We live in an era that’s all about speed – where getting jobs done yesterday just isn’t fast enough, where our smartphones could outdo the full computer systems of the year 2000, and where teenagers make a face if any electronic process gives them a half-second delay. It may seem silly to care so much about being truly instantaneous, but it’s a concern that’s shared in the business world; if you’re getting delayed for three or four seconds a hundred times during your work day, you’ll start to see a visible impact on your productivity. For just that reason, Gmail is introducing a speedy new feature that makes the process of sending mail even faster

Google is now showing Instant Previews — small thumbnails that show when a user mouses over an ad — for all search ads, presumably helping to qualify consumers before they actually click-through on an ad. The feature has been in testing for at least a week or so. The company is touting..

Earlier this month we asked you to take two polls in one post…

How badly does Yahoo want to skip ahead to the forefront of media and social check-ins? Badly enough to spend a reported $20 to $30 million to buy TV check-in service IntoNow, which launched its iPhone-based service just 12 weeks ago. IntoNow’s main “secret sauce” is the..

While Google launched their new Offers service last week – a coupon product similar to Groupon, the company that turned down a $6 billion offer – Groupon reached out and hired Margo Georgiadis, the VP of Global Sales Operations at Google, as their new COO. Groupon reported Georgiadis “drove sales operations across regions and channels and the global technology teams that commercialize Google’s products such as AdWords, AdSense and display among advertisers and publishers

Two of the biggest names in search are on the 2011 TIME 100 — the magazine’s choices for the most influential people in the world: Google CEO Larry Page and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. In the short Zuckerberg essay, April Capone – the mayor of East Haven, Conn., tells the…

Wael Ghonim, the Google Middle East employee who was detained during the revolt in Egypt announced he will be taking a long-term leave of absence from the company to start a non-governmental organization in Egypt, Wired reported. Ghonim became a rallying point during the protests in Tahir Square after he was detained , and his subsequent release foreshadowed the stepping down of the despotic Egyptian ruler Hosni Mubarak. Click to read the rest of this post…

Posted by randfish Today I want to share an incredibly simple yet massively powerful process for building search-optimized, “great content.” There’s no fancy tricks and nothing propetiary about the approach, but it is rare indeed to find an organization that follows these steps and hence, it’s a way to potentially differentiate and build a competitive advantage. Step 1: Build a Survey No one knows what searchers want better than the searchers themselves, so let’s hear what they have to say

Here’s a roundup of today’s other search news and headlines from around the web, sorted by category.

As expected, the Groupon Google Clone…