A Berkeley team has uncovered that a dozen ISPs have been hijacking search traffic for profit… and databasing all customer behavior. When users search for specific terms in search engines, the ISPs intercept that search and send the user to a third party marketing agency to earn commissions on the referral, rather than showing the search engine results page.
Google’s Android smartphone platform continues it meteoric rise to claim nearly a 50% market share. Meanwhile competitors Microsoft and Apple team up to spend billions to acquire dubious patents in an attempt to sue Google to try to make Android more expensive. Currently Android is provided for free to smartphone manufacturers.
Twitter is finally phasing out their old interface, and pushing the new interface available since September 2010 as mandatory for all Twitter users.
The Google +1 button is Google’s version of the Facebook Like button, but one problem it had was the slow load speed. Google has just addressed that with a super charge to the Google +1 button load speed, combined with a new asynchronous code snipped that you can use to ensure that the Google +1 button doesn’t slow the load speed of your site.
Google released research on PPC cannibalization of organic results; unfortunately they did not take organic ranking into account, which renders the results fairly meaningless. They did, however, provide a simple equation that you can use to determine if your PPC campaign is worthwhile.
