Should the death of print ever occur, Google doesn't want to be stuck holding the murder weapon.  Eric Schmidt has stated that "it's a huge moral imperative to help here" in reference to the newspaper industry.

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The United States remains the leader in science and technology globally, despite perceptions that the country is losing its competitive edge, according to a new report released today.

According to the RAND Corporation, a non-profit based in Santa Monica, the United Sates accounts for 40 percent of the total world's spending on scientific research and development, employs 70 percent of the globe's Nobel Prize winners and is home to three-quarters of the world's top 40 universities.

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Earlier this year, I wrote about FriendFeed's new search feature and how it was a powerful tool for finding conversations about your brand. I've used the site a little more, and I know it's a great way to find user-generated content as well. Now, Steve Rubel is weighing in on the discussion over the power of FriendFeed's search, saying it could disrupt traditional search methods.

Rubel suggests that the real power lies in searching among a network of trusted friends. He says there will be a whole advertising strategy built around it, which he dubs social contextual search advertising. Rubel thinks this is where Facebook and Google are headed as well.

Really, all FriendFeed needs to do is sell contextual ads for this to happen. But FriendFeed is a long way off from disrupting search or changing search ad models. And is that the true mission of the social aggregator?

One of the best things about FriendFeed and all social sites is discovery of new things. It's difficult to search for things you're not aware of, making discovery more powerful than search, in my opinion.

Even so, FriendFeed needs to figure out ways to help its users manage all the noise. When you're tracking a bunch of people who are all sending their blogs, social bookmarking votes, Tweets, etc. to FriendFeed, it gets a bit overwhelming. The new "rooms" that have been created are helpful and so is the hide feature, but tagging friends would be even better.

Plus, FriendFeed needs to watch the mobile space carefully. The attention economy will be streamlined even further and all the noise will be a distraction.

Finally, sites like FriendFeed and Twitter are all primarily used by internet marketers, bloggers, web developers, and other tech power users. Search appeals to the masses for obvious reasons, but social media sites have yet to prove staying power (Friendster, anyone?).

What do you think the future of search and social media are? Will social media overtake search or is Google here to stay? Let it fly in the comments.

Yahoo! is planning to combine their AMP and Right Media ad management platforms, reports Zachary Rodgers over at ClickZ. The question is when, and the answer is vague at best.

The AMP platform is expected to launch in Q3 but only to newspaper consortium partners. But it could take longer to integrate Yahoo!'s BlueLithium Network and the Yahoo! Publisher Network.

Still, display advertising is where Yahoo really shines over Google. Despite its recent DoubleClick acquisition, display ads aren't something Google really "gets" yet.

Read Zachary Rodgers full post on Yahoo's ad management integration plans on ClickZ.

Just because a social network is popular doesn't mean it's so easy to monetize, as News Corp. found out after its purchase of MySpace. Analysts have tried to extend MySpace's trouble to other social networks while balking at Facebook's $15 billion valuation. But after speaking with Facebook's Kent Schoen about the social network's fairly precise ad targeting, skeptics could be won over.

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The Mozilla Foundation will shoot for a world record when they make their latest browser, Firefox 3, available for download.

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Posted by great scott!

During SMX Advanced last week, we had the chance to invite several awesome search industry personalities to our booth and interview them.  We'll be bringing these interviews to you over the next couple of weeks. 

For the first installment of the SMX Advanced Whiteboard Interviews, Rand talks with Social Media Rockstar, Brent Csutoras, about his recent post on Shoemoney.com. Brent discusses why people need to be careful about what trade secrets they reveal on blogs and during conferences as it can have a profound effect on their own reputation and the reputation of the industry as a whole.




Whiteboard Interviews - Shut The #&@$ Up!! w/ Brent Csutoras from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

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It's often assumed that new sites haven't earned enough trust in Google to pass real value. But if you flatly skip over links from new sites, you're losing out on immense opportunities. In today's Link Building column, "Think Links from New Sites Have Little Value? Think Again," Justilien Gaspard advises link builders to think of it as investing in the stock market by looking for undervalued, or unnoticed, sites that have a high likelihood of rising in popularity.

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It's an interesting marketing concept, but how do the Live Search results measure up to Google, the de-facto search engine standard? In today's Building Brand Equity column, "Live Search Cashback vs. Google: A Case Study," Erik Qualman performs a test of product-based queries on each finds the results promising, but mixed.

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I never really thought about it, but it seems that you can fake PageRanks.  Now why would you want to do that?  I can think of many different reasons but here is one of the most pressing ones.

I am sure that you have heard of people buying up domains and the reselling them for greater value later on down the road.  These people are speculators, always on the look out for potential money makers.  It is actually brilliant but not always a good thing for those who would need the domains later on.

Anyhow, one of the most important factors that domain buyers take into consideration is the current PageRank of the domain.  If you have ever tried buying an existing domain, you would understand that one of the main reasons you would want to do so is that the PR is already decent.  It would save you months of work and money as opposed to starting from scratch.

It makes perfect sense – unless the PR is fake.  Yup, there are ways and means by which people can make the PR look good when in reality, there is no PR.  Since that is not a matter of importance to us – creating fake PR – let’s not dwell on it.  Instead, let us see how we can determine if the PR is legit.

I do not have much experience in this matter but I ran across a Fake PageRank checker tool.  The URL is http://www.seologs.com/pr-check/pagerank.html.  You can try it out yourself.

Do you know of any other way to determine the legitimacy of PR?