Spy into Google™.
The Mother's Day doodle is up in Google Hong Kong and China:
According to New York Times, Google is testing videos ads in its search results. Google is also testing ads that uses images, interactive maps and other more elaborate features.
At first, users will barely notice the change because the videos will not be immediately obvious. Ads with accompanying videos will have a small button with a plus sign. Google has increasingly used the plus icon to indicate that certain information — such as a map — can pop up on a search results page. Users that click the plus button on an ad will see a small video player that shows a commercial, movie trailer or other clip.There is no official word from Google at the moment.
For now, advertisers will not pay extra to put video in the ads. They enter a price they will pay for a click in Google’s regular text-ad auction. But in the video ads, the advertiser pays when users click to see the video, even if they never click through to the advertiser’s site.
“People who advertise a movie want to show a trailer. Why shouldn’t they have the same format we use for search results and have a little plus box that says watch the trailer?” said Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search products and user experience.
Google's flight stats search feature now delivers real time status and information in the search result OneBox. Just type the name of the airline and flight number (e.g. American 123, ua226) into the search box and you shall see something like this:
The information is provided by FlightStats.com which uses data feeds from the US Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) Aircraft Situation Display to Industry (ASDI). I have tested it with some flights departing from Hong Kong and it works fine so I guess it is available for all international flights.
Google has done a lot of customization to make its online applications look good on iPhone. Gmail supported IMAP. Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Reader made its interface iPhone-friendly. According to TechCrunch, they now integrate all these apps into one page if you visit Google.com in your iPhone:
Google's search engine secret sauce, the PageRank algorithm, finally gets an update after 6 months since its last update. Normally, PageRank updates every 3 months. There have been reports about a massive drop in sites that are widely known to be selling text links which Google identifies as manipulating search engine results. There have also been reports that YouTube's PageRank drops to 3.
Side note: You will now receive a confirmation if you submit spam or paid links report in Webmaster Tools which says:
Thank you for submitting a spam report for this site: [submitted URL]
We take the quality of our results very seriously, and we thoroughly investigate every report of deceptive practices and take appropriate action when we uncover genuine abuse. In especially egregious cases, we will remove spammy websites from our index immediately, so they don't show up in search results at all. At a minimum, we'll use the data from each spam report to improve our site ranking and filtering algorithms, which, over time, should increase the quality of our results.
We appreciate your taking the time to help us improve our service for your fellow users around the world. By helping us eliminate spam, you're saving millions of people time, effort and energy.
SearchMash, the experimental site operated by Google to test new searching experience, had a recent upgrade. Instead of the previous simple HTML version, they launched a flash version which is very unlike Google's usual practice of keeping things simple. However, SearchMash is still kept ad-free. The new interface is a complete makeover adding more interactive elements.
Here is how it looks like when you search for 'iPhone':
SearchMash implements Snap Shots preview technology so that a preview is shown on the right (which is called the 'preview area') together with site information as well as other typical functions such as search within site and go to cache page. You may navigate the results by clicking on them, using the arrow keys on your keyboard, or by scrolling. To open a result, you will have to double-click. And when you open a result, SearchMash follows you by adding a frame at the top:
To go to image results, simply click on the 'Image' tab and without loading the entire page, only the search result section would reload. You will still get a preview of the site that hosts the image as well as the size (width and height) and file name:
And just like web search, you will have to double-click the image to open results. For video results, I personally think it is the most useful and user-friendly. Instead of a preview, you can actually watch videos hosted on YouTube or Google Video on the right using the embedded player without leaving the results. Useful information about the video such as the title, author, duration and description are also shown. Similarly, you navigate by either clicking, using arrow keys or scrolling:
SearchMash brings Google Maps right into the search results. They kept the familiar interface and everything works exactly the same expect it is much faster and interactive:
SearchMash also provides more specific searches such as Wikipedia and blog search. You can see them by clicking on the "More" menu. You can view your search history, change your search preferences in the menu on the left.
According to comScore, Google continues to top global search charts with 37.1 billion searches in August dominating over 60% of the worldwide market.
| More Related News |
Pay attention to the description of the video! It reads '8 clicks from http://tstkeith.blogspot.com/2007/05/ ...'. Pretty obvious it is some referral statistics from YouTube. This suggests that YouTube has been putting its referral statistics in public allowing (extremely powerful) search engines like Google to access this information. I tried some other keywords but it doesn't seem to trigger the same "description". Could you find other keywords that produces the same (strange) video description? Or do you have other opinions about this phenomena?
The director of crawl systems at Google, Dan Crow is releasing a new META tag named "unavailable_after".
Easily understood from the name, the "unavailable_after" tag will tell Google when Googlebot should no longer crawl that page. It is especially useful for limited time offer promotional pages where the promotions will expire on a specific date. By using the "unavailable_after" tag, you can tell Google not to crawl these pages, after the promotions expire.
[Via Search Engine Land]
Google achieved an overall satisfactory rating from 48.2% of the 2,740 Web surfers who participated, beating Baidu’s 39.8%. Participants in the test accessed the search engines through pages that disguised the companies' identities.
The quality of their search results were rated for the eight most common types of searches in China: news, Internet and technology, finance and business, entertainment, shopping and dining, travel and transportation, science and education, and government services and public information. Google is ahead of Baidu in all categories but entertainment, suggesting Baidu has a better understanding of the music and movie tastes of Chinese Internet users.
The survey also find out that users were most dissatisfied (scoring a 30.3% disapproval rate) with the connections to Google.cn have been highly unstable, particularly during the test period, when it was periodically blocked by Chinese censors, resulting in blank pages and slow speeds.
Google was also complaint about its failure to provide page-caching in China, the absence of a search function for free downloads of music in the MP3 format and for not providing a popular chat-room like message posting board called post bar.
I suppose Google China is trying very hard to catch up with in entertainment and other local search services by launching Life Search (the Chinese version of Google Base) in China.
| Related: Copy of Report Chinese | English |
Bigger Attachments in Gmail
You can now send emails with attachment up to 20MB. You have to be aware, however, that this is also restricted by the recipient's attachment size limit (e.g. standard Yahoo Mail and Hotmail accounts only allows attachments under 10MB).
| Related: Official Google Blog | Gmail Help Center |
, animated yellow square smileys 
and static black & white smileys
.| Related: Official Google Talk Blog | Launch Google Talk Gadget |
| Related: Official Google Blog |
| Related: Official Google Blog| Google Translate |
Try it yourself. Enter keywords below:
Today is a big day for Google with all the exciting announcements that further enhances the core of Google's great empire - search. From day one, Google aimed themselves to become the universal search engine that ultimately search across all its content sources, compare and rank all the information in real time, and deliver a single, integrated set of search results that offers users precisely what they are looking for. Beginning today, Google will incorporate information from a variety of previously separate sources – including videos, images, news, maps, books, and websites – into a single set of results."At first, universal search results may be subtle. Over time users will recognize additional types of content integrated into their search results as the company advances toward delivering a truly comprehensive search experience."
- Google Press Release
Here are the three major upgrades:
The Power of Google Technology
Google has begin their first stage of an upgraded ranking mechanism (PageRank) that automatically and objectively compares different types of information. As always, Google search results are ranked automatically by algorithms to deliver the best results to users anywhere in the world. Most of this innovation addresses basic ranking algorithms and is often not obvious to users. Users just see more accurate results, more often, in more languages, which is our primary goal.
New Navigation Features
New dynamically generated navigation links have been added above the search results to suggest additional information that is relevant to a user's query. For example, a search for "python" will now generate links to Blog Search, Book Search, Groups, and Code, to let the user know there is additional information on his or her query in each of those areas. As a result, users can find a wider array of information on their topic, including data types they might not have initially considered.
Google's homepage and a number of applications (e.g. Gmail and Picasa Web Album, etc.) have also been updated with a new navigation bar on the top of the screen to provide easier access to popular Google products. Now, instead of having links above the Google.com homepage search box, users will see a navigation bar on the top left side of the page with various Google search properties and popular products including Gmail, Google Calendar, Docs & Spreadsheets, and Picasa Web Albums.
Experience the Experiments
Google also announced today a new experimental version of its popular search service called Google Experimental, available on Google Labs. This new test site provides users an opportunity to try out some of the latest search experiments and innovations and provide Google with feedback. One of the first experiments to be featured on the site enables users to view their search results on a map or timeline. For instance, when someone searches for "Albert Einstein" on Google Experimental, they can choose to view the search results on a map that shows locations mentioned within web pages about Albert Einstein or on a timeline that illustrates the history of Albert Einstein's life.
| Related: Press Release | Official Google Blog | Search Engline Land |
Google explains why anonymize server logs only after 18–24 months
They came up with three major reasons:
| View Original Post | Related Previous Posts |
Google Inc.'s corporate tagline has become "Search, Ads and Apps," reflecting a shift beyond search and advertising into online software applications, its chief executive said on Thursday.
| Related: Search Engine Land | New York Times |
Google aims at giving users the most relevant content in search result pages. Larry Page, co-founder of Google, stated that a"perfect search engine," is defined as something that, "understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.". Long ago, Google displays OneBox above search results which are information Google identifies as most relevant to specialized information like weather and stock quotes. In the past few months, they extend this idea to something bloggers name it 'PlusBox' or 'ManyBox' which basically is similar information provided in OneBox displayed in an expandable box after individual search results. Currently, PlusBox works for stock quotes, in-site search, maps and directions, related blog posts about corporates, etc. Lately, they experimented videos on PlusBox which means users can play videos hosted in popular videos sharing sites (e.g. YouTube and Google Video) on the search result page. Here is how users benefit:
Apart from PlusBox, Google is actively doing experiments with a site called searchmash which integrates all sorts of results (e.g. image, blogs, wikipedia, videos) in one page. Google Operating System forecasted that Google might add in a Google Scholar PlusBox that shows information about scholar papers: the abstract, the number or quotes, the number of pages and links to Google Scholar. I would suggest:
While Google is marching towards its ultimate goal as a 'perfect search engine', more testing will go on.
Google has been buying AdWords ads for its products in hopes to diverge traffic from its most popular product -- search to other services. I have done several searches trying to dig all the AdWords ads Google use to advertise its own products (see below for the products I have dug). I concluded that most these products that Google actually spend money competing with other advertisers are either unpopular and has a low market share or the Google version of that product for that particular keyword ranks pretty low (e.g. If you search for 'calendar', Google's calendar service ranks third). And recently, they even added something call 'Tip' which appears right below the search box when users search for particular keywords to promote its four products: Google Images (for searching images), Google Calendar (Google's web-based calendar service), Blogger (Google's free blogging service which recently went out of beta), Picasa Web Album (Google owned online album which provide one-time 250 MB of storage).
So far, I have dig these products which Google self-advertise: AdSense, AdWords, Google Toolbar, Google Talk, Google SketchUp, Picasa, Google Blog Search, Google Desktop, Google Pack, Google Calendar and Blogger. Have I missed any?
There is still a week till Christmas but Google has already started celebrating the holiday by showing candles and trees on the borderline between search results and ads for queries like Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa this would definitely draw more attention to the ads and more likely will users click on them. Is Google trying to boost its advertising revenue before the end of year?
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