Ask.com-owned Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com are extra clean today. Users checking out either of those sites today will notice unique branding from detergent brand Cheer. The entire homepages of both sites are blue and sparkly, just like the "sparkling bright" washing liquid. And, yes, you can still search for any naughty words. I tried. It works.

Over the past couple months the Bing team has been working hard to make your search journey a bit easier. One of the ways we have tried to do that is through improvements to autosuggest. Autosuggest helps you get to results faster by suggesting words or phrases that match the first few keystrokes of your search. These suggestions help you type less and get you on your way to better search results faster.

Although you probably guessed as much, people who occasionally update their Facebook status or post something on Twitter represent a significant portion of the online community. And today, Forrester pegged the exact portion at 33 percent. Forrester's been classifying online people as inactives, spectators, joiners, collectors, critics, and creators for quite some time, and its statistics regarding these groups have provided valuable about how the online landscape is changing.

An increasing number of shoppers in the U.K. are going online to buy groceries according to new research by the Institute of Grocery Distribution (IGD). The research found 13 percent of adults shopped online for groceries in 2009, an increase of 63 percent over the last three years. Although shopping online for groceries has become increasingly popular over the last few years, this section of shoppers represents less than one in four of those who buy goods and services online.

Amidst the issues that's happening right now between Google and China, Google decided to cancel the scheduled launch of its Nexus One phone in the country  this week. Citing a reliable source, AP is reporting that Google's decision to cancel the launch of the mobile phone was indeed related to Google's recent threat of shutting down its Chinese-based search engine since China refused to scale down it's restriction on the search engine. If you may have read last week,

Steve Baker, an engineer in the search quality group at Google, just did a nice post about synonyms on the Google blog. A lot of people seem to think that Google only does simple-minded matching of the users' keywords with words that we indexed. The truth is that Google does a lot more sophisticated stuff than most people realize. I'd say that Google does more with "semantics" and both document and query understanding than almost any other search engine.

Google has posted a t hought-provoking piece to the Official Google Blog, discussing at length, Google's system for understanding synonyms in search. As author Steven Baker says, "An irony of computer science is that tasks humans struggle with can be performed easily by computer programs, but tasks humans can perform effortlessly remain difficult for computers." Google considers understanding human language to be one of the hardest problems in artificial intelligence,

Want to know a secret? When prospective buyers visit your website, they are looking for more than just their desired product or service. The secret is, they're looking for reasons to NOT buy from you. Yes, that's right. Your prospects - no matter how motivated they are - are coming to the virtual table with a chip on their shoulder. Like the person burned by too many bad dates (you dated that person too?

New York magazine is reporting that the New York Times could be announcing its own move to a paid subscription model as early as this week . If this is the case, we may see more of the dominoes fall in this tenuous conversation. It seems that whenever anyone discusses even the threat of paid content online, a hush comes over the room and people start to whisper like they do when your creepy uncle shows up at the family reunion. Well, whether this is the time or not,

AdGooroo , a competitive intelligence agency, has released a new report , which indicates that there as has been a decrease in active advertisers for Google, despite projected Q4 gains. "Google experienced a quality purge this quarter and banned what we believe to be more than 30,000 advertisers, accounting for about 5.3 percent of its active advertiser base," said AdGooroo Founder and CEO Rich Stokes. "While this typically signals a negative impact on revenues,