censored a chinese guy's
blog, now google is providing censored results in china,

macworld reports
"To illustrate how Google has censored information using the Google.cn
search engine, HRIC conducted a comparison of four Google sites: Google.com
in English, Google.com in Chinese, Google.cn, and Google.com.tw, the company’s
Taiwanese Web site. The group conducted searches on all four sites for a range
of phrases in Chinese and English.

HRIC’s comparison found that many Web sites were not found using Google.cn
to search for Chinese phrases such as “human rights in China” and
“death penalty,” as well as the author and title of a recently published
book on former Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai. That book, Zhou Enlai’s Later
Years by Gao Wenqian, is banned in China."

As matt cutts puts here
google is now targeting search engine spam in other languages too, Google has
banned ( update - possibly re included because of cleaning up of spam ) bmw.de
( official BMW site for germany ) from their search index, they did this because
the seo company for bmw used the infamous javascript mouseover redirect to show
one version of the page to the user and other version to the search engine,

One SEO company and their clients were totally banned from the search engine because
of this tactic, Now google has started catching this problem in other languages, BBC
has a nice right up on this, they had a word with the bmw spokesmen this is
why they said,

A BMW spokesman admitted the company used the doorway pages, a
practice known as search engine optimization and banned by Google.

But the spokesman insisted the company's intentions were honorable."We
did not provide different content in the search results to the final website,"
Markus Sagemann told the BBC News website."However, if Google says all
doorway pages are illegal we have to take this into consideration."

Our thoughts,

First of creating doorway pages are not part of search engine optimization,
we can call it search engine spamming definitely not search engine optimization,
next it is weird that BMW need to use such tactics simple and decent optimization
will get their site good results they don't have to spam atall, They have to
blame their web designers for not designing a site compatible with search engines,
It is important that every company involved in web design should take search
engines in their mind when they do the design, I hope all SEO spammers will
learn a lessen from this,