About a month ago, Google Image Search started displaying its results a little differently; the makeover yielded a cleaner, but less informative, look. There was a low-level outcry from users, and now things are back to the way they were. That’s all good and well, and an important feature seems to have made it through the shuffle intact.

Here’s a surefire way of ensuring your site won’t make it to the Digg social news frontpage:

Customer satisfaction with the e-commerce industry has improved for the second year in a row and is close to an all time high, according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index, released today by the University of Michigan with e-commerce partner ForeSee Results.

The e-commerce industry received a score of 80.0 on ACSI’s 100-point scale, almost breaking its previous record in 2003 with a score of 80.8.

The e-commerce sector continues to do well in terms of satisfying customers and surpasses the national ACSI aggregate score (74.9) by 7 percent.

Compete announced today that they rolled out some enhancements to the Compete.com site. Compete is now a site I’m visiting more often to research web publishers and get a different look at data instead of just using Alexa.

There’s been a lot of lofty rhetoric effluviating (CAUTION: made-up word) out of Mountain View lately. Vinton Cerf and Eric Schmidt seem to agree that human nature, just like on Earth, makes for rotten digital societies – which is why Larry Page is working on a brain-based algorithm to fix it.

Microsoft has set foot in the social media sector with MSN Reporter which is a Digg style social news site. According to LiveSide, it was created by the Dutch MSN team and has been avialable in beta since October 2006.

On the whole, Google’s search properties are doing well – a recent analysis showed a 24% year-over-year improvement. There’s a lot of variation among those properties, however. Google Video was the clear winner, with a gain of 545%, but Froogle, Google Alerts, and Google Local all suffered losses.

So everyone and their mother is now giving out local SEO advice about getting listed in the local search engines/internet yellow pages. Recently articles were published on Entrepreneur.com and MSNBC which both of course suggested getting listed in these local directories including Google Maps. Sound advice indeed.

Keyon Hedayati over at the Google Analytics Blog has posted about a useful option for a Google Analytics Resource: The Google Analytics Forum.

Photobucket has launched a new service that will allow its 35 million users to do video editing online with technology powered by Adobe. The Adobe Web based video remix and editing technology is currently in Beta. Users can now combine photos, videos, text, and music to create videos or mashups of content from their Photobucket albums.

I have no idea, but he’s on the speaker lineup at the EconSM (economics of social media) conference put on by Paidcontent.org, being held on April 27th in Beverly Hills.

I recently ran a post that encapsulated the most current memes on Social Media – what it is, isn’t, and what it should be.

I also made a case for why Social Media should be classified as "Social Media."

AdBrite recently introduced  their InVideo Ads. Here are some of the feartures (excerpt from their site):

* Fully customizable video player, easy-to-use, and 100% free

* Brand your videos with your own custom logo "watermark"

* "Split-screen" ads engage users without interrupting viewing experience

* Sharing features promote your site when your videos get "viral"

I can’t help but think this is a silly discussion, like an argument about whether or not Lois Lane could really have Superman’s baby, but I’m diving in anyway to wrap my head around it and, in the process, take you with me.

HGTV, the home and garden cable channel owned by Scripps Networks has launched a social network called Rate My Room. The new social community can be seen at HGTV.com.

What are searchers thinking when they stare down a list of search results? Actually, the first thing to keep in mind is that searchers don’t stare at search results. They don’t even read them. They scan them. They quickly skim the page hunting for the word they typed into the search box, along with a few other words they’re thinking but didn’t bother typing.

Over the past few days I’ve been receiving a wave of blog spam from SEO lab – all of it to blogspot accounts – and all built around hyphenated money keywords ending in a seemingly random 2 or 3 alphanumeric characters.

For example:

college-loans-zet.blogspot.com
free-slots-lol.blogspot.com
flexeril-huf.blogspot.com

The challenge of finding quality job recruits has even hit Google, long a highly coveted destination for technology graduates. Google is even having to do some legwork these days.

Although it’s John Edwards who has made recent news over his choice of bloggers, it looks like Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton have been the ones making better use of social media.

For children ages 6-11 the most common online activity is playing games with 48 percent saying they had done so at least once in the last month according to new data from Experian Simmons. While that is not a major revelation what is surprising is that 21 percent said they had used the Internet to do homework and research.

Working with TV networks to get their content on YouTube has been harder for Google to figure out than any technical challenge it might face.

The New York Post reports that Getty Images is considering a purchase of digital image rival Jupitermedia Corp.  The purchase price would likely be an amount substantially higher than Jupitermedia’s current stock price of around $8 per share.

Over the last few years Jupitermedia has become a major player in online imaging by acquiring more than 25 online subscription image sites including Comstock and Photos.com.

The revelation that recordings by late British concert pianist Joyce Hatto are actually the works of other performers came to light only after a music critic popped one of her CDs into an iTunes-equipped computer.

Just saw on Twitter that Emily Chang had posted about RSS feeds for archiving your own personal history.