Surprise, surprise, Google is still the king of search in the U.S. In fact, any other search engine pales in user numbers comparison. According to new data released by digital analytics company ComScore yesterday, 66.7 percent of users core searches in September were on Google, which is 0.3 percent higher than August. Trailing behind were Microsoft's search engines, which got 15.9 percent of the market share, and Yahoo came in third with 12.2 percent - which is down 0.6 percent from August.

Google’s Nexus 7 tablet has been quite a hit, but there can be little doubt that the average quality of Android tablet apps still ranks behind iOS. Google is clearly aware of this and yesterday, the company is making a new push to get developers to ensure that their apps run well on tablets. To do this, Google just launched a Tablet App Quality Checklist that walks developers through the process of getting their apps tablet-ready.

When small businesses need to make investments in IT or other operations, it’s often the companies selling them the goods that help with financing solutions. Now it looks like Google is using that model to help drive more dollars to AdWords search advertising.  Google is launching a new service in the UK, AdWords Business Credit, which offers credit to companies specifically in the SMB sector to boost their online ad spend with the company.

Micropayments, a long-discussed way of supporting content on the Web that has yet to catch fire with users, is about to get a big boost from Google. The company confirmed that users will soon be able to pay for Web content using Google Wallet, buying individual articles for an average of $0.25 to $0.99 each. Once users buy the page, they will own it forever.

After having already surveyed ancient ruins and Arctic villages, Google's Street View team has now expanded their reach to the world's oceans. This week, the company added its first underwater panoramic images to Google Maps, giving users an intimate glimpse at coral reefs along the coasts of Australia, Hawaii, and the Philippines. Google gathered its underwater imagery as part of an ongoing collaboration with the Catlin Seaview Survey, a research initiative devoted to studying the world's coral reefs.

Dante D'Orazio has seen Google Glass trotted around more than a few times now on the faces of plenty of Google employees and even on a handful of models, but information on how the device functions and what its capabilities are beyond photography have been extremely difficult to come by. Yesterday he got precious few more details about voice commands and other functionality courtesy of The Wall Street Journal's Spencer Ante, who recently got a moment with a pair of the glasses and Sergey Brin.

After seemingly overcoming a series of security issues, Google is cashing out of the prepaid payment card market next month. The Web giant began telling users yesterday to get busy spending whatever balances that remain on their cards because they will be discontinued on October 17. The prepaid card was made obsolete with the introduction of the ability to use any debit and credit cards with Google Wallet.

Chromebook and Chromebox users (and anyone else using Chrome OS) have an update waiting for them that offers several usability improvements. Before you go check for the update, however, take note of what's changed: most notably, the updated OS features a smaller apps list that pops up from the taskbar. Whereas the old apps list introduced in the Aura update reminded us of OS X's Launchpad, the update turns the apps list into a Stacks-like window.

Google announced that it will pay up to $2 million for major vulnerabilities in its Chrome browser at a second Pwnium hacking contest this fall. Pwn2Own, a rival contest sponsored by Hewlett-Packard, will award as much as $200,000 in a mobile-specific challenge slated to run several weeks earlier. Google's Pwnium 2 will take place at the Hack In The Box security conference on Oct. 10 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Google Fiber has finally arrived in Kansas City, offering crazy-fast broadband speeds and a new television service on both sides of the Kansas / Missouri state line. Google is touting 1,000 Mbps download and upload speeds, positioning its service as 100 times faster than traditional broadband. Google compared the growth in processing power and storage to internet speed, pointing out that the latter hasn't kept up with the former. Google believes that its fiber will put data access speeds on the same exponential growth curve, saying that a Gigabit is only the beginning of its plans. Google also pointed out that the US is well behind other countries in terms of both speed and pricing.