Google is offering the “ Summer of Code 2013 ,” which is an internship for students who are willing to work on open-source projects. Unlike many interns who are working for experience without monetary compensation, Google has made their program a paid internship. This is not the first year that Google has offered the opportunity to willing students. The program was started in 2005, and this year the company will be accepting roughly 1,000 students for the internships. What do you think about Google offering internships to students? MORE >>

Since we covered Pinterest recently , I thought I’d explore Google+ today, and check out the approaches some of the A-list bloggers are using on this network. Gary Vaynerchuck might have become famous for his books, but he’s been vlogging since 2005, so its no surprise that his Google+ page is dominated by video posts. In fact, he appears to use Google+ primarily as an outlet to cross-promote his YouTube channel and associated videos. Both use Google+ to mix personal interests with family, home, and work-related content. How do you use Google+? MORE >>

The admin interface is a dream, the range of design themes and plug-ins that extend its functionality are best in class and far exceed what is available for all of the other blogging platformscombined, and now, there is word straight from Matt Cutts himself that WordPress plays best with Google. Matt Cutts has worked at Google since 2000, and knows as well as anyone how Google ranks web sites and how web sites can better interact with Google to get positive search results. I am a “WordPress hands-down, no question, no doubts&# kind of person. Congratulations! MORE >>

2005 Skype purchased by eBay  for $2.6 As recent as this week Google and Facebook had been rumored to possible partner to purchase Skype and obtain access to the 663 million Skype users.  Microsoft is buying Skype for $8.56 billion in cash. The Skype story: Skype has 663 million users (more than Facebook). 2003 Skype founded by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis in Estonia. billion. 2009 eBay sells 70% of Skype to Silver Lake for roughly $2.1 billion. 2011 Silver Lake sells eBay for $8.65 billion to Microsoft. Recommended book: Idea Man: A Memoir by the Cofounder of Microsoft. MORE >>

Way back in 1998 when Google forayed into web search from Stanford backyard, it was established that average length of a search query was just 1.2 In 2004 & 2005, more than 50% of the searches had only 1 or 2 words whereas now more than 50% of searches contain 3 or more words. Tags: US sample behavior consumer behavior google information internet behavior research search trends words. Year-over-year, the trend in our search behavior as measured by search query length, has become more sophisticated & specific (the average search query length was 2.5 words in 2006). MORE >>