Google - The Internet God

Meaning of Rakeback

2008-05-08T16:20:00.000-07:00

The definition of rakeback has to be understood in two parts. The first is ‘What is rake?’

Rake is a method of how online poker sites earn their income. When individuals play cash games the house gathers a percentage out of each hand. This percentage taken from each player is the income of the game house and this is known as rake.

When an affiliate gives a percentage of the amount collected to its players then it is known as rakeback. Thus rakeback is a means of income to the game house and money got back by players.

YouTube news and information

2008-04-29T19:23:00.001-07:00

Have you ever been to youtube only to find that it is very hard to have to go through the best of the videos on youtube? Then you are not alone. Thankfully, there is this excellent website that has done all of that for you. You do not have to visit youtube and spend a lot of time there looking for the top videos. Topyoutubevideos.com has a listing of all the top video clips available on youtube. With the easy user interface, you can easily find all the top videos on youtube in any category on this website with the confidence that it can be viewed even by 13 year old kids.

Quality & Reliability Ink cartridges

2007-07-21T08:04:00.000-07:00

Eezytrade stakes its reputation on being able to deliver ink cartridges(d92 ink) to your door as fast as possible, often within 24 hours of ordering, with the minimum of fuss. Most orders received before 4:00pm should be delivered in the first class post the following day. To guarantee your order arrives the next day we offer a special next-day delivery service (Monday to Friday)

Our rapid and efficient response has earned us the praise of many of our clients, and we aim to continue offering this top-level service to future customers. Another benefit of using Eezytrade is the simplicity with which you can order your ink cartridges online. All products can be found within a maximum of two clicks from the homepage. There is no complicated navigation, annoying pop-ups, or long forms to fill out. Just click your type of printer and go straight to a list of all printer ink cartridges for that machine, and choose the right one for you. And we will even re-cycle your old HP and Lexmark cartridges if you send them back to us in the provided freepost envelope - we care about the environment too. And if you need compatible Epson or Canon ink cartridges then we supply these as well. Whatever kind of cartridge you require, we probably have it in stock and will get it to your door as quickly as possible. d92 ink

JSTL and Expression Language

2007-06-28T16:06:00.000-07:00

JavaServer Pages Standard Tag Library (JSTL) is a custom tags collection that executes common functionalities in web applications, including iteration and selection, data formatting, XML manipulation and database access. JSTL allows JSP developers to focus on development specific necessities, instead of reinventing the wheel.

JSTL is composed of:

An expression language.
Standard actions libraries.
Validators (2 validators).

What is Expression Language (EL)?

Expression Language is a simple language based on ECMAScript (also known as JavaScript) and XPath. It provides expressions and identifiers and type conversion.

Expression Language makes easier the access to implicit objects, such as request / response servlet, scope variables and stored objects on JSP scope (page, request, session and application). EL reduces drastically the need of using JSP expressions and scriptlets, increasing web applications maintainability and extensibility.

Expressions

EL expressions are invoked with this syntax: ${expression}. Expressions consist of:

Identifiers.
Operators.

YouTube Redesigns and Moves to Google Accounts

2007-06-15T23:18:00.000-07:00

After updating their embeddable player, YouTube experiments with a new layout for the site. The new design places the search box in the center, moves the metadata below the video, makes it easier to rate the video and to find other related videos. There's also an option to embed a video using the old player.

To get the new interface, add &v3 at the end of a YouTube URL, like for this video.

YouTube also added to the homepage a list of videos that are being watched right now using active sharing, cleaned their search results and included a new option to view the results as thumnbnails.

But more importantly, you can now use your Google account to login to YouTube. You can link an existing YouTube account to a Google account or create a new one, but you'll still be able to use your YouTube credentials, so this is more like a temporary solution.

The login page proudly lists YouTube's features:

Upload, tag and share your videos worldwide
Browse millions of original videos uploaded by community members
Find, join and create video groups to connect with people with similar interests
Customize your experience with playlists and subscriptions
Integrate YouTube with your website using video embeds or APIs

Export Your Google Bookmarks

2007-06-15T23:14:00.000-07:00

Google Bookmarks offers a simple way to export your favorite links: as a bookmarks.html that can be imported natively in most browsers. You can also use this to backup your list of links, to view them online or to move them to other bookmarking web services.

To import bookmarks or to easily manage them, you need Google Toolbar. Hopefully, Google will improve the way bookmarks are displayed, integrate the tool with Google Notebook and Google Reader and let you share your links.

Until then, Google Bookmarks is a cool way to bias Google's search results towards your favorite sites...

Fishing Stories

2007-06-15T22:58:00.001-07:00

We are here for you to ask, tell, show, lie, or anything else about your fishing. Jump in and start sharing with everyone today!

A Fishhing Story

This is a story related to me by my father when I was small. He said he actually saw this happen in a fish weir, and have never forgot it.

Well, I never forgot it either, but I cannot for the life of me decipher its meaning. Or perhaps I don't see the forest because of the trees?

The following story was embellished a little to make the story a bit more exciting, except that the embellishments are what might have happened had they been witnessed. Anyroad, just read on.

There was once a squid and a black-striped croaker who were caught in a fish weir. After several days of captivity, they were very hungry and saw the other as food. But being of roughly equal size, and both relatively dangerous, they were naturally leery of the surroundings and wary of each other. So they kept an unobtrusive vigil, neither letting its guard down.

For days they circled the confines of the weir, keeping a sharp eye on each other. Finally, the croaker cannot take it anymore and made a sly and purposeful sudden attack. But the squid was alert, squirted some ink, changed color and escaped. The croaker rushed the dark ink anew before it realized the squid was not there anymore. So it prowled the cage again until it spotted the squid camouflaged against a mossy weir post.read more

Will You Ship Overseas?

2007-06-15T22:56:00.000-07:00

You can count on it. In fact we pride ourselves in shipping anywhere in the world. Not only will we ship overseas, but also APO, FPO, and anywhere else you can imagine. If the U.S. Post Office can get it there, then we can do it. read more about just tees

MilitaryChallengeCoin.net

2007-06-15T22:25:00.001-07:00

We have been in the Military Challenge Coin and Military Patch business for over 3 years now. We deal with several manufactorers that we trust to give us high end coins and patches. We are not so known out on the world wide web just yet, but our customer satisfaction is unmatched. If your not 1000% satisfied with your dealings with us, you money back garenteed. How can I be so cocky? I have mastered my business skills and prove it each day. You can visit their site http://www.MilitaryChallengeCoin.net

Ppen PowerPoint attachments as slideshows - GMail

2007-06-12T07:36:00.000-07:00

Now you can open PowerPoint attachments as slideshows, without having to download anything. Just click "View as slideshow" next to the .ppt attachment you want to preview. Since you can open .doc and .xls attachments with Google Docs and Spreadsheets too, there's no need to leave your web browser to check out your Gmail attachments. Learn More.

Semel's not cool in Google's shadow

2007-06-11T17:06:00.000-07:00

Just before Google went public nearly three years ago, Yahoo Chairman Terry Semel assured a roomful of securities analysts and money managers that his company would remain the Internet's brightest star. To punctuate his high hopes, Frank Sinatra's "The Best Is Yet to Come" played in the background.

Google has so thoroughly eclipsed its rival since then that a growing contingent of Yahoo shareholders believes the company would be better off without Semel, who could face a chorus of discon tent when he takes the stage at Ya hoo's annual shareholders meeting tomorrow.>>

Google Complains About Microsoft's Vista

2007-06-11T17:01:00.000-07:00

Internet search leader Google Inc. is trying to convince federal and state authorities that Microsoft Corp.'s Vista operating system is stifling competition as the high-tech heavyweights wrestle for the allegiance of personal computer users.

In a 49-page document filed April 18 with the U.S. Justice Department and state attorneys general, Google alleged that the latest version of Microsoft's Windows operating system impairs the performance of "desktop search" programs that find data stored on a computer's hard drive.

The Vista operating system, which became widely available in January, includes a desktop search function that competes with a free program Google introduced in 2004. Several other companies also offer desktop search applications.

Besides bogging down competing programs, Google alleged Microsoft had made it too complicated to turn off the desktop search feature built into Vista.

With its allegations, Google hopes to show that Microsoft isn't complying with a 2002 settlement of an antitrust case that concluded the world's largest software maker had leveraged the Windows operating system to throttle competition.

The consent decree requires Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft to ensure its rivals can build products that run smoothly on Windows — something that Google says isn't happening.

"The search boxes built throughout Vista are hard-wired to Microsoft's own desktop search product, with no way for users to choose an alternate provider," Google spokesman Ricardo Reyes said in a statement issued Monday.

In its own statement, Microsoft said it already has made more than a dozen changes to address regulators' concerns about Vista and pledged to address any other legitimate problems. "While we don't believe there are any compliance concerns with desktop search, we've also told officials we are committed to going the extra mile to resolve this issue," Microsoft spokesman Jack Evans said.

Justice Department spokesman Eric Ablin declined to comment Monday, citing confidentiality concerns.

Although he wouldn't discuss Google's allegations, Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal confirmed that several states are taking a hard look at whether Vista is affecting the effectiveness of programs that aren't made by Microsoft.

"We really have reached a turning point in the process and expect to make a decision on how to proceed by the end of the week," Blumenthal said in a Monday interview.

Describing the Vista complaints as "troublesome," California Attorney General Jerry Brown said he has been in touch with the Justice Department, other state attorneys general and technology industry representatives in an effort to resolve the issue.

"Our goal is to provide consumers using the Vista operating system easier access to competing features," Brown said in a statement.

In a story Sunday, The New York Times reported that the state attorneys general are more inclined to press Microsoft to revamp Vista than the Justice Department.

A court hearing to review Microsoft's adherence with the consent decree is scheduled June 26.

Google's complaint is just latest example of its escalating battle with Microsoft — a duel that figures to shape the future direction of personal computing.

With its search engine already established as the Web's most popular gateway, Google has been offering an array of additional services that could become the building blocks for a Web-based computing platform that lessens the need for Microsoft's products.

Besides e-mail and instant messaging, Google also is distributing word processing and spreadsheet programs aimed at the Office suite of software that has long been one of Microsoft's biggest cash cows.

Google has been able to offer most of its services free because it makes so much money from the ads that it serves up alongside its search results and other content published by the thousands of Web sites that belong to Google's network.

Hoping to siphon away some of that revenue, Microsoft has invested heavily in its own search engine, which still ranks a distant third behind Google and Yahoo Inc.

Microsoft engineered Vista so its desktop search and Internet search engine would operate independently in an effort to avoid legal problems, said Brad Smith, the company's general counsel.

"If we were creating a feature in Windows and somehow requiring people to jump from our feature to our Internet search, then I could at least understand an antitrust argument being raised," Smith said.

Google Chairman Eric Schmidt has been a longtime critic of Microsoft's business tactics. After raising antitrust concerns about Microsoft in his previous jobs at Sun Microsystems Inc. and Novell Inc., Schmidt again has been on the attack as he steers Google.

Last year, the Mountain View-based company reached out to the Justice Department to raise alarms about how the latest version of Microsoft's Web browser threatened to make it more difficult for computer users to install the toolbars of competing search engines. Although regulators decided not to intervene, Microsoft subsequently modified the way Explorer handled the selection of search toolbars.

Before putting its most recent misgivings on paper, Google began discussing the desktop search issue with authorities last year.

Those talks were apparently touched upon during a hearing in March when the Justice Department said it was investigating a claim that Microsoft had violated its antitrust settlement. Without identifying the complaining party, the Justice Department said the grievances were related to "middleware," or software that links different computer programs.

Google filed its written complaint just a few days after Microsoft publicly urged antitrust regulators to scrutinize Google's planned $3.1 billion acquisition of online ad service DoubleClick Inc. Microsoft contends the deal will give Google too much power over the rapidly growing online ad market. The Federal Trade Commission has opened a formal inquiry into the matter.

Java Forums - The largest Java Community

2007-06-11T16:22:00.000-07:00

In this blog post I am going to review about the one of the fastest growing Java Developers Forum.
You can view the forum Java Forum . They are maintaing the network of site for the Java Developers. In this forum you can post any doubts on Java Technologies. This is the link for java announcements where they post anything important happeings in the Java Industry. The following are the NetWork of sites maintained by them :

Java Headlines
Eclipse
NetBeans

Please visit these site and laern Java.

Apple and Google - Partnership Next Week?

2007-06-10T07:40:00.001-07:00

With Apple’s WorldWide Developer Conference (WWDC) on schedule for next week, this is the time for rumors to come flying. The latest one and highly-probable one: Apple and Google partnering up on updating Apple’s .Mac service.

Apple’s .Mac service provides consumers with one gigabyte of shared email/web storage that users can back their own documents up to and also host websites on. They also provide online calendar, synchronizing of bookmarks to multiple computers, and more, for $99/year. While this is all put on by Apple and seems like a good round-up features, Google, the search-engine giant, has most, if not all of these features for free and are in some cases better than what Apple currently provides. Google’s GMail service provides users with a continuously growing amount of storage space for their email, as well as Google PageBuilder to create your own site on, Google Calendar, and many other features that Apple provides.

Apple has been bashed for not updating these features to catch up with competitors, but that may change. Wired is reporting that Apple and Google may partner up with each other to update the .Mac service to make it more comparable to other solutions. In an interview with Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google and also an Apple board member, he believed that this was bound to happen. “We’re a perfect back end to the problems that they’re trying to solve. They have very good judgment on user interface and people. But they don’t have this supercomputer (that Google has), which is the data centers. What they have is a manufacturing business that’s doing quite well.”

This could be a hint to an upcoming re-release of the .Mac service. Also, when Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, was asked at the D Conference last week, he said that they “will make up for lost time in the very near future” for their putting off .Mac upgrade. We will see how this all folds out on Monday, June 11 at the WWDC keynote speech.

Firefox 3 Will Include Malware Protection

2007-06-09T18:45:00.000-07:00

Mozilla intends to extend Firefox's phishing protection to include a list of sites that try to install malware. "Similar to how Firefox 2 blocks Web sites that are potentially going to try to steal your personal information, Firefox 3 will block Web sites that we believe are going to try to install malicious programs on your computer. Mozilla is coordinating with Google on this feature," says Alex Faaborg.

ComputerWorld quotes Gervase Markham, a developer for Bugzilla, who says: "What we are actually doing here is giving Google veto power over any Web page." The list of potentially harmful sites is managed by StopBadware, an organization that fights against spyware, malware, and deceptive adware. StopBadware is sponsored by Google, Lenovo and Sun.

Google already shows alerts if you try to visit a search result that may install malicious software on your computer. The feature is also included in Google Desktop, which automatically updates a list of suspicious or malicious sites from Google's servers. Firefox will probably work the same.

Other new features that will be included in Firefox 3: a unified way of storing bookmarks, history, and information about Web pages, microformat detection, private browsing, support for offline web applications. Firefox 3 should be launched at the end of the year, but you can still try the Alpha 5 version at your own risk.

Picasa2Flickr - Upload Photos from Picasa to Flickr

2007-06-09T18:43:00.000-07:00

One of the most important advantages of Picasa Web Albums compared to Flickr is that it's easy to upload photos and to download photo albums if you use Google's photo organizer, Picasa.

Picasa2Flickr is an open source plugin for Picasa that lets you upload photos to Flickr. You can just select some photos from your albums, click on "Send to Flickr" and a small dialog will let you enter some information about your photos: tags, privacy options, the name of a set.

The plugin uses Flickr's authentication API, so you'll enter your credentials in a browser, without passing them to the application.

Notifier for Google Reader

2007-06-09T18:40:00.000-07:00

Google Reader Watcher is a Firefox extension that monitors your feeds from Google Reader and shows alerts when there's something new to read. The extension shows the number of unread posts in the status bar (this number is only an approximation, because Google Reader doesn't count past 100 for an individual feed). If you hover over the icon, you'll see the list of feeds that have unread posts.

Another way to keep up with your Google Reader feeds is to subscribe to this feed locally (for example, using Firefox Live Bookmarks or Opera's feed reader): http://www.google.com/reader/atom/user/-/state/com.google/reading-list?n=100. Note that the n= parameter represents the number of items from the feed and can be adjusted. As expected, you need to log in before accessing the feed, because it's not public.

Google undermining trust in Microsoft?

2007-06-08T22:21:00.003-07:00

oogle Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) has had a good time recently nipping at the heels of what many consider its largest enemy -- Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT). While I'm not agreeing that Microsoft is in Google's direct cross-hairs more than other companies, the area of customer security and privacy is one area where both companies have taken potshots at one another recently. Google has taken criticism for the immense privacy breaches it apparently is making available to the world, while Microsoft's Windows operating system and other software constantly have security issues, from malware to spyware.

Google recently posted an entry to its security blog that lists the most common web servers that are used to host malware, which then gets distributed to consumer PCs -- turning them into "zombies" for illegal online activity. Yes, you guessed it -- Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS) was listed along with the Apache web server (which runs the free Linux operating system) as responsible for distributing 49% of all malware on the internet. You probably know malware -- it's what is responsible for those annoying popups on many millions of PCs, and it generally slows down a PC significantly or crashes it altogether.

Now, to be fair, Google did list the open-source Apache web server as responsible for hosting and distributing malware on the internet as well, so I don't think this was a direct attack on Microsoft, but more as a statement of fact.

But, Google did take its analysis further and determined that Microsoft's server software was actually responsible for distributing malware twice as much as the Apache web server software. While this will not come as a surprise to many IT professionals, it seems that Google could have a motive of undermining trust in Microsoft's products by using published research and analysis showing weakness. Well, it's free to do that, and perhaps Microsoft could turn the tables on Google and point out weakness in the company's software -- except that Google does not make software for web servers.

Google buy

2007-06-08T22:21:00.001-07:00

Analyst Henning Wagener of AC Research reiterates his "buy" rating on Google (GOOG.NAS).

According to AC Research’s research note dated June 6 and published this morning, the company has made another acquisition. Google is taking over server specialist PeakStream, a corporation that, among other things, develops software for server computers. The systems are designed to run on work stations as well as on servers. With this acquisition, Google is able to enhance its own technology. As for the financial details of the deal, the parties agreed to disclose no further information.

Moreover, Google announced a close cooperation with salesforce.com, a producer of customer management systems. Salesforce.com is offering internet based solutions for the administration of client relations. The core of the agreement is the integration of the AdWords Google platform into the Salesforce Edition customer management software. With the development of a joint software package, the companies want to address in particular smaller sized corporations with less than 200 employees. Among other things, the Salesforce Group Edition shall enable companies to directly launch ads in the search results lists via Google AdWord. The analyst believes that this cooperation makes a lot of sense, since it ill probably enable Google to further expand its customer base. At Wednesday’s closing price of $518.84 and a 2007 P/E ratio of roughly 35, the company’s stock still seems to enjoy a somewhat moderate rating, considering the continuing rather large growth potentials. With the cooperation with salesforce.com, Google is reinforcing its competition with Microsoft in the corporate software market, the analyst says. Here, with internet word, mail, and calendar functions, Google is now offering more and more alternatives to the Microsoft office software. Against this backdrop, Google is likely to be able to gain some additional market share at the expense of Microsoft in this segment. AC Research reiterates its "buy" rating on Google

Google to digitize Big Ten school books

2007-06-08T22:20:00.001-07:00

Twelve major universities will digitize select collections in each of their libraries -- up to 10 million volumes -- as part of Google Inc.'s book-scanning project. The goal: a shared digital repository that faculty, students and the public can access quickly.

The partnership involves the Committee on Institutional Cooperation, which includes the University of Chicago and the 11 universities in the Big Ten athletic conference (yes, there are 11): Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Michigan State, Minnesota, Northwestern, Ohio State, Penn State, Purdue and Wisconsin.

"We have a collective ambition to share resources and work together to preserve the world's printed treasures," said Northwestern Provost Lawrence Dumas.

The committee said Google will scan and index materials "in a manner consistent with copyright law." Google generally makes available the full text of books in the public domain and limited portions of copyrighted books.

Several other universities, including Harvard and California, already have signed up to let Google scan their libraries.

But Google still faces a lawsuit by the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild over its plans to incorporate parts of copyrighted books.

Newspaper Alliances Help Yahoo! Expand Ad Reach

2007-06-08T22:15:00.005-07:00

The alliance between newspaper publishers and Yahoo! that was unveiled last November has now grown to 17 publishing groups representing over 400 daily papers, reports Red Herring. Hearst, the publisher of 12 daily newspapers including the San Francisco Chronicle, Houston Chronicle, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, said the alliance has already generated millions of dollars in additional revenue this year.

The partnerships, which are currently based around job classifieds with Yahoo!'s HotJob's service, allow newspapers to greatly expand their audience. "Most newspapers' web sites reach between 10 and 20 percent of their audience in their local market. Yahoo!'s reach in the same audience in local markets is 70 to 80 percent," Hilary Schneider, executive vice president of Yahoo! marketplaces, said at a conference this week. The alliance will expand to search advertising on the newspapers' websites later this year, and display advertising during 2008.

While the alliance may help Yahoo! compete with Google, who is in the the process of acquiring DoubleClick in part to bolster its display advertising business, it is the classified ad tie-ups that may turn out to be the best part of the deal. Internet ad spending in the first quarter of 2007 was $4.9 billion (a year-over-year increase of about $100 million). Search ads continue to dominate, followed by display ads, but the fastest growth was in lead generation and classified ads.

While Google's DoubleClick acquisition will give them access to industry-leading software, Yahoo!'s strategy of partnerships with premium media properties gives them access to top dollar advertising space. JP Morgan analyst Imran Khan upgraded his rating of Yahoo! last week in large part because of these partnerships.

And the tie-ups don't have to stop with advertising and classifieds, according to analysts. Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence told Red Herring, "Social media, community tools, shopping, and maps mash-ups could all be tapped into. Newspaper sites could really benefit from these tools." These alliances could really help push Yahoo!'s non-search products to a wider audience, and in turn ultimately help their overall brand (including search).

What are your thoughts? Can alliances with newspaper publishers and other media sites help Yahoo! take on Google in advertising? Or will Google's search dominance equate to continued dominance of the online ad market?

Postini IPO Coming

2007-06-08T22:15:00.003-07:00

We’ve been hearing that Postini, a security and compliance company, is on track to file for their initial public offering in the next few weeks.

They recently hired a new CFO, Murray Demo, who can handle the IPO process. He was with Adobe for ten years and served as CFO for the last six. According to our source, the company held what is called a “bake off,” which is a selection process for the investment bankers who will market and sell the company’s stock in the IPO, and selected Merrill Lynch as the lead underwriter. Merrill Lynch just happens to be one of Postini’s early customes, so loyalty may have played a part.

Postini’s revenues are rumored to be at around a $75 million run rate, and is “very” profitable.

This is the year that IPOs may make a big comeback. We are tracking a few companies that made it through the downturn, sometimes by resorting to drastic measures to keep the company going, and who are now planning to hit the public markets. Postini will likely not have the $1 billion valuation that Netsuite is looking for, but it is a healthy and profitable company nonetheless.

New Ask.com UI Gives 20%+ More User Satisfaction

2007-06-08T22:15:00.001-07:00

This week Ask.com released a new user interface, which they nicknamed Ask3D. The vertical layout scheme looks very unusual for a general purpose search engine. However it's aesthetically pleasant. But as well as the visual enhancements, the new vertical scheme has other wisdom behind it. Let me explain with this graph:

In the above examples, I queried my name "Emre Sokullu" on Google and Ask respectively. The results: Google gives me 5 results in the first page, Ask has 7. Assuming that most users don't even scroll down, my satisfaction probability is 40% higher at Ask. You might think that people do scroll down, but past usability experiments have shown that most do not. Or even if they do, they do it very carelessly. Indeed users don't just give up at the first page if they don't feel satisfied, they also are likely to give up at the first eye shot if they don't feel satisfied - this is a natural consequence of increasing user expectations.

But there are a few important parameters here. First of all, Emre Sokullu is a typical long tail query example. As the query approaches the head of the tail, Google and Ask return the same amount of results. But most of the time, while Ask returns 6, Google has 5. Consequently, the user satisfaction is approximately 20% higher. Also note that another important parameter here is a user's screen resolution. The average mainstream screen resolution worldwide is 1024x768.

Overall, a small difference of ~ 80 pixels means a lot. Ask has basically increased the user satisfaction probability by a huge 20%, with just a UI change. This is a very good example of where user interface innovation in search may provide tangible improvements in the search experience.

The F-shape theory

The heatmaps above represent the way users read different web sites. The interesting point here is the commonality of the F-shape reading pattern during the eye tracking studies. More about this interesting work is provided on Jabob Nielsen's site.

This suggests that the current Ask interface has no conflict with the F shape pattern. The extra margin at the left side gets reflexively omitted by users, as shown in the first and second examples above.

Other Enhancements

The enhancements at Ask are not limited to UI. Additionally, in popular queries, the right panel can give you a shortcut definition from Wikipedia and other relevant results from images, videos, blogs and shopping channels. Therefore the chances of getting a relevant result at the first shot increases.

Customization

Last but not least, Ask has taken some courageous customization steps as well. It allows you to have your favourite desktop image in the background each time you visit the site. This is a feature that complements the current social networking and mobile phone customization trends. Just as you enjoy having your own background image on your cell phone, Windows desktop and MySpace page, you can now enjoy having your own background on your search engine page.

All of these fancy enhancements come at a price though - the pages get more and more bloated compared to the simple Google and Yahoo interfaces. Ask's logic is to leverage the advantages of high speed broadband connections and expand in the US market mainly - where page download differences at that level are not even noticeable.

Conclusion

A few months ago, myself and our search czar Charles Knight had a discussion around the topic of UI innovations. My point then was that user interface innovations are not that important - the important thing is to make technological advances. I still advocate this idea and think a new search engine won't ramp up significantly just because it brings a few UI innovations. However it is certainly a good idea to combine technological shifts with user interface innovations; or in some sense, feed technological breakthroughs with smart UI magic. And this is what Ask.com has done.

The Internet? You Mean That Old Thing Google Bought?

2007-06-08T22:14:00.003-07:00

The news yesterday evening: Google will buy RSS publisher Feedburner for $100 million. What to call it? Googburner? Feedboogle? Fondleburger?

Whatever. Let's just call the Internet Google and get it over with. That's only half a joke: Google buys or invests in growth trends online. Whatever technology has the potential of bringing more people online (mobile ads, video) or manages their online experience (blogs, iGoogle, maps) is a target for acquisition.

Hence Feedburner. While Forrester says only 29% of large companies use RSS today (2006 stat), 48% of current RSS publishers are overspending on the trend, to the tune of $250k each per year. Everybody wants RSS to blow up.

Other reasons Google is scooping FeedBurner up:

Analytics. One place to get combined page views and feed views.
Access to reading and viewership trends of a schload of major publishers like USA Today and MediaVillage.
Cross-analyzing readership trends for better targeting of ad data. Duh.
Advertising in feeds. Also duh.

Google Universal Search Gives Big Ups to Maps, Video

2007-06-08T22:14:00.001-07:00

Google released its universal search update a few weeks ago, and now Bill Tancer at Hitwise says the upgrade is driving a lot of traffic to Google Maps and YouTube.

Well of course the YouTube bump makes sense. Like I said three weeks ago, you don't have to sell ads in videos, you can make money selling ads around searches for video. As video becomes more popular -- and not just on YouTube, on every video site -- people will search for those videos more often on Google. Even better, for Google, YouTube's rising tide lifts all boats. In this case the boats = other video sites. Monetize those, too. Turn Google Video into a meta search engine for all types of video.

As for the increased traffic to Google Maps, I wonder if that number isn't impacted by all the attention Maps received last week from the street view feature. Lots of media around that one, including my appearance to talk about the feature with Wired's Ryan Singel on G4TV's Attack of the Show.

eBay and Google set to start replacing tired advertising models

2007-06-08T00:52:00.003-07:00

It's pretty well known that Google's (NASDAQ: GOOG) AdWords internet advertising system works. It combines the auction format of letting advertising customers compete against each other for advertising spots along with customer responsiveness to ads in order to determine which advertisers see premium placement on Google properties. This type of "customer relevancy" combined with an auction format keyword bidding has made Google, well, the most successful advertiser on the internet.

But, when it comes to internet and auction, don't ever count out eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY). The world's largest auction web property wants to up the ante (so to speak) in creating an auction-based sales system that would put it directly in the crosshairs of Google. How so, might you ask? As Zac Bissonnette mentioned yesterday, ebay is making it possible for radio stations to auction off ad-time. Intriguing. Is this only the beginning for eBay? Although both eBay and Google are relative newcomers to the field of brokering advertising for television and radio, the lukewarm response to television brokering has already sent a signal. What's next?

Even if radio and television brokering ends up not working as well as planned for both eBay and Google, eventually the age-old model of ad brokering that's existed for decades will fall as some old paradigms shift. Google has already shown (and eBay as well) that giving customers a choice and putting them in control can lead to much greater things when compared to the protectionist system of relying on higher fees for airtime for traditional ad models that are working (and slowing) today in the television and radio markets. There is a reason more money is moving to internet advertising and away from television and radio networks: The customer interaction and advertising customization is years ahead of the old way of advertising. Leaders like eBay and Google know this, and also know that as old models of advertising and brokering pieces of advertising, there will be new models in television, radio and print needing to step in and take over. It's not a question of if, but when.

Salesforce.com And Google Co-Launch New Web-based CRM Product

2007-06-08T00:52:00.001-07:00

On-demand business technology provider Salesforce.com recently announced a strategic global alliance with Google to launch Salesforce Group Edition featuring Google AdWords. According to company press, the new platform is "a robust offering that combines the power of Salesforce on-demand CRM applications with the Google AdWords platform to achieve integrated sales and marketing success. This joint solution provides businesses of all sizes with the same tools used by larger enterprises to successfully attract and retain customers."
By encapsulating every element of the customer lifecycle -- advertising, creating leads, closing business and retaining customers -- in one solution, Salesforce Group Edition featuring Google AdWords enables users to

Advertise Online -- companies can create an ad that is displayed with the relevant search results on Google.com or across the Google AdSense content network of partner Websites. Users can create an ad in as quickly as five minutes and with as little as $5.
Attract Prospects -- When people search the Web for the products and services that your company sells, your ad appears with the relevant search results. When they click on your ad, visitors are taken to your Website.
Capture Leads -- Once the potential customers are on your Website, you can entice visitors to fill out a name capture form on your site with an offer for a Webinar, white paper, etc. The information collected on the form flows directly into Salesforce as a new lead.
Acquire Customers -- As soon as a lead is added into Salesforce, it is distributed to the sales team, enabling businesses to manage and share leads, track opportunities through the sales cycle and close deals.
Analyze Growth -- the platform features easy-to-access, real-time dashboards that give companies a bird's eye view into lead generation, sales metrics and company growth, allowing you to make decisions quickly and alter advertising strategies appropriately.
Mash-up Other Business Applications -- salesforce.com's AppExchange directory gives customers the opportunity to mash-up any of the 600 business applications, including mapping and productivity technologies.

Joint customers can go to the Google site at http://www.google.com/adwords/salesforce to login to their AdWords account and/or access Salesforce directly at http://www.salesforce.com/google

More than 600 applications are now available on salesforce.com's AppExchange, the world's first on-demand application directory, found at http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange

Human Edited Web Directory - Try It Now

2007-06-04T07:54:00.000-07:00

In this post i will write about the quality webdirectory which used for submiting all my sites. Normally submiting to webdirectory increases the page rank of our website. and also it gives the more backlinks to our website. When we select the webdirectory, we need to consider the following criterias into mind

Page Rank of the webdirectory
Number of visitors coming to the site
The categories in the webdirectory ( The more specific category you submit the link will be more relavent to the visitor

When we look at the importance of the web directoty, there is no wrong in investing decent amount for building backlinks by submit to the popular directories like Human Edited Web Directory.

The main advantage of using Jtrotta Web Directory is that you can edit and submit the links. If you have websites or blogs, then you should try it today.

Google adds FeedBurner to growing list of acquisitions

2007-06-02T20:14:00.001-07:00

Adding another potentially lucrative channel to its prosperous advertising network, Internet search leader Google Inc on Friday announced its acquisition of Feed-Burner Inc, a service focused on making money from the steady stream of information flowing from blogs, podcasts and traditional news sites.

Financial terms of the long-rumored deal were not disclosed -- an indication that the acquisition price was not large enough to dent Google's wallet, which is bulging with more than US$11 billion in cash. Previous reports about Google's plans to buy FeedBurner pegged the sales price at about US$100 million.

Google shares gained US$2.49 to close at US$500.40 on Friday.

With just 30 employees, privately held FeedBurner had been subsisting on US$10 million in venture capital raised since its inception four years ago. Google will allow FeedBurner to remain based in its current Chicago headquarters, but has not made a decision on whether the brand will be retained.

Although FeedBurner is a small company, the buzz about its service has been steadily building as it helped distribute ads through the rapidly expanding universe of bloggers, podcasters and other sites that send out headlines and links through Really Simple Syndication, or RSS.

More than 431,000 Web publishers currently belong to FeedBurner's network and the company says it delivers about 67 million feeds to its subscribers each day.

That kind of volume lured Google, which is aggressively looking for other marketing opportunities to build upon its success delivering text-based ad links alongside its search results and other more standard content on the Web.

Google recently has been experimenting with video ads on some of its partners' sites and its YouTube.com subsidiary and hopes to create a platform for distributing other types of visual ads with its planned US$3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick Inc.
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Google adds FeedBurner to growing list of acquisitions

2007-06-02T20:11:00.001-07:00

Google shares gained US$2.49 to close at US$500.40 on Friday.

More than 431,000 Web publishers currently belong to FeedBurner's network and the company says it delivers about 67 million feeds to its subscribers each day.

Why Google Gears Is Good News Bad News For Microsoft

2007-06-02T20:10:00.001-07:00

Google Gears, Google's new JavaScript API to help Web apps work offline, is certainly an intruiging concept. As recognition that people aren't always online, it will also surely be paraded by Redmond as validation of Microsoft's vision that the future of software covers the desktop, the Internet, and particularly, a combination of the two. But it's not all gravy. Google Gears gives browser apps persistance, long the sole bailiwick of the desktop client.

Don't think the primacy of the browser is suddenly here. Out-of-browser-experiences, or OOBE's, as I will call them to be cute, are still more responsive than your typical AJAX app, bound by tricky code and a lack of access to hardware resources like graphics acceleration. The browser also constrains the look and feel of the user interface, hence Microsoft pushes Windows Presentation Foundation for Internet-connected apps. Plus, Google Gears could take away one of the browser's greatest benefits: the ability to run applications without installation headaches.

And yet, Google Gears was an inevitable development Microsoft has neglected. Offline capability for heretofore purely online apps, like we now find from Zoho to Salesforce.com, is a necessary thing. Microsoft has repeatedly brought that to my attention over the past few months, as they well should since software plus services is the company's future. Microsoft itself has had things like Office Online, which searches the Web for templates and returns them, all inside of Office apps like Word, for years. But they've all come from the direction of the desktop toward the Web, rather than the other direction.

The value of Windows is that it is a relatively exclusive and powerful sandbox. Well, that, and that it is the dominant operating system by a mile, but that's beside the point. The value of the browser-based Web, on the other hand, is lightweight openness, as Google demonstrated with Gears, itself a relatively small download that's cross-platform and cross-browser. How to reconcile those two worlds is a bigger predicament than I am able to unravel. Adobe's Apollo run-time made an attempt to do so, now so does Google Gears and sometime soon will Mozilla Firefox 3.0. I know I'm comparing offline (and/or out-of-browser) apples to online (and/or in-browser) oranges, but the middle ground is sparse. Where's Microsoft's platform entry?

Silverlight, Microsoft's new cross-platform, cross-browser Internet platform, actually carries some potential, but it has no native offline capabilities and isn't likely to start working with Google Gears anytime soon. And the Novell-run Mono project may actually beat Microsoft to the punch of making Silverlight work outside a browser. Even then, will it run offline? No. Will it be as open as Gears? I'd say no.

Needless to add, Microsoft is far from the kind of openness that would have had the company build Google Gears itself. There's as much, if not much more, downside to Microsoft putting out an API that would enable people to develop offline apps for competitive Web and desktop platforms as there is upside. Rock, meet hard place. Move too fast, you could cannibalize Windows and Microsoft's desktop apps business; move too slow, and get left behind in a new world.

Google Book Search available in publisher sites

2007-06-02T20:09:00.001-07:00

This is the first time Google's Book Search service has been available outside of its main site in the Google.com domain. This co-branded search program benefits Google because the search engine will now be available more broadly. Meanwhile, publishers benefit by offering an additional search service to their Web site visitors.

Publishers can tailor the index of their search engine so that only books published by them show up in the query results, Google said Friday. As in the main Book Search site, these result pages give users the option to link to online shops that sell the listed books.

Interestingly, one of the publishers that put Book Search on its Web site is The McGraw-Hill Companies. Along with other major publishers, McGraw-Hill is suing Google for copyright infringement over Google's ongoing project to scan millions of copyright books without permission.

Although McGraw-Hill's position may seem at first contradictory, it stems from the fact that Google's Book Search service has two main pieces.

One focuses on securing formal partnerships with publishers, obtaining their permission to scan books and giving them control over how much of those books can be displayed by Google for free.

McGraw-Hill is one of about 10,000 publishers that participate in this partner program with Google that have collectively made available about 1 million titles for scanning so far, said Tom Turvey, director of Google Book Search partnerships. About 50 publishers have embedded Book Search in their sites already, and many more are in line to do so, Turvey said. McGraw-Hill didn't immediately reply to a request for comment.

Simultaneously, McGraw-Hill objects to the other portion of the Book Search operation, in which Google partners with major academic libraries to scan large portions of their collections. Those library scanning operations often involve copyright books, which Google is digitally copying without obtaining permission from publishers and authors

Google engineers try to read users minds

2007-06-02T20:08:00.001-07:00

These days, Google seems to be doing everything, everywhere. It takes pictures of your house from outer space, copies rare Sanskrit books in India, charms its way onto Madison Avenue, picks fights with Hollywood and tries to undercut Microsoft's software dominance.

But at its core, Google remains a search engine. And its search pages, blue hyperlinks set against a bland, white background, have made it the most visited, most profitable and arguably the most powerful company on the Internet. Google is the homework helper, navigator and yellow pages for half a billion users, able to find the most improbable needles in the world's largest haystack of information in just the blink of an eye.

Yet however easy it is to wax poetic about the modern-day miracle of Google, the site is also among the world's biggest teases. Millions of times a day, users click away from Google, disappointed that they couldn't find the hotel, the recipe or the background of that hot guy. Google often finds what users want, but it doesn't always.

Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow, pauses for breath at the company's Mountain View, California, headquarters on May 3.
PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE

That's why Amit Singhal and hundreds of other Google engineers are constantly tweaking the company's search engine in an elusive quest to close the gap between often and always.

Singhal is the master of what Google calls its "ranking algorithm" -- the formulas that decide which Web pages best answer each user's question. It is a key part of Google's inner sanctum, a department called "search quality" that the company treats like a state secret. Google rarely allows outsiders to visit the unit, and it has been cautious about allowing Singhal to speak with the news media about the magical, mathematical brew inside the millions of black boxes that power its search engine.

Google values Singhal and his team so highly for the most basic of competitive reasons. It believes that its ability to decrease the number of times it leaves searchers disappointed is crucial to fending off ever-fiercer attacks from the likes of Yahoo and Microsoft and preserving the tidy advertising gold mine that search represents.

"The fundamental value created by Google is the ranking," says John Battelle, the chief executive of Federated Media, a blog ad network, and author of The Search, a book about Google.

Online stores, he notes, find that a quarter to a half of their visitors, and most of their new customers, come from search engines. And media sites are discovering that many people are ignoring their home pages -- where ad rates are typically highest -- and using Google to jump to the specific pages they want.

"Google has become the life blood of the Internet," Battelle says. "You have to be in it."

Users, of course, don't see the science and the artistry that makes Google's black boxes hum, but the search-quality team makes about a half-dozen major and minor changes a week to the vast nest of mathematical formulas that power the search engine.

These formulas have grown better at reading the minds of users to interpret a very short query. Are the users looking for a job, a purchase, or a fact? The formulas can tell that people who type "apples" are likely to be thinking about fruit, while those who type "Apple" are mulling computers or iPods. They can even compensate for vaguely worded queries or outright mistakes.

`Give me what I want'

"Search over the last few years has moved from `Give me what I typed' to `Give me what I want,'" says Singhal, a 39-year-old native of India who joined Google in 2000 and is now a Google Fellow, the designation the company reserves for its elite engineers.

Google recently allowed a reporter from the New York Times to spend a day with Singhal and others in the search-quality team, observing some internal meetings and talking to several top engineers. There were many questions that Google wouldn't answer. But the engineers still explained more than they ever have before in the news media about how their search system works.

As Google constantly fine-tunes its search engine, one challenge it faces is sheer scale. It is now the most popular Web site in the world, offering its services in 112 languages, indexing tens of billions of Web pages and handling hundreds of millions of queries a day.

Even more daunting, many of those pages are shams created by hucksters trying to lure Web surfers to their sites filled with ads, pornography or financial scams. At the same time, users have come to expect that Google can sift through all that data and find what they are seeking, with just a few words as clues.

"Expectations are higher now," said Udi Manber, who oversees Google's entire search-quality group. "When search first started, if you searched for something and you found it, it was a miracle. Now, if you don't get exactly what you want in the first three results, something is wrong."

Google's approach to search reflects its unconventional management practices. It has hundreds of engineers, including leading experts lured from academia, loosely organized and working on projects that interest them. But when it comes to the search engine -- which has many thousands of interlocking equations -- it has to double-check the engineers' independent work with objective, quantitative rigor to ensure that new formulas don't do more harm than good.

As always, tweaking and quality control involve a balancing act. "You make a change, and it affects some queries positively and others negatively," Manber says. "You can't only launch things that are 100 percent positive." The epicenter of Google's frantic quest for perfect links is Building 43 in the heart of the company's headquarters here, known as the Googleplex.

At the top of a bright chartreuse staircase in Building 43 is the office that Singhal shares with three other top engineers. It is littered with plastic light sabers, foam swords and Nerf guns. A big white board near Singhal's desk is scrawled with graphs, queries and bits of multicolored, mathematical algorithms. Complaints from users about searches gone awry are also scrawled on the board.

Squashing bugs

Any of Google's 10,000 employees can use its "Buganizer" system to report a search problem, and about 100 times a day they do -- listing Singhal as the person responsible to squash them.

"Someone brings a query that is broken to Amit, and he treasures it and cherishes it and tries to figure out how to fix the algorithm," says Matt Cutts, one of Singhal's officemates and the head of Google's efforts to fight Web spam, the term for advertising-filled pages that somehow keep maneuvering to the top of search listings.

Some complaints involve simple flaws that need to be fixed right away. Recently, a search for "French Revolution" returned too many sites about the recent French presidential election campaign -- in which candidates opined on various policy revolutions -- rather than the ouster of King Louis XVI. A search-engine tweak gave more weight to pages with phrases like "French Revolution" rather than pages that simply had both words.

At other times, complaints highlight more complex problems. In 2005, Bill Brougher, a Google product manager, complained that typing the phrase "teak patio Palo Alto" didn't return a local store called the Teak Patio.

So Singhal fired up one of Google's prized and closely guarded internal programs, called Debug, which shows how its computers evaluate each query and each Web page. He discovered that Theteakpatio.com did not show up because Google's formulas were not giving enough importance to links from other sites about Palo Alto.

It was also a clue to a bigger problem: finding local businesses is important to users, but Google often has to rely on only a handful of sites for clues about which businesses are best. Within two months of Brougher's complaint, Singhal's group had written a new mathematical formula to handle queries for hometown shops.

But Singhal often doesn't rush to fix everything he hears about, because each change can affect the rankings of many sites. "You can't just react on the first complaint," he says. "You let things simmer."

The reticent Manber (he declines to give his age), would discuss his search-quality group only in the vaguest of terms. It operates in small teams of engineers. Some, like Singhal's, focus on systems that process queries after users type them in. Others work on features that improve the display of results, like extracting snippets -- the short, descriptive text that gives users a hint about a site's content.

Other members of Manber's team work on what happens before users can even start a search: maintaining a giant index of all the world's Web pages. Google has hundreds of thousands of customized computers scouring the Web to serve that purpose. In its early years, Google built a new index every six to eight weeks. Now it rechecks many pages every few days.

And Google does more than simply build an outsized, digital table of contents for the Web. Instead, it actually makes a copy of the entire Internet -- every word on every page -- that it stores in each of its huge customized data centers so it can comb through the information faster. Google recently developed a new system that can hold far more data and search through it far faster than the company could before.

As Google compiles its index, it calculates a number it calls PageRank for each page it finds. This was the key invention of Google's founders, Page and Sergey Brin. PageRank tallies how many times other sites link to a given page. Sites that are more popular, especially with sites that have high PageRanks themselves, are considered likely to be of higher quality.

Singhal has developed a far more elaborate system for ranking pages, which involves more than 200 types of information, or what Google calls "signals." PageRank is but one signal. Some signals are on Web pages -- like words, links, images and so on. Some are drawn from the history of how pages have changed over time. Some signals are data patterns uncovered in the trillions of searches that Google has handled over the years.

"The data we have is pushing the state of the art," Singhal says. "We see all the links going to a page, how the content is changing on the page over time."
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Can Google and Linux Topple Microsoft

2007-05-27T19:59:00.001-07:00

The story had a certain flair. In early March, the chief information officer of the Federal Aviation Administration , David Bowen, was reportedly considering forsaking Microsoft Windows and Office in favor of the Linux operating system and the Web-based Google Apps Premium office suite.

Could this be true? Might an office suite upstart topple the giant of giants? Does a Web-based suite of applications have enough punch to do the job?

Perhaps. Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) Apps Premium does offer a strong set of collaborative word-processing and spreadsheet tools, in addition to e-mail and calendar capabilities. "We built the [applications] from the ground up to focus on collaboration," said Mike Bradshaw, who leads Google's federal enterprise division. "They're providing a new type of functionality to the space that people have been looking for."More>>

Google continues gaining search engine market share

2007-05-27T19:26:00.001-07:00

Google continued gaining in U.S. search engine market share in April, up 1.4 percent over the prior month while Yahoo! held its second place position with 26.8 percent of U.S. searches, followed by Microsoft Sites (10.3 percent), Ask Network (5.1 percent) and Time Warner Network (5.0 percent).

According to the latest comScore Search analysis of activity across competitive search engines, Google now commands 49.7 percent of the Web in the United States, up 1.4 percent over the prior month when Google was reported to have 48.3 percent. Yahoo!, while maintaining the No. 2 spot, was reported to have slipped slightly to Google's advantage, down 0.7 percent in U.S. search engine market share in April with Microsoft down 0.6 percent for the No. 3 spot. While Yahoo's loss wasn't that negligable, Microsoft's market share was, representing a 3 percent decline, month-over-month.

Of interest was the fact that Americans conducted 7.3 billion searches online in April, virtually unchanged when compared to the prior month, but up 11 percent over the same period last year.

Google Sites led the pack with 3.6 billion search queries performed, followed by Yahoo Sites (2.0 billion), Microsoft Sites (757 million), Ask Network (376 million), and Time Warner Network (364 million).

Talk on your Personalized Homepage

2007-03-14T19:43:00.000-07:00

from google's Blog:

"We created the Personalized Homepage to help you gather all the things you care about on Google and across the web in one place. And since one of the things we all care about is communicating with friends, today we're excited to unveil a new version of Google Talk for your Personalized Homepage. The Google Talk Gadget lets you see your contacts and chat with your friends right on your homepage, and you don't have to download anything to start chatting. We've also added a few new features to make your chats a bit more colorful, like the ability to view YouTube videos and Picasa Web Albums photos in your chats. And just like many other gadgets, you can also add the Google Talk Gadget to your own webpage or blog.

To see the Google Talk Gadget in action on the Google Personalized Homepage, check out this short video. You can also read more about it on the Google Talk Blog. Then go ahead and add it to your homepage."

Viacom vs. Google: Test of key online law

2007-03-14T19:40:00.000-07:00

The copyright lawsuit filed Tuesday by Viacom against Google and its YouTube subsidiary could end up rewriting one of the key laws of the Internet age: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Viacom, which owns MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central, is alleging that Google and YouTube infringed copyrights ``on a massive scale'' by streaming more than 1.5 billion clips of shows like ``SpongeBob SquarePants,'' ``The Colbert Report'' and ``MTV Unplugged.'' It is seeking more than $1 billion in damages.

Google and YouTube have frequently cited the millennium copyright law -- also known as the DMCA -- in defense of repeated charges that they are illegally making money off of other people's creative work. But legal experts say it has yet to be determined whether key sections of the law apply to new media companies like Google and YouTube and scores of others.

``Any ruling in the YouTube case is certain to have implications for companies like Yahoo and eBay, as well as smaller companies like Facebook and imeem,'' said Fred von Lohmann, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. ``All of these companies rely on the exact same principles that YouTube does.''

Executives at Google and YouTube have argued that they comply with the DMCA because they remove copyrighted material as soon as they are asked by the copyright owner. This includes clips of TV shows like ``The Daily Show'' as well as videos created by users that contain copyrighted material, such as a home movie that has a Rolling Stones song as a soundtrack.

Viacom says this practice places the cost of enforcing copyrights on the ``victims of infringement'' who don't have the tools to effectively police the site. Last month, Viacom requested that YouTube take down more than 100,000 videos. YouTube complied, but a number of users reposted the videos almost immediately.

Viacom argues that the DMCA's ``safe harbor'' provision, which basically exempts hosting companies from liability if they take down copyrighted material once notified, does not apply to YouTube because copyrighted works are ``the cornerstone'' of its business model.

Google says that's not the case. ``YouTube has become even more popular since we took down Viacom's material,'' Google General Counsel Kent Walker said in a statement. ``We think that's a testament to the draw of the user-generated content on YouTube.''

Still, even Google quietly acknowledges that copyright law is being tested and new interpretations are possible. ``Any court ruling that imposes liability on providers of online services for activities of their users and other third parties could harm our business,'' Google noted in a yearly report it recently filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Google's shares fell $11.72, or 2.58 percent, to $443.03 in trading Tuesday.

Though it's not frequently acknowledged, any created work, such as a home video posted to YouTube, is copyrighted, but individuals generally have no power to enforce their rights unless they are affiliated with a major publisher or entertainment company.

For that reason, Ron Cass, chairman of the Center for the Rule of Law, believes a ruling in Viacom's favor would be good for ordinary people who post creative work on the Internet and who are increasingly having everything from pictures to blog posts plagiarized by other sites.

Mark Cuban, owner of Magnolia Pictures, said Google and YouTube's blatant disregard for copyrights has encouraged others to violate them. The distributor of films like ``Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room'' sent subpoenas to YouTube and Google Video last week requesting the names of users who uploaded its movies.

``Remember, it's not about how they treat Viacom,'' Cuban wrote in a post on his blog (www.blogmaverick.com). ``Viacom is big enough to take care of itself. It is about hiding behind a law, the DMCA, at the expense of copyright owners, to dominate the online video space.''

While other entertainment giants, including NBC Universal and News Corp., have asked YouTube to take down copyrighted material, Viacom is the first to sue.

James Nguyen, an attorney with Foley & Lardner in Los Angeles, said that's because some of them, like News Corp., own properties like MySpace that could be hurt by a new interpretation of the law.

``If Viacom wins, it really casts doubt on a number of businesses that rely on hosting information for users,'' Von Lohmann said. Yahoo's user-generated properties, such as Flickr, Yahoo 360 and Geocities, could also be affected.

Conversely, a ruling in Google's favor would allow the already numerous sites that are built around user-generated content to operate without having to enter into licensing agreements.

``Google has basically been following the advice of the best lawyers in Silicon Valley,'' Von Lohmann said. ``If Viacom wins, that would call into doubt all of the business models that relied on the same kinds of legal advice.''

Google phone pictures (probably fake)

2007-03-13T03:46:00.002-07:00

In a thread at the Mobile Burn forums MaDnEzZ has posted a screenshot taken while completing a survey online.

I'm signed up to a paid-survey website and well i received this the other day as part of the survey that i was participating in basically it was a survey about a google phone, which was designed by samsung, but running what seemed to be a google interface, i totally forgot to take a screen shot of the specs but they seemed decent, not mind blowing had the usual in par of 3g/wifi etc, had a camera 2megapixal from what i recall, feel really stupid for now taking a screenshot of the specs not lol

This is what the screenshot says about the Google Phone:

Google makes relevant information and communication tools easily available wherever you are.

The Google Phone brings the power of the internet in your pocket, in a simple and intuitive device. It combines the traditional voice and SMS capabilities of phones with all the exciting Google services from the PC such as Search, Gmail, Maps, Blogger…

The Google Phone, designed by Samsung, is a very thin and stylish handset with a large screen and a QWERTY keypad so that it provides a real internet experience.

All these internet services will be available under a simple Internet monthly flat fee, comparable to PC Broadband products, giving you transparency and control over your mobile bill. Thanks to simple relevant advertising, Google will even give you a 3 month discount on your mobile Internet monthly flat fee.

Mad4mobilephones opinion: its a fake

Google India announces Cricket World Cup Campaign, joins hands with K. Srikkanth

2007-03-13T03:46:00.001-07:00

With the ICC Cricket World Cup 2007 kicking off in just a few hours, all eyes around the world will be glued onto their television sets. But here’s one reason why you could perhaps head to your PC instead.

Google India has announced its Cricket World Cup Campaign that offers cricket enthusiasts an interactive experience via the web.

With this exciting initiative, users can write, share, debate about and enjoy the Cricket World Cup through an integrated platform of Google products like Google Desktop, personalized homepage, Blogger and Orkut through a special landing page, www.google.co.in/cricket. The platform aims to be a one-stop shop for all information related to the World Cup, enabling visitors to access regular updates, post individual comments and analysis of the game.

Speaking about this, Sundaraman K, Head of Sales, Google India said, “Google aims to constantly improve its users experience by designing products that make things easier and deliver better results than what was available before. Cricket is one of the key passions of users in India and this campaign is designed to bring people across communities together, offering them a unique cricket experience across different Google platforms.”

What’s more, cricketer and commentator, Krishnamachari Srikkanth, will host an expert blog ‘Cricket Zone’ with Krish Srikkanth’ at www.worldcupwithkrish.blogspot.com. Through this blog, users will be able to interact with cricket experts as well as other bloggers on the performance of the various teams and engage in match analysis among other interactive sessions. Krish will also bring expert content to an interactive social networking experience through Orkut, on Krishcricket community.

As a part of this initiative, Google is also hosting a blogging cricket contest, entries for which can be submitted at www.google.co.in/cricket/contest. This will include posts on anything from on-the-ground reporting from West Indies to viewers’ opinions on the progress of the various teams at the World Cup. Both existing and new users will get a chance to participate in the contest.

In addition, Google will also have a fully equipped Blogger vehicle that will visit Bhopal, Ahmedabad and Hyderabad, educating people on the use of Internet and blogging for self-expression. This educational road show will take off on March 19, 2007 from Chandigarh.

Well, cricket is a religion in India. Several big companies have even designed games and various cricket-related products and services to further induce the spirit if the game in the country, such as Microsoft’s Xbox 360 ‘Good Luck India’ Campaign and the ‘Yuvraj Singh International Cricket 2007’ - Xbox 360 Game, to name a few.

Google testing targeted TV ads

2007-03-13T03:45:00.000-07:00

Google Inc. has established a toehold in pursuing one of its next big ambitions: controlling which television ads viewers see and tailoring them to consumers' interests.

The Mountain View company honed the highly profitable Internet model of search advertising -- that is, selling ads targeted directly at consumers based on the terms they enter into Web search engines. Last year, the eight-year-old company racked up more than $10 billion of revenue by brokering online ads for itself and its partners.

Now, Google has begun a test run serving up TV commercials to cable subscribers in Concord, people familiar with the matter say. Google's pilot project to bring its approach to cable boxes represents a foray into the $54 billion U.S. market for TV advertising -- much bigger game than its online turf.

Although the effort is in its early stages, the progress underscores how Google could bring changes to how TV commercials are sold and delivered to viewers. Other Internet companies are also pursuing an entry into TV advertising, and any major Google success could eventually challenge the traditional TV and advertising powers.

In the Concord test, Google has been steering TV commercials to subscribers of cable provider Astound Broadband, a unit of WaveDivision Holdings LLC, since last year, according to four people familiar with the matter. When those consumers watch TV, some of the commercials they see have been sold to advertisers by Google and delivered to the cable company so that they appear in the normal breaks in TV programming as other ads do.

If the system is successful, Google could eventually try to establish itself as a middleman for purchasing TV spots, furthering its stated goal of offering advertisers one-stop-shopping for ads across virtually all media.

There is no assurance, though, that Google can repeat its success in online-search advertising -- a field in which it had little serious competition -- in the crowded, highly competitive arena of conventional media.

The previously undisclosed Concord effort, being conducted with a small group of advertisers, is aimed at testing the computer and network infrastructure needed for Google to broker and deliver commercials to cable systems more widely.

In the test, advertisers are buying commercial placements through an auction system, people familiar with the matter say. But it is at an early enough stage that the buys are being handled manually by Google salespeople, rather than through a full-fledged automated auction system like the one Google uses to sell ads online, one of the people says.

Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt in January told analysts the company was experimenting with TV advertising, without offering specifics. But he said the company intends to use its technology to better target TV commercials to users.

Rather than every household seeing the same commercial, Google in theory might tap databases with information about the demographics of an individual's neighborhood and examine the content of the program being watched at a given moment to better select which ads to beam through the TV. So, for example, a household in an area with lots of children might be more likely to see commercials for minivans than for sports cars.

Although federal privacy law restricts what cable companies can do with "personally identifiable information," the theory is that consumers will be better served seeing ads more relevant to them and will perhaps agree to share information about their habits and interests with Google.

Such data eventually might allow Google or others to more specifically tailor ads to individual households -- such as beaming ads for dog foods to viewers who own dogs.

"Advertisers in particular will pay much higher rates for ads that are targeted than ones that are untargeted," Mr. Schmidt noted.

At this stage, the commercials aren't targeted to specific households in Concord, which isn't far from Google's Mountain View headquarters, people familiar with the matter say. And the company likely won't on its own tap information about a specific household's buying patterns or other behaviors in order to choose the commercials because of the privacy concerns, one of the people says.

A spokeswoman for WaveDivision couldn't be reached for comment, but an executive with Astound, which has more than 25,000 subscribers, confirmed the test with Google is taking place.

Google's interest in TV commercials comes as the cable industry itself is turning to advertising as a promising source of revenue. One reason: Technology developments are starting to make it possible to target ads to specific households, as Google envisions. The Internet and cable players all want to play a role.

Several of the largest cable operators have also had discussions with Google about teaming up to do some form of TV advertising.

Google has broached the subject with Comcast Corp., a Bay Area cable operator and the nation's largest, with more than 23 million subscribers, as part of broader negotiations focusing on whether Google will continue as the search engine on Comcast's broadband portal, Comcast.net. Their current deal expires at the end of this year.

Some cable-industry executives are wary about giving a behemoth like Google too much power over their advertising. But many also recognize that Google will likely be a major force in the business. "We all believe as advertising moves from one-way to two-way, the winners are the Googles of the world and others that can provide truly two-way addressable advertising," said Steve Burke, Comcast's chief operating officer, during a recent earnings call.

Google's attempts to extend its ad brokering to traditional media aren't expected any time soon to contribute significantly to its revenue, 99 percent of which came from Internet ads last year.

Its traditional media-advertising efforts have also been bumpy to date. Google's executives admit to problems with the company's first tests of print-ad sales; they have given the system a major overhaul. Analysts say Google hasn't yet lined up enough radio-ad inventory to make its efforts there significant.

Although some advertisers are pushing for an Internet-based system for TV-commercial sales such as Google might provide, a group of them chose to team up with online auctioneer eBay Inc. instead. Even then, the TV networks and some advertisers and media buyers have proven resistant to such efforts to overhaul how TV ads are sold.

Some cable operators make as much as 6 percent of their revenue by selling mostly local ads in the time slots they get as part of their deals with the cable networks they carry. But cable companies feel they could greatly increase ad revenue by introducing a wide range of interactive features.

They see as the holy grail of advertising the ability to target different viewers with different commercials suited to their interests, much as Google imagines. "We're talking about delivering to advertisers things they increasingly like about the Internet," says Glenn Britt, Time Warner Cable Inc.'s chief executive.

Time Warner Cable had "preliminary conversations" with Google but the talks didn't advance because Time Warner executives didn't feel Google had much to add to its advertising effort, according to Britt. "We have the technological capabilities to do those things," he said. "We don't really need them."

Comcast is separately planning targeted ad-serving tests this year with three vendors that have been working close with cable operators on new forms of advertising, including OpenTV Corp., Visible World and Invidi Technologies, according to people familiar with the matter.

But Comcast executives caution that next year would be the earliest the company would launch this type of advertising. "In 2007, it's going to be baby steps," said Charlie Thurston, president of Comcast Spotlight, the operator's advertising arm.

Cable operators have to be careful about what they disclose to advertisers and others on customer viewing habits. Federal privacy law restricts what cable companies can do with "personally identifiable information."

Windows Vista Launch Hurts Yahoo, But Not Google

2007-03-07T23:40:00.001-08:00

The launch of Windows Vista has lifted Microsoft's Live Search share of the U.S. search market, but Microsoft's gain has come at the expense of Yahoo and Ask rather than Google.

"We saw a pretty substantial lift for the first time this year for Live Search," says Jeremy Crane, director of client services at Compete, an online market research firm. "And it happened to coincide with the consumer launch of Vista."

Live Search is the default search engine in Vista, a home-field advantage that Google has sought to counter with distribution deals for its search software.

In a blog post published today, Compete reported that Windows Live had received almost 590 million Web search queries in the United States in February, a 10% increase from 534 million in January.

During this period, Microsoft also saw a 10% increase in search query volume, which translates to a market share gain of 1 percentage point, moving Live Search from 8% to 9%.

Google also saw a market share gain of 1 percentage point during the same time frame as a result of a 3% gain in overall search volume, which reached almost 4 billion queries. Google's share of the U.S. search market in February rose to 63% from 62% the previous month.

Yahoo and Ask lost market share during this period, dropping from 23% to 21% and from 4% to 3% respectively. Yahoo's market share loss of 2 percentage points was the result of a 7% drop in search volume. Ask's market share loss followed from a 5% decline in search volume.

Last month, comScore Networks reported that Google had captured 47.5% of the U.S. search market in January, a significantly lower percentage than Compete counted. comScore also noted that Yahoo's U.S. search share dropped to 28%, Microsoft's rose slightly to reach 10.6%, and Ask's declined to 5.2%.

Crane attributes the difference in statistics to different methodologies. comScore, he says, includes a variety of online properties such as video search in its search numbers, whereas Compete only counts Web search.

Google arrogant? Google CEO Eric Schmidt responds

2007-03-07T23:36:00.001-08:00

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has been making the rounds this week, the Wall Street rounds: Morgan Stanley Technology Conference in San Francisco on Monday and Bear Stearns Media Conference in Palm Beach yesterday.

I listened attentively to his every keynote words (read my first-hand report in “Google CEO extols $800 billion advertising opportunity”).

I welcome any opportunity to hear Schmidt speak in order to glean further insights into Google’s strategies and tactics, and I did, as I report and analyze in “YouTube: What Google CEO Eric Schmidt really thinks.”

Schmidt not only leads Google, he is the number one search engine’s top cheerleader. Listening to the Google CEO’s Googley take on the world’s content and its advertising sometimes brings to mind how remarks of President George Bush provide prime fodder for Jay Leno and David Letterman monologues, or Bill Maher declaring “Mocking Bush is my patriotic duty”:

MAHER: Making fun of the president keeps this country safe. The proof? I've been doing it nonstop for years, and there hasn't been another attack. Maybe the reason they haven't attacked us again is they figured we're already suffering enough.If I could explain one thing about George W. Bush to the rest of the world it's this: We don't know what the hell he's saying either! Trust me, foreigners, there's nothing lost in translation, it's just as incoherent in the original English. Yes, we voted for him — twice — but that's because we're stupid, not because we're bad.

Bush is just one of those things that are really popular for a few years and then almost overnight become completely embarrassing. You know, like leg warmers, or Hootie and the Blowfish, or white people going, "Oh no you di-int."

While I have been reporting and analyzing Schmidt’s business case for Google, others have been keenly interested in his take on Google’s “arrogance,” or not.

For example, I headlined the Schmidt hour long philosophical expose on Google’s “new paradigm,” that he presented to Morgan Stanley, by underscoring “Google CEO extols $800 billion advertising opportunity.”

The SFGate, on the other hand, headlined “Google’s arrogance confirmed.”

How so? Featuring a photo of the Google CEO captioned, “Google’s arrogant ways,” Verne Kopytoff says of Schmidt’s hour long address:

All of you who think that Google is arrogant got a big affirmation today from none other than Eric Schmidt, the Internet leviathan's chief executive. He accepted responsibility for some of the negative perception about the Mountain View search engine, which instills fear across large swaths of the technology industry because of its large size and grand ambitions. By being more open, Google has overcome some of its earlier image troubles, Schmidt suggested. "We didn't tell the story, and we didn't have people inside the company to talk to our partners," Schmidt said.

In Associated Press reports of the Schmidt Q & A to Bear Sterns, Google’s arrogance, or not, is again a key focus:

Asked by a member of the audience whether Google is "arrogant," as charged by some in traditional media, Schmidt said, "I'm sure we're arrogant." But he chalked up those complaints to a negotiating tactic and groused that one of the ways traditional media negotiate "is it's leaked, and you're sued to death." Expressing dismay, Schmidt said, "It's not normal in the technology industry, I can assure you."

Asking Eric Schmidt point blank if Google is “arrogant” may provide attention getting headlines and provocative copy, but it is not productive.

Eric Schmidt Google’s “new paradigm” assertions themselves, put forth at Morgan Stanley and Bear Sterns, innately reflect the arrogant philosophy and operating principles of Google, and I shed sunlight on them.

In my “Google CEO extols $800 billion advertising opportunity”:

Schmidt on Google Cloud computing:

Why would a rational person put personal information anywhere else but the cloud, given risks of losing and/or damaging a mobile device or PC?

Schmidt on Google stance to video content owners:

It is a difficult business model transition for them. We tell them we will work to help them get to the new Google iconic model, (convincing) usually works after the initial conversation.

In my “YouTube: What Google CEO Eric Schmidt really thinks”:

Schmidt on YouTube ultimatum:

Users are going to make copies of your copyright content, so you may as well get used to it and embrace it.

Schmidt on what copyright holders really get from YouTube:

Compensation is still “unclear” and Google is not worried about that right now because the millions of YouTubers represent “potential monetizable targets.”

Or, in the words of Pat Schroeder, CEO, Association of American Publishers:

Google has ‘a hell of a business model – they’re going to take everything you create, for free, and sell advertising around it.’

Google Bookmarks FAQ

2007-03-04T04:37:00.001-08:00

A small guide for people that continue to ask how to use Google's low-profile bookmarking service.

What is Google Bookmarks?
Google Bookmarks is an online service that lets you save your favorite sites and attach labels and annotations. Unlike the bookmark feature from your browser, bookmarks are stored securely online, so they are accessible even if you're using other computers.

There are many sites that do that. What's so different about it?
The most important features that set Google Bookmark apart from other services is that all your bookmarks are private (nobody else can see them) and fully searchable. You are no longer restricted to the title of the page, the description and the URL - you can search the entire page. A similar service is the new version of Yahoo Bookmarks, currently in beta.

Can I import my bookmarks?
For Firefox and Internet Explorer, you can download Google Toolbar, and use the "Import bookmarks" option that appears on the drop-down menu next to the Bookmarks icon. For other browsers, you should import your bookmarks to Firefox and use Google Toolbar as explained before.

If you use other online bookmarking tools, you should find an option to export your bookmarks in their support center. For example, in del.icio.us go to Settings and select Export/backup to save your bookmarks in a HTML file that can be imported into your browser.

How can I add bookmarks?
If you've already installed Google Toolbar, you can use it to add or remove bookmarks. Just click on the blue star to add the current site as a bookmark. Click again on the star to choose one or more labels.

For Firefox, there is a very good extension called GMark that shows your bookmarks in the sidebar and another extension that mimics Google Toolbar and adds drag-and-drop.

But to add bookmarks there's a very simple bookmarklet that should work on almost any browser. Just drag this to the links toolbar: Google Bookmark. You'll also find it at the bottom of Google Bookmarks homepage.

How can I search my bookmarks?
Googe Toolbar adds a new option for bookmarks in the list of search engines. If you type the first letters from the title of a bookmark, Google Toolbar gives you the option to load that site.

You can also use Gmarks that searches as you type or you can just go to the web interface at google.com/bookmarks. Search the same as you'd do at Google.com. To restrict your search to a label, add label:name to your query (note that labels are case sensitive).

Is there an option to see my bookmarks in Google's personalized homepage?
There's a gadget that lists all your bookmarks by label and lets you edit them. You can add it multiple times to see bookmarks from different categories.

Will these bookmarks affect Google's search results?
You'll see the labels selected for a bookmark next to its corresponding snippet in the search results. Bookmarks affect Google's search results only for you. Google improves the relevancy of the search results by tailoring to your interests, so the order of the search results could change in some cases. A bookmark in the search results:

Will I be able to access my bookmarks from any computer?
The bookmarks are stored on Google's servers, so you can just log in and have instant access to your bookmarks from your personalized homepage (if you added the gadget I mentioned before) or at google.com/bookmarks.

How can I export my bookmarks from Google?
You can export the bookmarks as a feed, but it won't be very useful unless you're a developer. A better thing to do is to use the GMarks extension for Firefox, that creates a file called bookmarks.html, which is easy to import in your browser.

Is there a way to store the full content of my bookmarks on Google's servers?
No, but you can try Google Notebook, that lets you select the content of a page and save it as a note.

I want to bookmark my favorite posts from Google Reader.
Install Greasemonkey in Firefox, restart the browser and add this script. You'll see a new "Add bookmark" option at the bottom of each post.

What would you like to see in Google Bookmarks?
Some ideas: Google Bookmarks should make it easy to add bookmarks from the toolbar by adding the functionality available in the bookmarklet, a tag cloud should be a nice way to explore the bookmarks, you should be able to search the entire site if you bookmark the homepage, to save copies of the pages and to get recommendations for labels and related pages.

Google Click Tricks Fix: Fraud Is Only 0.02 Percent

2007-03-03T05:05:00.000-08:00

Google has posted an in-depth look at their click fraud detection scheme on their Inside AdWords blog, which says undetected click fraud constitutes only 0.02 percent of overall fraud in the AdSense network.

Danny Sullivan wonders why Google waited until now to release the extra data. Could it be because Yahoo's Panama is suctioning off 3 to 5 percent of advertisers' budgets from Google? Avenue A clients, too, say Yahoo's new ad system is working just dandy.

Don Dodge provides a good recap of Google's cat-and-mouse game with click fraudsters.

At any rate, Google's basic message here is "trust us, we have it under control." It's doubtless that click fraud concerns have come up not only with publishers but also in meetings with concerned parties in new markets. Even though click fraud can't exist in the same manner in TV and radio markets, Google still has to prove the company is worthy of trust.

I would imagine that, as Google expands, these types of "trust us" posts will appear more often.

Google Partners with LabPixies to Show Gadget Ads

2007-03-02T22:48:00.001-08:00

Google started to test a new kind of ads, that are basically Google gadgets. In this example, Google included 4 YouTube videos that promote Gmail and 5 tips, that combine text with images. So the ad is more flexible than other Google ads and gives the user more options and even power tips.

The ad was created by LabPixies, a company that uses gadgets to create ads centered on content. "Our novel approach for marketing ensures that rather than just forcing your content on uninterested users, you can reach an ever-growing users community who are actively searching for content. (...) LabPixies builds campaigns based on your content and tools, which provide the user with a real taste of your product and brand."

[If you're reading this in a feed reader, <a href="http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/03/google-partners-with-labpixies-to-show.html">go to the site</a> to view the ad.]

It will be interesting to see if Google's collaboration with LabPixies will go beyond this Gmail ad and if Google will start to use gadget-ads to monetize the personalized homepage.

Note that the gadget above is detached from its AdSense context, so I'm not getting paid if you click on the links or play the videos. If you like it so much, you can even add it to your personalized homepage.

Google China Grows Very Fast

2007-03-02T22:40:00.001-08:00

In the last month, Google China launched many services. They added a simple version of Google Maps, Google Suggest was enabled by default for web search, a Chinese version of Google Zeitgeist called ReBang ("hot ranking") was launched, but it's not accessible outside of China.

Google Translate added the traditional Chinese (spoken in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau) and also an option to suggest a better translation if you see phrases that look weird (like in the screenshot below). You can make suggestions only for Arabic, Chinese and Russian, the languages for which Google uses machine translation.

Google Books has just been launched in Chinese, with a very limited amount of books (a search for "China" returns 2325 results).

"China Network Communications Corporation (CNC), the country's second largest fixed-line operator, will use search engine giant Google to provide Internet search services for its 16 million broadband users," reports People Daily Online.

Google made a lot of sacrifices to try to become an important presence in China, where Baidu dominates in search and advertising. Google launched last year Google.cn, that delivers censored results to comply with local regulations and to offer a more reliable service to its users: "Google users in China today struggle with a service that, to be blunt, isn't very good. Google.com appears to be down around 10% of the time. Even when users can reach it, the website is slow, and sometimes produces results that when clicked on, stall out the user's browser. (...) Filtering our search results clearly compromises our mission. Failing to offer Google search at all to a fifth of the world's population, however, does so far more severely."

Philipp Lenssen quotes some interesting counter-arguments, like this one from Danny Sullivan: "Ultimately, I want Google to pull out and fight back. I can see the argument for being engaged in a country, for trying to help promote change over time. But I feel like Google should be big enough and principled enough to be engaged by not being engaged. That might do far more good now than years down the line."

But maybe Google is not powerful enough to make a difference in China's internal regulations or maybe they try to build something solid there, so they can have more authority. It will be interesting to watch the months to come, when Google will try to add more services to Google China, to build custom ones only for the Chinese audience, and hopefully even to be brave.

Google Toolbars Voting Buttons

2007-03-02T22:37:00.001-08:00

In December 2001, when there was no Digg or StumbleUpon, Google Toolbar launched a beta version:

A new version of the Google toolbar now in beta testing sports a new look -- happy and sad faces that let toolbar users rate web pages. (...)

Google says that excessive clicks are watched for. Google also assures that it has mechanisms in place to ensure good sites don't get penalized by competitors voting against them.

Here's how Google describes the feature: "Use these buttons to vote for or against a page or search result. Click the happy or unhappy face to tell Google that you like or dislike a particular page. You can also use these buttons to report especially good or bad results after you do a search with Google."

Matt Cutts explained at that time: "Right now it's just an experiment. Worst case, it's an easy way for people to report spam that we can handle automatically. We might see if we can improve our search with this data."

In 2003, when Google Toolbar 2 was launched, Google was still undecided: "This feature is currently in test mode, so you will not notice any immediate effects based on your action, other than experiencing a warm sense of satisfaction from having shared your feelings with people who really do care."

The tests must have been positive since the feature was included in the next version too. It's interesting to note that the mysterious feature continous to be available in the Internet Explorer version of Google Toolbar (Settings > Options > More > Voting), but it hasn't been included in the Firefox extension.

This small feature may have been responsible for detecting spam sites or for changing page rankings, but Google could resurrect it and make it a part of Google Personalized Search. They already show interesting pages related to your interests, these voting buttons could refine Google's data and improve the personalized search results.

Find Facts Using Advanced Search Queries

2007-03-01T18:31:00.001-08:00

If you're trying to obtain simple facts from Google, but you don't get direct answers (like for Japan population), use another strategy. Try to think how would you formulate a statement that contains the answer to your question.

Instead of asking "When did Yahoo buy Flickr?", think that a page that contains a statement that starts with "Yahoo bought Flickr in" should answer your question.

Step 1 - use quotes
Search for "Yahoo bought Flickr in" and you'll actually get the answer in the snippets. Not all the statements will give the same answer, so try to find the most popular opinion or the most reputable source.

That's great, but what if you want to find more complex information, like Yahoo's acquisitions from 2005 and their dates? The template for statements should be "Yahoo bought [company name] in [month] 2005". Replace the words in brackets with an wildcard.

Step 2 - use wildcards
Search for "Yahoo bought * in * 2005". A wildcard replaces one or more keywords, but you'll get pretty accurate data, like "Yahoo bought Konfabulator in July 2005" or "Yahoo bought the social bookmarking site Delicious in December 2005").

But how do you know that your template is good enough? To improve the performance, let Google match the synonyms of important keywords. Use OR between the synonyms of a word.

Step 3 - use OR
Search for "Yahoo bought OR acquired * in * 2005". You'll get the results for these two queries combined: "Yahoo bought * in * 2005" and "Yahoo acquired * in * 2005".

If you want to find some Yahoo acquisitions over the years, try the special syntax for intervals. To match all the integers between 1997 and 2007, add this to a query 1997..2007. This also works with currencies and measurement units.

Step 4 - use intervals
Search for "Yahoo bought OR acquired * in * 1997..2007". Although Yahoo was launched in 1994, they started to acquire other companies in 1997, after the IPO.

Of course, you'll say that a Wikipedia article about Yahoo contains all these acquisitions, but this was just an example. It works with almost any kinds of facts, as long as you use good templates and it has the major advantage that you'll see the answers in the snippets and you don't have to visit each search result. I found this extremely useful on a mobile phone, where it's difficult to read web pages and to find something inside them.

Microsoft says Googles success a wake-up call

2007-03-01T18:27:00.003-08:00

Microsoft cheif technical executive Ray Ozzie.

Watching Google rake in advertising revenue "was a wake-up call within Microsoft," the company's

Watching Google rake in advertising revenue "was a wake-up call within Microsoft," the company's top technical executive, Ray Ozzie, said.

But he said Microsoft plans to do more than simply mimic Google by rolling out web-based versions of desktop programs or following its particular search and advertising model.

Ozzie, who has only made a handful of appearances since his promotion last June to replace Bill Gates as chief software architect, told analysts and investors on Tuesday at a Goldman Sachs conference in Las Vegas that he has been laying the groundwork for programmers across the company to build Internet-based software.

"There is a sea change going on in the industry," Ozzie said. In a question-and-answer session broadcast over the Internet, he likened the current shift to the way the PC era that took off in the 1980s marked a move away from centralised mainframe computing.

But Microsoft has yet to offer a cohesive package of programs that run over the internet instead of from a PC.

Ozzie gave little indication of what might be coming, or when. Meanwhile, Google has expanded beyond searches to offer free, web-based programs similar to Microsoft's mainstays, Word and Excel.

Ozzie said Word, Excel and other parts of Microsoft's "Office" suite have weathered threats from both desktop and web-based programs in part because competitors always compromised functionality.

For example, he said, users always have to be connected to the internet to use a web-based word processor.

Instead of jumping belatedly into the fray with web-only programs, he said Microsoft will pursue a mix of software loaded on PCs and internet services that also work with the growing array of mobile devices, a strategy he called "software-plus-service."

He said he sees free, web-based, ad-supported software as a way to extend Microsoft Office's reach, but gave no specifics. He noted that this solution was not likely to appeal to the company's big business customers.

Sid Parakh, an analyst with McAdams Wright Ragen in Seattle, said that "what he's trying to say is that even though we are behind, we are not going to necessarily copy a model that's out there."

In the U.S. search market, Microsoft is stuck firmly in third place behind Google and Yahoo, according to January data from research group Comscore Networks Inc.

Right now, Ozzie said, people rely on general web search engines for all types of queries.

Under his leadership, Microsoft is betting that internet users will want search capabilities built into all the different places they spend time, from video game community sites to the Outlook email and calendar program.

He pointed to the software maker's acquisition on Monday of Medstory, a health search engine, as an example of Microsoft's plan to offer targeted groups of web surfers to advertisers.

Parakh said the Medstory acquisition was solid. "Advertisers do want a targeted audience," he said. If Microsoft can deliver it, "I don't see a reason why advertisers won't move."

Google to Offer Click Fraud Protection

2007-03-01T18:27:00.001-08:00

Google Inc. has announced that it will provide more tools and data to help its advertisers assess and combat click fraud. Click fraud is a controversial practice that is the biggest enemy of the highly popular and profitable online advertising method known as pay-per-click.

Google disclosed data showing that while its pay per click advertising is under regular attack from fraudsters, almost all fraud tricks are automatically detected. This rebuffs critics of Google's pay-per-click advertising who say it's a magnet for fraud.

Click fraud is when web site publishers try to trick Google's ad system into counting ads that are never seen by actual users, or when competitors use automated programs to create false clicks, which drives up charges per click and their rivals' ad rates.

Some click fraud-fighting companies think that the practice of click fraud is rampant and forces advertisers to pay an extra $16 billion per year. They also believe that up to half of all ad clicks are fraudulent.

According to Google, however, an average of 10 percent of all ad clicks are invalid and claim that is a worst case scenario. Google claims the amount is usually in the single digits.

Google also claims that the amount of click fraud that Google does not catch represents less than 0.02 percent of the times an ad is clicked.

Google also announced that it is introducing a number of new click fraud-fighting measures in the upcoming weeks and months. This will include allowing advertisers to notify Google about specific internet addresses from where they suspect click fraud attacks originate.

Other tools include providing advertisers with a resource center to address questions and Google will make available a standard way for advertisers to report click fraud.

"We're trying to provide advertisers as much transparency, understanding and control around this issue as we can," said Shuman Ghosemajumder, Google's business product manager for trust and safety.

So starting in March, Google plans to allow its advertisers to blacklist certain IP addresses for reasons such as suspicion of click fraud or even because their clicks don't lead to sales.

"IP filtering is going to allow advertisers to say: 'If I believe a given IP address isn't producing productive traffic for me, then I don't want to ever show my ads to that IP address,'" Ghosemajumder said.

Google reached a settlement of a click fraud class action lawsuit last year which has been described as a big victory for the company. A loss may have likely cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars. Google managed to settle the case for $90 million.

Google Maps Shows Real-Time Traffic Data

2007-02-28T23:45:00.001-08:00

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?

2007-02-28T23:40:00.001-08:00

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

2007-02-28T19:28:00.000-08:00

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

2007-02-28T19:26:00.000-08:00

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

2007-02-28T19:22:00.002-08:00

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

2007-02-28T19:22:00.001-08:00

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

2007-02-28T19:14:00.000-08:00

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

2007-02-27T23:13:00.000-08:00

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

2007-02-27T23:10:00.000-08:00

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

2007-02-26T18:50:00.000-08:00

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

2007-02-26T18:48:00.000-08:00

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

2007-02-24T22:42:00.000-08:00

Google - The Best Place To Work

2007-02-24T22:32:00.000-08:00

Google Dominates the International Search Landscape

2007-02-24T04:14:00.000-08:00

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

2007-02-24T04:02:00.000-08:00

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

2007-02-23T04:46:00.000-08:00

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

2007-02-23T04:45:00.001-08:00

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

2007-02-20T03:36:00.000-08:00

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.