The Amazon Associate blog just announced that its affiliate program has just been directly integrated with Google Blogger.  This means that you can now earn some dough from promoting Amazon products even without spending money on a blog hosting site. While if you're a Blogger.com user, this means that you can now easily add Amazon Associates product links directly from your Blogger dashboard. I'm not really sure about which of these will benefit from this integration.

YouTube just released their Year End Top Video Report for 2009 and not surprisingly Susan Boyle's audition video in Britain's Got Talent show emerged as the most watched video on YouTube globally and Pitbull's "I Know You Want Me" tops the the music video category.  But aside from these two, YouTube also published their 2009's fastest rising search on a monthly basis. Some of the fastest rising search terms are correlated with the most watched videos list.

Latest comScore data for November search volume is showing a slightly unexpected result. For the second time Bing managed to beat Google in terms of total US core search volumes, while Yahoo's search volume continues to go down. So while the total US core search volume increased from 13.2% in October to 17.8% Y/Y in November, Microsoft sites domestic core search market share increased by .4% from 9.9% in October to 10.3% in November. Likewise,

After Hitwise's Top Search Term and Top Visited of 2009, it's now Twitter's turn to release its Top Twitter Trends of 2009 . Since Twitter is considered as the major source of real-time and up-to-date information, its trending topics would enable us to understand what was happening around the world as well as show us how people everywere can be united in their concern for what is happening in the world.

What could be a more fitting way for Bing  to end the year on the right note but to release its very own native iPhone app.  It's free and available now at the iTunes Apps Store )iTunes Link(. Key Features of the Bing iPhone app include: Daily image from Bing.

Google has quietly rolled out a new feature for ranking and showing different aspects about businesses on   Place Pages for  Google Maps. The new feature will let you read reviews of business establishments as well as see how their fare through color coded rankings. In case you forgot, Place Page is a web page for every place in the world containing snippets of information about a place. Place Pages for Google Maps cover  businesses, points of interest, transit stations,

Experian Hitwis e has just released two significant data of 2009 - top-search term and top-visited site with Facebook and Google earning the top spot respectively. Facebook beats dislodged last years top-searched term - MySpace. While Google obviously retained its last year's position. Moving from last year's 10th spot, Facebook accounted for 2.48% of the top 300 searches in 2009.  Including other variations of searches related to Facebok such as facebook.com,

Yahoo just made a minor enhancement to its search results by making it easier to find local businesses . This is done by adding the Yahoo local business shortcut everytime it displays search results for business-related query even if the query does not contain the location. Additionally, search results can now be refined further by neighborhood or nearby city right on the search results page.

The order of battle for Google this week seems to be on URL shorteners. This has been quite a trend on Twitter and Facebook with various third-party URL shortener sites offering this kind of service. But while others offer it as a stand-alone service, Google is taking the URL shortening thingie on a different approach - via Feedburner and Google Toolbar . As mentioned by the a post from the Official Google Blog ,

Couldn't decide on what to get for your techie friends who got almost all the gizmos released this year? Google has a solution for that. How about giving them the gift of Google Chrome instead? Google quietly rolls out this new marketing campaign for its Chrome browser. It's actually a neat and clever way of marketing the Chrome Browser, tying it up with the Christmas festivites. The idea is,

Frankly, it's about time that Google come up with its own phone. Not just the co-manufactured phone running on Google's Android platform but a real Google phone with the Google brand and to be sold through Google not through network carriers or any mobile company. Guess what? It might soon become a reality as there have been strong proofs of a new Google phone which even have a name already - the Google Nexus One.

Google has introduced two new search-related features - universal search features to Google Suggest and Quick Scroll extension for Google Chrome. Both features are aimed at making it easier and faster for users to find the information they need and are good examples of how Google is extending the power of Google search beyond the results page. Universal search feature adds more suggested search terms beneath the Google search box after you've typed in your search query.

Yahoo is officially joining Google and Bing in the race to provide the most relevant real-time search results a.k.a. Twitter-integrated search results.  This was earlier hinted at when Yahoo started integrating relevant tweets to Yahoo News Shortcut . This time around relevant tweets will be integrated to search results using Yahoo's algorithms for determining which tweets are relevant to the query. While this may seem similar to what Google and Bing may be currently doing,

Although local shopping search engine Milo.com has been around for two years already, it is only now that the site is going full blast as it leaves beta stage. Before you start thinking that Milo.com is just another local shopping search engine that will only tell you specific online deals, well actually it does more than that. Milo also gives you available inventories of products available on stores near your location. Sounds good, right? Wait, there's more.

Google has just launched Google Groups to Google Apps Premiere and Google Apps Education Edition.  This will give business enterprises which are using Google Apps for their company's enterprise wide collaboration/communication system a facility for their employees to create Groups within departments or sub-units easily. Employees within a company can start creating their own mailing lists as well as use Google Groups facility for sharing documents, spreasheets,

Continuing its Purple colored, You-centric branding campaign Yahoo is launching "You In?", a year-end giving campaign that aims to encourage people to do some act of kindness around the world. To document this noble feat, Yahoo launched its Purple-themed Kindness site where anyone can post online status messages relating to good deeds done by people - to inspire other to do the same. Here are examples of how the site works: For example,

As an early Christmas gift to us Mac users who have been waiting for so long, Google has finally outed Chrome for Mac )beta(.  As a bonus, Google has also released Chrome for Linux and activated Chrome Extensions for Chrome users in Windows platform. If you're a Mac user and you haven't downloaded Chrome Beta for Mac, you should - right now.

So aside from real-time search , Google is also embarking on a more  ambitious and yet a possibly useful feature, this time  for its mobile search service . These new features  will allow you to do mobile search by voice, location maps and visual imagery. Mobile Search by Voice - This mobile search was introduced last year, and after a successful run, Google is now making this feature available in several new languages including - Japanese, joining English and Mandarin.

Google continues to improve  its Analytics service by introducing some more great features namely - annotations, custom variables, new tracking code setup wizard and a new version of the Google Analytics API. In brief, here's what each of these new features will let you do on your Google Analytics account. Annotations - Lets you leave shared or private notes right on the over-the-time graph of any Google Analytics account which you have been granted access to.

Yahoo just added some more search refiners to its video search vertical - TV and Movie Actors. These refineres aim to help you explore your TV shows and movies while searching for them on Yahoo Video Search. You can see these video search refiners on the left side of the Yahoo video search page once Yahoo video search displays your search results. These refiners were created intelligently which will narrow down your search intuitively.