Search behemoth Google has acquired DoubleClick for $3.1 billion, following a bidding war with Microsoft, AOL and (allegedly) Yahoo!. The sale gives Google access to DoubleClick’s online advertising software and, crucially, its relationships with publishers, advertisers and ad agencies, including MySpace and The Wall Street Journal.

Google’s winning bid is almost three times the amount DoubleClick fetched when it went private in 2005 for $1.1 billion.

After over thirty years in private beta, Google’s Gmail is finally available to the general public. It’s a pretty good offering too: Gmail’s spam protection is pretty robust, and the 2.6gb of storage is more generous than accounts offered by Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail.

You can sign-up for a Gmail account here.

He-of-many-Riks Lomas has launched Microsummaries.org, an online resource dedicated to the Microsummaries feature in Firefox 2.

Microsummaries - next big thing or white elephant?

More information at:

http://wiki.mozilla.org/Microsummaries
http://wiki.mozilla.org/Microsummaries/Using

Google have launched Google Docs, yet another online application. Merging Google Spreadsheets with Docs (originally Writely, purchased by Google earlier this year), the service is being billed as “Google Docs & Spreadsheets”. Not the most imaginative of titles, but Google Office is sure to be upon us within the next twelve months.

I can’t help but wonder: is there really any demand for this? If you’re not interested in or and can’t afford to use Microsoft Office, there are numerous options available, including the very capable OpenOffice.

Google appear hell-bent on taking over the world: they know what you search for, they’d like to listen to your conversations, control your email, offer maps and satellite photography, productivity tools…. a digital Kim Jong il?

Google seem set to purchase video sharing site YouTube in a staggering $1.6 billion deal, if rumours are to be believed. Google’s own video service has long played second-fiddle to YouTube, which is far and away the most popular video site on the ‘net; as Google like to dominate every market they operate in, it’s little surprise that they now have YouTube in their sites.

Google have launched Google Image Labeler, a “game” created to help improve the quality of search results returned by Google Images.

It’s an intriguing concept: upon login, players are randomly paired and given 90 seconds in which to suggest keywords for a series of images. Points are scored when users suggest the same word.

Google’s objective is to use the data generated by this game to improve their search technology using human intelligence. Full credit to them: they’ve conjured up a strangely compelling game which will encourage an army of people to provide this valuable information for free!

Goggles is a fun flight simulator game that uses graphical data from Google Maps. A great idea from Mark Caswell-Daniels.

SitePoint have published “The Ultimate SEO Guide” - a comprehensive article covering the fundamentals of search engine optimisation, written by Shirley Kaiser.

The guide includes valuable, common-sense strategies for improving traffic and search engine rankings. From site build guidelines to copy suggestions, the article provides a thorough grounding in the basic principles of SEO.

It’s well worth a read if you’re new to SEO: it’s a little light on SEM (search engine marketing) and details on paid-for search engine rankings, but otherwise it comes highly recommended.

Yahoo! have launched a radical overhaul of their site this week. The emphasis seems to be on usability and speed of navigation: the homepage still features a large amount of information, but it now appears in a more user-friendly, aesthetically pleasing format.

Disappointingly, the homepage does not validate, but it functions very well with no page styling. I appreciate that Yahoo! are at the mercy of advertisers, and their site needs to display a tremendous quantity of information, but one would hope they’d take a positive lead with accessibility and W3C standards.

New features of the Yahoo! site include:

• Searching can now be narrowed to a specific area by clicking on tabs for images, video, audio etc. (similar to Google’s homepage which shows images, Google Groups, Froogle and so on).
• Favourite items, information and searches can be stored in the navigation, accompanied by reasonably pleasing little icons.
• A “Yahoo! Personal Assistant” can provide you with a quick, at-a-glance view of what’s happening in your (Yahoo!-orientated) world.