Other Google Topics Archives

The Google News Blog has announced that it is now incorporating YouTube videos with Google News results. As the blog post explains, "You'll see the prefix "Video" next to story titles, and clicking on these video links will open a video player directly on the page so you can watch the video right there."

For the time being, Google is adding news video from CBS, Reuters, and a few Hearst TV stations. In the upcoming months, Google will add other media sources as well.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Yesterday, the Internets were abuzz with news that Google has launched Friend Connect, which appears to be "APIs for Open Social participants to pull profile information from social networks into third party websites," according to TechCrunch.

Google's own press release mentions that Friend Connect makes websites social.

The move is applauded by many forum members, who feel that it's great that Google is taking the initiative to make the web more social. Others are a bit skeptical for a variety of reasons, including the fact that if Google's code snippet is on every page on the web, they can learn your habits quickly. Further, another concern lies in the numerous personas assumed by some individuals on the web. If you accept the terms, you're no longer separating your different personalities; instead, the web will be a "big bucket of shared data."

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld and Search Engine Watch Forums.

Google has moved the location of the "Saved Locations" feature in Google Maps. Now, you should see an arrow down on the right hand side of the search box, in Google Maps. Clicking on that arrow will show you your saved locations. It is in that area where you can find the "Edit saved locations" feature, as well.

Here are screen shots to illustrate:

(1) Click on the arrow down:

(2) Will trigger a box to open up below with your saved locations and a way to manage them:

Maps Guide Brian explains in a Google Groups thread:

I understand that it's a bit inconvenient for those of you loyal "Saved Locations" users, but assuming the drop-down arrow remains, any suggestions on how we can improve this feature? I'd love to hear everyone's feedback!

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

The folks at WebmasterWorld really look at every fine detail when it comes to Google's search behavior. Moderator, Receptional Andy said he noticed that when searching in Firefox at Google, Google would append an HS parameter in the URL, when clicking from search result page to search result page.

For example, conduct a search for anything at Google using the Firefox search bar. Then move your mouse over the next link at the bottom of the Google results. If you look, you will notice an HS parameter. It looks like this:

It is not found in the first search URL, but only when you click next and only when the search is initiated when using the Firefox search bar. Here are the parameters I find after the HS=, cWW, hyB, oyB, WJr, and they keep going.

What does it exactly mean? I am not sure. It seems to be assigned on a page by page level, and only with Firefox.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Yesterday was Mother's Day and the search engines and search industry blogs/forums had special themes and logos up for the day. Here is a compilation of the logos I found:

Google:

Yahoo (Flash):

Dogpile:

Ask.com

Cre8asite Forums

Search Engine Roundtable

Plus today, Google has a special logo on Google.co.uk for Florence Nightingale:

To view last years Mother's Day logos from the search engine industry, click here. Also, Gary Price has his quick Mother's Day facts.

Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums, Search Engine Roundtable Forums, and DigitalPoint Forums.

After a deathly cyclone ravaged the Myanmar (Burma) region, thousands of people are still hoping for aid while the death toll rises into the six digits. Fortunately, if you go to Google.com today, you'll see that they're looking to help. A screenshot of what my homepage appears as is included:

The link takes you to the Myanmar disaster relief page which allows you to donate through UNICEF or through Direct Relief International.

Forum members believe that the poignancy of this link is a great gesture and are happy that Google is taking a proactive stance to help out the victims and their families.

More disaster relief resources from other search properties are described in Greg Sterling's very useful Search Engine Land post.

Discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

Want to share something you found particularly useful on Google Reader with some more information? You now can, thanks to a new feature called "Share with Note" that looks just like this:

On the bottom of any feed item, click on "Share with Note" and the screen above pops up. You can then give some feedback into why you're sharing the particular blog post or news story. In other words, it's a feature that Google Reader users have been waiting for.

On your sidebar, now you can click on "Notes" (under "Your Stuff" to see your friends' shared notes. Since the feature is brand new, none of my friends are using the notes yet, but I expect that to change in the near future.

Overall, the response has been overwhelmingly positive, but a lot of people who are testing the feature out are unable to find a "Delete Note" button (or even an option to edit the note), so be careful when adding notes -- for now, they appear permanent!

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

In order to make it easier to get driving directions and see an intersection or area before you actually get to your desired location, the Google Maps team has integrated driving directions with Street View.

For example, take a look at this:

When you first click on the map, you get the driving directions.

More specifically, in this new update, click on the camera next to the driving directions to see the specific place where you'll need to make a turn:

Cool stuff. :)

Forum discussion continues at Google Groups.

Update by Barry: More specifically, you can click from directly within street views to your next turn. Plus it shows you what turn to make from within the street views overlay:

CNBC interviewed Google's CEO Eric Schmidt earlier this week and the informative interview is now live for everyone to read. Video is available in three parts: part 2, and part 3.

In a nutshell (thanks to engine and nomis5), Eric Schmidt says that he is not aware of the specifics of the Microsoft-Yahoo deal. We know what he knows -- whatever the press people are telling us.

Additionally, Schmidt mentions the difficulty Google is facing when looking to monetize on social media. On the other hand, mobile growth looks promising. The scariest challenge for Schmidt in the future is language translation.

Finally, he says that there's dramatic market growth in the Japanese, Chinese, and European markets, and that Google is a very strong brand in Europe.

In other words, really good stuff. Sit down and give it a listen or read the 6-page interview that I found that nobody posted on WebmasterWorld. ;)

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn and WebmasterWorld.

Search Engine Journal has a very cool photo of a vending machine in Google's Japan office.

Since I'm not sure who took this photograph (update: it was Loren Baker!), I'm showing you a small size image here:

More photos of Loren's cool Google Japan journey are on Search Engine Journal.

Are you really surprised at such a welcoming vending machine? ;) Google, after all, is the best company to work for!

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

Google is making a major promotional push for iGoogle (Google's personalized home page), with the new artist themes section. If you go to the Google home page, you will notice a special logo that looks like the logo on the right of this post, and a line that reads:

What happens when great art mixes with your homepage? iGoogle Artist Themes

Clicking on the logo or the link will take you to that special iGoogle Artist Themes page, for you to select from about 70 iGoogle personalized themes made specifically by artists. Here are a few sample themes:

This promotion is not just based in the US, Gabs notes Google is pushing it in the UK as well.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Roundtable Forums and DigitalPoint Forums.

The New York Times reports that "Google researchers say they have a software technology intended to do for digital images on the Web what the company’s original PageRank software did for searches of Web pages." The algorithm, dubbed VisualRank, weighs and ranks images that look most similar.

WebmasterWorld members fear that this could be a problem for spammers -- just like folks aim to build links for PageRank, so too this may happen in the image arena.

However, it may build traffic to images too, which some individuals are hoping for.

Perhaps this is the beginning of greater software technologies that will "index audio spoken in videos" and podcasts. Those transcription services would be super cool.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

Remember the Google Maps stickers spotted throughout the UK? They looked like the image on the right of this post.

Well, a while back, probably a year or so ago, I convinced Google to send me one. It never actually made it to my office. I didn't really think about it until now, when I spotted a Google Groups thread that has word from Google that the stickers are forever gone!

Google Maps representative, Jen, said:

I've been trying to track down these stickers for months for some other people in this group but sadly it looks like they've disappeared into the abyss of aged promotional materials. If we ever make more, I'll be sure to follow-up with you. I don't know if we're planning to do that though ever, so... :o(

Say it ain't so! Can those stickers become collector items? Did I miss out on my opportunity on receiving one of these collectables?

Maybe a neat tip for Google would be to start a map game, to find the missing Google Maps stickers. Or maybe not.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Have you ever wanted to see what interests Google employees? Now you can. Google has combined research written by Googlers in Papers Written by Googlers. Currently, there are a variety of sections that are broken down into the following:

• Algorithms and Theory
• Artificial Intelligence and Data Mining
• Audio, Video, and Image Processing
• Distributed Systems and Parallel Computing
• Education
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Hypertext and the Web
• Information Retrieval
• Machine Learning
• Natural Language Processing
• Operating Systems
• Science
• Security, Cryptography, and Privacy
• Software Engineering

Pretty heavy duty stuff and very computer-science oriented.

For search enthusiasts, tedster has found two really great papers entitled Finding Near-Duplicate Web Pages: A Large-Scale Evaluation of Algorithms by Monika Henzinger and Structured Models for Fine-to-Coarse Sentiment Analysis by Ryan McDonald et al. Ted believes that these two papers can shape the future of search, especially the latter one which deals with semantic processing.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Earlier this week, Reuters said that Google has announced technology to provide brand images on cell phones. In other words, based on a user's query, they'll be provided with some sort of image advertisement that has been scaled to fit on the screen of a mobile phone.

The ads work on a CPC basis and must link to a mobile-phone optimized website, according to the article. They are also currently available in 13 national markets (Australia, China, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Russia, Spain, the UK, and the United States).

Beyond the initial suspicion, people are worried that mobile ads will penetrate even further beyond web surfing. One forum member says that he is dreading the day when his phone will ring with an ad instead of with his selected ringtone. You never know.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

A little over a month ago, I ran a poll asking Would You Want to Work at Google? The results were a bit surprising, 69% of the 143 responses said they would like to work at Google.

98 respondents or 69% of our readers said they would like to work at Google, while only 45 respondents or 31% said they do not want to work at Google. Here is the cute pie chart:

The pie chart, is almost pacman like, sorry Matt.

Continued forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.

A Google Groups thread confirms that Google Maps is lacking support for a common feature needed both here in the States and overseas, support for multi-language listings.

A Google Groups member asked:

As a multilingual company our website is in more than one language and each language has the same name but different URL. Should I create a listing for each language?

Google's official response is that there is no way to add more than one language URL for a single listing and that you should not add more than one business profile for the same physical address. Google Maps Jen said:

We don't have any way to handle multi-language listings at this point in time, and we strongly encourage businesses to only create one listing per physical address. However, it's a great suggestion to support these types of business listings - maybe we'll be able to support this in the future.

I am pretty sure many local search engines ask for languages spoken at the company when creating a business profile. I am not sure if those are one of the questions asked by Google Local. In any event, if multiple languages are spoken, adding a special URL for each language, should not be too hard.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Maybe so, just a spidering glitch, weird links, or sitemap error? I was searching this morning in Google doing some tests on Google's new Whois feature. When I plugged in a domain what popped up in the first page of the results was a weird URL including encoded ampersand and other characters in front of the shown URL for the website (aboutus.org). Once I clicked on the link I got a 404 error.

Screenshot:

Link to Result.

Thoughts? Comments?

A WebmasterWorld member discusses an interesting scenario regarding Google's requirement to have you log into your Google account when you access any service tied to Google. For example, if you have a Gmail account, you're likely also posting onto Google Groups with the same identity. What would happen, then, if you needed (for whatever reason) to share your login to Google Groups with someone -- say, a coworker? You'd be giving them access to everything else tied to that Google account.

The issue is not that simple and many users, especially those who use Google for various business purposes, opt to have 5-6 email accounts rather than one single account where the identity can be confused. If you have to, you can use different browsers (Windows users can now use Firefox, IE, Opera, and Safari!). And if you're paranoid, anonymous proxies are the way to go because of no IP tracing.

Many forum members point out that Google isn't trying to make your life difficult. It just makes life easier to consolidate logins than to have to worry about logging in and saving different usernames and passwords again and again. (Of course, the other argument, which is obviously presented, is that Google wants to track every move you make...)

Regardless, the desire for Google to have such uniformity is obviously causing concern among forum members who feel that any of their information can be accessed simply because they're almost always logged into Gmail.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Can Google disappoint? I am personally don't get it, but I did help cover the announcement last night at Search Engine Land with Google Beats Forecasts With 30% Increase In Profit. The news is still dominating Techmeme, here is the overview:

Google's reported revenues of $5.19 billion for the quarter ended March 31, 2008 and a net income of $1.31 billion. Previous quarter revenues was $4.83 billion in Q4 and $3.66 billion in Q1 2007. Previous quarter income was 1.21 billion in Q4 2007. Google's shares are currently up over 12% in after market conditions, now at $506.87.

In short, they totally beat expectations and now their stock has climbed $77, 17% plus, overnight in after-market conditions.

The forums are buzzing about the news. Many are saying things like, "wow" and Google is making too much profit on their dime, and so on.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld,Search Engine Watch Forums and DigitalPoint Forums.

Beu posted a Search Engine Watch Forums thread on a new eBay listing to bid on getting a VIP tour of Google's Mountain View office, aka the Googleplex.

The private tour is for two individuals to get an "insider's look at the "best place to work." In fact, this is being organized by Foundation for the Future, an organization that "raises private funds that allow Menlo-Atherton High School to address the real-time needs of its diverse and high-performing students." Note that the winning bid will go in its entirety to the foundation.

If you win, you get to pick a date on the weekdays only for a two and a half hour tour, which includes lunch. Only catch is you need to pick a date before July 31, 2008.

The eBay auction runs until Apr-20-08 21:00:00 PDT and the current bid is only $265.00, with 15 bids already. So, if this is for you or if you just want to give a nice donation, go to the eBay listing and bid away.

Forum discussion at Search Engine Watch Forums.

If you rely on Google's email server, be it Gmail or Google Apps, you may have noticed a major issue with connecting via the IMAP server.

As I reported at Search Engine Land, Google's IMAP server seemed to black out, along with Google Talk features. So I went over to check how wide spread the issue. There were two thread about the IMAP issue, which quickly turned into dozens of threads, with dozens of posts in each thread. Here is a quick video showing you the thread after thread of people reporting the IMAP issue:

Yes, the threads keep coming, even though it is fixed. But as you can see, IMAP threads have over taken the Google Groups forum.

The Google Groups thread I posted in at this time has about 37 posts. About 45 minutes later, a Google represented created a thread in the announcements area, telling us that they are aware of the issue. Then at about the same time, a new thread propped up that IMAP was back. So the outage seemed to be for about 45 minutes and seemed to impact every single Google Email IMAP user. The Google rep said:

We're aware of a problem with IMAP access and chat in Gmail. Users are reporting the inability to see IMAP in their account settings and inability to access IMAP. Also, users are reporting receiving a 'We're experiencing technical difficulties that may prevent your chats from being sent' in their Chat list. Our engineers are currently working to find a solution. We appreciate your patience, and we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Forum discussion at Google Groups including the announcement thread.

TechCrunch explains that Marissa Mayer of Google discussed the "evolution" (if you will) of the motto, "Don't Be Evil." She says:

“It really wasn’t like an elected, ordained motto. I think that ‘Don’t Be Evil’ is a very easy thing to point at when you see Google doing something that you personally don’t like; it’s a very easy thing to point out so it does get targeted a lot.”

At Search Engine Land, Barry shares a bit of history of exactly when it started. He explains that it was coined in 1999 when Google was afraid that its organic search results would be impacted by the business units of the company. It was used more heavily when the company grew to 300 employees and corporate policy was put in place.

Forum members at Cre8asite Forums find the quote interesting, since it's still heard very often today. There's just too much of Google "doing something that [people] personally don't like," it seems.

Not everyone agrees, though. Other forum members feel that Google has been indispensable for their needs, and some other weaker search engines (perhaps because of this) haven't measured up. Others believe it comes down to potential for being evil, but they haven't necessarily fulfilled their "evil plan[s]."

Then there's another reaction entirely. Pierre Far, a friend of mine who wrote a killer entry on social media marketing on my blog, says that Google is a bit pervasive today with its consumerism at heart and users' privacy thrown out the window.

But then again, EGOL points out that Google users opt-in for all of this, so it's up to the user to decide whether s/he wants it.

The debate is roaring on and continues at Cre8asite Forums. Good stuff.

If you take a look at virtually any Google Local listing with reviews, you might notice that Google is showing twice as many reviews, as the company really has. For example, my company listing shows a review count of 4, but in reality, I only have two reviews.

Here is a picture:

Yes, Google shows the number 4 but only really has two reviews listed.

A Google Groups thread has confirmation from Google that this is an issue that they are looking to address:

It's a known issue that we're working to resolve. Sorry about that. For now, it's best to just assume that you only have 4 reviews.

Forum discussion at Google Groups.

Google is dominating the search share once again with over two-thirds of searches, according to CNN Money (which cites Hitwise). In March of 2007, Google only dominated 64% of the market. That number has jumped 3% in a year.

Surprised? Not so much. Forum members are used to hearing the news. One points out, however, that Baidu has 70% of the Chinese search share.

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

This weekend, there have been numerous reports about a couple in Western Pennsylvania that has sued Google for taking photographs of their home and displaying it on Google Street View. Aaron and Christine Boring are suing Google for violating their privacy and causing them mental distress.

Some photos of the boring house include the following three photos:

The claim is that the photograph was taken from a driveway that was labeled "Private Road" and that Google did not acknowledge the Boring's right to privacy.

I've read reports about this all weekend, and a number of people have not found any signs that indicate that the drive is private. One person suspects that the sign was put up after the fact. A forum member echoes this sentiment:

If you look at the map and street views in question, it can be confusing as to where the road ends and where the private drive, if any, begins.

Further, members are a bit annoyed that the Borings never actually requested that Google take it down. Their first stop, it seems, was litigation.

As many folks say, what was the damage here? Google Street View shows images from thousands upon thousands of homes. Why does one family decide that their privacy is violated by starting a lawsuit against Google? Is this the way to handle private matters?

Forum discussion continues at WebmasterWorld.

Forum members are noticing a new feature to Google Analytics that allows you to select certain views (by day, week, or month).

The day view is what you're used to. On the other hand, the week and month views are entirely different.

Here's the week view:

Here's the month view:

On each of these, you can hover over the end points and get the statistics you're looking for (views per week or per month). Obviously, since it's only the beginning of April, you're expected to see a decline in your view for the month as it only calculates visits for the month of April.

Forum discussion continues at DigitalPoint Forums.

There has been a lot of discussion over the reporting features in Google Ad Manager. Here are some threads, both praising and hating the reporting tools in Google's new Ad Manager, a free ad delivery system. We have two threads at WebmasterWorld, one loving it and another WebmasterWorld thread hating it. So I figured I show you some of my reports:

Order report

Creative Report

Sales Person Report

Advertiser Report

Targeting Report

Placement Report

Ad Slot Report

Whole Network Report

Those are all the reports within the reporting section. Of course, most working screens are reports, in themselves. But these are the standalone reports, as an admin of the reports.

If you are really wanting an invite, Google's Ad Manager Pro, in the Google Groups thread said they are working on processing applications as quickly as possible:

As you may be aware, there has been a tremendous response to the release of Google Ad Manager. We're working to process all of the applications as quickly as we can, and we're still working through a few kinks.

Reminder, I also a detailed tutorial on Google Ad Manager, if you are already using it.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Barry Welford spotted dated results on a variety of Google localized search engines.

For example, if you performed a search on Google French, you'd see this:

The same result occurs on Google Finnish:

Of particular note is the fact that Google is showing the date in your mother tongue.

Will adding dates become normal in the future? We can only keep watching.

Forum discussion continues at Sphinn.

After Google finally acquired DoubleClick the controversy of Google now officially owning an SEM company was a reality. DoubleClick owned Performics, a company that sells SEM services, including SEO and PPC. Yes, a major conflict of interest. Google, officially announced that they will be selling off the search marketing side of Performics.

While that means a bunch of SEOs and SEMs jobs are bit up in the air now, the SEM community still feels, overall, that Google has made the right decision. Google's blog post explains the rational in selling it off:

It’s clear to us that we do not want to be in the search engine marketing business. Maintaining objectivity in both search and advertising is paramount to Google’s mission and core to the trust we ask from our users. For this reason, we plan to sell the Performics search marketing business to a third party. We believe this will allow us to maintain objectivity and the search marketing business to continue to grow and innovate and serve its customers. While we have not yet identified a buyer, we’ve received preliminary interest from a number of our current partners. Search Marketing will continue to run as a separate entity until the division is sold.

Stand up in my opinion. On the other hand, Google will be keeping the affiliate marketing group of Performics. Google explains that keeping that division in the Google team will provide "enhanced value and reach for our affiliate advertisers, and additional tools and monetization opportunities for our publishers." I guess it can bolster the Google AdSense referral project and some of their DoubleClick ventures.

Did any individual influence this decision? I suspect Danny Sullivan and Google's Matt Cutts had an influence, I suspect Matt actually had a huge impact on that decision, but he can obviously not talk about it. In fact, I am glad it happened after our April Fools Matt Cutts Transfers to Performics – Will Assume Lead SEO Role (it would have killed that story if released a couple days earlier).

In any event, I wish the best to all the SEMs and SEOs at Performics. I am sure it will work out for the company and your jobs in the long run. You can always pitch clients that Google once owned your company, as John jokes. But the bottom line is that this is the right move by Google and most of the SEM community would agree on that. Of course, this decision comes to no surprise to any of us.

Forum discussion at Sphinn, WebmasterWorld and DigitalPoint Forums.

There is an interesting new bug with Firefox 3 Beta 5, that sends a surfer through a redirect page after clicking on the Google search result. Here is how to reproduce the issue:

(1) Be in Firefox 3 Beta 5
(2) Be signed in to Google (you must be signed in to your Google account)
(3) Go to Google.com
(4) Enter the search term: [yahoo] or any other search term
(5) Click the first result (should be Yahoo! i.e. www.yahoo.com)

Then what happens is your are taken to a redirect page at Google.com as opposed to going directly to yahoo.com. Here is a screen capture of the redirect page:

We are not sure if it is just a Firefox bug or also a Google bug or both. There is a lot of discussion about this issue throughout the forum space.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums, Web Hosting Talk, Gamers With Jobs, and here is the Mozilla Bug Tracker.