As pointed out by Barry, a friend of mine over at seroundtable.com (http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/007250.html), google seems to now be seeing subdomains of a website as being from the same domain as the root.

Some examples that Barry and SEO Scoop noticed are:

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.seroundtable.com
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.about.com
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.blogspot.com
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.craigslist.org

Until I saw Barrys post I had never seen subdomains come up in searches for www.domain.com before using the site: operator.

Maybe the bit in googles webmaster central that allows you to specifiy www.domain.com or domain.com of a website is finally working properly, or possibly this is gathered from the xml sitemaps data.

This may affect those who rely on links from subdomains being seen as seperate entities and holding a little extra weight than normal internal links.

 Update (Jan 22: 11.23am)

CrankyDave Said: "ETA… Just checked 2 of links you posted Will (about and craigslist) and neither were showing any subdomains. Perhaps it's the DC I hit."

 You are correct. I am not seeing them there any longer either, tho they are still on 4 DC's, so it may just be an engineer playing with some new changes on those DC's. If that is the case, then it could be something we can expect across the board soon if it works out as expected.

Update (Jan 23: 8am) As noted on RustyBricks log, Google says this was a mistake and is being corrected.

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Many people have used the free encyclopedia, Wikipedia (founded by Jimmy Wales), Although it is not a reliable source of information all the time, many still enjoy the great amount of information which is shared between the users.

Well it seems that Jimmy Wales is slowly entering the Search Engine field by gathering commotion about the new search engine he is planning on releasing - Search Wikia (formerly known as Wikiasari).

There have been a good amount of misconceptions which has been derived due to the curiosity of what this project is. Many people believe that Search Wikia is the same thing as Wikisearch . This is not the same thing, since Wikisearch is what searches the Wikipedia Encyclopedia. Furthermore, the name of this search engine is "Search Wikia", not "Wikiasari", which was the name given to a previous version of the project which built up to Search Wikia.

Despite the fact that Amazon is a contributor to Wikia Inc. - Search Wikia is not related to Amazon's A9.com Search .

Many new search engines are trying to focus on a certain aspect of their features. The new revived Ask.com search engine has been trying to get their users to focus on the aspect of the tools which are available to their users. ChaCha Search is trying to focus their users on the point that humans are powering their search. So what would Search Wikia want to provide their users?

From the looks of it, they plan on completely changing the search engine industry:

Search is part of the fundamental infrastructure of the Internet. And, it is currently broken.

Why is it broken? It is broken for the same reason that proprietary software is always broken: lack of freedom, lack of community, lack of accountability, lack of transparency.

It seems that he Jimmy Wales is looking to build a human-powered search engine. Now will this be with actual humas assisting you in your search results like ChaCha Search? Or does he plan on creating a way for users to suggest websites for common search results?

For now we can only assume based on the type of people he is looking for:

I am looking for people to continue the development of a wiki-inspired search engine. Specifically community members who would like to help build people-powered search results and developers to help us build an open-source alternative for web search.

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When browsing through Google's Search Engine Results Pages (SERP's), most might not notice the small blue box underneath the Google results pages which advertises different Google programs (at the moment it seems to be mentioning the Google Desktop the most).

However, I noticed an unusual message displayed in the blue box when searching for webmaster tools on Google. It said:

Get disorganized in 2007. Use Google Desktop to find your /url?sa=L&ai=B5…………..

(The message is longer and can be seen in the image)

Now not everyone will see this all the time, but if you refresh (hit F5) a couple of times you might come across this particular message.

Now this raises the question of whether it was an actual error on Google's end or if it was meant to draw attention to how "disorganized" one can be. 

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Google has always been striving to create applications and resources which are useful to all kinds of people and various uses. Google has recently launched an addition to their search engine by allowing their users to search through patents. There have been other established patent search websites, the most common one being the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

Google has indexed all the current 7 million patents which have been created and stored by the USPTO from the 1790's until the patents issued in the middle of 2006. The only room to expand is including international patents issued across the world. 

The original announcement from Google was:

Today, we're excited to be releasing the beta version of Google Patent Search, which makes it easy to search the full text of the U.S. patent corpus and find patents that interest you. Start your exploration at www.google.com/patents or visit the Advanced Patent Search page to search by criteria, including patent number, inventor, and filing date. You can view images of original patents online.

The advantages to Google's Patent Search is the fact that they provide the actual photos of the original patent and it is much easier to browse through the results when you compare it to the USPTO Search Results. Furthermore, even more people will be educated on which patents exist, and for which items the patents protect.

The Google Patent Search is powered by the same technology which is used for Google Book Search, which basically takes a snapshot of every page in nearly every book and allows you to search according to keywords which may be present in the text. Google has taken a picture of all patent information and has stored it in their database to allow others to search according to common keywords related to a patent they might be interested in.

However, the release of Google's Patent Search leads to a couple of questions, the most common one will be "Will Google offer Pay-Per-Click (PPC) listings on the search results?". At the moment there does not seem to be any sponsored listings on the Patent Search Engine Results Pages (SERP's). Nevertheless, if Google does offer sponsored listings, it might cause controversy on what type of PPC Advertisements are displayed on the Google Patent SERP's. 

Google seems to be launching numerous services which are working towards "organizing the world's information", which seems to be Google's original mission statement from the start.

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Up until now, Google was mostly BETA testing their click-to-call service on certain advertisers in the UK. Recently, Google has released their Click-To-Call service to advertisers in India. This seems like a decent idea since most companies have employees in India manage their support/sales phone department.

Advertisers participating in the Google Click-To-Call program had an advertisement displayed on the Google SERP's under sponsored links which resembled the picture on the right.

When you click on the advertisement, a small menu would drop down and ask for your home phone number. After you enter your home phone number, you will receive a call from Google, who will forward you to the advertiser. This service does not affect the internet user who enters their phone number. Google is used as a middle person who will forward your call to the advertiser for no charge.

When you look at the statistical side of this service, you would notice that this would be more effective than Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Campaigns. The conversion rate when you talk with a potential customer would be much higher than simply displaying an advertisement on Google's Sponsored Links section using Google AdWords.

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