According to CNet…

Google is planning a partner forum for about 400 people, including bloggers and journalists from major media outlets, and is prohibiting participants from writing about it, according to a search engine industry expert.

I’ll donate an extra $100 to the Katrina efforts if there isn’t a single leak from this event.

Over at the AJ blog comes news of a new feature added to Ask.com’s Smart Answers; advanced shopping features with Gifts.com.

Rather than using price and product features as the primary purchasing criteria, this feature enables users to intuitively search for gifts using a wide range of personal criteria, including price, gift occasion, recipient interests, age and gender. In response, we’ll provide a range of gift ideas, from consumer electronics to travel adventures and spa getaways.

Mark Cuban posts his (biased) review of Google Blog Search and explains how IceRocket can out-manoeuvre the giant.

Google is fast. But it becomes very slow when you have to go to jump between their front page advanced search page in order to date delimit your search.

Google doesnt support Topics/Tags. Which means that when you do a search for a keyword and it returns 3k results today, well that same search might return 33k results next year at this time. Google has some nice search delimiters, but self inclusion in a topic by the author is probably the best.

Looks like Google is putting aside some money for a “rainy day”.

Google has raised $4.18 billion in a secondary offering, as investors try to add to their holdings of a stock that has more than tripled in value since the company’s initial offering a year ago.

Google’s follow-on offering on Wednesday, in which shares were priced at $295 each, was completed less than one month after Google filed to sell 14.159 million shares, a number that matches the digits of the mathematical term pi with the initial 3 removed.

Bloomberg has an insider, “familiar” with the goings-on at AOL, tell them that the company may switch their search results from Google to MSN.

If true, this would be certainly allow Microsoft the chance to finally edge up their market share, while at the same time reducing Google’s.

“Google and AOL have a healthy global partnership and AOL remains a valued partner,” Google spokesman Michael Mayzel said.

That reminds me of a college AD issuing a statement that their 0-11 football coach, has their complete support. Usually it’s an empty statement.

I think a Microsoft/AOL partnership has a high likelihood of happening, especially as Microsoft is rumored to be considering taking a stake in AOL.

Over at MarketingVOX you’ll find news that television network executives are using blogs to promote their shows.

VH1, TBS, and several PBS affiliates have promoted their shows via the BlogAds ad network. TBS has advertised “The Real Gilligan’s Island,” “Sex and the City,” and “Minding the Store,” on entertainment-related blogs; PBS has promoted documentaries about Robert F. Kennedy, Fidel Castro, and sex researcher Michael Kinsey.

Don’t you get the sense that blogs are on the “starting blocks” just ready for someone to fire the start gun? If someone can figure out a concrete way to monetize blogs, it could be the next “search”.

Don’t think this is real, do you?

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – September 15, 2005 – Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) announced today its plans to enter the lucrative adult content market with a new search engine that will be kept separate from its main line of search services.