It’s Google day on Marketing Pilgrim. Google is testing a way for people to customize their search results. Marketers shudder (but you know it was coming). Google keeps moving towards rewarding quality and delisting thin sites. As they get more sophisticated it gets tougher to game Google. If they can give people power to influence their own search results, it could have a quite an influence on the SEM industry.

If you have quality content it will only help you as your sites rise to the top. Along this theme, today Google said they have recently purged the search engine of thousands of malware sites.

It looks like Google might be getting serious about its payment product, Google Checkout. First, right around Thanksgiving, they replaced the ‘Videos’ link with ‘Products’. Earlier this week, Google announced Google Checkout promotions for the holiday season.

Now today, Google Blogoscoped reports that the SERPs in that same Product Search (nice name, eh?) are littered with Google Checkout Badges. As Philipp’s subtitle reads, “No PayPal Badges In Sight.”

And also today, Internet Retailer reports that Google Checkout is pulling ahead of PayPal Express Checkout in terms of adoption by major etailers. Of the top 200 largest online merchants, twenty-six accept payment through Google Checkout, compared to twenty-one who take PayPal EC. (via)

The two payment options were neck-and-neck at the time of the last survey (Jan 2007), with 15 merchants accepting each.

While the WSJ is speculating, Marketing Pilgrim is all about confirming, and we can confirm that Google will indeed bid on the new 700MHz wireless band.

According to Google, its formal application to participate in the 700 MHz auction will be filed with the FCC on Monday, December 3, 2007 — the required first step in the auction process.

“We believe it’s important to put our money where our principles are,” said Eric Schmidt, Chairman and CEO, Google in a statement. “Consumers deserve more competition and innovation than they have in today’s wireless world. No matter which bidder ultimately prevails, the real winners of this auction are American consumers who likely will see more choices than ever before in how they access the Internet.”

The interns are taking over the Googleplex! Seriously, if you want to know why Google is so intent on reaching geniuses at an early age, you need look no further than today’s upgrades to Google Reader.

Google Reader gets a new feature which recommends new RSS feeds to you–based on your current feeds and web history–and also receives "drag & drop" functionality–allowing you to re-order your feeds and easily move them to new folders.

Both new features were the handy work of ex-interns at Google!