The "Facts about Google’s acquisition of AdMob" page Google established in November of last year apparently hasn’t satisfied the Federal Trade Commission’s curiosity.  A fresh report indicates that the FTC has stepped up its investigation of the deal by seeking sworn declarations from third parties.

This isn’t a good sign for Google.  Todd Shields and Dina Bass heard about the FTC’s move from "people with direct knowledge of the matter," so the affair appears to have developed beyond rumor stage.

Also, after talking to Stephen Calkins, a professor of law who used to serve as General Counsel of the FTC, Shields and Bass reported that the FTC tends to seek declarations "’when they think there is some significant chance’ the agency will ask a court to block a merger, or seek to modify a deal."

Google’s been running into more and more antitrust trouble as of late.  From the problems with its book digitization project to a European Commission probe, the search giant’s been held up on several fronts.  It wouldn’t be surprising if something – such as this AdMob deal – becomes a breaking point.

Still, asking for sworn declarations isn’t the same thing as strongly objecting.  It remains possible the FTC will give Google’s acquisition of AdMob a green light.

Two Google executives have again assured onlookers that the company is dealing with the situation in China.  While in Abu Dhabi, Eric Schmidt indicated today that something will happen sooner rather than later, and Nicole Wong told politicians in D.C. that leaving China is still an option.

Unfortunately, not a lot of other details and/or promises were forthcoming.  Eric Schmidt’s exact words, according to Jerry Dicolo, were "something will happen soon," and whether that’s "soon" as a five-year-old would perceive it or in terms of continental drift is hard to say.

We should note: it’s already been almost two months since Google stated in an official blog post, "[O]ver the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all."

As for what Nicole Wong, Vice President and Deputy General Counsel at the company, had to say, there was less wiggle room.  The AFP reports that she maintained, "We are not going to change our decision on not censoring results anymore."  Also, with respect to abandoning the country, Wong added, "We are prepared to do that."

Google and Baidu investors are sure to remain on pins and needles until the situation is resolved.

February was a quiet month for the search market; we’re not going to suggest any companies either break out the champagne or fire their CEOs as a result of the small changes that took place.  Still, for those who are curious, comScore believes it was Google and Bing that came out looking like winners.

Google managed to increase its share of the U.S. search market to 65.5 percent, up from 65.4 percent in January, according to comScore’s data.  Bing, meanwhile, accomplished a more impressive feat (in overall terms, and especially in relation to its size) by grabbing 0.2 percent of market share.

That put Bing in control of 11.5 percent of the market, up from 11.3 percent the month before.

Yahoo’s share of the search market then decreased, heading from 17.0 percent to 16.8 percent.  Which is embarrassing, but not yet catastrophic, as the company’s partnership with Microsoft moves towards completion.

The interesting thing will be if Bing and Yahoo keep trading share.  Also, of course, if Google keeps increasing its dominance.  We’ll be sure to cover comScore’s next report to see if any trends have emerged.

While we normally don’t comment on market share fluctuations that occur in places other than America, some recent changes in the UK may bear mentioning.  According to the AT Internet Institute, Google’s share of the search market slipped by 1.6 percent between January and February.

That’s a significant amount.  Indeed, as the slightly upsized figure below shows (sorry for any blurriness), if Ask and AOL had suffered similar losses, they’d have been wiped out, hitting zero.

Of course, that didn’t happen.  Instead, both Yahoo and Bing benefited from Google’s dip.  Yahoo gained a not-bad 0.6 percent, and Bing increased its share by an even-better 0.7 percent.

Google’s still in an extremely dominant position, but given that Microsoft’s about to spend $2 billion on Bing commercials in the UK, these changes are noteworthy.  Microsoft might not be throwing its money away, as some people have speculated; there’s now the possibility that it could extend or accelerate this growth trend.

We’ll be sure to write again about the UK search market next month if anything out of the ordinary happens.  In the meantime, it should be interesting to see how those Bing commercials are received.

Two Google executives have again assured onlookers that the company is dealing with the situation in China.  While in Abu Dhabi, Eric Schmidt indicated today that something will happen sooner rather than later, and Nicole Wong told politicians in D.C. that leaving China is still an option.

Unfortunately, not a lot of other details and/or promises were forthcoming.  Eric Schmidt’s exact words, according to Jerry Dicolo, were "something will happen soon," and whether that’s "soon" as a five-year-old would perceive it or in terms of continental drift is hard to say.

We should note: it’s already been almost two months since Google stated in an official blog post, "[O]ver the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all."

As for what Nicole Wong, Vice President and Deputy General Counsel at the company, had to say, there was less wiggle room.  The AFP reports that she maintained, "We are not going to change our decision on not censoring results anymore."  Also, with respect to abandoning the country, Wong added, "We are prepared to do that."

Google and Baidu investors are sure to remain on pins and needles until the situation is resolved.

February was a quiet month for the search market; we’re not going to suggest any companies either break out the champagne or fire their CEOs as a result of the small changes that took place.  Still, for those who are curious, comScore believes it was Google and Bing that came out looking like winners.

Google managed to increase its share of the U.S. search market to 65.5 percent, up from 65.4 percent in January, according to comScore’s data.  Bing, meanwhile, accomplished a more impressive feat (in overall terms, and especially in relation to its size) by grabbing 0.2 percent of market share.

That put Bing in control of 11.5 percent of the market, up from 11.3 percent the month before.

Yahoo’s share of the search market then decreased, heading from 17.0 percent to 16.8 percent.  Which is embarrassing, but not yet catastrophic, as the company’s partnership with Microsoft moves towards completion.

The interesting thing will be if Bing and Yahoo keep trading share.  Also, of course, if Google keeps increasing its dominance.  We’ll be sure to cover comScore’s next report to see if any trends have emerged.

While we normally don’t comment on market share fluctuations that occur in places other than America, some recent changes in the UK may bear mentioning.  According to the AT Internet Institute, Google’s share of the search market slipped by 1.6 percent between January and February.

That’s a significant amount.  Indeed, as the slightly upsized figure below shows (sorry for any blurriness), if Ask and AOL had suffered similar losses, they’d have been wiped out, hitting zero.

Of course, that didn’t happen.  Instead, both Yahoo and Bing benefited from Google’s dip.  Yahoo gained a not-bad 0.6 percent, and Bing increased its share by an even-better 0.7 percent.

Google’s still in an extremely dominant position, but given that Microsoft’s about to spend $2 billion on Bing commercials in the UK, these changes are noteworthy.  Microsoft might not be throwing its money away, as some people have speculated; there’s now the possibility that it could extend or accelerate this growth trend.

We’ll be sure to write again about the UK search market next month if anything out of the ordinary happens.  In the meantime, it should be interesting to see how those Bing commercials are received.

Investment banking and securities firm Goldman Sachs is more or less giving up on Google’s Nexus One.  A note Goldman Sachs published this week indicates that it’s cut its 2010 sales forecast by a whopping 71.4 percent.

As reported by the Wall Street Journal, the note stated, "We previously estimated that Google might sell 3.5 mn Nexus One units in 2010."  Now, after seeing some data from Flurry, "We forecast that Google sells 1.0 mn Nexus One units in FY2010 . . ."

Goldman Sachs doesn’t have much confidence that Google will be more successful in the future, either.  The firm believes Google will sell additional devices as it "rolls out a second Nexus handset, markets it more aggressively, and makes it available offline," but nothing like 3.5 million was mentioned.

Instead, Goldman Sachs predicted "that Google sells 2 mn handsets per year in 2011 and future years."

This is fairly bad news for the search giant, given that the Nexus One was supposed to make so much of a splash.  The online-only sales model and lack of advertising may have been meant to save Google huge amounts of money, too.

By and large, Google Maps is great, providing well-plotted directions and up-to-date contact information on demand and free of charge.  But slight inaccuracies persist, and to fix this problem, Google will now allow people to reposition markers using Street View instead of just maps and satellite images.

Perhaps this sounds familiar: you type an address into Google Maps, switch to Street View, and find yourself staring at a Wal-Mart instead of an Italian restaurant.  Then you spend five minutes clicking up and down a street to locate the correct spot.  Frustrating, right?

Now there’s an easy fix.  A post on the LatLong Blog suggested, "When you find a place that is in a wrong location, click on the marker and get an infowindow open as what you did before. . . .  Click on the ‘edit’ link, and then click the ‘Move marker’ link in the updated infowindow."

After that, "You’ll see two jumping markers in the map and the Street View image appear, which means both of them can be dragged.  When you drag the marker on the map to a new position, the marker inside the panorama will be updated correspondingly, and vice versa."

This should greatly increase the accuracy of Street View as people tie markers to establishments’ entrances.  And that’ll benefit users in addition to any businesses that might otherwise lose potential customers due to poor directions.

YouTube has changed the default size for embedded videos. By default they’re getting bigger at either 480×385 for a 4:3 video, or 640×385 for a 16:9 video. YouTube says it went with these sizes, because they will give most viewers the best viewing experience because they better match current video encoding sizes.

"A video’s life on YouTube is just the beginning; embedding gives it a life off of the site. Just look at your favorite blogger and they’re likely to be embedding YouTube content in their posts," says YouTube Senior Web Developer Geoff Stearns. "In fact, almost every popular video on the site is first made famous by embeds on the Web. That number can be as high as 50% of views in the first 48 hours, kicking off a great cycle."

"When using the ‘Play in HD’ option, it’s best to embed the player at a very large size (at least 1280×745) in order to accommodate the large size of the video," says Stearns. "If you play HD video in a small player, the user’s computer will have to scale down the video to fit within the player, costing the user extra CPU cycles and bandwidth, which may result in choppy playback. It’s always best to play the video size that best fits the size of the video player. And if you want even better performance when watching HD content, you can choose to watch it in full-screen."

When users click the embed code, on a video page, they will be able to choose the following for the video player:

- The color and size
- Whether or not to include related videos
- Whether or not to display the player border
- Whether or not to play in HD by default — triggers video resolutions of 1280×720 (720p) or 1920×1080 (1080p)

This week YouTube also expanded its auto-captioning program. This is a tool  that combines some of the speech-to-text algorithms from Google’s Voice Search to automatically generate video captions when requested by viewers. More on that here.

We’ll let you decide whether, given the recent loss of life in Haiti and Chile, Google’s timing is a little off here.  But for better or for worse, the search giant picked today to promote Google Apps in a blog post titled "Disaster Recovery by Google."

A few points in Google’s defense: it created a Person Finder tool in response to the earthquake in Haiti, which it pulled out again following the earthquake in Chile.  Also, the company used its homepage and official blogs to solicit aid donations and spread awareness both times around.

So on to the new development.  In a lengthy post on the Official Google Enterprise Blog, Rajen Sheth, a senior product manager over Google Apps, asserted that the service can save businesses from losing any information in the event their hardware is damaged or destroyed.  Physical backups will only help businesses restore things up to the latest backup point.

Sheth then noted that storing information with Google Apps can be cheaper than relying on physical solutions and storage area networks, too.

He at last concluded, "No one likes preparing for worst-case scenarios.  When you use Google Apps, you have one less critical thing to worry about."

In case you missed it, WebProNews streamed a live interview with Google’s Matt Cutts today from SMX West in Santa Clara. It’s hard to narrow down the discussion to a singular topic, but here are some of the things touched upon in the video:

- The status of Google’s Caffeine update (nothing’s wrong, they’re just being careful.)

- Site Speed as a ranking factor – settle down, it’s not replacing relevance (and it’s independent from Caffeine)

- PageRank – Google’s probably not going to rename it, but people do obsess too much over it.

- PuSH – indexing much of the web in real-time

- Coming up with metrics for authority in real-time search

- Google Buzz – Why Matt Cutts likes it, but still uses Twitter as well

- Why does every product that comes out have to be the killer of an existing product?

- SEO vs. social media marketing

- NCAA Basketball and the Kentucky Wildcats

After discussing the above topics, Matt and interviewer Mike McDonald turn to Twitter for audience questions for Matt to answer.

Check out our new live video site at live.webpronews.com for coverage of SMX West, and future events (as well as whatever else we may end up broadcasting). You can also find archived videos there in case you missed any.  

Google is looking to improve upon its own internal SEO efforts. The company has created what it calls an "SEO Report Card," designed to improve the user experience and visibility of some of its own properties. The company says it aims to identify potential areas for improvement in Google’s product pages, which could help users find them more easily in search engines, and fix bugs that annoy visitors and hurt the pages’ performance in search engines.

Google is making this report card publicly available though, and that means other businesses and webmasters can study it themselves, and use what they learn to improve their own sites. It may come as a surprise to some, but Google appears to have a great deal of improvement to do when it comes to search engine optimization, the irony of course coming from the fact that Google operates the world’s most dominant search engine.

"Simple steps such as fixing 404s and broken links, simplifying URL choice, and providing easier-to-understand titles and snippets for our pages can benefit both users and search engines," says Google’s Search Quality team. "From the start of the project we also wanted to release the report card publicly so other companies and webmasters could learn from the report, which is filled with dozens of examples taken straight from our products’ pages."

Here’s a quick look at their scoring:

The whole document is about 50 pages (though much of that is graphical), and is available to download in PDF format. Google began by reviewing the main pages of 100 of its different products across a number of common SEO topics, and says it will go deeper into the sites in future versions of the report card.

What do you think about Google’s SEO scores? Do you find the information within the report card helpful?

A little more than a month ago, Google introduced click-to-call phone numbers in local ads on smartphones.  Now, the popular program’s undergoing an expansion as Google’s made it easier for large companies to take advantage of the offering.

A post on the Inside AdWords blog explained today, "[W]e’re bringing the same click-to-call benefits to national advertisers through phone extensions.  Phone extensions allow you to add a phone number that will be displayed whenever your ad is triggered, regardless of the user’s location."

Here’s the upshot, then: "This enables customers to connect with your business by phone directly from the ad and can be especially useful if you have a call center to handle customer inquiries."

Advertisers should profit as a result of this development, considering that phone calls are more likely than clicks to lead to purchases.  Google looks set to make a lot of money, too, since this move will encourage corporations with big advertising budgets to give click-to-call ads a shot.

Perhaps the only losers will be the companies that don’t adapt quickly.  They’ll risk losing sales to competitors with more eye-catching and actionable ads.