Filling up your car has escalated as gas prices are reaching the $3.50 a gallon average across the United States with little sign of gas prices dropping anytime soon. With gas hitting $3.50 , diesel prices topping off well above $4 a gallon and a record $117 a barrel for oil, Americans have finally become more proactive about saving money at the tank. In addition, the surge in oil, which is traded globally on the Euro instead of the slumping US dollar,

Google announced its Q1 Earnings reports last night which more or less crippled expectations that Google may have not had such a fantastic first quarter in 2008. Well, Google proved the analysts wrong with a 30% increase in profit during the Q1 of the year, amidst a slowing US economy and revenue escalating 42% to $5.19 billion compared to the same period last year. In pre-maret trading overnight, Google stock value has skyrocketed from $449.

Microsoft has acquired the Seattle based travel search startup Farecast , which has been the recent target of acquisition rumors. The buyout of Farecast was confirmed on the Farecast Blog : Were excited to confirm that Farecast has been acquired by Microsoft! This acquisition creates tremendous opportunities for the Farecast team and our customers. We look forward to sharing more details in the weeks to come. Microsoft was already a Farecast partner ,

Just incase you could not think of a more bizarre public relations scenario, Tiki Barber, the former New York Giants running back and TODAY Show correspondent is now running the ball for Team StumbleUpon. That's right, Tiki is working with StumbleUpon's " Thumbs up for Trees " initiative. Visitors and members of StumbleUpon can plant a tree for free simply by giving a website a thumbs up : no digging required . Get it? Don't Digg on Earthday, Stumble!

Is Domain Parking and running AdWords on domains being replaced by building out lead generation and content driven services? It looks like a mix of SEO, content and smart monetization is flipping the domaining market upside down. Here are a look at two domains which sold this month for a lot of money and how they are being transformed into niche portals. So far this month two top level one word domains have sold for over 2 million dollars each,

When planning and implementing a Google AdWords campaign, copywriting is a key factor to establishing a high quality score, relevance and click thru. Not only is persuasive copy a way to stand out among the crowd and include searchers in the buying process while still on the search results page, but sometimes copy can be used to stand out from the crowd. ASCII Art is a way to form pictures and images using simple keyboard symbols,

Google Website Optimizer and Google Analytics )or Urchin( have both dropped the Beta label as both offerings from Google have graduated their initial 'testing' phases )umm' just how many business models are dependent on an analytics program in Beta testing(.

For more or less 8 years )well 10 for one of them( there have been only two across the board methods of measuring the importance and popularity of a website : Alexa Ranking and Google PageRank. Both methods are flawed . Sure, others have entered the fold, with Yahoo Backlinks, Compete.com and even SEOmoz PageStrength entering the fold )although PageStrength is dependent upon the others(; but even given their weaknesses,

We have received loads of excellent search marketing related articles for our Search Engine Journal Guest Blog Post Competition with over $10,000 in prizes. The original window to submit posts ended on April 15th, which many of us were reminded yesterday, is tax day in the US. For this reason, and because SEJ headquarters is under attack from a flu bug epidemic, we are extending the deadline to submit your guest blog posts until midnight,

According to a Hitwise study, Youtube now has a 73.18% share of the US online video market out of a group of 68 online video sites, meaning 73.18% of US visits amongst such online video sites ended up at Youtube. That online video share is up 32% over March of 2007, when Youtube had a 55.28% market share. Of the top 5 US online video sites; Youtube, MySpaceTV, Google Video, Yahoo Video and Break.com, only Break.com was the only other online video site to grow in market share,

Earlier in the month I did an overview of the new bid filtering features launched by SponsoredReviews.com to filter bids from bloggers who want to write about your advertised site or business. The way this works is an SEO or advertiser sets up their Blog Review Opportunity Then bloggers review the various advertiser opportunities and place bids on them. For example, a blogger usually bids anywhere from $10 to $50 on the chance to write a paid review.

Last week Yahoo announced that it was buying IndexTools , the web analytics company, to add a stronger analytics platform to the Yahoo Marketing and Yahoo Business Services offerings. Yahoo's strategy with IndexTools is to upgrade the analytics technology for Yahoo advertisers and then go more widespread, possibly with a Yahoo hosted version of the analytics solution.

This is a friendly reminder that the Search Engine Journal Guest Blogging Competition is still running and SingleFeed, the shopping search feed optimization company, has upped their sponsorship offering to a 6 month free subscription for SingleFeed's Data Feed Management and Optimization service ; a $1,074 value!! SingleFeed 's enhanced sponsorship puts the final prize tally at over $10,

Is the end of Yahoo Search Marketing near? Yahoo has announced that they are running limited tests of AdWords sponsored search ads )or Google AdSense for Search, which are AdWords served in the search results of non-Google search properties( beside Yahoo Search results. Yahoo says that the test will apply only to traffic from the Yahoo.com site in the U.S. and will not include Yahoo!'s network of affiliate or premium publisher partners,

Commercially altering holidays is a very old school marketing tactic which has been implemented by the greeting card, flowers, beer and department store industries for years. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was a creation of the Montgomery Wards department store and the modern Santa Claus character was put through a makeover by Macy's in the early 1900's. Guinness even went the route of launching a public relations and advertising campaign this year to make St.

Today is turning out to be a day chock full of good analytics news. First Yahoo announced that they are purchasing IndexTools and integrating their advanced analytics into their business services suite, and now WebTrends has announced that they have tapped former Google executive Daniel E. Stickel as their new CEO.

Following in the footsteps of Google Analytics and Microsoft's adCenter Analytics, Yahoo is looking to better its analytics offerings which now exist in a mediocre blogging format with MyBlogLog and a private analytics tracker for Yahoo Search Marketing customers. Yahoo is getting serious about web analytics with its announcement to buy IndexTools Analytics , which is a property of Yahoo acquisition target Tensa Kft. Note : IndexTools also offers third party PPC management,

Flickr has launched its video on Flickr video sharing service , which lets Flickr Pro members upload videos with a maximum length of 90 seconds to their Flickr photostream.

Jack Spirko has published an open letter to Google explaining why SEO's should not be treated as enemies of the Google state : Sometimes it seems that despite owning one of the biggest SEO Companies in the world that Google has it in for all of us. They have waged war on buying links, crippled paid blogging services by nuking their networks page rank and have even banned web sites of major corporations.

Best of the Web ) BOTW.org ( has pulled off an Internet web site classification coup de etat, hiring over 30 of the top DMOZ editors which had built the foundations of the Netscape Open Directory Project during the 'glory days' of DMOZ. The new Best of the Web team is a hand-picked squad, with many names well known in the directory industry. It includes 6 of the most active "metas" from the days ODP took its baby steps; laisha, kfander, furbis, mitch, kctipton,