In case you haven't noticed by now, Google has gotten bigger. The homepage and search results pages now have a bigger searchbox, complete with a bigger font when you type in a query.

"Although this is a very simple idea and an even simpler change, we're excited about it — because it symbolizes our focus on search and because it makes our clean, minimalist homepage even easier and more fun to use," says Marissa Mayer, Vice President, Search Products & User Experience at Google.

Besides the larger font in the search box, the text for the suggestions below is larger as well. Here is a look at the difference between the old Google and the new Google:

"Over the past 11 years, we've made a number of changes to our homepage. Some are small and some are large," says Mayer. "In this case, it's a small change that makes search more prominent."

"Google has always been first and foremost about search, and we're committed to building and powering the best search on the web — now available through a supersized search box," she adds.

The only reason we're discussing the fact that Google has gotten bigger with regards to design elements, is really because Google is so big in terms of search market share and just the daily lives of many, many users. And hey, this is the search industry we're covering.

Google announced plans to give AdSense publishers a new way to generate revenue by allowing multiple Google-certified ad networks to compete for display ad space on their sites. This means that AdWords advertisers may end up having to pay more competitively, while AdSense publishers could reap the benefits.
Google explains the concept in the following video:

"You may remember that we began to accept display ads served from qualified third-party vendors over a year ago, which helped increase the number of display ads competing on AdSense publisher sites," says Google Business Product Manager Sean Harvey. "With this new change, participating ad networks can also bid in our auction to appear on AdSense sites. This new capability will help you generate the most profit for every ad that appears on your site, whether the ads come from AdWords advertisers or Google-certified ad networks."

The networks themselves are ad agencies and companies that partner with advertisers and publishers to buy and sell ads on sites they don't own. AdSense publishers will now be able to allow advertisers from these networks to compete directly with AdWords advertisers for their ad space. The ad networks:

- Connect advertisers with publishers

- Provide access to additional inventory not currently available with AdWords

- Adhere to Google's standards for user privacy, ad quality and speed

Reporting and payments will still run through AdSense as always, and available ad formats will remain the same as they have been for AdWords. Publishers will still have control over which networks can show ads on their pages, and they can choose to opt out of receiving ads from specific networks, or all networks.

Right now, the feature is only available to publishers in North America and Europe, but Google plans to rolling out to more places in the future.

How this will affect your business?

Google has introduced a set of new ad templates for its Display Ad Builder tool. The templates, which Google refers to as "elegant" reside in the "general" category.

"These templates have ready-made buttons and backgrounds that give each ad a cohesive look and feel," says Dan Friedman of Google's Inside AdWords Crew. "More specifically, the backgrounds use subtle gradients and the new buttons have unique shapes, icons and color treatments. The goal of these ads is to make it as easy as possible to create high-quality ads in a matter of seconds without having to use complex graphics software."

With some of the new templates, advertisers need only upload their product image and write some text, and the template pretty much takes care of itself. For the design-impaired, it's a good way to easily create a decent looking ad.

In addition, most of them seem to cater to "clickiness," meaning they make it easy for a call to action to inspire a click. aka. You can make money online.

To use the templates, just click Display Ad Builder on the Create an Ad page in AdWords. Google Display Ads features over 90 different templates. Google offers a display ads tutorial here.

Probably the most important step in getting your site found in a search engine is the one in which the search engine crawls it. There are things that can be done and things that can be avoided to make this process as painless as possible for the search engine, which will in turn, make it as painless as possible for the webmaster.

Since Google dominates the search market share by such a large market share, it is always a good idea to listen to what they have to say about such matters. So when they post a presentation with tips on optimizing crawling and indexing, you'll probably want to pay attention.

Google has done just that, highlighting things to stay away from, and things you can do to enhance your site's crawlability. Here is that presentation with specific examples of URLs.

"The Internet is a big place; new content is being created all the time," says Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Susan Moskwa. "Google has a finite number of resources, so when faced with the nearly-infinite quantity of content that's available online, Googlebot is only able to find and crawl a percentage of that content. Then, of the content we've crawled, we're only able to index a portion."

"URLs are like the bridges between your website and a search engine's crawler: crawlers need to be able to find and cross those bridges (i.e., find and crawl your URLs) in order to get to your site's content," continues Moskwa. "If your URLs are complicated or redundant, crawlers are going to spend time tracing and retracing their steps; if your URLs are organized and lead directly to distinct content, crawlers can spend their time accessing your content rather than crawling through empty pages, or crawling the same content over and over via different URLs."

If you want to get crawled faster by Google, you should remove user-specific details from URLs. Specifics of this can be viewed in the slideshow. Basically, URL parameters that don't change the content of the page, should be removed and put into a cookie. This will reduce the number of URLs that point to the same content, and speed up crawling.

Google says infinite spaces are a waste of time and bandwidth for all, which is why you should consider taking action when you have calendars that link to infinite numbers of past/future dates with unique URLs, or other paginated data.

Tell Google to ignore pages it can't crawl. This includes things like log-in pages, contact forms, shopping carts, and other pages that require users to perform actions that crawlers can't perform themselves. You can do this with the robots.txt file.

Finally, avoid duplicate content when possible. Google likes to have one URL for each piece of content. They do recognize that this is not always possible though (because of content management systems and what have you), which is why the canonical link element exists to let you specify the preferred URL for a particular piece of content.

Google released its second quarter earnings report this afternoon, and the search giant met and beat most analysts' written estimates. Its bottom line in terms of profit looked especially good.

The consensus was that Google would post $4.05 billion in net revenue. It managed $4.07 billion, instead. Then the company established a more impressive contrast when it came to earnings per share - $5.35 versus $5.05 - although Henry Blodget wrote, "the EPS upside appears to have come from a lower-than-expected tax rate."

As for net profit, Google leapt from $1.25 billion for the second quarter of last year to $1.48 billion, a jump of 18.4 percent. That doesn't look to be a result of being tentative, as the official report announced, "We expect to continue to make significant capital expenditures."

Eric Schmidt also stated, "Google had a very good quarter, especially given the continued macro-economic downturn. While most of the world's largest economies shrank, Google's year-over-year revenues were up 3%. These results highlight the enduring strength of our business model and our responsible efforts to manage expenses in a way that puts us in a good position for the economic upturn, when it occurs."

Still, Google's down by 2.62 percent in after-hours trading. It may be that some people are doing a little profit-taking, or there could be another problem plaguing the company. Dan Frommer wrote, "CNBC mistakenly reported Google's net sales as $3.07 billion before correcting themselves a moment later."

One last thing worth noting: as of June 30th, Google employed 378 fewer full-time employees than it did on March 31st, so some significant cutting has taken place.

Microsoft's Bing accounted for 5.25 percent of all U.S. searches for the month of June, according to the latest data from Hitwise.

Google continued to hold on to its dominant position growing 7 percent year-over- year capturing 74.04 percent of the U.S. search market for the month.

Yahoo landed in the second position with 16.19 percent of the search market, but saw its growth drop 17 percent year-over-year, while Ask received 3.15 percent of searches with its growth slipping 22 percent year-over-year.

The remaining 48 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.36 percent of U.S. searches.

Looking at the weekly percentage of U.S. searches for Bing, it has grown at an average weekly rate of 25 percent for the month of June, Adding in Live.com and MSN Search along with Bing, the combined search engine have grown at an average of 16 percent during the month. Bing grew faster than the three other top search engines for the month.

The length of search queries has increased over the past year. Longer search queries, averaging five to more than eight words in length, increased 8 percent between June 2008 and June 2009. Searches of eight or more words increased 16 percent. The same time period showed that shorter queries - those averaging one to four words long - have decreased 2 percent. Searches of two words accounted for the majority of searches, making up 22.88 percent of all queries.

Search engines continue to be the most popular way Internet users navigate to key industry categories. Comparing June 2009 with June 2008, business and finance, entertainment, online video and sports categories showed double-digit increases in their share of traffic coming directly from search engines.

Google and Bing have both talked about site architecture issues lately on their blogs. Site architecture is an important part of search engine optimization, and crucial to ranking.

"You can have great content and a plethora of high quality inbound links from authority sites, but if your site’s structure is flawed or broken, then it will still not achieve the optimal page rank you desire from search engines," says Rick DeJarnette of Bing Webmaster Center.

If you have time, and site architecture is not your strong suit, I would suggest reading both Microsoft's post and Google's, but to sum them up, here a few tips from each of them.

Bing's Tips

1. Use descriptive file and directory names

2. Limit directory depth

3. Limit physical page file size

4. Externalize on-page Javascript and CSS code

5. Use 301 redirects for moved pages

6. Avoid JavaScript or meta refresh redirects

7. Implement custom 404 pages

Google's Tips

Google starts out by talking about some site architecture myths, and also shares a couple slideshows (they talked about the topic at SMX London).

Finally, they offer these tips:

1. Check that your robots.txt file has the correct status code and isn't returning an error

2. Keep in mind some best practices when moving to a new site and the new "Change of address" feature recently added to Webmaster Tools.

3. Review the settings of the robots.txt file to make sure no pages -- particularly those rewritten and/or dynamic -- are blocked inappropriately.

4. Make good use of the rel="canonical" attribute to reduce the indexing of duplicate content on your domain.

As I said, Google and Microsoft both have plenty more to say on the topic in their respective posts. The Bing post is actually the third installment in a series.

Last year, Google began crawling and indexing Flash content, but now Google has announced that it can also index external resource loading. In other words, Google can index external content that loads within an SWF file, and associate it with that file, so that it will appear in search results.

For example, a site that loads something like this in Flash:

..might appear in a Google SERP like this:

This is new to Google's Flash-crawling abilities. On Google's Webmaster Central Blog, Software Engineer Janis Stipins breaks down just what Google can do when it encounters SWF files:

- Index textual content displayed as a user interacts with the file. We click buttons and enter input, just like a user would.

- Discover links within Flash files.

- Load external resources and associate the content with the parent file.

- Support common JavaScript techniques for embedding Flash, such as SWFObject and SWFObject2.

- Index sites scripted with AS1, AS2, and AS3 even if the ActionScript is obfuscated.

With regards to AS3, Stipins says, "The ActionScript version isn't particularly relevant in our Indexing process, so we support older versions of AS in addition to the latest."

Webmasters who have SWF files on the web that don't want them or any of their external resources crawled, can take care of this with their robots.txt file.

Google as a social network has been getting a bit more play recently as they have made certain moves like giving users the ability to create vanity URLs for their profiles.

One wild card that Google has that trumps all other social networks is that it is the largest brand on the web. Furthermore, it is the largest search engine.

Today Google announced that Google profiles will start being included at the bottom of search results pages where applicable. And suddenly, a lot of people that were just using Google the search engine may realize that that they're already using Google the social network. Those with accounts may or may not see their own profiles show up in ego searches, and those without a counts may notice profiles they didn't know existed and be influenced to start one.

Those without accounts can simply google " me " and the top result is a promoted spot by Google leading to Google account profile setup.

This could potentially even help improve reputation management at least to some small degree. "When searching for yourself to see what others would find, results can be varied and aren't always what you want people to see — whether it's someone else with your name, or the finishing time from that 5K you ran back in 2002. We want to make that better and give you more of a voice," says Google's Brian Stoler.

Users who want to appear on SERPs will probably want to fill out their profiles if they have not already done so. The vanity URL is certainly an option as well, though it is unclear as to whether or not using this has any influence on showing up in the SERPs. There is room for 4 profiles on any given SERP.