Google Maps Shows Real-Time Traffic Data

Google Maps shows real-time information about traffic for many US cities (like Kansas City, New York). To see this, switch to the map or hybrid mode and click on the new traffic tab. Google Maps will add a layer that colors the roads in green, yellow, red, or gray. The colors represent how fast the traffic is moving:

* Green: more than 50 miles per hour
* Yellow: 25 - 50 miles per hour
* Red: less than 25 miles per hour
* Gray: no data available



Until now, this feature was available only in the mobile client of Google Maps.

How Popular are Google Gadgets?

That's a tricky question. But Google decided to reveal a part of the mystery by showing the number of page views per week for the universal gadgets - those gadgets that work in the personalized homepage, in Google Desktop or syndicated in other sites.

Fortunately, it's very easy to see the numbers for almost any gadget (but not for feeds), so here's a list of some of the most popular gadgets:


* Date & Time - 130,290,121 page views per week

* Google Calendar - 91,491,639 page views per week

* Driving Directions - 38,615,797 page views per week

* Map Search - 31,460,719 page views per week

* Wikipedia search - 27,314,972 page views per week

* Dictionary.com search - 12,520,786 page views per week

* YouTube search - 9,515,502 page views per week

* Google Reader - 3,383,720 page views per week

Google explains that: "Gadget pageview statistics are approximate only (...) and represent the number of times that the gadget was rendered, including Google Personalized Homepage, Google Pages, Blogger, Google Desktop, and across thousands of independent pages around the web."

Etelos offers CRM for Google

Today, private Seattle company, Etelos, unveiled a “customer relations management” (CRM) tool that can be used on Google’s homepage along with Google’s other applications.

It is just one more step toward making Google’s suite of software more compelling for small businesses, as an alternative to the expensive Microsoft Office.

There are already lots of features you can use on Google’s homepage, such as calendar, weather and news. However Etelos is offering a full-fledged CRM tool, which lets business owners and sales agents manage their relations with their customers — including reminders to stay in touch, ways to manage tasks and share schedules (see screenshot below).

While Google’s $50-a-year suite offers email storage, word processing, spreadsheets and calendar, it did not have a CRM product.

Etelos’ product is in (beta) testing, and is invitation-only for now. Accounts can be requested at www.crmforgoogle.com. Once out of testing, Etelos CRMforGoogle will offer a basic free edition, but also monthly paid subscription versions which will allow further customization, choice of hosting and integration with other software, the company said.

Google Searching for More Government Work

Google is wrapping up a two-day sales meeting in DC today, where it hopes to convince federal contractors, engineers and the military that Google is ready to take on more government work.
Google has been selling products to the U.S. government for about three years. One of those products is Google Earth, which the military uses for battlefield information in Iraq and Afghanistan.
According to the Washington Post article, Google hopes to sell enhanced versions of Google Earth, custom search applications and Google Apps Premier to government agencies.
Google's government work has been the subject of much speculation. Last year a former high-ranking Marine (who believes the WTC attacks were really an orchestrated demolition) said that Google had been working in tandem with the CIA.
Stephen Arnold, who is quoted in the Washington Post article (linked above) as saying Google is interested in powering the government's back office, told me last year that Google's technology could be used to predict the locations of terrorist attacks

Google Seminar, Hosted for Business Enterprise Exhibition

A free seminar, hosted by Google, recently spotlighted how Google Enterprise technologies could be engaged to relieve overburdened IT budgets, enhance productivity and accelerate communication and collaboration across organizations.

The gathering at the Loews Hotel, in Nashville, Tennesse, included Google Enterprise products featuring the Google Search Appliance, Google Mini search hardware and Google Earth for Enterprise. More than 50 top local business decision makers and IT managers registered to attend Presentations by Google Enterprise spokespersons.

With the largest index of websites available on the World Wide Web and the industry's most advanced search technology, Google Inc. delivers the fastest and easiest way to find relevant information on the Internet. Google's technological innovations have earned the company numerous industry awards and citations, including two Webby Awards; two WIRED magazine Readers Raves Awards; Best Internet Innovation and Technical Excellence Award from PC Magazine; Best Search Engine on the Internet from Yahoo! Internet Life; Top Ten Best Cybertech from TIME magazine; and Editor’s Pick from CNET. A growing number of companies worldwide, including Yahoo! and its international properties, Sony Corporation and its global affiliates, AOL/Netscape, and Cisco Systems, rely on Google to power search on their websites. A privately held company based in Mountain View, Calif., Google's investors include Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers and Sequoia Capital.

Google Struggles to Buy Chinese Gmail Domain Name

Google has been having a tough time acquiring the Chinese domain name for its popular, free web-based email service, Gmail. Beijing ISM Internet Technology Development Co., the company that currently owns “Gmail.cn”, currently operates its own free email service called ISM Gmail.

According to Reuters, Google recently tried to purchase Gmail.cn, but its offer was refused. Google also tried to buy Gmail.cn in 2004, the same year that Gmail launched, a spokesperson for ISM noted to technology trade pub InfoWorld.

ISM’s service pre-dates Google’s public release of Gmail. Google had been using Gmail internally for more than two years previously. However, after the public launch in 2004, Gmail.cn took on a look that was remarkably similar to Google’s. Both now use similarly colored logos and follow a similar design aesthetic.

Two years ago, Google paid handsomely to recover the domain names “google.com.cn” and “google.cn,” briefly causing a surge in Google-related domain name-squatting.

Google has been increasing efforts to buy Gmail-related domain names and filed a lawsuit against a polish poetry group for using “Gmail.pl.” The Internet company lost Gmail trademark disputes in both Germany and the UK, where the service is now known as “Google Mail,” and is currently battling to maintain control of the domain name in Switzerland.

Updated Google Apps Pose Threat to Microsoft Office

Google Inc. last week unveiled an upgraded version of Google Apps, a hosted suite of business applications that some analysts said could soon become a serious competitor to Microsoft Office.

Priced at $50 per user per year, the new Google Apps Premier Edition is the third and most sophisticated version of the suite, which was first launched in August with two free editions.

The latest version offers guaranteed uptime, IT management tools, technical support, increased e-mail storage and integration with the Google Docs & Spreadsheets word processing and spreadsheet application, the company said.

Corporate users had mixed reactions to the offering.

“I played with Google Spreadsheets once not long ago,” said Jim Prevo, CIO at Waterbury, Vt.-based Green Mountain Coffee Roasters Inc. “This may have promise down the road, but I’m not excited about it in any way at this time.”

Corporate desktops serve many purposes, said Prevo, adding that he doesn’t think they will be quickly displaced by Web-based office applications.

Gmail domain dispute looms for Google in China

Google, fighting to consolidate its trademark globally, faces an obstacle in the world's second largest Web market -- China's www.Gmail.cn, which is refusing to sell its Internet address to the U.S. giant.

A legal source told Reuters on Monday that Google was trying to buy the Internet domain name www.gmail.cn, which is run by Beijing-based ISM Technologies.

The name closely resembles Google's internationally known email service, www.gmail.com, and the colours in which the two logos are written are similar. The ".cn" suffix is commonly used for Chinese domain names.

Google recently began offering free Gmail accounts in China to promote its brand among local users.

"Google has contacted Gmail.cn about the Web address and logo issue, but there is no progress so far," said a legal source in Shanghai familiar with the situation.

ISM Technologies -- which on its Web site www.ism.net.cn claims to be the largest wholesale Internet domain registrar accredited with Chinese government-backed Internet body CNNIC -- refuses to sell, but there is as yet no sign that Google will sue, the source added.

Google's China spokeswoman Jin Cui did not answer repeated calls to her mobile phone. A spokesperson for Gmail.cn could not be contacted by telephone calls to the company's Beijing offices

Google is already embroiled in legal action, launched earlier this month, against a group of Polish poets to stop them using the Web address www.gmail.pl, European news reports have said. The company also this week reportedly lost an attempt to gain sole control over the Gmail trademark in Switzerland.

But the Gmail.cn case may prove more complicated, given that intellectual property issues in China can become complicated by politics, the source added, especially between U.S. and Chinese firms.

"It's unlike the Polish case. The Chinese company is also an internet service provider which provides mail services, and Gmail can literally just be referring to a 1G mailbox or something like that," said the source, referring to the 1 gigabyte-sized mailbox.

Google already owns local Web addresses www.google.com.cn and www.google.cn, aimed at the world's second-largest Internet market after the United States with around 137 million Web users.

Google is fighting to narrow the gap between its market share of around 17 percent in China and market leader Baidu.com's share of around 58 percent.

And Google's trademark worries may not end with China.

A search on several domain registration Web sites showed that variations on "gmail" were still available for purchase and www.gmail.de called up a Web site for a German courier service.

Google in Content Deal With Media Companies

Google built an empire delivering advertisements across the Internet, and now it plans to distribute content from media companies just as aggressively.

Google is working with Dow Jones & Company, Condé Nast, Sony BMG Music Entertainment and other large content companies to syndicate their video content on other Web sites. The videos appear inside Google ad boxes on sites that are relevant to the content of the videos, and advertisements run during or after the content. Google shared the ad revenue with the video provider and with the sites that show the videos.

There are already video ad networks that make similar deals, and NBC Universal is attempting something similar. But the Google experiment could be more widespread since the company already has a vast reach on the Internet.

“Once upon a time, if you had some video content that you wanted to distribute, you could do it on three television stations in the days of the networks, then 100 in the days of cable,” said Kim Malone, director of online sales and operations for Google AdSense. “Now, thanks to this program, you can do it on literally millions of channels on the Internet.”

On the financial news site StreetInsider.com, for example, videos from The Wall Street Journal, a Dow Jones property, are running within ads on the site. In one, Emily Friedlander, a Wall Street Journal reporter, narrates a video feature on the TKTS booth in Times Square; Sam Schechner of The Journal speaks about marriage in TV shows; and Jonathan Welsh visits a motorcycle show.

After the three videos, a commercial from Pantene Pro-V, a hair conditioner, appears. In that case, Google shares the ad revenue with StreetInsider.com and Dow Jones.

The videos and the accompanying ads can also be found on articles on YoungMoney.com, AdVersus.com and SeatGuru.com, among other sites. A ski resort show created by LX.TV, a broadband network, is being shown with ads on skiing blogs.

The ads are part of Google’s larger initiative to gain traction with consumer goods companies who spend billions on brand advertising. Founded as a text-based search company, Google’s early advertisers were smaller companies and advertisers who bought ads to generate direct sales rather than to build brand recognition.

Large brand advertisers still spend the bulk of their money on television advertising, but Google sees potential for them to spend more online through the use of video ads.

But Google’s broad plan to bundle media content with ads depends on participation from media companies. On the one hand, Google’s network will bring more visibility of their content across the Internet, where attention is fragmented online between thousands of sites. On the other hand, media companies like to be a destination in their own right, so that they can sell ads on their sites.

“We want people to come directly to our site, but that’s part of why we’re doing this,” said Sarah Chubb, president of CondéNet, the digital arm of Condé Nast. “To see if we can find people that we haven’t found in other ways.”

Media companies also want to keep control over their relationships with advertisers. Google sells ads in its network for Condé Nast videos, but in a similar content-ad test with MTV Networks last fall, MTV sold the ads (sharing the revenue with Google).

Adam Cahan, executive vice president of strategy and business development for MTV Networks, said that his networks want to make sure that when their content is distributed on the Web, that it links to their sites.

“In the same way that Harry Potter book sales grow from a Harry Potter movie, you would not give the movie away to support the book sales,” Mr. Cahan said. “There is a balance between promotion and consumption that is up to the original content producer to manage.”

Shallow Comparison of Blog Search Engines

The purpose of a blog search engine is to index blogs and to show some information easy to find in a feed, like the date of a post, the author or the tags associated with a post. Unlike web search engines, blog search engines have less sites to crawl and the feeds save them a lot of time, so they pick new posts much faster.

You should use a blog search engine when something important has just happened and you want to find out what people (and not the media) think about it. You can also use them for news that aren't in mainstream and for niche subjects.

I like Technorati's homepage because I can find what's popular right now: the top searches, tags, the most popular content. I like them because they show numbers next to each blog, like number of blogs that link there or the rank of a blog. Their numbers are simply irrelevant because the links aren't equal in importance, but it's nice to have the comfort of a ranking (it's similar to Alexa). Technorati is often down or pretty slow, but they have cool widgets to add to your blog or feed so I forgive them.

Google Blog Search is all about search. Unlike Technorati, Google Blog Search is not down or slow and sorts the search results by relevance. That may seem weird, so you can also sort them by date. Google's search engine is cool because you can easily change the time interval and create mail alerts for your favorite topics. For some queries, you'll also find a lot of spam, mostly from Blogspot.

Ask Blogs & Feeds wants to impress you. Blogs are a domain where Ask.com is strong (they own Bloglines), so their blog search engine must be good, right? Yes, but there are too many options. You can search for posts, feeds and news. You can sort the results by relevance, popularity and time. For each search result, you have the option to subscribe to the feed, send the content to your blog and to preview it right inside the search results page. That's cool, so why should I visit the blog? Ask's strongest point is the preview option and the option to sort posts and feeds by popularity, which uses Bloglines stats.

Sphere is good for only one thing: to find related posts and blogs. So you read something interesting and want some context. Sphere proudly shows you something to read. You can add the "Sphere it" button in your browser and use it when you get lost in a strange article.

Icerocket is a mix of Technorati, Ask and Google Blog Search (in fact, they copied a lot from Google's interface). It's also the best-looking blog search engine, but there's no way to sort the results other than by date or to restrict to a language.

The most original blog search engine is Findory that personalizes the results by analyzing your clicks. It's far less comprehensive than the others, but you'll love the search results recommended just for you. It's a good idea to create an account and to add your favorite blogs.

So if you want to have some idea about a feed and its popularity, try Technorati. If you want good results and a minimalistic interface, go to Google Blog Search. To preview search results, use Ask, and to find related posts, Sphere could help you. Icerocket tries to be a bit of everything, but it only partially succeeds. Findory shows mostly popular blogs, but it's a good filter if you don't want to read too many posts.

It would be nice to have a search engine that sorts the posts by date, but it also takes care to remove irrelevant results (including spam). A blog search engine that clusters the results by topic, like Google News, but also shows the connection between posts and their dependency. A way to monitor what interests you and to filter the good stuff.

Tips for Google Toolbar

Google Toolbar is one of the most criticized software created by Google (competing with Google Desktop), mostly because of the privacy issues generated by some advanced features. But Google Toolbar is also pretty useful. Most of these tips work with the latest version of Google Toolbar for IE (v4) and Firefox (v3).

1. I'm Feeling Lucky. Type your query in the search box and press Shift+Enter if you want to bypass the search results page and to go directly to the top result.

2. A new tab for my search results. To open the search results in a new tab, press Alt+Enter after you type your query. You can combine this with the previous tip: Alt+Shift+Enter will open the top result in a new tab.

3. Focus on search. If you want to go to the search box without using the mouse, type Alt+G (G is from Google).

4. Search Slideshow. If you want to move to the next search result without going back to the search results page, enable the Next / previous buttons:
Settings > Options > More > Even more buttons > Next & Previous

5. A better find-in-page. Most browsers have pretty poor options to find some words in a page. Firefox and Opera have inline search, but that's not pretty helpful if you want to find some words in a page, but you don't want perfect matches. Enable in Google Toolbar:
Settings > Options > More > Page Tools > Highlight search terms AND Word find
Now when you visit a page, type what you what to find in the search box, and click on the yellow crayon from the toolbar. The words found in the page will be highlighted in different colors, so it's easy to discover the interesting sections at a glance. To move to the next instance of a word, click on that word in your toolbar. To disable the highlighting, click on the crayon icon again.

6. Translation. Do you visit a German page that offers some interesting details about the latest Google Desktop vulnerability, but you don't know German. Just right-click anywhere in the page and select:
Page Info > Translate Page Into English
This should work for most languages available at Google Translate and Google automatically detects the language of the page.

7. Fixing typos. Maybe Firefox shows you the words that are misspelled, but Google can automatically fix the misspellings in a magical way.
Settings > Options > Features > Spell checker
Next time you type something in a text area, right-click on the arrow next to "Check" on the toolbar and select "Autofix". The green words are fixed by Google, while for the red words Google couldn't find a fix. You can click on the colored words to choose another suggestion.

8. Privacy alert. Google Toolbar pings Google's servers automatically to check for updates. If you don't want to send Google additional information, disable this features:
* Google-account related services: Bookmarks, Send to, Docs & Spreadsheets, Gmail button
* PageRank (option when you install the toolbar; to show you the PageRank of each page you visit, Google Toolbar needs to send it to Google)
* Send usage statistics to Google (disabled by default)
Google says in the privacy policy that, except for the Google-account features, no other information is connected to your Google account, even though they store it in their logs.

9. Customize the toolbar. In Firefox, you can customize the toolbar to occupy less space.
Settings > Options > Layouts
A good idea is to select "Replace Firefox search box and hide Toolbar". How to restore Google Toolbar icons? Right-click on the toolbar, click Customize and drag the icons to Firefox's toolbar. This way you can occupy a single row for the toolbars. But what about other search engines? See the next tip.


10. Add any search engine. You just have to right-click on any search box, and select "Generate Custom Search". Any search engine can be added to Google Toolbar. Click on the arrow next to search box and select one before or after you type a query.

11. Built-in calculator. Type "87/9", "12 kilometers in miles", or "e^2" and Google shows the answer directly under the search box. (This option is available in the regular search box included in Firefox 2).

Google Factory Tour

Google - The Best Place To Work

Google Dominates the International Search Landscape

A special report from the Search Engine Strategies conference, February 13-15, 2007, London, UK.

What is the most popular search engine in the UK? In Europe? In the world?

According to representatives from major ratings and traffic analysis services who shared their latest stats during "The Search Landscape" session at SES London, the answers to these questions are: Google, Google, and Google.

The Search Landscape session was one of the first on the opening day of the conference. It was moderated by Julian Smith, insight and research director at MEC Interaction, EMEA, part of Mediaedge:cia. Speakers included Alex Burmaster, European Internet analyst at Nielsen//NetRatings; Heather Hopkins, VP of research at Hitwise; Richard Zwicky, CEO of Enquisite; and Bill Hunt, CEO of Global Strategies International.

According to Nielsen//NetRatings' Burmaster:

• 256 million people visited a search engine in December 2006 – 81% of the global Internet population.
• The search audience has grown by 10% over the last year, while the total Internet audience grew 8%.
• The search audience has grown most dramatically in France (27%) and Spain (21%), ahead of the US (8%) – however, the US is still biggest market by far.
• Search is most popular in the UK (85%), France (83%) and Spain (83%) -- ahead of the US (77% reach).
• Google's audience has grown almost 2.5 times the rate of search's – continuing to eat into the share held by its competitors. It now has almost 3 times the audience of nearest rival, Yahoo Search.
• The US engines dominate local markets, but the market is "just" big enough for local players.
• The average searcher views 93 search pages a month across 27 minutes, which represents 3.4% of total time spent on the Internet.
• France and Spain have the heaviest users of search; US searchers are the lightest users.
• Despite Google's dominance, it is important to understand searcher behaviour doesn't take place in isolation – around two-thirds of searchers visit at least two search brands.

According to Hitwise's Hopkins:

• In the UK, search engines are the largest category, traffic-wise, overtaking adult Web sites in October 2006.
• Market share of visits to UK search engines was up 22% year over year in December; but other categories grew faster, including Net Communities & Chat, up 34%, News and Media, up 24%, and Food and Beverage, up 29%.
• Google (www.google.co.uk and www.google.com) powered 77% of UK internet searches in the four weeks leading up to February 10, 2007; Yahoo Search (uk.search.yahoo.com and search.yahoo.com) powered 8%; Ask.com (uk.ask.com and www.ask.com) 5%; and MSN Search (search.msn.co.uk and msn.search.com) 5%.
• Yahoo Search is growing rapidly – up 12% in the past year; Google is up 6% year on year, while MSN Search and Live Search are down 15% year on year; Ask.com UK is down 30% year on year, but up 12% in past 6 months.
• Search is the point of entry to the Internet; she illustrated this with a Music Category Clickstream Map that showed the central position of Google UK.
• Searchers behave differently on different search engines.
• On Google UK and Yahoo UK & Ireland Search, searches for Web 2.0 properties MySpace and Bebo were more prominent.
• On Ask.com UK, searches were more commercial, such as searches for "car insurance" and "share prices".

According to Enquisite's Zwicky:

• Based on click through activity from August 1, 2006, to January 20, 2007, Google had a 71.6% share of the global search engine market, an 80.2% share of the UK search engine market, and a 78.4% share of the French search engine market.
• Yahoo had an 11.1% share of the global search engine market, a 5.5% share of the UK search engine market, and a 3.8% share of the French search engine market.
• However, from January 20 to February 12, 2007, Google's share of the global search engine market dipped to 67.1%, it slipped to 76.1% in the UK, and slid to 76.9% in France.
• The primary beneficiary appeared to be Yahoo, which saw its share of the global search engine market increase to 14.9%, rise to 8.3% in the UK, and improve to 5.3% in France.
• Why the changes? Did Google's new algorithm, which was designed to minimize the impact of Googlebombs, have an unintended blowback? Did sales of HP desktop and laptop computers, which had the Yahoo Toolbar pre-installed, soar over Christmas? Zwicky said each industry is searched differently, so "you need to know what it looks like for your own site."

Hunt, the final speaker, presented the preliminary results of the SEMPO European User Study. (I should disclose that SEMPO is a client of my firm.) The study was conducted by Jupiter Research in January 2007. It surveyed advertisers and agencies in France, Italy and Spain.

The top level findings included:

• 31% of advertisers spent at least 50,000 Euros on search marketing, compared to 37% of agencies who spent that much on behalf of their clients.
• 62% of advertisers plan to increase search marketing spend over the next 12 months.
• French, Spanish, and Italian advertisers focus more on SEO, compared to paid search.
• Advertisers plan on utilizing mobile search, video search and pay per call more in 2007.
• Advertisers' top search marketing objectives are generating immediate online sales and building brand awareness.
• Increasing competition for top rankings has been advertisers' and agencies' greatest problem with their search marketing efforts.
• Both advertisers and agencies, especially agencies in Spain, are satisfied with the ROI from their search marketing activities.
• The main reasons advertisers hire agencies is to improve results, and due to a lack on internal knowledge/expertise.
• 26% of advertisers not currently using an agency would consider using one to improve results. However, 61% are satisfied with keeping search marketing in-house.

Following their presentations, the panelists were peppered with questions about Google, Yahoo, social networking sites, YouTube, and MySpace. While Google still dominates the search landscape, it was clear that the attendees were interested in seeing the bigger picture.

Google Docs & Spreadsheets vs Microsoft Office

A lot of people like to compare Google Docs & Spreadsheets with Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, and other office suites, and to say that Google's product is less powerful and can't be a threat for Microsoft. But this comparison is plain wrong.

Here's an excerpt from a 2005 press release of Writely, that was bought by Google in 2006 and became the Docs part of Google Docs & Spreadsheets:

While Salesforce.com's Marc Benioff and others have hailed Writely as a serious challenge to Microsoft and its dominance of the office productivity market, Writely is not a carbon-copy of existing desktop solutions. Rather, Writely is an innovative, Web-centric word processor that leverages the connected nature of the Internet to provide online storage, editing, sharing and communication of documents - documents that users can now upload and save in multiple formats.

In a post from 2005, Writely argued that web applications have the advantage of being more approachable. They don't require software installation, reading manuals.

One of the reasons the web is so nice is that the page UI is simple...a few things at a time, a very easy metaphor, etc. It passes the "mom" test - I can usually just tell my mom to go to a site, and she usually can figure it out. I can't remember the last time I could do that with a desktop app. So, even though the windows desktop is "richer", it's not necessarily better.

And because they wanted to build something new, they ignored the obvious approach of trying to copy Microsoft Office. Writely tried to add features that make sense on the web.

The other question I get asked a lot is related - "So, how much of Word are you planning to copy?" The answer is: "none of it". We don't think of ourselves as a copy of Word on the web. (...) We're a word processor, re-invented for the web.

Writely stayed away as much as possible from copying Word, and admired Gmail's success, that didn't copy any desktop mail client, unlike Oddpast, which was released much earlier than Gmail. Oddpost was bought by Yahoo, that transformed it into the new version of Yahoo Mail.

What's the difference between Oddpost and Gmail? One followed desktop interaction conventions, required a particular browser and a particular operating system, and gained a cult following. The other came along four years later, followed Web interaction conventions, worked across all modern browsers — and transformed its entire category. Some might argue that Oddpost is the more sophisticated solution. But Gmail is part of the larger Web in a way that Oddpost never could have been.

This philosophy transferred to Google Docs & Spreadsheets, so that's why it's unfair to compare it to Microsoft Office. Even if they'll add more features (charts in Google Spreadsheets, pagination in Google Docs), the products won't try to be an imitation of a desktop product, but something that can be done on the web and takes advantage of the huge power of the web: collaboration, instant feedback, mashups, live data from the web, contextual search.

Google Apps Premier Edition

Google Apps Premier Edition is the promised offering for small businesses. It includes 10 gigabytes of mail storage, 99.9% uptime guarantee for email, APIs to integrate with the existing infrastructure of a business (single sign-on, user management, email gateway), 24/7 phone support. Everything for $50 a year per user (there's a free trial until April 30th).

Google continues to offer two free editions of Google Apps:

* a edition for schools, that includes the APIs and 24/7 phone support

* a edition for families and groups that has all the features that were available until now.

All editions of Google Apps* include Google Docs & Spreadsheets and are compatible with the BlackBerry version of Gmail's mobile application.

Google's intention is to convince it can deliver "simple, powerful communication and collaboration tools for your organization without the usual hassle and cost" and the package can integrate into an existing environment. Google has learned a lot since last August, when it first introduced Google Apps, and has adapted to fit the needs of a corporate environment. Will businesses adapt to use Google's web applications and trade some features for an always-available online interface?

The Market Shares of Online Feed Readers

Feedburner, that hosts more than 600,000, is in a good position to offer some statistics about feed readers. The most popular feed readers are web-based, so it's interesting to know how they stand. Feedburner decided to ignore the total number of subscribers, because it's pretty irrelevant, and looked at the number of posts that are actually read and at the number of clicks to the original site.

If you look at the number of clicks, the top 5 web feed readers are (it's interesting to note that Yahoo is the only one that displays only the titles):

1. My Yahoo 54%
2. Google 21% (Reader + Personalized Homepage)
3. Bloglines 11%
4. Netvibes 9%
5. Live.com 3%


In terms of post views, the situation changes a little bit (Yahoo couldn't be included here because you can't read posts inside My Yahoo):

1. Google 59%
2. Bloglines 33%
3. the others had 3% or less.


So the most important online feed readers are My Yahoo, Google Reader/IG and Bloglines, although it's hard to make a comparison between Google and Yahoo from this data. Google has more subscribed than any other feed reader, though: 76% from all FeedBurner feeds have at least one Google subscribers, unlike Bloglines (63%) and Yahoo (51%), which don't have a wide coverage.

Google and Bloglines seem to attract more tech-oriented users, but also more diverse users than Yahoo (hence the feed coverage). Google tries to satisfy both users who read a lot of feeds (and would choose between Google Reader and Bloglines), and users who subscribe to a manageable amount of feeds (Google Personalized Homepage or My Yahoo should be a perfect match), so it's in the perfect position to become the number one destination for reading feeds, if it's not already there.

Finding Custom Search Engines

Google doesn't provide a way to find custom search engines built by other users, but you can restrict a normal Google search to the homepages of those search engines. You just have to add [site:google.com inurl:coop/cse] to your query. For example, you can use [site:google.com inurl:coop/cse css] to find custom search engines for CSS.

This might be useful if you have to do some research on a narrow topic and the regular Google search doesn't return good results. By restricting your search to a list of sites about CSS or web programming, you'll definitely find great results even for ambiguous queries like "position" or "display".

To make things even easier, I created a custom search engine that searches through more than 100,000 custom search engines.