by Miriam Ellis Talk about Happy Holidays and the spirit of giving! Mike Blumenthal has just published the very first Complete Google LBC Category List we've ever seen. This is the gift Local SEOs and local-focused business owners have been waiting for and it vastly simplifies the process of picking the right categories for a given business - something you can't afford to make a mistake about!

by Claudine Zap Hugh Hefner (the man) has done a bang-up job with Hugh Hefner (the brand). He's taken his Playboy empire from print to Web to reality show. Now there are rumors that he'll be played by " Iron Man " mega star, Robert Downey Jr.  An interview with the actor on FoxNews.com caused searches on "hugh hefner" to skyrocket. The " Sherlock Holmes " actor has got Hef's endorsement. The Playboy king told Fox , "Robert Downey Jr. and I have talked about it,

by Mike Krumboltz Many have wondered when Morgan Freeman would finally star in a movie as Nelson Mandela. This weekend, their wait ends as "Invictus" hits theaters. Also making some noise on the big screen: Disney's "The Princess and the Frog" and Peter Jackson's "The Lovely Bones." Which film should you see? Let's look at each with a critical eye... Invictus Directed by Clint Eastwood ,

Posted by Yushi Jing and Henry Rowley, Google Research Earlier this week, we announced the Labs launch of Google Image Swirl , an experimental search tool that organizes image-search results. We hope to take this opportunity to explain some of the research underlying this feature, and why it is an important area of focus for computer vision research at Google. As the Web becomes more "visual,

Mozilla's director of community development is not at all happy with Google. Following an eyebrow-raising comment from CEO Eric Schmidt on the subject of privacy, Asa Dotzler has, in fact, pretty much suggested that everyone use Bing instead. Here's what set Dotzler (along with a whole lot of other people ) off: on the subject of whether or not folks can trust Google, Schmidt told Maria Bartiromo, "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know,

In my opinion an HTML sitemap is one of the most important tactics you can use to distribute your link juice efficiently within your site. Yet many bloggers and webmasters neglect it. In this article I will explain how the HTML sitemap works, and also give you a hot tip you can use to boost your search engine optimization. First things first, what is an HTML sitemap? It is an actual page of your website that outlines the complete structure of your site,

The Federal Trade Commission released a report today that found minors can easily access sexually and violently explicit content in online virtual worlds. The congressionally mandated report, "Virtual Worlds and Kids: Mapping the Risks," calls on operators of virtual worlds to take steps to keep explicit content away from children and teens, and recommends parents become familiar with the virtual worlds their kids visit.

It must be all of the tough competition from Zoho, Microsoft's increasing cloud offerings and other collaboration startups. Google continues to refine and crank out new features for Google Docs, which it admitted earlier this year had been getting dusty. Docs no longer has time to get dusty without something new happening. This week, the Docs team made several improvements around search relevance, exporting data and sharing content. But first,

Five years ago today, Digg.com went live. What started as a simple idea has certainly come a long way. From a vision of a new way to surface news, and a team of three, to 40+ million monthly visitors and 80+ passionate employees...well, suffice it to say that I'm very proud of what we've become.

Yahoo is officially joining Google and Bing in the race to provide the most relevant real-time search results a.k.a. Twitter-integrated search results.  This was earlier hinted at when Yahoo started integrating relevant tweets to Yahoo News Shortcut . This time around relevant tweets will be integrated to search results using Yahoo's algorithms for determining which tweets are relevant to the query. While this may seem similar to what Google and Bing may be currently doing,