We're convinced that structured data makes the web better, and we've worked hard to expand Rich Snippets to more search results and collect your feedback along the way. If you have review or people/social networking content on your site, it's easier than ever to mark up your content using microformats or RDFa so that Google can better understand it to generate useful Rich Snippets. Here are a few helpful improvements on our end to enable you to mark up your content:

Testing tool. See what Google is able to extract, and preview how microformats or RDFa marked-up pages would look on Google search results. Test your URLs on the Rich Snippets Testing Tool.

Google Custom Search users can also use the Rich Snippets Testing Tool to test markup usable in their Custom Search engine.

This is a nice tool, next I like to see a tool that will replace old/wrong "snippets" much faster. If you see that your result has a bad CTR, you like to test better snippets or titles and currently it takes a lot of time until your website modifications are updated here.

Great, you can always ask :)

Recently we received some questions about how Google uses (or more accurately, doesn't use) the "keywords" meta tag in ranking web search results. Suppose you have two website owners, Alice and Bob. Alice runs a company called AliceCo and Bob runs BobCo. One day while looking at Bob's site, Alice notices that Bob has copied some of the words that she uses in her "keywords" meta tag. Even more interesting, Bob has added the words "AliceCo" to his "keywords" meta tag. Should Alice be concerned?

At least for Google's web search results currently (September 2009), the answer is no. Google doesn't use the "keywords" meta tag in our web search ranking. This video explains more, or see the questions below.

Q: Does Google ever use the "keywords" meta tag in its web search ranking?

Is this news? NO.

Google has stopped using meta keywords years ago.

Use a good page title for better results and write great meta description to get a better CTR in google search results (the description is the only meta tag which is used in Google search)

Google half-way cancelled their SOAP API a while ago, but they now* offer a parametrized URL that returns a JSON data set. Google says this REST approach is useful for "Flash developers, and those developers that have a need to access the AJAX Search API from other Non-Javascript environments." This may be even simpler to use than the SOAP API, though I wonder how long (and how well) it's going to be working. Here's an example query:

I used the Google Search SOAP API on several site some time ago and because the API doesn't work for all the time I moved to the Yahoo Search API. Actually I don't like the Yahoo results (the quality of results might be the reason that many people doesn't use Yahoo to search the net). The REST search API from Google is a good alternative, even if you need to re-write your whole application. Your can search in different Google search product and you have plenty parameter to filter your result:
http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/documentation/reference.html#_intro_fonje

Found on TechCrunch

this is great, but I prefer Google :D

So how does it work? Which type of complains are processed first?
They have an option to report unauthorized content duplication, I reported some site which has copied a big part of my website and until now there was no response.