Today’s New York Times reports on a possible pending antitrust lawsuit against Google. Salient excerpt:

The areas of inquiry include accusations of manipulating the search results it displays to favor Google commerce services it has developed like Google Shopping for buying goods and Google Places for advertising local restaurants and businesses. In the civilian subpoenas, the F.T.C. calls this “preferencing.”

The investigators are also looking into whether Google’s automated advertising marketplace, AdWords, discriminates against advertisers from competing online commerce services like comparison shopping sites and consumer review Web sites.

C|Net also reports … and provides some interesting commentary from readers.

Stay tuned: We’ll be hearing a lot about this in the weeks to come.

Here’s another example from my ongoing rogues’ gallery of crappy spam messages. If you’re like me, you’ve seen your inbox inundated with LinkedIn-related spam messages today. (I received 7 of them before noon.)

One theory I’ve often seen says the misspellings and bad grammar are intentional in order to fool spam filters. I think that’s giving these scummy bottom-feeders far too much benefit of the doubt. I’d have to think that better grammar, spelling and punctuation would fool more people into clicking — probably enough to far counterbalance any spam filter effect.

Of course, if you roll over any link in such an email (don’t click, fool!), you’ll immediately see the domain that they’re trying to trick you into visiting. Sadly, too many people don’t take that half-second and as a result get completely hosed.

If I made a list of 100 small businesses from my local Sunday paper, I bet 75 or so of them could learn a lot from this Social Media Today post.

Because in my experience — and I bet in yours, too — most small business websites do a lousy job of being informative in ways that today’s customers demand from all businesses, big and small.

Over on Social Media Today, Jon-Mikel Bailey makes a lot of sense. For all the smoke and mirrors and promises and dreams and statistics and analyses and … well, look: It boils down to knowing your customer and having a communications strategy.

Takeaway for marketers: Duh.

Looking for social media statistics? One of the best aggregators of stats I’ve come across is The Social Skinny, which posted 216 of them not too long ago. Noodle around the site and you’ll find hundreds more — enough to season any conference call or presentation.