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Preferred Sites, Google Experiment
Google Kills Products Just recently, Googles 3D world Lively was shut down. Now Google announced theyre canceling a couple of other products or product features. These are:
Google Chrome Updated An update for Google Chrome! The latest preview version of Google Chrome features a couple of additions, Google announced, including:
Correction about Checkout Icon Yesterday I mentioned Google claims that the Checkout badge on ads is causing an increase of 10% clicks on search result pages. But I had misinterpreted...
Clickable Ads With Checkout Icon Cross-integrating their products can help Google bring customers from their more successful products to their less successful ones. Google Checkout is a...
Euro-Google Logo
Datasets Program Stopped by Google Google is cancelling their Google Research Datasets aka Palimpsests program. Its aim was to provide large data sets for others to use. Wired in January this year...
Google Tries New Design for Search Links
Google Results Page Jump Search Engine Land reports that Google is testing a web search result style that allows you to jump straight to an anchor within a page. In the screenshot, the link...
Google and WSJ Arguing Over Net Neutrality The Wall Street Journal reported that Google was steering away from Network Neutrality. A neutral broadband network, Wikipedia says, is one that is free of restrictions on content, sites, or platforms, on the kinds of equipment that may be attached, and on the modes of communication allowed. The WSJ writes: Google Inc. has approached major cable and phone companies...
Reporting Concerns on Google Maps Since a recent Google Maps Street View update, Google shows the wording Report a concern at the footer of their panorama photos (in older versions, a text...
Google Chrome Released From Beta Google just took their browser Chrome out of Beta. Google say they did so because their goals for stability and performance have been met (while disclaiming...
Street View Expands on Google
Magazines Now in Google Book Search Google Book Search now also includes scans from magazines such as Ebony, New York Magazine, Mens Health, Popular Science and Popular Mechanics*.
Webmaster Settings: All-in-one Google reorganized their Webmaster Tools a bit and grouped several configurations within a single Settings section. There you can toggle and adjust things:
Image Search Bar in Google
New York Times on Google The New York Times has a longer article on censorship of and through Google around the world. (Note as opposed to what you might understand...
Gmail Vulnerability? Google says that recent reports on a Gmail vulnerability arent true (maybe this one at GeekCondition.com, as blogged here earlier; my emphasis in the quote):
YouTube Live Event Relied on Akamai? Mogulus reports that YouTube had roughly 700,000 concurrent viewers during yesterdays first YouTube live stream event, which featured...
Google Allows Votes and Comments on Searches Google has gone live with a big change to their result pages, at least for those of you who are logged in. Its called SearchWiki, and lets you edit the...
Google-Advertising Views on Tibet
ConsumerWatchdog on Gmail and Chrome ConsumerWatchdog released a video in which they criticize certain aspects of Google products which they consider to be privacy problems.
Video Chat with Gmail
WebmasterWorld Not Showing Content Two years ago, the WebmasterWorld forums didnt always show the same page when you clicked through to them via Google. Matt Cutts was...
Flu Trends on Google Google (at their philantropic arm Google.org) launched the Flu Trends USA page. Google.org explains: "We have found a close relationship between...
Auto-Translate with Google Reader If you would like to subscribe to a blog or other feed in a language youre not speaking, Google Reader now offers an auto-translate feature for you.
Google China's Net Cafe Homepages Google China offers several homepage variations, specifically tailored to be shown in Google-partnering internet cafes. For reference heres the...
AOL Mail Team Mocks Gmail The AOL mail blog published a sarcastic letter suggesting that Gmail copied from them. The premise is that Gmail is dressing up as AOL" for Halloween:
Google Book Search Agreement Google scans many books for their book search program but you cant access everything due to copyright restrictions. Now after years of discussion Google struck a deal with the Authors Guild and Association of American Publishers. BBC writes: Google will establish a non-profit Book Rights Registry...
Small Change to Google Phrase Search Syntax Ianf in the forum noticed that a Google search for "foo.bar" is not the same anymore as a search for ""foo bar"" In other words, it used to be that you...
Google Earth for iPhone
Gmail Now Supports Gadgets The Google gadgets platform is further expanding in scope: you can now include gadgets to the left-hand side of Gmail. Google provides two...
Anti Gay Marriage Ads On Gay Community Site Real classy, Google keyword matching algo (or Google targeted advertising)... serving an anti gay marriage ad on a gay community/ interests site!
Google as Autonomous Smart Superorganism Kevin Kelly writes (with some rights reserved; my emphasis): "I am not the first, nor the only one, to believe a superorganism is emerging from...
Google Analyzes Brain Waves to Measure Ad Effects
Google Acquisition of Begun Blocked in Russia Svetlana Gladkova writes: Back in July we reported on acquisition of a Russian contextual advertising company Begun (one of the largest companies...
Google Makes User Profiles Indexable at Gstatic A few days ago, Google added a link to a Sitemap XML file in their robots.txt. The Sitemap is hosted at gstatic.com (I wonder why?) and contains links to...
Broken Homepage Link to Energy Calculator
Google Registration Box to Non-Google Users There once was a time when Google search tried to be a neutral bystander, watching the web without getting too actively involved. There once was a time when Google instructed webmasters to serve their Googlebot the same thing served to a sites human users.Now, Google is...
Regular Google Street View Live for France
Google Shows Broken Backlinks The Google webmaster tools added a feature which lets you see the sources of links which trigger a file not found on your site. To try this, click on your...
German Court Rules Against Google Bloomberg reports that Google lost two court cases in Germany over the display of thumbnails in their image search results.
Google Employee Visions
Google Says Results Will Be RSS-Enabled
PageRank Checker Bookmarklet ChromeFans has a nice PageRank checker bookmarklet. A bookmarklet is a bookmark containing JavaScript, and it might make a nice alternative...
Google AdSense for Games
Google Russia Classifieds Search Google released a classified ads search site for Russia a while ago. Ionut in the forum points to an auto-translated Google blog post from August:
Unmarked Google Ads
A Removed Dictionary Link in Google Results Google has removed the dictionary link in search results for at least a portion of users, or perhaps all users, Im not sure which (who of you is still seeing it?...
Google Blog Search Clusters Hot Topics The Google Blog Search homepage consisted of a simple search box, but now it looks like Google News or Techmeme: it groups related stories into groups.
Google SMS Channels for India
Try Google Search As It Was in 2001 In honor of their tenth birthday*, Google brought back their search engine the way it was many years ago, in January 2001. Below an old-school...
Restrict Google Images to Photos Google Image Search has a new advanced option: you can restrict results to show photos only (or photos mostly, as Googles analysis may not always get it 100% right).
Investigation Into Communication, NSA & Google A PDF file published at GovernmentAttic.org contains, according to its description, the NSA -US National Security Agency- administrative processing file for FOIA -Freedom of Information Act- request for records on Google and contracts With Google. I asked Seth Finkelstein of...
Google Firefox: Firefox Is Safest Browser Take a look at what Google, the company behind the Chrome browser, (still) has to say hosts on their Google Firefox homepage at google.com/firefox...
Google Finding Quotes Google added a new service to their Labs called Google In Quotes. This site lets you enter a keyword and then shows you what some politicians " from...
Avoid Reformatting a Dynamic URL Googles webmaster blog on the subject of dynamic vs static URLs, in bold and italic, writes: "We can crawl dynamic URLs and interpret the different parameters. We might have problems crawling and ranking your dynamic URLs if you try to make your urls look static and in the process hide parameters which offer the Googlebot valuable information.
Google Book Search API Released Google now offers a book search API which allows other sites to embed book previews, query for certain book information, or just link to books at...
Better Not Link to Google News Hosted Articles
Play Music Right From Yahoo Results
Ads are Confused With Organic Results Google created a German microsite called Google Full Value of Search to advertise their AdWords program, which shows ads in search results.
Google News Archive Hiccup Googles news archive search engine has a timeline option, mapping events and names. The usefulness of this feature greatly varies, as quite often its broken.
Google on Artificial Intelligence The Ignorance is Futile blog collected many quotes by Google employees on the subject of Artificial Intelligence. I find one of the most interesting quotes...
Google Static Maps With Satellite Images
New Gmail Lab Experiments
Google Reacts to Chrome Privacy Concerns Google had been criticized for some of the privacy issues evolving around Google Chrome. For one thing, Googles browser Chrome has a so-called...
Privacy Concerns Over Google Chrome's 'Omnibox'
Google's 'Search Options' Prototype One of the prototype search results Google is currently testing shows a Search options link in the blue results bar. When you click it, a navigation bar expands to the left side...
Google Cuts Off Forestle Launched just this month, Forestle is a search engine using Googles Custom Search program. On their homepage they say, Save 0.1 yd of rainforest with each search you do at Forestle.
Google Experiments Colorful Checkout Badges
Google Suggest To Become Default, Google Says
Google Translation Onebox Google has a new direct result showing translations, triggered for certain queries. Here are some examples: * -translate Hello into French- - Google offers the translation "all, bonjour".
Google Releases Geolocation Features for Ajax API, Gears Google provides a neat new way for you to grab the users location information via JavaScript. Its the ClientLocation property of their Ajax API. All you need is a free API key...
Bloggers Services Offered by Google at Political Conventions
Google AdSense for Feeds Live
Google Minus Google Do you believe Google pushes its own properties too much in their search results? If so, Google Minus Google is for you. Its an unofficial clone of Google that looks just like the real thing...
URLs Everywhere
Google Gives Itself a Special Ad David sent in a special ad by Google which was different from ads you can do in AdWords, which is in contrast to how Google once said their "ads are created and managed under the...
Google China Music Search Live
Google Slowly Closing Page Creator
Google Translation Center, a New Human Translations... ...Service in the Making. Google is working on a new service called Google Translation Center. Just a short while ago, we noticed that center had been added to Googles robots.txt file...
ChiefMall Contractor Search Engine Alex Ksikes, who I worked with on GoogleModules.com some years back, this month with his team mates launched ChiefMall.com. Alex tells me The search engine indexes a fairly...
Google Chubby and the Paxos Algorithm Nope, this is not the title of a childrens book (though it would be great as that!). Quote Google: "Chubby is a fault-tolerant system at Google that provides a distributed locking mechanism...
Google News Redesign Experiment
Google Releases 3D World Lively Google just released Lively, a 3D world where you can chat with others and create your own rooms. Traces of this program appeared back in 2007 under the name of My World (this project also nicknamed Google metaverse; TomHTML, Tony and I also lately saw traces of something called Google Rooms, though we arent 100% sure its related).
Google Ends Referrals Program Google just announced they are ending their AdSense referrals program. In the past " until August 2008 when this will officially stop " AdSense referrals allowed you as a webmaster...
Google and "Family Guy" Creator Teaming Up
Making Google More Open Drake Bennett at The Boston Globe has a long article about how Google managed to remain fundamentally likable, as he says, while today being a behemoth, with more than 15,000...
Googolopoly Game
Google Daily Tips Gadget Google provides a daily Google tips gadget for iGoogle. Heres a sample tip of the day: If you use Gmail, you may have noticed the headlines that appear at the top of your inbox.
TinEye Image Comparison Search TinEye is an impressively fast, and well-working image comparison search engine " you provide either an image URL or image on your hard disk, and then they will show similar images.
Gmail Labs: Opt-In Features Google went live with Gmail Labs, experimental features for web mail client Gmail which you can choose to enable one by one. Note this may still be rolled out for you; if you have it...
Vanity Hacking: Get Your Own Google Definition TomHTML of the French Google watch blog Zorgloob conducted an interesting experiment, and the results are in now. What Tom did was to put up a couple of fake definitions in order...
Google's New Favicon
Glimpses of a Google Maps Redesign Google Maps is showing a redesign here, though I dont know in what occasions it shows and whether its experimental or meant to go live for everyone. At the moment in Firefox...
Google App Engine Pricing Plan and More Google in a press release announced they are now allowing open sign-ups to their App Engine, which according to Google saw 150,000 developers register so far. The App Engine...
Google Earth Inside the Browser Google released a Google Earth plug-in and API. This means you can now view Google Earth-based applications " with functionality defined by the developer of a site " in your (Windows) browser. Its a bit of a bridge between the Google Maps browser-only application and the existing Google Earth desktop-only installation.
Google Street View Cars on Video
Google's Optimized Discussion Board Result Haochi Chen stumbled upon what looks like it may be a prototype of an optimized Google result snippet for discussion threads. In a search for e.g. router vs modem, the top result from...
Climate Change Information on Google Maps
Google Factory Tour Today starting at 9:30am Californian time, Google is holding a press event in their Mountain View headquarters lasting until noon (another factory tour was held in 2005).
Google China's Extended Earthquake Help Google China has launched a multitude of help efforts for people looking for information in relation to the disastrous May 12th earthquake centered in Sichuan province. Some days ago...
Searching Google and Others for Suicide "Suicide" is a potentially important search query because it may be entered by people contemplating committing suicide. Both Google and Yahoo in 2008 give relevant results of sites...
Google's Laser Logo This is one of the weirder and more interesting logos to show on the Google homepage: in disco neon colors, Google today celebrates the anniversary of the first laser. Wikipedia explains:
Google Developer News: Maps Flash API, HTML Google released a Flash/ ActionScript API for Google Maps. Google says this allows current Flash developers to easily integrate Google Maps into existing Flash apps, but that it also...
Top Third-Party Results for 'Google'
Google Started Blurring Street View Faces Google updated the panorama photo imagery of Manhattan as part of Google Maps, and for this update also blurred the faces of persons shown in the pictures. Google at their...
Google Friend Connect Launched Google released Friend Connect, a service for webmasters to add such gadgets as comments, reviews, or contact lists to their site. Furthermore, Friend Connect supports any creation from the Google gadget initiative OpenSocial, and also adds social features to a given site which connect the site to the social network site of a user.
Google's Office Filter Program Google Web Security for Enterprise (based on Postini) is an offering by Google which, according to the company, "provides real-time malware protection and URL filtering with policy...
Changes to Google Translate
Google AdSense in Comic Sans Font Search Engine Roundtable shows off a screenshot of what looks like a Google experiment " using the Comic Sans font in AdSense ads. Among designers and people with taste in general...
Artist Themes for iGoogle
Google Apps Hacks Is Out A couple of days ago I received the first couple of copies of Google Apps Hacks* from OReilly and today, the book is fully live on Amazon, too! Its very exciting for me, as this book project...
Google VisualRank
DomainTools' Paid Links Google recently revived their domain information onebox. Enter e.g. whois google.com to find a special link referring you to domain info from domaintools.com. As Beussery.com found out,
Google Docs Updates: CSS Editing, Saved Searches and More Google Docs received a couple of updates. For instance, you can now create custom views onto your documents by saving advanced searches, which will then be displayed in the folder...
Google Finance Redesign
Google Hands Over Profiles of Suspected Pedophiles On April 9th this year, AFP wrote that Brazilian authorities ordered Google to hand over 3000+ profiles containing suspected pedophile material on Googles social network Orkut. However...
Unusual Google Domain Names Pingdom compiled a list of domains which they say are mostly owned by Google. Included in the list (probably often for reasons of having obtained a domain from a typosquatter or someone...
iGoogle Preview With Friends Features, Expandable Views The Google personalized homepage iGoogle is now available in a preview version for developers to play around with new features. You can log-in via the new iGoogle developer...
Google Street View Cars Spotted in Italy
Google News Quotes Finder Google News added a quotes feature. Search for a name of a person, say Marissa Mayer, and above the news results you may find a gray speech bubble box showing a quote and its source.
Google 3D Warehouse Integrates Street View The Google Maps Street View feature has now been added as a tab to Googles 3D Warehouse, in case the model includes geo information. The Warehouse directory offers 3D models...
Google Huddle Chat Taken Down Just two days after the release, Google removed their main sample application for the new Google App Engine. HuddleChat.com is now showing the following message: Hi, a couple of our colleagues wrote Huddle Chat in their spare time as a sample application for other developers to demonstrate...
Google Talk Labs Edition
Google Turns Quoted Into Unquoted If Nothing's Found This seems to be (at least relatively) new: now, when you do a quote search that doesnt yield any results, Google will search for your words without the quotes. This will turn the phrase...
Google April Fool's Jokes Galore Japan started early with the April 1st specialties, but the jokes continue. Thanks to everyone who helps collecting Googles April Fools pranks in the forum (or sent in things via mail)! Heres the list of Googles jokes and Google-related pranks from over the web, which I may update during the day...
Kids Forbidden to Use Google?
Google Maps Street View API Street View data (those detailed panorama photos available for some US cities) is now also available as part of the Google Maps API*. The samples utilizing the GStreetviewPanorama...
New Google Documents Menu The Google Docs document editor has a new menu (see video), similar to the one spotted in a Google employees presentation before. Instead of the tabs, the menu is now more traditional
Google Calendar Spam Several of you have received spam in Google Calendar. Thats right " an event, automatically added to the calendar, which contains a description starting with the usual scammy lines...
Video Ads in Google Results Some have started to spot video ads on search result pages (Google pre-announced this a while ago), like in a search for phone. I cant see it yet, but Google Operating System and Digital...
Google Against Anti-Censorship Proposal TechCrunch and Barrons.com report that Google has recommended a no vote against a proposed anti-censorship, as well as a human rights, shareholder proposal. The proposal titled Internet Censorship suggests Google should institute policies including the following minimum standards:
Yahoo Redesign With Centered Logo The last time the Yahoo homepage saw a major overhaul was in May 2006. Now, another redesign moves the logo from the left side back into the middle again (Martin in the comments...
Google Distorting Info on 20% Time? Commercials lie, including the ones by Google, as a statement by Gmail inventor Paul Buchheit would suggest. Heres the quote from the commercial by (now ex-Google employee) Joseph OS.:
Google Analytics Benchmarking Live
New Design for Google Japan The Google Japan homepage was redesigned, as some of you are seeing it (and as the Google Japan blog reports). Perhaps this only shows in some locations " I cant see it yet " but Colin...
Google Charts API Update Google updated their charts API, which they first released back in December 2007. First of all, the old limit of 50,000 queries per user per day has been removed (though Google asks you email them if you receive more than 250,000 queries a day so they can better scale this). Also, there are several extended or new features.
Updated Google Quality Rater Guidelines A newer version of what seems to be the guideline for Googles quality raters* has surfaced (I dont know when it surfaced, it may have been recently). Brian Ussery gave it a look already.
Google Ad Manager Google is testing a new product they call Ad Manager. This free and currently invite-only service is supposed to be a framework for webmasters, helping you to sell your ad space.
The Lost Features of Google Google created tons of products in the past. And some of them, they removed again after finding that they didnt work, required too many resources, didnt take off, or were overshadowed by legal concerns. Here are some of the lost Google services and features.
Google AdWords Experiments With Automated Matching Google is testing a system that automatically spends advertisers money by algorithmically extending AdWords campaigns (the Google-powered ads placed on search results and AdSense...
Google's New Advanced Search Page Search Engine Roundtable reports that Google updated their advanced search page. I cant see it yet, so perhaps its still being tested or still being rolled out? Then new advanced page...
Google Contacts API Released Google just released a Contacts API as part of their existing GData feeds framework. Google says with this API, your app can get a list of a users contacts, edit and delete info in existing...
Site Search Onebox Google Sitelinks appear below certain results, for instance when you search for a site name. That much is old. But now, as Russell and Maxim mailed in, some of you see a site-search box...
Ask.com to Become Women's Site This sounds like an April Fools joke, but the source is Associated Press, via San Francisco Chronicle: In a dramatic about-face, Ask.com is abandoning its effort to outshine Internet search leader Google Inc. and will instead focus on a narrower market consisting of married women looking for help managing their lives.
Google Sites Launched Google released Google Sites, allowing you or a whole team to build websites with documents, photos, presentations and more. This new service, which was spawned from the Google-acquired JotSpot suite, just works with a Google Apps account, though. If you dont have a Google Apps account, try signing up for one.
Google Adjusts Query Direction for Hebrew, Arabic Hebrew and Arabic Google will now more dynamically adjust from left-to-right/ right-to-left typing, depending on what language you enter, Google announced. For instance, if you go...
Adding Meta-Data to Yahoo Search Yahoo announced they will soon give websites the chance to offer more data about their site, in order to help Yahoo better structure how the site is listed in search results. Search Engine...
Google2Go for Windows Mobile Bryan Burkholder released a software for Windows Mobile (note: it requested newer files of the .NET framework on my phone) called Google2Go, can quickly access different Google services.
Yahoo Pushes for Dissident Release Yahoo originally helped the Chinese government to jail dissidents, but after receiving public blame they now show regrets and push for release of dissidents. In their blog they write: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will travel to Beijing next week to discuss a wide range of political issues with senior Chinese officials.
Lost and Found ~ Google According to a Google search for I lost all my and variants, people are currently looking for the following things: if you believe the search results for I found and related queries:
Winner of the Google Logo Redesign Contest There have been a lot of very interesting entries to the little Google logo redesign competition we started. The competition ended on Friday and here is the winner " eVisibility.coms art directory Tyler Jordan created the hands down most impressive design (and then ended up on the Digg homepage with it):
Search Engines of 1996 In October 1996, German Spiegel mentioned web search engines for the first time (Im using the homemade search tool to dig through their archive). The article shows how much of a need...
Google's Many Valentine's Day Specials Google is all dressed up for todays occasion, Valentines Day. Its the day where in many cultures couples and wanna-be-couples are expected to send a greeting to their loved one, causing sales spikes for greeting cards companies and probably chocolate and flower companies as well, and depression amongst some of the singles.
Yahoo's Bradely Horowitz Switches to Google
Early Yahoo and Google Richard Brandt in his Stanford Magazine article from 2004 " Net Assets: How Stanfords computer science department changed the way we get information
Kevin Fox Leaves Google Kevin Fox announced he has quit his job at Google to join a smaller start-up. Today is Kevins last day as a user experience designer at Google, where he says he designed Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Reader 2.0
Google As Seen Through Vintage Netscapes Netscape Navigator has been officially discontinued recently. But we can still download some of the older versions of this legendary browser. The following screenshots...
Google Discontinues Inline Gadgets Google earlier this month announced theyll stop allowing new gadgets for iGoogle...
How Google Tests Results Quality Technology Review interviewed Googles director of research, Peter Norvig, asking him how Google tries to find out about the quality of their search results. Peters answer:
Google Talk Translation Bots Google announced they introduced a couple of translation bots to their chat software Google Talk. For instance, invite en2zh@bot.talk.google.com...
Google's Vint Cerf Interviewed Google vice president and chief internet evangelist Vint Cerf was interviewed by Suisse publication Das Magazin in Zurich in late November. Here are some of his statements (my translation): Asked on the semi-religious meaning of his job title: "Humanity should understand the blessings of the internet. Our history shows: the more people go online, the more flat hierarchies are becoming.
Google Knol Knol, just announced a the official Google blog, is a currently private, invitation-only knowledge sharing service. Google says that a Knol is a unit of knowledge,"* and in the style of the old-school About.com website, experts are invited to the service to write an introductory article on a subject of their expertise. Google wants to provide all the tools to write this, and host the content and so on, so that experts can focus just on the content.
Google Oneboxes to the Right Side Sartaj sent in a screenshot of a special Google result experiment he was seeing while searching for Bono Coexist: a YouTube video box to the right side...
New Google Street Views Google Maps added a couple of new cities to their Street View feature
How Google Helps Index & Organize Your Room This is a thought experiment asking the question: What items in your room at home does Google index? That is, which items around you containing information...
Google Bans Ads For (Most) Paid Links Marketplaces Google continues to crack down on those text link advertising methods which dont carry the "nofollow" attribute as a "machine-readable disclosure."
Google Gadgets for Mac, Google Maps Mobile Update and More Google Desktop is now available for the Mac too if you have OS X 10.4 or higher. This means Google added another platform to deploy Google Gadgets...
State of Typosquatting (and How Google Benefits From It) McAfee released a report on typosquatting, the act of cashing in on a users misspelling of a domain they want to visit. What typosquatters do...
Enable Auto-Complete on Google Homepage Spotted by Ionut, Google lets you add the auto-complete feature to the Google.com homepage. Just log-in and visit the Experimental Search homepage, and click...
Barack Obama's Speech at Google Last Wednesday, on November 14th, Barack Obama " potential US presidential candidate for 2008 " visited the Google headquarter. He held a speech and was later...
Google Trends Reveals People's Predictability Google Trends shows an interesting search popularity graph for the queries turkey (as in turkey the food, too) and diet: On North-American Thanksgiving day
Google Android: First Look, Developer Kit, and Competition Google created a video showcasing Android, the Google-initiated, Linux-based open source mobile operating system being backed by the recently announced...
Google Shared IP for "Crime" of Free Speech In August this year, a citizen from India was arrested, charged with posting insulting images of a historic figure to Googles social network Orkut.com, CNet reports.
Yahoo Apologizes In Dissident Jail Case 3 years ago, Yahoo received an order from the Chinese government to turn over information regarding an email that was sent from China to the US with information regarding the Chinese govt role censorship efforts.
Did Google Kill Log-File-Based, Premium Variant of Urchin? Ken Fisher at Ars Technica tells how when Google acquired Urchin and turned the Urchin on Demand software into Google Analytics, they basically put the paid part of the stats tool that was based on log files to a halt:
What Did Your Visitors Ask? Google Analytics allows you to see what people searched for in Google to find your site " if you inserted their little tracker code into your template, that is. They do so by checking the referrer value, which for most search engines contains the keywords entered (e.g. ...google.com/search?q=hello...).
Google Acquires Zingku Google say they acquired certain assets and technology of Zingku, the Google Operating System blog reports. Heres what Zingku does, according to their About page:
Google Video Alerts The neat Google Alert service lets you subscribe to certain search queries to get updates emailed to you. For instance, you can subscribe to mentions of your website name in Google News.
Google-powered Social Site Shuts Down Tianya, a company co-operating with Google in China, is actively shutting down groups dealing with sensitive topics such as Falun Gong, or certain political discussions, a forum member reports.
Google Expands China Offerings Google launched video.google.cn, a meta video search engine for the Chinese market. Just like with other localized versions of Google Video, this one shows clips from a variety of sources in a frame.
Yahoo Image Search Loves Flickr Search Yahoo Images for -google-, and 70% (14 of 20) of the results are from Yahoo-owned Flickr*. Search for -google reader-, and 100% of results are from Flickr.
Google Privacy Problems Introduced Through Presentations Googles Presentation tool is just freshly released but already introduced a first privacy vulnerability for Google Accounts... independent of whether or not you look at a presentation.
Google Presentations Released CEO Eric Schmidt promised an online PowerPoint-style application for this summer, and as summer ends in a couple of days, a lot of people eagerly awaited this addition to the Google office this week. And today, indeed Google Presentations launched as part of Google Docs & Spreadsheets... or now just Google Docs, as some of the logos already read.
Leaked Google Video Discusses Google Reader, Social Efforts A video disclaimed to be Google - Confidential with the title Nooglers And The PDB: Reactor (Ben Darnell, September 6, 2007) made its way onto a public Google Video page.
How Marissa Mayer Almost Killed AdSense (Kind Of), and More Iionnovate put up an audio interview with Googles Marissa Mayer. During the talk, Marissa names social networks as one of the biggest hot areas in technology today.
Google´s CFO Leaves Google today announced their Chief Financial Officer, George Reyes, is stepping down. Quote CEO Eric Schmidt from the press release, which doesnt mention why George is leaving:
Weird Google Analytics Bug What a strange Google Analytics bug... and it has persisted for a week now, rendering my referrer stats for all of my sites partly useless...
New Hi-Res Google Satellite Images The Google Lat Long blog published a list of changes to their satellite imagery. Does anyone know if this relates to Google Maps, Google Earth, or both?
Google Does Not Always Disclose Ads Google has stopped to always disclose their ads served to websites via the AdSense program. Previously, all ads would carry a disclaimer reading something along the lines of "ads by Google".
Yang is Yahoo's New CEO Yahoo's Terry Semel stepped down as CEO and is making place for co-founder Jerry Yang to replace him, the Wall Street Journal (reg-only) reports. Jerry in a blog post says...
Google Maps Update - Higher Resolution The Google Earth blog reports that Google Maps went live with higher-resolution imagery for several locations, including cities in France, Canada, Germany and Japan (this mirrors what was available...
Did Google Acquire g.cn? Did Google acquire g.cn? This super-short domain redirects to Google.cn now (and if your browser language hasn't been set to Chinese, it will then redirect to Google.com).
Google Desktop 5 Released Google Desktop is now available in version 5. Google redesigned some of the look and feel of the application, increased the security - there were some recent problems - and added previews to Desktop search results.
Google Censorship FAQ Does Google censor search results? Yes, they sometimes do, in different countries, like Germany, France or China. Sometimes, specific content is censored globally (including US results, e.g. in the case of certain censored newsgroup messages).
Suggest Translations to Google When you use Google to translate a website into any of the Beta translations Google provides (Chinese, Russian, Japanese and more)...
Google Censorship API? Technophilia and technophobia are the two extremes of the relationship between technology and society. The latter regards technology as destructive because it leads to a process of dehumanization and believes social reliance on technology is harmful.
Googleshare Translations Wired recently ran a pretty interesting article on the machine translation efforts of Jaime Carbonell of Meaningful Machines.
Technorati WTF Blog search engine Technorati - continuing the eternal search for their own site's purpose - added a new feature called WTF (short for "what the f**k," though Technorati claims it means "where's the fire"). It works like this:
Google From A - Z Answers: Google Answers was a human search engine project that ran from 2002-2006. Around 500 researchers worldwide at a time, often experts in their fields, directly answered to paid questions at answers.google.com...
Marissa Mayer Talks Search Usability Gord Hotchkiss of Search Engine Land talked to Google's Marissa Mayer about search results design issues.
YouTube Content with Google Video Google acquired YouTube last year, and now they've started to integrate YouTube results within Google Video.
Wikipedia Adds Nofollow to Outgoing Links Wikipedia now adds the "nofollow" attribute to all external links. The reason given for this is to battle spam links, like those of blackhat search engine optimizers.
Google Book Search and Freeing Google Books Google Book Search allows you to download full PDFs of books which are in the copyright-free zone of the public domain.
Google's Intelligent Agent Software In 1994, Kevin Savetz predicted what the 'net would be like in 1995, including an interesting prediction for what he calls 'intelligent agent software packages.'
Google and Its Automated Resume Filter The New York Times reports that Google engineers try to improve finding good job candidates by assigning an automated quality score to applications.
Google Results Feature Microsoft Ads Microsoft is advertising on Google - thus paying a competitor - as a (US) search for .mov files shows. The ad is pointed out in the screenshot below.
Reactions to the Discontinuation of Google API Google some days ago announced they are stopping any support for the Google web search SOAP API.
Tracking System for Google Bugs What an excellent idea! Wouter Schut got fed up with untracked Google bugs across Google's many services, and now created a Google-based but completely unofficial bug tracking system.
About AdSense Showing Google Logo Lots of you are annoyed/ surprised/ happy/ curious about Googles rebranded ads, and as questions on this keep coming, I think a little wrap-up is in order.
Does Google Sometimes Allow Cloaking? Google's Matt Cutts is on debunking duty lately - everything from "Google is in bed with the CIA" to "the Google Toolbar indexes your page."
PageBull, Visual Search Engine PageBull is fun. Instead of a traditional, text-based results, it returns (relatively large) screenshots of the pages in question, ordered on a grid. PageBull is even...
Big 3 Search Engines Team Up on Sitemaps Google, Yahoo and Microsoft announced theyll support the Sitemaps format (which originated as Google Sitemaps) together.
Google Displays Titles For Uncrawled Pages Did Google change the way they display non-crawled pages in their results? As you know, search engines respect the robots.txt file and only crawl stuff theyre supposed to crawl.
Let Yahoo Pick Your Color Scheme This is an interesting concept: the Instant Color Schemes Generator lets you enter any search term, and then finds the first five images for this term using the the Yahoo Image API.
Search Public Google Calendar Events Google Calendar has a new feature that allows you to search public events. Of course the events have to be listed in Google for you to find them via Google Calendar.
Visual Search at Like.com Over at Riyas Like.com, interesting things have been happening. The site now presents a visual search engine that looks for the likeness of two given pictures.
How Does the Algorithm View Your Website? Great article in the NYT over the weekend about an ad arbitrage directory named Sourcetool, which Google punted from the AdWords program. A couple quotes:
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