Following its successful acquisition of Double Click, Google is selling the search engine marketing site of Double Click to avoid conflict of interest.

If a blog, in the official Google blog, it says:

It’s clear to us that we do not want to be in the search engine marketing business. Maintaining objectivity in both search and advertising is paramount to Google’s mission and core to the trust we ask from our users. For this reason, we plan to sell the Performics search marketing business to a third party. We believe this will allow us to maintain objectivity and the search marketing business to continue to grow and innovate and serve its customers.

Google went on further to say it has not yet found a buyer for the Performic.

Just as dust was settling on last Google PR update (11/01/2008), another PR update happened on the 29th of February 2008, 1 month and 18 days or so apart, this keeps the Google PR update unpredictability alive and well. The update before that of 11/012008 took well over 3 months to happen.

There was nothing spectacular about the February 08 update, other than to reinforce the widely know Google’s policy of punishing sites that sell or buy text link especially web directories, most sub pages from web directories have PR removed from them so that they cannot pass PR to sites listed in them.

Google announce the released of Google Sites, an add on to Google Apps, which allows and individual or an entire team to build websites that incorporates a variety of information in one place, including videos, calendars, presentations, attachments, and gadgets.

Once the website is built, you can easily share it for viewing or editing with a small group, your entire organisation, or the whole world.

This new Google Apps add on is available to both free and premium users. The new service was spawned from the Google-acquired JotSpot suite. Some demo Google Sites follows:

* Company intranet — http://sites.google.com/a/organic-city.com/intranet/Home
* Team project — http://sites.google.com/a/altostrat.com/project-eggplant/Home
* Employee profile — http://sites.google.com/a/altostrat.com/jkraus/Home
* Classroom — http://sites.google.com/a/googleclassrooms.org/mrs-richau/Home
* Student club — http://sites.google.com/a/googleuniversity.org/ski-club/Home

A Google PageRank update which seem to have started sometime last week stabilises when all Google data centres seem to have synchronised by 11 of January 2008. Website owners and webmaster started seeing changes in their internal pages early last week, this reports were not seen as a precursor to a full PR update initially, but as more and more webmaster reported changes in their website internal pages, the Google PR watching community were on full alert as the reported changes in internal pages was seen as evidence of an imminent PR update; they were not disappointed, full PR update was visible all Google tool bar equipped browser by 11^th of January.

This PR update was a bit of a surprise, website owners were not expecting PR update so early in 2008.

According to Patrick Altoft of Blog Storm a reliable Google source leaked part of the Google algorithm code responsible for the Google PR update of a few days ago to Patrick. The code according to Patrick goes as follows:

$spammers=file_get_contents("http://www.45n5.com/top100/");
$pos = strpos($spammers, $domain);
if ($pos === false) {
$newpagerank=rand(0, 10);
} else {
$newpagerank=rand(0, $pagerank);
}

I don't know how reliable Patrick's source... the leaked code is reminicent of the Hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy, where the meaning of the univers and everything in it was found to be 42.