I don’t think I have ever said “google it”, but it appears enough other people have to warrant Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary adding the verb to it’s latest edition.

“Google is definitely a verb,” said Dan Reynolds, a 35-year-old salesman at YES Computers in Northampton. “Google has become like a secondary brain for a lot of people. If you want quick info on something, that’s what you do. You google it.”

Respectful of the trademark, Merriam-Webster lowercases the entry but maintains the capitalization while explaining that the verb means “to use the Google search engine” to retrieve online information.

“We’re defining a trademark as a verb, just like we did with the word xerox,” Morse said.

The Fool.com looks at other popular names that have gone on to become verbs. Xeroxed and Photoshopped are well known examples.

We reported on speculation that eBay may decide that Google Checkout is too much of a threat and use its “Safe Payments Policy” to prevent eBay sellers from using the PayPal rival.

Well, surprise! eBay has done just that, with this update to their policy:

Payment Services not permitted on eBay: AlertPay.com, anypay.com, AuctionChex.com, AuctionPix.com, BillPay.ie, ecount.com, cardserviceinternational.com, CCAvenue, ecount, e-gold, eHotPay.com, ePassporte.com, EuroGiro, FastCash.com, Google Checkout, gcash, GearPay, Goldmoney.com, graphcard.com, greenzap.com, ikobo.com, Liberty Dollars, Moneygram.com, neteller.com, Netpay.com, Nochex.com, paychest.com, payingfast.com, paypay, Postepay, Qchex.com, rupay.com, scripophily.com, sendmoneyorder.com, stamps, Stormpay, wmtransfer.com, xcoin.com

Why have a good clean fight, when you can handicap the competition instead?

Via Wingo.

The Washington Post looks at how upset customers are no longer content to tell their neighbor, they’re out to tell the world with videos and blogs.

“This has been a wake-up call for these companies,” she said. “The day where you send a little letter to the CEO is over. In the age of technology, you have to be even more careful of how you treat your customers because you don’t know where they’re going to go. Now everything’s out in the open.”

There’s no doubt that voicing your complaint via a blog, is a powerful option right now (hence companies asking us to monitor their reputation). That said, it will be interesting to see at what point we start tuning out those that complain via their blog. After all, it takes less than 5 minutes to create an anonymous blog and make-up negative stories about a company. There’s no accountability and often no clue as to the perpetrator.

Verne Kopytoff reports on a new click-fraud study released by Outsell, Inc. The study interviewed 407 online advertisers and led to an estimation that more than $800 million of clicks in 2005 were fraudulent and estimates $1.3 billion of fraud this year.

What else did the study discover?

Clicks believed by advertisers to be fraudulent: 14.6 percent

Money paid by advertisers for bogus clicks: $800 million (2005)

Advertisers who said they were victims of click fraud: 75 percent

Advertisers who said they reduced click-based advertising or plan to: 37 percent

Revenue lost by Google, Yahoo and other Web sites, as a result: $500 million

Advertisers who request refunds because of fraud: 7 percent

Average refund: $9,507

News that Google may have accidently revealed secret spam scores, has the SEO community buzzing.

Here’s a sample of what was found in one site’s Google cache info:

pacemaker-alarm-delay-in-ms-overall-sum 2341989 pacemaker-alarm-delay-in-ms-total-count 7776761 cpu-utilization 1.28 cpu-speed 2800000000 timedout-queries_total 14227 num-docinfo_total 10680907 avg-latency-ms_total 3545152552 num-docinfo_total 10680907 num-docinfo-disk_total 2200918 queries_total 1229799558 e_supplemental=150000 –pagerank_cutoff_decrease_per_round=100 –pagerank_cutoff_increase_per_round=500 –parents=12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23 –pass_country_to_leaves –phil_max_doc_activation=0.5 –port_base=32311 –production –rewrite_noncompositional_compounds –rpc_resolve_unreachable_servers –scale_prvec4_to_prvec –sections_to_retrieve=body+url+compactanchors –servlets=ascorer –supplemental_tier_section=body+url+compactanchors –threaded_logging –nouse_compressed_urls –use_domain_match –nouse_experimental_indyrank –use_experimental_spamscore –use_gwd –use_query_classifier –use_spamscore –using_borg

More at SE Watch.

Jeremiah takes a light-hearted look at whether TechMeme can be compared to a representative democracy.

It’s occurred to me that TechMeme, much like many democratic forms of government is actually a Representative Or Electorial Democracy–the spokespersons are elected (by links) to have a seat and speak their mind in the anointed forum. They often represent the voices of others (by linking out) and draw conclusions from within.

I certainly think my voice on TechMeme represents the cynical minority (most of the time), but it’s an interesting comparison. TechMeme certainly does a good job of conveying the general consensus of bloggers – just by reading TechMeme, you can ascertain whether a news story is considered positive or negative.

Smarter.com today launches a new look online shopping search engine. As part of the re-launch, Smarter also plans to start crawling the web and indexing product listings as a compliment to its existing paid advertisers.

ClickZ has additional details, including…

With Smarter.com’s new comprehensiveness comes an increased emphasis on soft goods, such as clothing. For those categories, the company has created a clustering technology to allow users to narrow searches by attributes such as brand, color, fabric and fit. Smarter.com believes allowing people to narrow results will result in advertisers receiving more qualified leads.

Smarter.com is a client of Fortune Interactive.