It took the attorneys 5 years to get it approved, but Google now officially holds a patent for its homepage.

Below is the official patent document from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. You will see in the image some bolded elements; these are the areas that Google has patented.

Google received the design patent for a graphical user interface for a display screen of a communications terminal. What does all this mean? Basically, Google owns the idea of having a giant search box in the middle of the page, with two big buttons underneath and several small links nearby. So if you want to build a search engine, make sure it doesnt contain any of these elements.

This patent does make a small amount of sense, seeing as though the sparse design of Googles homepage is one of the secrets to its success.

What will be interesting is to see how Google plans to flex its muscles with this new patent. Will they go after Yahoo who has a very similar search page? Or perhaps the more imminent threat, Bing?

I guess the moral of the story is, if you want to build a search engine then go crazy, but make sure it looks crazy too otherwise Google will come after you.

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As per the recent Google blog post 23 indexes have been created that track some major economic sectors such as auto, retail and unemployment.This is an interesting fact that Google luxuries index can track queries related to jewelry, rings, diamond, ring, jewelers, tiffany and more.

Auto-buyers index on the other hand is an interesting feature of Google that lets you compare actual stocks and market indexes to Google Trends. The data for these indexes can be easily downloaded for use with your own models.

For more details, refer to the Google Finance Blog. Also check out the Google Research Blog for information on Hal's research on Google Trends data to determine various economic conditions.

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1. It's Santa Clara in late October, where the weather will still be hovering around 75 degrees (that's 24-25 Celsius for us Canadian Folk).
2. 3 Great Tracks: Search Marketing, Social Media and SEO with frequent appearances on topics such as: Web Analytics and Mobile
3. Some excellent sessions on the agenda which deal with integration, reputation management and actionable site reviews.
4. They've had some great speakers such as Google's Marissa Mayer and Hitwise's Bill Tancer in the past and are expecting to keep the trend of having the top talent on-location going.
5. Bill Hunt has been added to the Searchnomics Advisory Board who brings a vast amount of strategic knowledge to the table.

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Sure, weve seen the release of a new Google search engine, sandbox, but it appears to be in the very early stages of development and not being taken up by the broad public. Google need a fix and quickly.

So, how can Google put the pressure back onto Bing? The answer might just be in AJAX.

Google AJAX search is a search functionality which uses more advanced JavaScript to make search result pages load even faster by only loading new information as needed on new queries.

Michael Stoppelman, a software engineer at Yelp (and a previous engineer at Google) believes that AJAX is the key to Google overcoming Bings growth. Here, Michael explains why AJAX matters:

Money money moooooney. Site speed is a huge deal for search engines. Speeding up your results usually means more searches. Which also means more ad clicks, bing bing.

Some web gurus whove analysed the new Bing search engine have noticed that it produces results faster than Google, but an AJAX Google should be faster than Bing.

How will you know if youre getting the AJAX results? You will be able to tell by the URL. A normal Google Search has will have a thread similar to the following at the end of the URL:

/search?q=QUERY

An AJAX search result replaces that with something that looks like:

/#q=QUERY

Here is an example below:

Do you think this speed increase will actually make much difference? Both Google and Bing produce results in about a second, so will this increase actually hold much benefit to searchers? We would love to hear your thoughts below.

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