Google, using its recently acquired Double Click, has crowned Facebook as the king of websites garnering approximately 570 billion page views per month, more than eight times as many pages viewed at Yahoo.com, coming in second place with 490 million visitors per month.

Facebook receives criticism about is privacy settings though they are continuously making changes according to user feedback received. Facebook has stressed that users are not abandoning the social networking services despite this and from these figures, it looks like that’s the case.

Though critics have continued to press Facebook to make all information private by default, Facebook says that the essence of a social networking site is to share. It’s true, you know. Why would anyone want to put up all the information online only to keep them private?

After so many years that AdSense has been in the market, Google finally seems it fit to reveal publisher revenue share in a long blog post on the official Google AdSense blog.

I guess it is because of the rife speculation that Google can give us whatever they like or perhaps it is because of the many complaints that seem to grow by the day that publisher revenues have continued to drop from one month to another. Many of my friends tell me so, and I am experiencing it myself.

For the sake of transparency, Google has revealed that that are sharing 68% of the revenue with publishers of AdSense for content and 51% for AdSense for search.

Don’t ask if these are fair rates or if they are industry standards. Heck, Google made the industry and like I mentioned earlier, they can give us whatever they like and if we want to earn from the program at all, we will have to take it. Some people just feel blessed that AdSense is here at all.

Let’s just hope that nobody will be banned from the programme just when they are reaching the threshold to cashout!

Source: http://adsense.blogspot.com/2010/05/adsense-revenue-share.html

I use Google every day and look forward to a new doodle when there is one. Last evening, I got a surprise when Google presented us with its first ever playable doodle in the form of the Pacman game. If you grew up in my era, you would surely have wasted enough time playing the game. I sure did!

My friends were all very excited to see Pacman on Google and they sent me text messages to let me know about it although I discovered it first and even played a few rounds of the game already on my Google search page. LOL

Anyway, I think Google doodlers came up with an amazing idea to mark the 30th anniversary of creator’s Tōru Iwatani Pacman game. It’s a very simple game of eating dots and at the same time avoiding “ghosts”.

Facebook unveiled a new security feature that would require a Facebook account holder to identify their log on devices so that if a Facebook account is accessed from a device that is not on the approved list, it will trigger an alert.

The person who logs on from the unapproved device will have to answer a security question which will not be difficult to answer if he is the real account holder. Some of the questions that might get asked, besides the security question if it was provided, could be the date of birth or even to identify a friend in a photo. This could be rather tricky even for a real account holder because some people do not use their real name on Facebook.

Anyway, if you think this is feature is useful to you and could help prevent your Facebook account to be accessed by unauthorized people, you can look out for the feature under your Account Settings page.

When Google Buzz was quietly launched a few months ago within Gmail and caught all of us by surprise, many Gmail users were concerned about privacy issues. Google Buzz seems to have finally gotten it right, finally, after listening to user input across the board and now, quite a few people I know have adopted it.

My friend was pretty excited with the feature that allows users to comment on a Google Buzz by email. She said that it’s very convenient but I don’t think it’s extremely special because it would only clutter up my email inbox and sent folder, which I dislike.

Anyway, this is just one of the minor updates that Google Buzz has undergone and I believe as time goes by, there will be more changes. I don’t use Google Buzz at all because I am not comfortable with the idea of people in my contact list keeping tab of my every movement but I hope to see some significant improvements soon.

I was away from my computer the whole day yesterday and only accessed the web from my mobile phone as I was on the move. This morning, i fired up Google.com to do a search and was greeted with a new search results layout.

While everyone says this is a good improvement for Google and bringing it from merely a search engine to a search application following the heels of Yahoo!, MSN and Bing, who all already have the search navigational sidebar built into their page first before Google, I don’t think that I like the new layout very much.

Although it is said that the navigational sidebar is merely cosmetic, I do think that somehow the way the search engine works have change too. For example, I wanted to find the spelling and definition of a word and I keyed in what I wanted in the search bar like how I usually do with the “word+definition” but somehow, no matter what variation I used this morning, I somehow still couldn’t find the real spelling of the word I wanted and the definition of it.

Bah…it wasted a lot of my time. I don’t think I like the Google search so much anymore. What about you?

Experian Hitwise has released a report that “facebook” was the top organic search term in the United States in March while the term “ebay” was the top paid search term. Experian Hitwise took into account searches from the top three search engines in the United States: Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

Besides the core terms of “facebook” and “ebay”, variations of these terms from “facebook.com” to “ebay login” also came out tops in the top ten list of the most popularly searched terms in March, for paid and organic searches.

As a blogger, I touch on a lot of subjects that are related to both facebook and ebay, on different blogs, of course, and from what I can see, some of the most popular facebook related topics that people want to read about are facebook policy changes and facebook games or facebook game hacks. As for ebay, the top stories are usually rare or weird ebay auctions.