Google have announced this week at SES New York the introduction of AdWords Search Funnels . This led me to think of a quote which was on Twitter a while ago, (I think was from Chris Lake - correct me if I'm wrong though): "Conversion Attribution is Like Selling Xabi Alonso & Hoping for the Same Result" . Image credit: Flickr Even if you don't know anything about football,

by Vera H-C Chan How many times can " American Idol " contestants invoke the F-word and get away with it? Contestant after contestant smiled through withering criticism and said they just trying to have "fun." They were the only ones: An aghast Randy Jackson used words like "honestly terrible," Ellen DeGeneres couldn't understand the song choices (nearly all were older than mentor Miley Cyrus ),

To stop Gmail accounts from getting stolen from their real owners, Google is starting to send notifications to Gmail members whose accounts they think are being compromised. This is in response to the increasing problem on Gmail abuse through various suspicious login activity  by unathorized access to Gmail accounts.

To be a Baidu shareholder must be a wonderful thing. The Chinese company's stock went up yet again today and was at $608.50 when the closing bell rang, making this the first time it's ever ended a trading day above $600. Here are a couple other numbers sure to make other investors jealous: shares of Baidu actually gained 2.29 percent today, which represents a significant increase, not a symbolic tic. Also,

If youre subscribed just to the Microsoft Advertising Blog , you may not know that were blogging on the adCenter Blog from Search Engine Strategies in New York right now. Its so great to see so many marketers here asking such incisive questions in informative and, in many cases, very advanced sessions on PPC, SEO, social media and video. The expo hall is packed and the #SESNY Twitter tag has been surfacing very positive feedback that folks are enjoying being here,

AOL said today it is launching Patch.org, a charitable foundation to support access to local news and information in underserved communities. Patch.org will partner with community foundations and other organizations to launch sites and bring local news and information to communities that lack adequate news media and online local information. For each of the sites launched via Patch.org,

Google introduced a new security feature for Gmail today. It notifies the user when a suspicious log-in activity is detected on their account. This notification will come in the form of a message saying ""Warning: We believe your account was last accessed from" along with the geographic region that Google can best associate with the access. Engineering Director Pavni Diwanji explains on the Gmail Blog: To determine when to display this message,

by Mike Krumboltz On Tuesday morning, a beaming President Obama signed the health care bill into law. "It is the law of the land," he declared. But the president's political rivals aren't giving up . Republican senators, led by Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, are putting forward several " headline grabbing " amendments in an effort to slow or even stop the law from taking effect. The New York Times explains that "senators are permitted to offer an unlimited number of amendments.

A company that has over 40 million domain names under its management - and is perhaps better known for controversial ads featuring busty women - has effectively followed Google's lead in China. GoDaddy will stop registering domain names in the country. Ellen Nakashima reported this afternoon that GoDaddy's taken this step "in response to intrusive new government rules that require applicants to provide extensive personal data, including photographs of themselves. . . .

Back in November, the ever-popular Justin Bieber was scheduled to have an autograph signing in a Long Island mall. It didn't quite go as planned, and they got about three times as many people to show up as expected, and this created what authorities found to be an unsafe environment. The interesting part was that a record label exec, who was involved in the event's organization, was arrested for not tweeting, upon police orders to do so (an apparent crowd control effort).