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On Tuesday, Google announced the beta launch of AdSense for games which is expected to give the in-game advertising industry a huge boost, and will be Google’s first foray into the video games market.

 Below is a screencap of what we can expect with this move.

According to Christian Oestlien, the senior product manager for AdSense for Games, the program’s beta launch will focus on the placement of a variety of forms of ads in Flash-based casual games and some larger titles.

In the beginning at least, Oestlien said, Google will work with partners like PlayFish, Mochi Media, Demand Media and Konami.

The latter, Oestlien said, would use AdSense for Games to place ads in well-known titles like Frogger and Dance Dance Revolution.

More information about this launch can be read here.

Search Engine Land has recieved confirmation from a Google spokesperson that an extended feature for Google Alerts will soon be launched that includes RSS feeds for search results and Google Alerts.

In an email today, a Google spokesperson told us: “While I can’t be more specific about an ETA, I can confirm the launch.”

Currently Alerts are available by email only, and Google is the only major search engine not to offer RSS feeds of search results.

Facebook announced on their blog yesterday that they have now integrated searches on Live.com into the Facebook search box for all US residents. This is a further extension of thepartnership Facebook has with Microsoft that dates back to 2006 when Microsoft first started displaying their ads on the social networking site.

We’re always working on innovative ways to make your experience on Facebook more useful. Toward that goal, today we’ve added Microsoft Live Search to your Facebook search experience (for people in the US). This is the first step in giving you the ability to find content from across the web while using Facebook.

By integrating web search into Facebook, you can increase the information available to share with your friends, family and coworkers on the site. For example, your friend may invite you to an event at a new restaurant. Without leaving Facebook, you can check out the details of the restaurant on the web. Or, say you see photos in your News Feed about a friend’s recent trip to Dubai. Inspired, you can search the web for more information about travel without having to leave Facebook. Along with your search results, you may also begin to see ads for products, services or other things that are relevant to your query.

The feature means that when a users starts typing a search term into the search box they are given the option of searching Facebook or searching the web - meaning users can search without leaving the site. When doing a search of Facebook itself, the results page will have an extra tab of “web” results that a user can click to regardless. Of course relevant ads from Microsoft Adcenter are also displayed with the search results.

The feature is working on my profile also, however the results are very different to those I would recieve searching through NineMSN.

In another of the recent efforts at increasing revenue from the site, Google’s YouTube has announced on both the official Google blog and the official YouTube blog the debut of click-to-buy options on videos.

When you view a YouTube video with a great soundtrack, you often see comments from YouTube users asking about the name of the song and where they can download it. Or when users watch the trailer for an upcoming video game, they want to know when it will be released and where they can buy it.

Today, we’re taking our first steps to providing YouTube users with this kind of instant gratification, by adding “click-to-buy” links to the watch pages of thousands of YouTube partner videos. Click-to-buy links are non-obtrusive retail links, placed on the watch page beneath the video with the other community features. Just as YouTube users can share, favorite, comment on, and respond to videos quickly and easily, now users can click-to-buy products — like songs and video games — related to the content they’re watching on the site. We’re getting started by embedding iTunes and Amazon.com links on videos from companies like EMI Music, and providing Amazon.com product links to the newly released video game Spore(TM) on videos from Electronic Arts.

An example of these buttons can be seen below the clip here on a screen cap from the site;

YouTube has begun experimenting with a different angle on post-roll adverts. As we posted a while back, videos that have adverts enabled currently have optional overlay videos that would pause the clip you are watching and play an advert video before taking you back to the place where you left off - a feature that was only kicked in if a user clicked a button to play the promotional video.

The difference now is that at the end of the clip, regardless of choice, a video clip related to the optional overlays will play automatically. I first read about this on Epicenter on the Wired blog network who had this to say;

This may seem to contradict Google’s justification of overlay ads earlier this summer when they said that 75 percent of their viewers were dissatisfied with pre- and post-roll ads,  but it looks more like a simple way to get a few eyeballs at otherwise ignored content. The new ads still only run on a small portion of videos, and even if the drop off rate is high, if a few people hang on to watch the previously promo’d ad at the end, it’s still more viewers than would have seen the ads otherwise.

ChannelNews reported yesterday that retail giant Harvey Norman is set to slash marketing budgets by up to $60 million due to a downturn in profitability. Internationally, the current marketing budget is said to be in excess of $300 million.

Reporting an 18% downturn in profitability due mostly by the poor performance of their Irish operation Gerry Harvey said that the company would be forced to cut its marketing budget by at least 20 per cent.

Insiders at the company have also told ChannelNews that the Company is looking to spend more dollars online and with vertical market publications. More marketing dollars online? About time!

Yahoo is intending to streamline how digital ads are bought and placed across the Web with the launch of their new advertising platform; APT. It’s been under development for the last 2 years and details of the platform can be found at the official website.

APT aims to link Web site owners, advertisers and the agencies between them who sell ads. It’s an automated platform that gives advertisers a range of tools to control where ads should appear, what kind of Web surfers the ads should be shown to, and how much they are willing to pay.

Click here for more details on this story.

One of the biggest perks of working for the biggest search engine in the world was the food. Employees of Google at their US based complex were given all you can eat, three meals a day, with plenty of room for friends and family. This is all coming to an end.

Many of the employees, to supplement their wage (which is traditionally low, except for the Google Engineers) would take home vast swags of food on Friday night, enough to last them the whole weekend. This “abuse” of perks according to co-founder Sergey Brin is the cause of the new rules:

There has been a lot of concern and debate on campus about abuse of the guest privilege in the cafes.  We wanted to take the opportunity to review our guest policies and ask for your help in enforcing them.

Google has always had a magical aura of the perfect place to work. Even though the new rules still are more lenient than found in the vast majority of large businesses, perhaps the aura is fading. If Google can’t recruit the top staff it is used to having, then perhaps the innovative ideas may dry up.

Although this is conjecture, it makes you think about the impact on the future of the internet which could be influenced by a meal.

For more information, check out this article.

It’s been around a year since Yahoo! implemented advanced searches for music. When searching for an artist, the results displayed will feature photos, videos, samples and even the official website. After the success of this service, they have decided to roll out new features which will enhance a music lover’s search experiences.

The new features mean that you will be able to play up to 25 full length songs a month. Previously, you were limited to 30-second samples, so this is an excellent upgrade to the service. By further exploring the service, you will be able to listen to a greater number of audio files, as well as increasing the number of tracks in the shortcut from three to four.

Yahoo! mentioned this example:

Now you’ll be able to listen to Rihanna, sing along to Madonna and JT or rock out to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs without having to leave the search results page or type in a log-in. Simply click your song of choice and the new media player from Yahoo! Music, called FoxyPlayer, will launch near the bottom of the page. The player is easy-to-use and offers full functionality for song playback, like artist and song info and even an expandable playlist tab. You’ll be able to continue browsing the results page while the player is in use or turn it off at any time with a single click.

We’re not sure whether this will be enough to drag users away from the 700lb gorilla (known as Google to its friends), however it is great to see Yahoo! trying something different to try and give the users a better experience. Search engine results are all about helping a user find the information they are after, and this new style of display may be a trendsetter.

This evening Yahoo will be bucket testing a new version of its homepage with a small percentage of users. Below is a screencap of what could be the website’s new homepage, where the last change to the design was more than a year ago.

The new page combines what Yahoo calls “broadcasting” elements, which are the same news and resource links for everyone, with “narrowcasting,” which are highly customized home pages made popular by My Yahoo, iGoogle, Netvibes and others.

A key addition is the introduction of third party services to the Yahoo home page. For now users can log into their Gmail or AOL Mail accounts and view emails right from Yahoo.com. This is similar to what AOL unveiled last week. And like AOL, Yahoo has chosen to leave Microsoft out of the party.

All other changes to the website are largely cosmetic. Further details on the rollout of the changes can be read at TechCrunch.