Google has joined the IPSO Alliance , which is a group of technology companies aimed at promoting the Internet Protocol for "smart object communications." The idea is that items ranging from appliances to cars, and even factories, can communicate as individuals do on the web. "Google's participation in IPSO is a result of its expectation that many devices will become part of the Internet environment," said Vint Cerf, Google's Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist.

This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs on Fridays. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed. What a busy week for Google! From the launch of real time, to the addition of universal search features in Suggest, searching on Google just got a whole lot better this week. Real-time search Want to know what people are saying about [ google chrome ] right now?

Some Google users have had a mysterious link appear in their accounts when they visit Google's product page. The link is for "Google Guru", and is accompanied by the text, "Ask questions and get answers from online users." Its icon is a question mark. If it is showing up for you, it is located between Groups and Knol on Google's "More Google Products" page: According to Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Land, Google Guru is a product that was launched in Russia back in 2007.

The next International Search Summit will take place on 13th May, 2010 at a new venue, The Barbican in London. The speakers and the agenda are yet to be confirmed, but the event will once again focus on issues and trends in international seo, ppc and social media which affect search marketers as they carry out online activity across the globe. This will be the fifth International Search Summit to be held in London - details on past events including speakers,

Posted by great scott! Ho-ho-ho! Merry Winter to you! In a very special Whiteboard Friday we'll look at the new model for attracting lots of inbound links: giving back to webmasters. Nowadays it's not always enough just to have great content. You've got to give the linkerati value-something that will incentivize them to link to your site. Rand Fishclause discusses how this new model works and then, next week,

Today's chatter is all about how Google is buying local business review player Yelp for some $500 million. The only surprise for many of us Google Watchers is that this hasn't happened already. But hey, the recession snuffed out M&A in 2008 and Google has proven itself to be back at the bargaining table in the latter half of 2009, buying six companies since August, including mobile display ad giant AdMob.

MySpace, The Wall Street Journal, and the World Economic Forum, are giving a MySpace user the chance to be a citizen journalist at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2010 in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland. The MySpace Citizen Journalist winner will be chosen by a panel of experts and will join the Davos press corps using MySpace to report on the conference news and interview world leaders about relevant issues.

As I've noted in the past, Wolfram Alpha, the much-hyped search computation engine that was supposed to be the future of search hasn't exactly set the world on fire . As of November, Compete data indicates it was receiving under 300 thousand unique visitors in the US. To put that into perspective, Ask.com had over 41 million. However, that's not to say that Wolfram Alpha is a failure. Not only is it still quite young,

It is an amazing discovery when you've been using a site for more than a year and then come across some new, unexpectedly genius way to take advantage of it. This happened with Twitter to me: I found a new awesome way to make the most of its feature called "Favorites" (do you use it?). It never occurred to me that knowing who favorites my Tweets and which of my Tweets get favorited,

I am sure Googlers should be enjoying this: hardly can they say a word, there follows a wealth of guessed and speculations. This time Matt Cutts is said to have mentioned that their 200 variables in Google algorithm and already plenty of people started looking for them. Anyway, I stumbled across this forum thread and made up my mind to share this discussion at SEJ by providing my own list of variables and asking you to contribute.