Google Nov. 8 launched a version of its search application tailored for Windows Phone 7, which debuted today on handsets from AT&T and T-Mobile. AT&T is selling the Samsung Focus and HTC Surround for $199 with a two-year contract. T-Mobile is offering the HTC HD7 for $199. Of course, just as Apple's iPhone from AT&T and the Google Android-based Droid line from Verizon Wireless are preloaded with Google Search,

I've spent the morning playing with and writing about RockMelt, the social Web browser. RockMelt hooks into Facebook Platform to let users browse content online and share it with their Facebook friends and tweet to Twitter. Users can also integrate RSS feeds. Pretty much anything anyone wants to do to read or share content can be done in RockMelt without forcing users to open up multiple browser tabs to share content on Facebook or Twitter. I'm a heavy Google user.

Google is reportedly close to releasing a refreshed Google Product Search service leveraging the technology it acquired from Like.com, which it picked up in August . Like.com makes a visual search engine that helps consumers match clothes and other apparel online and purchase them from retailers. It's part comparison shopping site and part fashion consultant. Google said after the deal: "While Like.com will operate its Websites separately in the near term,

2010 is hurtling toward its end, and it's always good to take the pulse of the mobile applications industry. This is especially apt considering mobile poses the greatest growth potential of any app sector, when combined with local and social apps. Millenial Media, that intrepid standalone ad shop that did not sell out to Google, Apple, Microsoft or Yahoo )give it time(, has posted interesting stats about what platforms developers are writing apps for )or aren't(.

First Google Voice has been seamlessly blended with Gmail , now AdWords. Is there anywhere Google won't put the call management application? Google has launched AdWords call metrics, a new feature that helps advertisers gauge calls they receive through Google's click-to-call ad feature. Call metrics, an ad-hoc ad analytics tool, uses the Google Voice technology to assign AdWords campaigns a special, clickable phone number.

It may never be fair to cry "Dead Man Walkin'" for a brand new Web service, but unfortunately that's the conclusion I've come to after playing with new curated search service Blekko this morning. Blekko is geared to cut out the clutter of Web search on Google, Bing and Yahoo. You know, the kind of clutter where you search for something and get 40,000 results, most of which aren't really useful. Blekko gets points for that, but to do this users need to create slashtags,

Google saw two high-level departures last week, with AdMob Founder Omar Hamoui and Google Maps and Google Wave creator Lars Rasmussen. Who knows what Hamoui is doing, but Rasmussen has gone to Facebook, the latest of the 20 percent of former Googlers that now make up Facebook. Google confirmed both departures in different statements to me. For Hamoui, Google was effusive in its praise,

Google capped a week of big location search and ad news with a new version of Google Maps for Android that is absolutely tuned for location-based services. Google Maps 4.6 features an option to update the Google Latitude friend-finding tool in real-time and a new design for Place page reviews. By running Google Maps 4.6 on and Android 2.2 smartphone, such as the Motorola Droid, Droid 2, Droid X or HTC Droid Incredible,

Bloomberg Television this month began running a nice little series called Bloomberg Game Changers profiling some of the most influential captains of industry, including Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Google Co-founder Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The lineup includes leaders in technology, finance, politics and culture, including Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Apple CEO Steve Jobs, talk show host Jon Stewart, rapper mogul Jay-Z, financier Henry Kravis, and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison.

Anyone wondering what people who conduct voice searches for are looking for? Chitika says its local search listings. The ad network said that people who search with their voice on the iPhone are three times more likely to be looking for local results. Chitika, which noted earlier this month that Google commands as much as 97 percent of searches through Apple's iPhone, said that almost seven percent of searches were done through Google's voice search.

Google's display and mobile ad businesses may be chugging along at a combined $3.5 billion run-rate for the year , but competition from Apple's iAd and other ad platforms mean the search engine can't curb its enthusiasm for the hunt. The company's AdMob mobile display ad unit , which it acquired by paying more than Apple bid, is launching interactive video and interstitial ad units on Google's Android platform. See directly below.

When it comes to TV consumption, I respect Mark Cuban's opinion quite a bit, so I paid close attention to two of his recent blog posts regarding Google TV and Apple TV. On Oct. 22, Cuban wrote "How Google TV Could Hand Netflix the entire streaming universe," a rant against the notion of TV networks working with Google TV. Cuban argued: All you internet pundits want the broadcast networks to give the content away for free. THAT IS STUPID.

Royal Pingdom offered a fun post Oct. 19 dealing with one of my favorite topics: Google Creep. Google Creep is my nickname for the spread of Google's sphere of influence across the Web, starting with search, moving into Web applications and content such as YouTube, easing into the mobile Web, and just this month television with Google TV . Royal Pingdom has assembled stats from various Web researchers charting Google's dominance in search )StatCounter says Google has 91.4%(,

File this under: Kettle, meet Pot. Renowned Mozilla Firefox browser/Facebook for iPhone developer ) turned Facebook for Android developer? ( Joe Hewitt joined Apple CEO Steve Jobs in sounding off on Google's Android operating system and its pretension for being open. Hewitt on his personal blog questioned recurring claims by Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Android creator Andy Rubin's of Android's openness by correctly pointing out that carriers are manipulating Android.

Google has recently started running a new search engine experiment that provides "shared by" and "recent updates" links to Twitter tweets and Facebook and MySpace status updates for some popular queries. Search Engine Land's Danny Sullivan saw the shared by feature when he searched for "Tom Bosley," the patriarch of the family on "Happy Days," who passed away Oct. 19.

Less than two weeks after we learn that Marissa Mayer has been moved over to run Google's geo/local efforts, the search engine she helped launch to global prominence is adding a location tab to the left-hand panel of its search results page on Google.com. To this point, when users wanted to view or manipulate their location information on Google.com, they had to click "View customizations" on the results page.

Google could use its Street View imagery as the backdrop for the company's online gaming strategy if it chose to pursue this avenue. That's the premise of this fun blog post by Paul Winston, a computer graphics software programmer for a large neuroscience research lab. Noting that the cost of creating good quality content is one of the major costs of creating the game,

As Google scrambles to get Android 3.0 out the door, the company's most recent iterations of the open source operating system have combined to comprise 73.8 percent, or almost three-quarters of the millions of Android handsets on the market. That's the latest data according to Google's Android developer dashboard, which currently counts all active handsets through Oct. 1. Specifically, Android 2.1 is on 40.4 percent of all Android devices, followed by the latest Android 2.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg takes some flak for being nervous when he speaks, but he was quite clear about what he thinks of Google Oct. 13 when he helped Microsoft's Bing team introduce social search integration between Bing and Facebook. Zuckerberg's words, viewed through the context shouldn't be taken lightly. While he didn't directly name Google, his comments on why he chose Bing as the first search engine he opened Facebook data to in such a detailed fashion,

By now most people who care enough have weighed in about the promotion of Marissa Mayer, Google's longtime vice president of search and user experience, who was moved to run Google's geo/local business unit. Google told me Oct. 12: "Marissa is moving over to an exciting new role covering geo/local, which is crucial to our users and the future of Google. Marissa has made an amazing contribution on search over the last decade,