The beta days are over at Google, at least for some of its most popular applications. As we predicted two months ago, Google is finally taking the beta label off of Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, and GTalk today. And it is about time. For instance, Gmail, which launched five years ago and is by...

It’s one thing when Internet companies like Facebook adopt OpenID, it’s another when a giant retailer like Sears Holdings Corporation embraces it. Sears has just announced that it will enable over 1 million monthly MySears and MyKmart visitors to use their Google, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter...

Google has always been about speed. From its highly streamlined homepage to vast server farms, the company goes to extreme lengths to ensure that all of your search queries are returned in a fraction of a second. Now, it wants the whole web to be that fast.   In a video posted to the company’s...

Over the next 2 weeks several staff from TopRank be hitting the road for multiple SEO/Social Media/PR speaking and training events. We invite you to attend and would love to meet up with readers of Online Marketing Blog.    Topics during these events will emphasize the practice areas of our...

Not an hour after Google announced the general availability of Friend Connect, Facebook is doing the same for its competing Facebook Connect service. Now any third party website that wants to pull personal data about visitors from Facebook – and send back activity reports to their news feeds –...

Google may get three times more search traffic than Yahoo, but, SearchWiki aside, most of the innovation seems to be coming from Yahoo and Microsoft’s Live Search as they strive to gain a larger slice of the search market share. Last year Yahoo introduced Search Assist, an advanced autocomplete...

When Google pulled out of its proposed search advertising deal with Yahoo last month, it was chief legal counsel David Drummond who made the announcement. He cited concerns of a “protracted legal battle,” but only now do we learn that the Justice Department was only three hours away from...

It’s the season for top searches, and Ask.com just doesn’t know how to play the game. To compile these, big search engines take all the top search terms for the year and promptly throw the data out. They then compile a list of terms that they think properly reflects key trends that people...