While conducting some research last night I accidentally stumbled across what appears to be new Google Universal testing within organic search results. I noticed the new look and layout on several universal searches I queried such as seattle, wa (featuring both book and news universal results), 10,000 bc (featuring video universal results), ecommerce (featuring news universal results) and ball (featuring image universal results).

JetBlue Airways announced today that they will now be accepting PayPal payments for passengers who wish to make ticket purchases off of their website, JetBlue.com. Todays partnership between JetBlue and PayPal makes for the fifth major airline to begin accepting PayPal as a website payment option for ticket transactions.

Practial Ecommerce (PE) and Yahoo Small Business have teamed up for an excellent offer going on right now where Yahoo Store merchants can get a full one year subscription to Practical Ecommerce’s annual print magazine, complete with all 6 issues for FREE (magazine printed bi-monthly). Yes, I said FREE for a year compliments of Yahoo. This is a great way for PE to gain new reader subscriptions to their industry leading eCommerce magazine, it also helps many of Yahoo’s small to medium-sized merchants gain insights into the world of eCommerce and selling Online.

PE has three main ways of distributing information to their readers; one is the print magazine previously mentioned, they also offer an Online version of the magazine through their blog, podcasts, forums and regular columns and finally they send out a regular newsletter (EcommerceNotes) with tips and resources to help more merchants on their journey to Online selling success. PE magazine, site, blog, forums and newsletter contains unique eCommerce related features, tool, interviews, site profiles, professionals and many recurring departments, such as search engine optimization, email marketing, customer conversion, legal issues, pay per click advertising and much more.

Caught this announcement on the Google Checkout Blog yesterday and it also appeared on Search Engine Land today. It looks as though Google has added another Trends tool to their arsenal that caters to eCommerce sellers, shoppers and even eTail professionals and search engine marketers.

The new eCommerce trends tool is called Google Checkout Trends. The tool is similar to Google Web Search Trends, except that the Checkout Trends tool only aggregates useful sales data from Google Checkout merchants and charts the data on an easy to use, easy to read interface for the user to see. Basically, it shows users important trend data about who is buying and selling what from Checkout.

If you’re like any other person on Earth you have probably subscribed to one or more print catalogs in the past and currently receive them via your mailbox each month. Personally, I receive about 3 -4 paper catalogs each month from companies including Cabelas, Land’s End, Victoria Secret, Business 2.0 and many even a few more like the Costco business catalog or my update catalogs from Dell, HP, T-Mobile and more.

It looks like the folks over at PriceGrabber have rolled out a fresh new look for the comparison shopping sites homepage. There were some initial reports from around the blogoshere that they have been testing it for about a month now, and it looks like they are pleased with it, as the new design appears to be here to stay (before it was only being displayed at certain times to certain visitors).

Last night I was browsing my Technorati reaction links and spotted a recent one from Brian Smith’s blog, ComparisonEngines.com. If you’re not already familiar with Brian’s blog, it’s all about comparison shopping engines and understanding the inner workings of them. It also includes comparison shopping tips, news, specifics about data feeds and much, much more.

I was hoping that we got added to his blogroll, so when I jumped over to check out what was up, I noticed that indeed we did get added, but the blogroll wasn’t the only thing that he updated recently. As a matter of fact, he rolled out a whole new look and feel for the blog including a new color scheme and header graphic with really cool rounded corner content background images. Comparison Engines is one of the eCommerce blogs I visit most often during each week (the Get Elastic blog is another one).

Here’s Brian’s post about the blog redesign, posted on Christmas Eve.

I recently noticed a change to the ‘Products’ link in Google’s main navigation. Not too long ago they removed the ‘Video’ link and replaced it with ‘Products’ instead. Now they have changed the ‘Products’ link again, but this time they renamed it to ‘Shopping’ on the main navigation found on all results pages and Google’s main page.

I was browsing news headlines yesterday and came across an interesting one on CNN Money about Google Product Search. According to the news piece, the comparison shopping engine site by Google has been experiencing dramatic drops in traffic to their shopping service while comparable shopping search services such as TheFind.com or Pronto.com and even Yahoo Shopping have all increased or remained steady, at the least.

I will be heading down to Las Vegas tomorrow to attend the annual WebmasterWorld PubCon Conference. The actual conference doesn’t start until Tuesday next week, however I decided to go a little early to take in some of the Vegas attractions, shows, sights and, of course, the nightlife. Posting may be a little lighter than normal, but I do intend on publishing some must see content today, tomorrow and next week, so it won’t be completely deserted, just not everyday like I prefer.