Microsoft feels threatened by the iPad. That was made clear by the words of CEO Steve Ballmer at Microsoft's financial analysts meeting. Microsoft intends to come out swinging with Windows-based iPad rivals. It's just a matter of when, and if customers will have anywhere near the same enthusiasm they have had for the ipad.

Of course, Microsoft isn't the only company that has to worry about winning that enthusiasm. Any other player in the tablet market has a lot to live up to after the iPad's phenomenal sales. However, whereas Google, for example, may be able to ride on some of the building enthusiasm for the Android operating system, Microsoft is hoping familiarity with Windows will be the ticket.

Here are some of the things that Ballmer said (based on a transcript provided by Fortune). "There is a category that we've had Windows on for actually a long time.  We've had Windows 7 on, tablets and slate machines now for a number of years, and Apple has done an interesting job of putting together a synthesis and putting a product out, and in which they've -- they sold certainly more than I'd like them to sell, let me just be clear about that.  We think about that.  We think about that in competitive sense."

"Just like we had to make things happen on netbooks, we've got to make things happen with Windows 7 on slates.  And we are in the process of doing that as we speak.  We're working with our hardware partners, we're tuning Windows 7 to new slate hardware designs that they're bringing them to market. And, yeah, you're going to get a lot of cacophony.  There will be people who do things with other operating systems.  But we've got the application base, we've got the user familiarity.  We've got everything on our side if we do things really right."

Microsoft also appears to be relying on Intel to help boost consumer enthusiasm for whatever products it launches. "We'll get a boost sometime after the new year when Intel brings its new Oak Trail processor to market," Ballmer said. "Oak Trail is designed to be lower power.  Lower power is good in a lot of ways.  It leads to longer battery life, no fan, lower kind of noise levels, a lot of less weight -- a lot of things that people like."

It will be interesting to see how Windows Phone 7 does, and if it is able to drum up further enthusiasm as well. Either way, look for Microsoft to bring Windows to a variety of new mobile computing devices.

Google is retiring the old version of AdSense for Search and telling users to switch to the new version powered by Google Custom Search, which has been offered for a while.

If you see "powered by Google" on the logo on the search results page, then you're using the old one. In a post on Google's Inside AdSense blog, Katrina Kurnit writes:

AdSense for search with CSE gives you more control over your search results without changing how you earn money showing AdSense for search ads. For example, with the new version, you'll have access to advanced features like refinements and promotions. Our team has developed a number of updates and improvements during the past few months, and you can access more advanced features at www.google.com/cse.

Your existing AdSense for search box will continue to work normally for a few more months, and we'll be sure to update you when we retire this version. To take advantage of the benefits offered by the new version of AdSense for search and ensure you don't miss any revenue during the transition, we encourage you to update your code now.

To upgrade go to AdSense setup and "AdSense for Search" then select the sites you want your users to be able to search across, customize the look and feel and update the code for your site. Google offers more info here.

Search Engine Land Editor-in-Chief Danny Sullivan points out how poorly Google handles those gaming Google News, using Google Trends as a starting point.

Do you find Google News to be too heavily polluted? Share your thoughts.

He found a blatant example when the term "chocomize" became listed as "volcanic" on Google Trends. When clicking for the results, he found several sites serving Google ads that presumably only created posts about the term because it was trending (as a way to get some easy traffic, and potentially ad clicks). In fact, some examples came from sites that were clearly aimed at entirely different niches, such as a horror movies site and a TV/Anime site. The biggest problem from the user's perspective is that there was nothing immediately indicating why the term was trending.

The real reason the term was trending was apparently because CNN ran a story earlier in the day about a company called Chocomize that makes custom candy bars (a pretty cool concept, I have to say), but when looking at the Google News results, Sullivan had to really dig to find that story.

"The pollution within Google News is ridiculous," Sullivan says. "This is Google, where we’re supposed to have the gold standard of search quality. Instead, we get 'news' sites that have been admitted — after meeting specific editorial criteria — just jumping on the Google Trends bandwagon, outranking the actual article causing the term 'chocomize' to be popular, polluting the news results and along the way, earning Google some cash."

Earning Google some cash indeed. There is no doubt that this goes on all the time, specifically with AdSense sites. Interestingly, in a story grouped with Sullivan's on TechMeme, the Wall Street Journal has some words from Eric Schmidt talking about Google's famous "one trick pony". Schmidt is quoted as saying, "But if you've got a one-trick pony, you want the one we have. We're in the ad business, and it's growing rapidly. We picked the right trick." The piece goes on to talk about how that trick is going to pay off greatly in the mobile space as well, as more and more people gravitate to the Android operating system.

Schmidt has said in the past, as Sullivan reminds us, that the Internet is a cesspool (referring to an excess of useless content). So, to be fair, Schmidt doesn't come across as being very enthusiastic about the sites that take advantage of Google Trends to game Google News. Still, there is money to be made, and if sites meet the criteria of what it takes to get into Google News, there's a fine line Google has to walk, regardless.

Can it all be so simple?

Sullivan says, “It shouldn’t be that hard for Google to police what shows up in response to what it publishes on Google Trends. Spam sites ought to be nabbed. AdSense sites ought to be shut down. News publishers abusing the very lucky position they have of being in Google News, by routinely tapping into Google Trends topics that aren’t relevant to their publications, should get the boot.”

While I greatly respect Sullivan, and value his analysis and opinions, I’m not sure it’s as simple as that. We've all seen how the mainstream media sites turn to blogs to get their stories (sometimes without giving credit or links), just as the sites in question appear to have done with CNN. We spoke with Sullivan about this not too long ago after he became a victim of such a scenario.

It's hard to say that just because you use Google ads, you should be penalized. That's not to say there isn't an issue, but while there may be plenty of “garbage sites” there are some pretty highly respected publications that serve ads by Google. The horror movie blog pointed to, does appear to generally offer horror movie related news (while crediting sources), based on a quick glance of its most recent content.  But if the Chocomize story on that blog doesn't credit its source, that is a problem. Maybe this is a “garbage” site, maybe it’s not. From Google's standpoint, determining that can’t be easy in all cases.

Looking beyond the credit issue for a moment, when it comes to topic-spam, who’s to say what a publication would find of interest to its audience? I’m not sure that I agree that a blog mainly focused on horror movies, for example, should not be able to blog about chocolate or another off-topic subject every now and then. That’s up to the publication and whether they want to risk alienating their own audience, if you ask me. Again, I’m not saying Sullivan is wrong about this particular site’s practices. I’m just looking at the bigger picture.

Maybe Google could do more to look at story sources, but that's got to be a difficult task across all publications, and there would no doubt be plenty of room for debate between publications about who broke a story first.

I'm not saying this is what happened either, but hypothetically, what if the horror movies blog actually talked to the Chocomize people first and had the story first, and CNN just happened to find it and find it newsworthy themselves, and do their own piece. Now, that's an unlikely scenario in this particular example, but it's not outside of the realm of possibility in other examples, such as the one Sullivan experienced recently himself.

Regardless of that even, it's hard to say "you can't have content about this topic because we posted it as a trending topic."

There is clearly a problem with Google Trends. Sullivan is right in that the result doesn't help explain why the topic was trending. He's also right in that the original source (CNN) should be more visible. However, cleaning up the "pollution" might not be such an easy problem to conquer. It’s hard to say if Google is allowing such pollution to go on so it can make more money or if the problem is just too difficult for the search giant. It could be a combination of the two.

What do you think? Comment here.

ApartmentGuide.com has introduced a search tab on its Facebook page.

To find an apartment, visitors to ApartmentGuide's Facebook page can click on the search tab and enter the city, state or zip code. Price range and number of bedrooms is also an option to narrow the search. Users are offered apartment listings that match search criteria on the Facebook page.

"A significant portion of ApartmentGuide.com users are between the ages of 18-35, aligning nicely with Facebook's demographics," said Arlene Mayfield, president, Apartment Guide. "Further, Facebook had over 150 million U.S. users in July 2010 with that number expected to grow considerably."

"With roughly 54% of all Internet users projected to be on Facebook as of February 2010, we wanted to make sure that consumers had the means to easily search for an apartment and communicate with their friends and family regarding their apartment search experience on this industry leading social site."

Other new features added to the Facebook page include:

*Share button: Users can share favorite properties with their Facebook friends.

*Like button: Users can like a specific property.

*Facepile: Users who have clicked the Like button on a property details page and are logged into Facebook will have their Facebook profile photo added to the Page's Facepile.