The culmination of Black Friday and Cyber Monday sale officially starts the holiday shopping season. So, if you still got some Christmas shopping to do, you might want to do it via Google Checkout. Google's online payment facility , which supports various online store is offering exclusive discounts ranging from $5 - $20. The promo gig is running until Dec. 17, just about enough to give yo all the time you need to complete your Christmas Gift list.

Following Bing and Y ahoo's year-end search trend report, Google has also released its search Zeitgeist 2009. As expected, searches for the King of Pop, Michael Jackson again leads the top 10 fastest rising queries made on Google search worldwide. And while it was nowhere to be found on both Bing and Yahoo's report it seems that Google users are searching about Facebook more on Google Search as it made it to the number 2 spot. At the number 3 spot is Tuenti,

After Bing , it's now Yahoo's turn to release their list of top searches for 2009.   And guess what's the most searched term in Yahoo this year? - Michael Jackson of course.  Following MJ is none other than Twilight. Bing's No.2 most searched keyword was Twitter. Aside from the said two search terms, the rest of the Yahoo's top searches are different from those of Bing's.

Here's some more Black Friday-related search statistics to digest. The Google Retail Advertising Blog )Yup, there is such a blog on Google( is reporting that online shopping searches on Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday were at its all time high this year. Searches for "Black Friday" increased by more than 20% year over year, while searches for "black Friday sales" and "black friday ads" also increased by more than 50% YOY. Likewise,

Now that Black Friday is over and everyone is in the U.S. are probably busy finding the best Cyber Monday deals online , it's interesting to note which online retailers made it to the top of the charts during Black Friday's shopping craze. And according to Experian Hitwise data it was none other than Amazon - their second in a row. As  this year's Black Friday traffic to retail websites went up by 9% compared to 2008, Amazon received 13.55% of U.S.

Although a little earlier than usually done by other search engines, Bing has released its top trending topics for 2009 .  "Michael Jackson" was the number most search keywords although the most search personality was "Perez Hilton." The list was created based on the analysis of billions of searches against those that were searched using Bing.   Aside from MJ,

The Google Webmaster Blog has this short post explaining how abusing sites' comment fields by putting up comment containing links to the poster's site can actually hurt both sites' ranking. That is of course if the comments posted are actually not related to the post or gibberish. In short, non legit comments whose objective is to raise the poster's site ranking. If you have done this before to boost your site's ranking, and your site was penalized by Google.

Two down, two to go for the Microsoft-Yahoo search ads deal. Both the Canadian and Australiation anti-trust authorities have just cleared the controversial deal.  In a joint announced published by SeattlePI blog , Yahoo and Microsoft jointly stated that: "Microsoft and Yahoo! have been notified that Australian and Canadian authorities have separately concluded their reviews and have no objections to our proposed search agreement.

While Google was busy working with more search ads formats , Yahoo on the other hand is busy improving  their Search Assist feature . So, today Yahoo has just rolled out several new features aimed at helping searchers find the right information on various Yahoo online properties including Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Sports and Yahoo! Finance. The new Search Assist features make use of the Search Assist layer in displaying relevant links related to a search query.

Google has been experimenting on various search ad formats for the past couple weeks now but it is only now that they decided to put up a post explaining each one of them.  Actually it makes sense, with Google hoping to get some headway on the upcoming Thanksgiving Black Friday Sale which will see more users searching for great shopping deals. The new search ad formats are more interactive, more visual and perhaps engaging.

Google has just rolled out a new feature of AdWords - product extensions which shall be available for all U.S. AdWords advertisers.  Product extensions are new ways by which you can add more relevant and specific information to your Google product ads. AdWords' product extensions let  you use your existing Google Merchant Center account for highlighting products directly in search ads,

By now everyone in the U.S. are probably busy looking out for the best consumer electronics deal that various stores, both online and brick and mortar stores are offering this coming Black Friday sale.  For its part Google is looking ahead as it prepares Google Product Search for the official start of the Holiday Shopping season. Hence, some new Google Product Search features to help you get the best value for your bucks.

Black Friday sale is a few days away but Google went ahead on a shopping spree and acquired another company. This time it's the startup called Terracent which specializes in display ad technology. The reason for acquiring Terracent according to the Official Google Blog post : As you know, we've been busy releasing new features and products to help improve display advertising on the web for everyone. We believe that Teracent's technology fits neatly into these efforts.

NewsCorp's Rupert Murdoch's crusade against Google is definitely starting to sizzle.  Mr. Murdoch's assault against Google started last week when he said that he might resort to legal actions to stop Google from "stealing stories" published in his company's various newspaper publications.  And now look who is coming to the side of NewsCorp? - Bing.

Twitter has just activated its GeoLocation feature which will let you opt-in whether you want your tweets to be tagged  with your current location.  The feature is carried not on your Twitter.com account but on third-party Twitter apps which will use the Geolocation API  released by Twitter. If you're using Twitter apps such as Birdfeed, Seesmic Web,

So you've read all about it, seen all the video materials, the what's not and what is - of the Chrome OS , that is. What's left now is how you can actually have a look and feel of it in action, or at least almost in action. Over at TechCrunch , they are running a piece on how you could possibly run Chrome OS using the available materials. The whole process might seem easy but I bet it is not for non-geek people like us.

What would you get if you combine web search and real estate listings? Well, there's not a real name for this feature but Google is nonetheless rolling it out , direct from the labs of Google's Australia office.  This new feature  lets you search for "real estate" properties as it appears on Google Maps. Isn't it great that when you're trying to look for a real estate property,

There's an interesting findings discovered by research company Rapleaf which made a study of around 120,000 webmail accounts from users of various webmail client including aol, gmail, hotmail and yahoo. According to the report, while Gmail users are more connected and have more friends on a social network, other webmail users however maintain more social networking profiles . The Rapleaf study looked into the age, gender and social networking data of the sample population.

I just installed Google Mobile on my iPhone yesterday and was checking out the cool features that it offers. What's good about this app is that it gives you quick access to various Google Mobile services including Google News. Speaking of News, Google just made some enhancements to this service which is available now for iPhone, Android and Palm Pre users. The enhanced Google News Mobile is now more consistent with the desktop version. So,

As soon as Google goes official with the Chrome OS, every tech people I know jumped into it. Each with his own comments, impressions and ideas on what was made available by Google so far. You've read about our earlier report as well as Google's own announcement . Now here's what other bright minds in the tech world have to say about the Google Chrome OS. Brad Linder of Download Squad : Google ChromeOS: It's basically a modified browser that runs web apps.