The panda and penguin updates both shook the SEO industry. Intended to identify sites that provide spun articles, Google Panda and Google Penguin scanned the whole web, punished sites it found have copied or irrelevant content by pulling down their search rankings and/or suspending the sites Google AdSense accounts. However, these two Google soldiers have different functions and if your …

It’s been around since the early days of Google Buzz, but Google’s +1 button has always been a mystery to content producers and users in the sense that while its purpose is known – you approving of  content,  making it similar to Facebook’s “Like” button, the benefit is not common knowledge. Unlike Facebook’s Like button, Google +1 doesn’t share the …

With all due respect to Google, its social media efforts till date (apart from Google+) have been nothing to write about. Google Wave was a disaster and Google Buzz made a limited impact. The online search giant witnessed a turnaround in its social media fortunes with the launch of Google+ and it now wants to step up the ante in …

Just days after David Drummond, Google Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer published a lengthy rant on the company blog accusing rivals Apple, Microsoft and others of engaging in “a hostile, organized campaign against Android,” the search engine giant announced a deal to acquire Motorola Mobility. In one fell swoop, Google beefed up its patents portfolio and entered into …

The fur, as well as the “pixie dust” is starting to fly in the contentious patent trolling war launched against Android and Apple app developers. The infamous patent troller in question, patent-holding firm Lodsys, LLC, sued nearly a dozen app developers claiming infringement of two patents the firm owns that Apple and Google are already paying licensing fees for. In …

Somebody Call the Wambulance! Google, the search engine giant that took in nearly $30 billion last year, just can’t help casting itself as a victim in the ongoing patents wars. Whatever the merits of its claims regarding anti-competitive behavior waged by Apple, Microsoft, Oracle and others in joining forces against Google to gobble up valuable mobile device patents that could …

Get ready to rumble! You may have heard the ear-splitting plaintive wail bursting from the Mountain View, California Googleplex on Wednesday. Apple is launching an all-out litigation offensive against makers of Android devices for allegedly swiping the patented designs of its popular iPhone. And on a second front, Apple is teaming up with Google rivals Microsoft, Oracle and others to …

When Google+ launched, I knew that comparisons to Facebook are inevitable and many experts would be quick to claim that Google+ will dethrone Facebook as the #1 social network. However, challenging Facebook is no child’s play. The world’s leading social network silenced its critics by announcing that it now has a community of over 750 million users.

Google’s popular Realtime search feature quietly vanished during the long Fourth of July weekend. Why? The search engine’s two-year deal with Twitter providing it with access to Twitter’s live “firehose” of public tweets expired on June 2. Rather than continue offering pointless trending social media results minus instant tweets from the world’s most popular micro-blogging service, Google removed Realtime search …

With all due respect to Google, its social media efforts till date have been nothing to write about. Google Wave was a disaster and Google Buzz made a limited impact. In contrast, Facebook has gone from strength to strength and emerged as the world’s leading social network that’s fast approaching the 600 million member mark. It’s been a bitter pill …

Is Google Offers a Groupon killer? A few months after Groupon spurned Google’s $6 billion takeover offer, Google is poised to make a big splash in the daily deals pre-paid coupon business. Google Offers, the search engine giant’s answer to Groupon, the king of the growing plethora of deal of the day services, is making headway after less than a …

There’s no doubt Facebook’s explosive growth in the last couple of years has envied many Internet heavyweights including the likes of Google and Microsoft. Google, in particular, has been leaving no stone unturned to take on Facebook in this high stakes battle for supremacy in the social search segment. While Facebook chose to side with Microsoft and chose the Bing …

Geolocation services are all the rage these days and the location based services market has gained amazing popularity amongst people from all walks of life. Though Foursquare and Gowalla have been great advocates of how businesses can leverage geolocation services for targeted marketing campaigns, they’ve now been overshadowed by the big boys of the social media world – Facebook (Places) …

Google’s Social Search experiment has finally come of age. The online search giant yesterday announced that Social Search results will no longer be relegated to the bottom of Google search pages. Instead, relevant posts from the social media accounts of a user’s friends will now be integrated into the list of results. The social search results include activity on Flickr, …

According to the Chicago Tribune, quoting two people “with direct knowledge of the situation”, Groupon has reportedly rejected Google’s $6 billion offer for the Chicago-based daily deals start-up, Groupon Inc. and will remain independent. A source also told the Tribune, “Groupon may still choose to pursue an initial public offering but will not make a decision about going public until …