Google has decided to help out the planet, yet they aren’t making it widely known.Google has created a site called Blackle.com.

Blackle.com is a search engine that is just as powerful as Google, but the entire background is black. The only color on the site is the letters. When the search results are displayed, they are listed just as Google, but without the color.

Listed on the front page of Blackle.com is a running total of Watt hours they’ve saved, or you’ve helped them save, by using Blackle.com.In addition to all the savings, there is also a page you can go onto that will give you a list of things we all can do to same more energy. Not only is Blackle energy conscious, it adds a novelyty to the searching process.

Anyone who wants to add another way to “Go green” and save the enviroment, will appreciate the using such a novelty item beuilt by one of the largest search engine. If your customers are big in the Green revolution, having a link to Blackle. com is a great way to show that you share their beliefs and it just might keep them coming back to you.

Matt Cutts of Google said at the Las Vegas PubCon that Google will very soon begin treating sub-domains and subdirectories the same, meaning that there will be a total of only 2 URLs from a domain in any set of search results - making it impossible to get multiple spots using sub-domains. Mr Cutts has promised to update people with more information on this as soon as he can.

This will be a major change if it happens. For example, searching for ‘google’ at Google returns ten results from Google - nine of which are on the google.com domain and one on google.org. Several of them are sub-domains.

Assuming that this rule is applied to everybody (with the exception of hosting sites like Blogspot and WordPress.com, for whom it wouldn’t make sense to apply the rule to) then even Google would be limited to two results per search. Will they do that to themselves?Right now it’s pure speculation on exactly how Google will handle this proposed change. Only time will tell.

This time it was the chance of big boys of blogging like Problogger “Darren Rowse and” Jeremy Schoemaker who witnessed sharp fall in their websites pagerank. Google has been updating its pagerank algorithm since last month and they have updated the whole system thrice this month. Problogger saw falling pagerank from 6 to 4 and again back to 6 and same was seen by Schoemaker.

Google has been penalizing sites for paid links. It has become more careful on sites cross linking features. Rather than blacklisting site from Google’s database it has simply stopped giving value to a site with paid links as they used to get much credit in past.

According to Google:

“Google is always working to improve the ways that we generate relevant search results and update our opinions of sites’ reputations across the web. The Google Toolbar shows an indicator of Pagerank, which is Google’s opinion of the reputation of a webpage. Values in the Google Toolbar can fluctuate for a number of normal reasons, including changes in how we crawl or index the web, or changes in the link structure of the web itself. In addition, Google may update the visible Pagerank indicator in the Google Toolbar to incorporate not only our view on the backlinks to a page or site, but also to incorporate our opinion of the forward links for a site. ”

It seems that Google has come up with some hidden actions and is going to fight back all those spam that clutters Google’s space. Well, what I see now is that - if Google reduces the value of Pagerank or does any changes then that’s going to hurt the vibrant Link building and directory submission industry that is simply based on the power of Pagerank. This can also be a different kind of dotcom bubble burst.  Beware People!!!

This shift was obvious! For last few years Google was on spree to buy new technologies. From Orkut to Youtube now Google has almost every type of Web business in its domain. But what lacked was the synchronization of all these applications into one platform.

Google had been buying new start ups since couple of years but these applications didn’t seem to work as Google‘s strategy. Youtube and Orkut might have been an instant hit but other Google applications like Google Answers had to be shutdown because of lack of user participations. Now according to a recent of Washington Post, Google has made a huge change in its policy of buying new startups. They have instead focused on developing and revamping the current product lineup…

These efforts are indicative of a recent shift in Google’s strategy. Instead of creating new products, Google’s developers and engineers are being called on to improve existing products and technologies. Google is hoping that by easing access to the Internet, users will spend more time there, ultimately creating new revenue opportunities.

It seems like Google has heard the voice of many of its users who use Google product each day. We can only hope that Google brings in better products in coming days.

MediaPost reports on comments, about image and video ads potentially appearing on Google, made by company speakers at the Citigroup Technology Conference in New York this week. However, this is just a further acknowledgment and confirmation of what Marissa Mayer previously alluded to during the Universal Search unveiling in May.

At that time Mayer said:

    Well we don’t have anything to announce on that today. I do think this opens the door for the introduction of richer media into the search results page. We are now going to understand how users interact with that. And as Alan always likes to say search is about finding the best answer, not just the best URL or the best textual snippet.

For us ads are answers as well. Searching ads is just as hard as searching the Web, as searching images. And so I was hoping that we could bring some of these same advances in terms of the richness of media to ads.

The MediaPost piece reports that the Google reps said they were proceeding “cautiously” with the introduction of new ad types (although images and video have appeared in sponsored links before). Regardless, you can be sure that more images and video will eventually make their way into the sponsored results of Google.com. It’s really just a question of when.