Searches for 'Thanksgiving recipes' rose 7% prior to Thanksgiving compared with the same time in the prior year, according to Hitwise. Recipes aside, the data firm said retail visits rose 15% in the past week compared with the previous week. During the Sunday and Monday prior to Thanksgiving, total visits combined rose 9% compared with 2011. Online retail visits rose 10% just prior to the U.S. holiday. The Amazon.com tool was the top visited retail site, with Walmart and Target completing the top three.

Mozilla released Facebook Messenger for Firefox this week. This update, made possible through an application programming interface, allows developers to integrate connections to social media in the browser. It displays a sidebar showing Facebook chat sessions and updates, such as new comments, without requiring the user to steer to Facebook's Web site, explains Gregg Keizer. It's one more integration between social and search, regardless of the search engine being used to query information.

A discussion between Jayson DeMers and former Google Webspam team employee Andre Weyher reveals how the Google team operates and what they look for in regard to inbound link profiles. The article provides insight on how search engine optimization experts should view guidelines. The two talk about Google's process for applying penalties to Web sites based on inbound link profiles, how Penguin determines the domains to penalize, and what is the best way for a Web site to recover from a penalty.

Google has announced the Google Code-In contest for students ages 13 to 17. For 50 days following Nov. 26, Google will give students the ability to work on a variety of open-source projects and provide the ability to learn from others. They also will have a chance to earn points and cash prizes. The Google Open Source team will also host a Google+ hangout to discuss the details of the contest.

What is the effectiveness of retail tweets on Twitter? The social site hired Compete to find out. It turns out that Twitter users who see a retail tweet are more likely to purchase that company's product or services. In fact, 39% of Twitter users who saw retail Tweets made a purchase from a retailer's Web site. And the more tweets they saw, the more likely they would at least visit the retailer's site, and then make a purchase.

Thinking about launching a new Web site, although your current site works just fine? Maybe the company plans to launch a new line of products or services? Siddharth Deswal takes us through the steps needed to ensure that the new design converts at a higher rate than previous sites. Deswal describes how to use basic, cost-effective research to achieve an understanding of the process of designing Web sites, using A/B testing.

Google recently released a transparency report that details requests that government agencies around the world make for user data from Google as well as demands to remove content from its services. The most recent report on user data requests includes 31 countries. There were 20,938 requests for data made from 34,614 Google account holders in the first half of this year, up from 18,257 requests for 28,562 users in the second half of 2011, according to The Age.

With recent changes to Google's Webmaster Guidelines for affiliate sites, Julie Joyce serves up some tips on how to build links properly. She guides us through the "automatic" disadvantages and how to ovecome them, and reveals that the key for many affiliates is to draw traffic through capturing different types of searches that big brands might attract. Conducting research and creating unique content also attract links.

McKay Allen serves up tips on optimizing mobile paid-search ads, focusing on a few best practices for mobile paid search. He takes us through optimizing ad copy, driving calls, integrating AdWords extensions, setting up keyword strategies and dayparting, and perfecting and testing landing pages. Allen also highlights the importance of bidding for position in mobile search engine results.

Think of Bing.com as a search engine that is controlled through voice and gestures where Kinect glasses and wrist-word accessories are the future. Tom Warren tells us that Microsoft Research opened its doors last week to offer a peak into the future of no-touch computing. Through Kinect, Xbox became the first benficiary of an alternative search business model based on waves and wearable devices.