“Find it with Google. Buy it with Google Checkout” – excellent opening lines to describe the latest product by Google – Google Checkout which launches Google’s foray into ecommerce.

From the Official Google Blog:

“One cool feature of Google Checkout is that you can buy from stores with a single Google login – no more entering the same info each time you buy, and no more having to remember different usernames and passwords for each store. To help you find places to shop, you’ll see a little icon on the Google.com ads of stores offering Google Checkout. It’s an easy way to identify fast, secure places to shop when you search. And after you’ve placed your order, Google Checkout provides a purchase history where you can track your orders and shipping information in one place.”

Google Checkout is closely synched with your Google Adwords account. For sellers it is only available for US residents & companies based in the US.

Read more:

• Find it with Google. Buy it with Google Checkout
• Webmasterworld

This just in from Google:

–
Want to find those IRS forms to get in your taxes on time? Need to figure out where to send your DMV fees, or find the phone

number for your local parks and rec department? Google U.S. Government Search launches today — it’s a site on which you can

1) search across a huge index of U.S. Federal, state and local government websites via a single search box, and 2) stay up to

date through personalized content feeds from government agencies and press outlets. Off you go.

For easy bookmarking, go to http://usgov.google.com.
–

The poor usability of the ‘Indian Government Websites’ is often a topic of discussion at CueBlocks. You would find that most sites only work in IE and have no cross browser compatibility.

This just makes me wonder if ‘We’ are ever going to get there…

The much awaited Google’s Online Payment System – GBuy (or Google wallet) is slated for a beta launch on the 28th of June. Ebay’s Paypal is up for a head on competition.

The market domination of Paypal till now is poised to be challenged. Going by Google’s track record of very high quality products, Gbuy is being eagerly awaited by the online community.

Skeptics who think Google is heading the Microsoft way would be jittered by Google now even knowing where you spend your cents and dollars.

Read more about Gbuy at:

• Forbes
• Search Engine Watch

Of late have you witnessed your website or your client’s website having problems in particularly getting picked up by Google? Have you checked all you coding, site programming, robots.txt, robots meta tag, 302 and other redirects, duplication, quality of out going links,any search engine unfriendly structure parameters which might have crept in and have also tried the age old advice of being “Patient” but still haven’t had much success in identifying the real problem and why Google is treating their site with so much disdain? Well the only good news is that you are not the only one and many websites are undergoing the same plight.

Webmasters and site owners have been talking for the past few months on how Google is giving step motherly treatment to their websites and not picking up new webpages of their sites or showing some very old Google Cache history.

Some of the symptoms cited include:

a. Sites are not being crawled for weeks.
b. Google SERPs returning old pages.
c. Site not appearing in Google for previously high ranking keywords.
d. Drop and fluctuation in the number of indexed pages.

We have studied and compiled a list of some useful articles and threads from forums which throw some light on this. We hope that these would help in understanding the nature of the problem and possible solutions.

• Google admits to server problems
• Google’s Grey Goo problem
• Pages Dropping Out of Big Daddy Index
• Tired of waiting for Big Daddy to fix itself
• Big daddy has indexed only 136 of my 20,000 pages (Help Needed: Big Daddy hates me -)
• Dealing With The Consequences of BigDaddy
• Matt Cutts
• Barry at SEORoundtable has compiled a few threads talking about this.

On May 9th, Yahoo launched Alltheweb Livesearch.
They seem to have taken a cue from Google Suggest – but I must admit its one impressive tool. I’ve been using it for a week now and its been a lot of fun!

Here’s a bit on Alltheweb from Ysearchblog:

AlltheWeb is a search destination that has its roots as a showcase of new and innovative technology – for example AlltheWeb was the first site to roll out the calculator functionality within the search box. The site will remain true to its roots as we continue to introduce new technologies there in the future.

Google recently launched Google Trends during their Annual Press Day.

As per the Official Google Blog:
“Google Trends builds on the idea behind the Google Zeitgeist, allowing you to sort through several years of Google search queries from around the world to get a general idea of everything from user preferences on ice-cream flavors to the relative popularity of politicians in their respective cities or countries.”

Some very useful insights on search trends which would come in handy for optimization firms.

Some interesting reviews / related links:
- 25 Things I learned on on Google Trends by Steve Rubel
- Google Press Center (full webcast of the of the Press Day)
- Google Fight

I love the new interface of Google Sitemaps. Its much more user friendly, navigates easy and integrates the support center much better than earlier. Here’s a screenshot:

And when do we see Google Analytics stats next to this?