Recently, Google loosened their belts and their policies in regards to Adwords and it looks like competing Microsoft took advantage of them.

Internet Explorer and the NBA Draft?

Now, I’m a moderately creative kind of guy but I’m still perplexed at figuring out how the NBA Draft and Microsoft’s recent browser, Internet Explorer 8 are even remotely related.

Oops, I just did the search again and it appears as if Google has removed adwords ads for the search “NBA Draft”.

Back to work.

For Diggers around the world, Google has recently released a strikingly similar version of Digg.com, the very popular content rating site.

Digg has long been a fan favorite for SE Marketers because of the credibility that search engines give to content and backlinks that are contained within their articles. The Google version, appropriately named “What’s Popular”, is reserved for use by iGoogle users and will use some serious math to calculate how content is displayed. The content comes from Google’s arsenal of services (for example: iGoogle user submissions, YouTube and Google Reader). iGoogle users can rate trends, giving them high or low marks and higher rated articles stand atop their respective categories.

Currently, the “What’s Popular” concept is merely a gadget on an iGoogle users desktop and there is no indication that Google (or any other search engine for that matter) will give weight to top rated articles but it wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility to think that Google would give weight to top rated content that’s featured on their product.

Adding to the mystique is the possibility that Google will kick the gadget up a notch and make it a full fledged site that will go nose-to-nose with Digg.