It’s getting toward that time of year again. The weather isn’t getting better – Winter drags on for even longer than last year – and what you could really do right now is the prospect of a holiday somewhere warm in the summer to look forward to.

You have your list of top places you want to visit, your bank statement, and the will to go book somewhere right now.

But how to do you best decide where to go with the money you have? Bing Travel is here to help.

Over the past few months I’ve been playing on and off with Skimlinks, a UK-based service providing easy monetisation of outbound links for websites. You may have also seen my post about how excellent their customer service is.

My desktop Huddle client, Clustr, wasn’t the only Adobe AIR application to launch last week. Skimlinks also announced the release of Skimkit, their tool for publishers to find relevant products for their website.

From the Skimkit website:

Filled with a live database of millions of products from Skimlinks merchants, SkimKit changes the way you research content; saving you time, and providing you with more targeted and relevant results, right to your desktop.

Today I logged on to Google.com for the first time in several days. I immediately noticed that the design of the homepage has had a bit of an overhaul.

I had a look, and it seems that very few accounts are getting the new design – I couldn’t find mention of it on Twitter or Google (even results within the past few days).

There seem to be more than a few changes in the homepage this time round. Here’s a quick run-down.

So both Google and Bing have recently announced new products that not only improve the search experience, but revolutionise the way that information is displayed. First of all, Microsoft announced Bing Visual Search; then today, Google Labs offered a new way of navigating news with Fast Flip.

Thanks to everyone who was decent enough to answer my survey on my website’s advertising policy the other day (if you missed it, you can follow me on Twitter – @chris_alexander).

The uptake was about 30% of what I was hoping for, and a larger number certainly would have made decision making from the results easier, but none the less this is what I found.