As an interim entry for the annals of the Annual Internet Infinite Regression Awards, I note Best News Site Prediction of Its Own Demise )This Week( - Techmeme on the new Google Blog Search. Will have to check it out. Old Google Blog Search was so bad and so spammy.

To continue the off-topic nature of recent blog posts... Whenever I tune into a radio station like 92.5 JACK-FM )"Toronto's best music mix," one of several similar best music mixes available(, I'm reminded of why I hate it when somebody is so overtly trying to target "people like me". Sure, if you had to target "people like me," I guess you'd try really hard to follow up a song from Green Day with some bad Platinum Blonde. On paper, I like both - or have, some days,

Of all the responses to the Chrome announcement, three stood out for me. 1. The most obvious approach is to download it and try it, as I've just done. If you like it, predict world domination for Chrome! The thing is lightning fast, and bound to improve. So the commenter on the previous post, Mark, makes a compelling case when he argues: "...while my [Twitter] friends are hardly a representative sample of anything other than agency technogeeks,

This is one you just have to cheer, for the "hey, cool!" factor. Today Picasa is set to release a feature that will recognize a series of faces in your collection as being the same person, and offering the ability to tag them all quickly. Now that's sharp! I sort of stumbled into using Picasa as it was one of the first photo organizers I used seriously - Flickr notwithstanding. I'm glad I stuck with it. They keep adding features and I find it a joy to use.

Stale news, but interesting: Jeremy Toeman received a notice from UMG regarding his posting of a video on YouTube that included copyrighted content )U2's Beautiful Day( in the background. The offer from the copyright owner, facilitated through YouTube, basically said, go ahead and leave the video up if you wish, but we'll be showing advertising on it. To some this might sound heavy-handed; to others, a nice compromise. I tend to think the latter. As Toeman writes,

I just got through a bit over half of Bryan Eisenberg and John Quarto vonTivadar's Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer , on the plane on the way from Toronto to San Jose. In the last hour of the flight, I quickly scanned the remaining chapters. Funny and all too familiar story: I left the book in the back of the seat when I got off the plane, so I expect United Airways personnel, or the next passenger,

So basically, what SearchMonkey does is allow publishers to push their customized content look and feel right into the Yahoo Search results. Well, not push, actually, but make available, based on open formats. So for users who opt into the widget for any given company's rich content, if the listing for that content comes up in search results, custom look-and-feel info included. So if it's a Yelp review, you get a bit of the Yelp "richness, look, and feel" right on Yahoo.

Linkworthy for a Friday: Yahoo is now automatically enabling formatted Yelp , LinkedIn, and Yahoo Local results via its SearchMonkey rich data / open formats platform. I'm a big fan of SearchMonkey and happy to see Yahoo forging ahead with it. P.S. Yahoo should acquire Yelp and LinkedIn. This dude is dumping Outlook for web-based email. Welcome to the club, finally!

This very timely post by Google Fellow Amit Singhal gives us a brilliant capsule summary of past and present trends in information retrieval. Most of those who pay close attention will be familiar with the high level trends, as well as some of the bells and whistles that search engines have added that do a great job of guessing at user intent. In nearly every bullet point though,

TechCrunch reports that at the 11th hour, Google walked away from a deal to acquire Digg. Given the perfectly good news-recommendation features being used by more and more users at sites like Yahoo already, it looks like it may not be a great fit for anyone; thus, Digg might indeed have to raise more capital and go it alone. It would be overzealous of Microsoft to acquire it, IMHO, but maybe a strengthened partnership is in the cards.

Through the magic of dynamic keyword insertion in title, GM's AdWords ad serves up the headline "2009 Chevy Cobalt" when you type "2009 Chevy Cobalt SS". When you click, you're taken to the page for the 2008 Chevy Cobalt, of course, since they're still trying to clear those out. Time to back button: less than a second. General Motors can sort of afford the lost click )for about $2-3( misleadingly applied to their own brand term,

So a man got 668 clicks on his ads through one portion of his Google AdWords, and zero conversions. And for that, it's seen as good enough reason for a lawsuit . Ever heard of testing? I'm no lawyer, but it looks like the complaint is shoddily written and inaccurate. The thinking here is that the suit has limited merit because: There is little truth to the claim that the ads had "little or no chance of converting.

Danny's trenchant analysis of this recent court order to Google starts by playing the WTF card, but does much, much more. In this detailed post, he cogently argues for a savvy national Internet privacy act. Absolutely. We cannot endure repeated episodes of clumsy application of outdated law, with judges spinning theories about cookies and IP addresses, sometimes ignoring real privacy concerns,

Very brief update from conference-land. After attending Fredrick Marckini's excellent keynote session in the a.m., I moderated sessions for the rest of the day. Very brief summary of one: In the State of Search Marketing in Canada panel with Ken Headrick, Brent Bernie, Guillaume Bouchard, Eric Morris, and Martin Byrne )Microsoft, comScore, NVI, Google, Yahoo(,

Browsing through Sphinn, the forums, and other places where online marketers hang out, it's hard not to notice the disproportionate focus on anything but paid search. To put it another way, the disproportionate focus on SEO, especially SEO 1.0 details, intimate details of SEO's as individuals, who said or did what, and various meta-minutiae contributions like the one you're reading now.

One thing is certain: Bryan Eisenberg is delivering the SES Toronto keynote on May 18. What is less certain is the topic. It's classified information, says Eisenberg .

Andy Beal tells it exactly how it is : Google trends just "took a small baby step towards being something of value." Actually, if you're doing broad keyword brainstorming and seasonality research and you don't want absolute counts, Google Trends is the best available tool. It gives you real Google data )though not absolute(, is very handy in terms of presentation of historical data,

Thinking things over, I've come to the conclusion that Canada has comparative advantage in a few areas )not quite as many as she might think(: Smugness Gay Marriage Blackberry Universal Health Care )only compared to US( Diamond mining not in a war zone Oil sands French people not from France We also have some fascinating thinkers and poets nonpareil: Marshall McLuhan, Têtes à Claques , Leonard Cohen, and Funnyman Bobby Bittman .

Since Barry Schwartz has escalated his Search Engine Roundtable post to a post over at SEL about Google's - wait for it - new favicon , I thought I'd provide a 10-of-you-need-to-know tidbit of my own, and unlike the lower-case favicon )which Barry doesn't like(, it's been something I have been waiting on a long time. For AdWords advertisers and agencies who have an MCC )My Client Center( multi-account dashboard,

Henry Blodget's post on the impending crisscrossing of lines on Google's and Microsoft's core businesses is timely. In 2009 sometime, Google's search ads business will be l arger and more profitable than Microsoft's core Windows operating system business . )If Microsoft is lucky, that won't be the day Google launches a hostile takeover bid for Microsoft, a development Sergey Brin slyly alluded to several years ago, when such talk could easily be dismissed as a joke,