Wikipedia has introduced a special search feature that behaves pretty much like Google Suggest - you get suggestions in a drop down as you begin typing characters.

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Yahoo! is now displaying pictures from Facebook profiles next to search results just the way Google shows image thumbnails in search pages.

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What do search engines do when they detect duplicate content at multiple places ?
Brian Brown says - "Rather than penalizing sites or Web pages, the search engines filter out those pages that they consider to be duplications, placing them further back within the search results. If the pages you want to show up first don’t [...]

Most experts believe that linking to other high quality and authority websites from your content helps in improving your own rank in search engines.
But how can spreading link love improve your website ? Justilien Gaspard explains it best on SEW:
"When a search engine discovers a page pointing users in the direction of more useful [...]

Last Friday, I attended a live chat session with the webmaster team at Google and it was a good learning experience. They had a Q&A session where you could type in doubts and within minutes, a member of the Google webmaster group would respond.

In case you missed that event, here’s a summary of the important points discussed in the Q&A - there was no option to record the audio or the slides. Here is Part I, you can read Part II here which is about web design, duplicate content and re-inclusion requests.

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This is Part II of Google Webmaster Chat. You may also want to read Part I.
Web Design – CSS, Javascript, Hyperlinks
1. Googlebot does not ignore all Javascript code on web pages. So if you are trying to keep some text, image or hyperlink out of Googlebot’s eye through the use of Javacript, that may fail [...]

Clipmarks is a wonderful web clipping tool that lets you quickly save specific pieces of any web page online. Your clips are also indexed by Google and other search engines.

When people share content from your website onto Clipmarks, you get some extra visitors but that could also hurt the rankings of your website or blog in Google.

That’s because Clipmarks doesn’t link to the original story and Google can assume that Clipmarks is the original owner of the content that is actually written by you.

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Q: What are the benefits of submitting a sitemap to Google Webmaster dashboard if your website is already crawled  well by Google? In other words, what are we missing out if we don’t submit a  sitemap?
Google: By submitting a Sitemap we see which URLs have been added and changed.  We can crawl those earlier [...]

Google is now playing video commercials on their homepage.

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Relevant Outbound links to authority / quality websites on your blog / website can boost your organic rankings in Google and other search engines.