Groupon, the service that provides daily deals that save customers money, is getting a lot of attention these days. Now, they'll be getting much more. Late yesterday, the company announced a big feature in Personalized Deals. Today, they have released an FAQ for those.

"Personalized Deals is the biggest thing we’ve done since we launched Groupon," the company says. "While Groupon won't look much different, sending different deals to different users transforms Groupon in four big ways."

If you thought Groupon was getting big, this feature might be the ticket to making it a household name. Along with the launch of an Android app last week, Personalized Deals is likely going to put Groupon on a lot more people's mobile devices.

As a result of the Personalized Deals feature, users will start getting offers from a growing number of businesses, which are tailored to their location, preferences, and buying patterns.

"Groupon has become so popular with merchants that we can’t keep up with demand," Groupon says. "Over 35,000 merchants are queued to be featured on Groupon, and with 97% of our merchants wanting to be featured again, that list is only going to get longer. As a response to unmet demand, Groupon has become one of the most prolifically copied websites in the history of the Internet, with over 500 worldwide Groupon knockoffs appearing in the last 12 months."

There's no question that the Personalized Deals feature is going to continue to attract businesses to Groupon. Customers have more of a reason than ever to use the service.

Microsoft's cloud computing division has scored a significant victory.  Three of them, even, as this morning, the company was able to announce that Dow Chemical, Hyatt Hotels, and the University of Georgia will use Microsoft cloud computing solutions.

A Dow VP indicated in an official statement that Microsoft's experience and expertise contributed to his corporation's decision.  That's arguably a bit of a snub to Google, which is making every effort to catch up to and overtake Microsoft in this field.

Meanwhile, the CIO of Hyatt Hotels complimented Microsoft's flexibility.  Also, if anyone's counting, Hyatt said this development will affect around 40,000 deskbound employees, plus perhaps another 17,000 workers who don't have full-time access to a computer.

Finally, the CIO of the University of Georgia said, "With Live@edu, we believe we will have a best-in-class communications and collaboration infrastructure . . ."  And for the record, something like 85,000 University of Georgia faculty, students, and staff should be using of that.

Again, then, Microsoft has scored some big wins, and Google - with the delay in L.A. representing its most recent cloud-related headline - seems to have lost this round.

Microsoft's stock is down 0.06 percent at the moment, a little behind the Dow (which is up 0.07 percent), but ahead of the Nasdaq (which is down 0.28 percent).

Motorola announced its Q2 financial results today. These include sales of $5.4 billion. The company shipped 2.7 million smartphones during the quarter, but mobile device sales were down 6% from the previous year.

Other highlights include:

- Second-quarter GAAP earnings of $0.07 per share, compared to GAAP earnings of $0.01 per share in second quarter 2009; non-GAAP earnings per share* of $0.09 compared to earnings of $0.03 per share in second quarter 2009

- Total cash** of $8.3 billion; completed $500 million debt tender offer

- Enterprise Mobility Solutions sales of $1.9 billion; GAAP operating earnings of $181 million; non-GAAP operating earnings of $292 million

- Mobile Devices sales of $1.7 billion; shipped 8.3 million handsets, including 2.7 million smartphones; GAAP operating earnings of $87 million; non-GAAP operating loss of $109 million

- Networks sales of $967 million; GAAP operating earnings of $178 million; non-GAAP operating earnings of $191 million

- Home sales of $886 million; GAAP operating earnings of $29 million; non-GAAP operating earnings of $57 million

- Announced sale of majority of Networks business to Nokia Siemens Networks

"In the second quarter, our Enterprise Mobility Solutions and Networks businesses continued to deliver best-in-class market leadership and financial returns, with strong operating earnings and excellent cash generation," said Greg Brown, Motorola co-CEO and CEO of Motorola Solutions.

"In addition, last week, we announced that Nokia Siemens Networks will acquire the majority of our Networks business. We are very proud of the operational and financial performance of our Networks business and are excited to have reached this agreement to combine our Networks team with such an industry leader," Brown continued. "This is great news for our customers, our investors and our people and will allow us to sharpen our strategic focus on providing mission-and business-critical solutions for our government, public safety and enterprise customers."

"The Droid X launch has been very well received and is seen as one of the best smartphones in the market today with a 4.3 inch high-resolution display, Adobe flash and an 8 megapixel camera. As we continue to execute on our business strategy, we are in a strong position to continue improving our share in the rapidly growing smartphone market and improving our operating performance," added Sanjay Jha, Motorola co-CEO and CEO of Motorola Mobility. "The Mobile Devices and Home businesses remain focused on developing next-generation products to capitalize on the convergence of mobile experiences and home entertainment."

More details about Motorola's second quarter can be found 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.

Android device owners can perhaps stop frantically deleting apps from their phones.  An app that appeared to represent a serious security risk - supposedly transmitting users' passwords, browsing histories, and text messages to someone in China - has been found to mine much less data than early reports indicated.

The scare started when, at the Black Hat Security Conference, representatives of mobile security firm Lookout talked about an app called Jackeey Wallpaper.  They either misspoke or were misquoted, and word spread that the app transmitted far too much personal information.

That created something of an uproar, since Jackeey Wallpaper has been downloaded more than a million times.

But later, Quentyn Kennemer was able to write, "MyLookout chimed in with us to clarify some details . . . .  Specifically, the app does collect data from your phone, but only the device's phone number, subscriber identifier, and voicemail number fields are retrieved.  SMS and browsing history are not touched by any of the apps they analyzed throughout their Blackhat conference."

Kennemer then continued, "Your voicemail's password is also not transmitted unless you included the password in your phone's voicemail number field."

So Android users should remain cautious about what apps they download, always researching the developers behind them, but it doesn't look like any massive security breach has occurred.