Coinstar's Redbox announced today that it is has started rolling out Blu-ray rentals. The company says titles will be available at 13,300 kiosks nationwide.

"Offering Blu-ray rentals is an exciting opportunity for redbox to expand our product offerings and build on the relationships that we've established with millions of consumers nationwide," said Mitch Lowe, president, redbox.  "Redbox is a convenient, affordable home entertainment provider and we're delighted to offer consumers their favorite movies on the increasingly popular Blu-ray Disc format." 



"According to a recent report by the Digital Entertainment Group, sales of Blu-ray players increased 103 percent in the first half of this year," the company noted in its announcement. "The sale of almost two million set-top players during this time has increased the total number of Blu-ray players sold to an estimated 19.4 million, resulting in more consumers entering the Blu-ray rental market."

Redbox Blu-ray rentals will cost $1.50. Regular DVDs are only $1.00.

Redbox recently made public intentions to use a web service to expand its library, which would make it a much bigger competitor to Netflix. That appeared to be mostly forward-looking, however. It's hard to say when that will happen, and what its offerings will be exactly.

Google Earth is meant to give its users a realistic view of the world, and the program by and large accomplishes that.  A new upgrade will make it even more accurate, though, by showing users whether or not they'd be getting wet if they were to visit certain parts of the globe.

Yes, Google Earth 5.2 is now supposed to account for both rain and snow - everything "from light drizzle and snow to hurricanes and blizzards," in fact - at least in some regions of North America and Europe. 

As for how a person can take advantage of the new feature, it's not at all complicated.  Software engineer Quarup Barreirinhas explained on the LatLong Blog, "First enable the clouds layer, then zoom in to a particular location where it might be raining or snowing."  (You check out the radar layer to see what's covered if guesswork isn't your thing.)

Zoom in far enough, and you'll be able to see something like the image below, which was captured/generated around the time Hurricane Alex was passing into Texas.

Travelers and people who are weighing a move - along with folks who just enjoy interesting graphics - are sure to appreciate this information.

Maybe only weathermen will object to the development, since Google Earth is starting to represent a pretty decent alternative to watching the local forecast.

Google has announced a new advertising format for Google Merchant Center users. The format is based on the product extensions AdWords format that lets advertisers add specific product listings.

There is a difference with this new format, however. The format, which runs on Google Product Search, will show users products and prices without them having to click on a "plusbox" to expand the ad.

"These ads are a great opportunity to market the breadth of your product catalog and highlight any promotional messages directly to conversion-ready shoppers on Google Product Search," says Google Product Search Product Manager Andrew Poon.

Poon also notes that to take advantage of the new format, you should make sure your product extensions ad campaigns are being served on "search partner" sites.

This isn't the only new ad format from Google. The company also announced a new location extensions format with map features today. More on that 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.

According to a report released by Barracuda Labs, Google has twice as much malware than Bing, Yahoo, and Twitter put together. The study was conducted across these web properties over a two-month period.

Barracuda says it reviewed over 25,000 trending topics and nearly 5.5 million search results, analyzing them to identify the types of topics used by malware distributors. The firm will be presenting its findings at DefCON 18 this weekend, but the report is available here (pdf). Barracuda lists the following as highlights from its findings:

- Overall, Google takes the crown for malware distribution -- turning up more than twice the amount of malware as Bing, Twitter and Yahoo! combined when searches on popular trending topics were performed. Google presents at 69 percent; Yahoo! at 18 percent; Bing at 12 percent; and Twitter at one percent.

- The average amount of time for a trending topic to appear on one of the major search engines after appearing on Twitter varies tremendously: 1.2 days for Google, 4.3 days for Bing, and 4.8 days for Yahoo!

- Over half of the malware found was between the hours of 4:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m. GMT.

- The top 10 terms used by malware distributors include the name of a NFL player, three actresses, a Playboy Playmate and a college student who faked his way into Harvard.

- In general, activity is increasing on Twitter: more users are coming online; True Twitter Users are tweeting more often, and even casual users are becoming more active. As users become more active, the malicious activity also increases.

- Only 28.87 percent of Twitter users are actual True Twitter Users.

- Half of Twitter users tweet less than once a day, yet one in 10 users tweet five or more times a day and 30 percent of Twitter accounts have never tweeted.

-  One in every eight Twitter users has at least 10 times more followers than they are following.

-  Only one in 10 users is following more than 100 users, and almost half are following less than five.

- The Twitter Crime Rate for the first half of 2010 was 1.67 percent.

"Our study shows that attackers have serious efforts devoted towards getting in front of the billions of eyeballs that are using search engines everyday and the millions of users that are connecting on social networks like Twitter," said Dr. Paul Judge, chief research officer and VP at Barracuda Networks. "Therefore, we continue to analyze their approaches and build new techniques to find them and protect users."

NetworkWorld points to some market share numbers, which seem to mirror the malware percentages presented by Barracuda.