In the wake of the Bing-Facebook press event, major announcements have been made by the companies; some that will be going into effect almost immediately and some that will start to happen in the coming weeks and months.

The Google Webmaster Central Blog announced they have updated the link reports within Google Webmaster Tools. The new reports show you three things in general: The domains linking most to your site The pages on your site with the most links A sampling of the anchor text external sites are using when they link to your site You can *** Read the full post by clicking on the headline above ***

U.S. Internet advertisers spent $12.1 billion in the first half of this year — a new half-year record, and the highest second-quarter revenue on record, the Interactive Advertising Bureau reported yesterday. That figure is 11.3 percent higher than the first half of 2009.

comScore’s September U.S. search market share numbers are out . Google, which has dropped share or remained steady pretty much for the last year, made some slight gains

Looking for a little traction in China, Microsoft has partnered with the country’s largest online retailer, Taobao.com (whose parent company is Alibaba Group, owners of Yahoo China). The site, Etao, has launched in a public beta version and is a shopping search engine that will display results on a range of categories and will be powered by Bing

Yesterday Sony held a press event to unveil their new line up of Google TV products. As has been previously mentioned these Internet ready devices will be powered by Google’s open source browser, Chrome and will allow for search through your DVR, TV and the web. The Sony models will be available for the holiday season; they are currently available for pre-order on SonyStyle.com , they’ll be in Sony Style stores by the weekend, and at Best Buys soon after that.

With the November mid-term elections just a few weeks away in the U.S., one website is urging its readers to manipulate Google’s organic search results in an effort to lead Democrats to victory. Chris Bowers of The Daily Kos calls the practice ” Grassroots SEO ,” but it’s basically Google bombing, or link bombing. The goal of a link bomb is for many websites or blogs to work together to influence the rankings (popularity) of certain pages in the search engine results pages (SERPs), mainly on Google, but also in other search engines like Bing and Yahoo.

The Pearlfinders U.S. Index tracks topics from over 4,000 conversations with senior marketing executives in the US per year, aggregating their opinion by trend and topic. Of the 224 digital-specific briefs profiled in Q3, nearly a third of interviewees were looking at their digital media support this quarter.

Bloomberg broke the news that one of the most respected and visible Google personalities, Marissa Mayer, is switching roles in the company. She will no longer be Google’s vice president of search products, instead she is moving into overseeing location..

Time? Money?