Gmail Increases Maximum Attachment Size to 25 MB

Now you can send bigger attachments in Gmail, as Google increased the maximum attachment size from 20 MB to 25 MB.

Link:
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/...

Google Gives Presentation On Search Engine Optimization

Easily add Custom Google search to your website

Add the Custom Search element, and let visitors search your site and other sites you choose using the power of Google Custom Search. If you like, earn revenue from your site with AdSense for Search.

Try it out:
http://veign.com/help/custom-google-search.php


Link:
http://www.google.com/webelements/customsearch/

Google's Tetris inspired logo

On Google today...

Nearby Intersections on GOOG-411

If you're out and about, you can call GOOG-411 and get local information about businesses. Now we've made it even easier to orient yourself without a map in front of you: call GOOG-411, ask for 'details', and in addition to the address and phone number of the business, we'll also point you to the nearest street intersection or adjacent streets.

You can try it now: call 1-800-466-4411, look up 'Google in New York', ask us for more 'details', and we'll tell you that our Chelsea office is 'near the intersection with West 16th Street'. Unless you're a seasoned New Yorker, this might very well save you from walking up or down a few blocks.

Link:
http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2009/05/...


Don't know about Goog-411? Read about it here:
http://www.veign.com/blog/2007/04/goog-411-google-voice-local-search.html

Google Similar Images

Refine your image search with visual similarity

Similar Images allows you to search for images using pictures rather than words. Click the "Similar images" link under an image to find other images that look like it. Try a search of your own or click on an example below.

Link:
http://similar-images.googlelabs.com/

Whats new for Google searching?

Google Search Options:

Wonder Wheel:

Rich Snippets:
Read more:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/...


SkyMap: Google Sky Map turns your Android-powered mobile phone into a dynamic window on the night sky. When you point your phone upwards you will see a map of the brightest stars, constellations and planets in that part of the sky. The next time you see a bright star and want to know what it's called, Sky Map can help you identify it.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/


Codenames Spellmeleon and Chameleon: A new way of displaying results for misspelled words that should help in those clicks on sites that prey on misspellings
http://www.dullest.com/blog/searchology-spellmeleon-chameleon/

Comments in Google search results?

I sure hope not. What a mistake it would be to allow public comments in Google search results. All I can see is the blackhat SEO guys hammering the comments to help bring down the competition's websites. Why? Because the amount of clicks a search results gets can affect its overall rankings. Bad comments means less clicks, means it position could drop.

Read more here:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/weblife/?p=630

Google now offers a Contact Manager

My Contacts is a place to import, store and view all of the contact information that's important to you. You can also create your own groups of contacts to easily email many people at once.

Really its nothing more than a contact manager. You manage contacts and contact groups and nothing more.

Link:
http://www.google.com/contacts

Be sure to check out my big list of Google's services.

PowerPoint and TIFF file viewing from Google in Gmail

A few months ago, we added fast online viewing of PDFs in your browser. As of today, that same viewer now supports TIFF and Microsoft PowerPoint document formats too: you can now view TIFF and PPT files online, directly in your browser, without having to save the files to your computer and without needing to buy, install, or wait for any special software to start up.

We've had a "View as slideshow" option for PowerPoint files for a while; now we've integrated this conversion technology into the same viewer that we use for PDFs and TIFFs.

Cool. Wonder if this will expand my trick for converting Office documents to HTML file.

Link:
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/....

Google News Timeline

Google News Timeline is a web application that organizes search results chronologically. It allows users to view news and other data sources on a browsable, graphical timeline. Available data sources include recent and historical news, scanned newspapers and magazines, blog posts, sports scores, and information about various types of media, like music albums and movies.

Try your birthday. Limited results for me, but there were results.

Link:
http://newstimeline.googlelabs.com/

Check out more of what Google has to offer at the Big List of Google

Gmail Now Tells You Who You Want To Email

Not sure who else to add to that group email? Gmail Labs now has a useful “suggest more recipients” feature that suggests contacts that you might want to include in a group email based on the people you’ve grouped together as email recipients in the past.

For example, if you often send family emails to your mother, father, husband, sister and brother, when you start composing an email to your mother and father, Gmail will suggest adding your sister, husband and brother. The feature is triggered only after you’ve added at least two recipients to the email.

Link:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/17/...

Find out where you ranked in Google when someone clicked your link

Your analytics software can already tell you a lot about the traffic you’re getting from natural search: which search engines are sending traffic, what keywords are sending traffic, which pages are getting the most search engine traffic. But wouldn’t it be nice to know exactly where in the search results your page appeared when the user clicked?

Google has confirmed speculation originally published by Patrick Altoft that their new referrer string does include ranking data.

Link:
http://searchengineland.com/...

Google uncloaks once-secret server

Google's big surprise: each server has its own 12-volt battery to supply power if there's a problem with the main source of electricity. The company also revealed for the first time that since 2005, its data centers have been composed of standard shipping containers--each with 1,160 servers and a power consumption that can reach 250 kilowatts.

They show the inside of a Google module data-center - very smart designing.

Link:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10209580-92.html

Create a form that stores data in a Google Spreadsheet

A tutorial video on how to use forms in Google Spreadsheets to create simple surveys and quizzes.

Specify your canonical at the site level

Carpe diem on any duplicate content worries: we now support a format that allows you to publicly specify your preferred version of a URL. If your site has identical or vastly similar content that's accessible through multiple URLs, this format provides you with more control over the URL returned in search results. It also helps to make sure that properties such as link popularity are consolidated to your preferred version.

This is great. Google is giving web developers much more control over sites that they push out. No longer do you have to go into Webmaster Tools to fix canonical issues with your website.

Actually, this method gives you much more control. In summary, you can have duplicate content on your website and specify, through a special tag, which is the page that Google should be indexing. This means you can easily filter out Print version of pages or pages with additional query parameters.

Link:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com...

Single Google Query uses 1000 Machines in 0.2 seconds

Google is normally quite secretive about their search infrastructure but, in a break from tradition, they have revealed that a single search query on Google can consume the processing power of 1000 machines.

Link:
http://www.labnol.org/internet/...

See where your friends are on a map

With Google Latitude, you can:

• See where your friends are and what they are up to
• Quickly contact them with SMS, IM, or a phone call
• Maintain complete control over your privacy

Link:
http://www.google.com/latitude/intro.html

Google Earth 5 Preview

Google launches Measurement Lab for detecting ISP throttling

Measurement Lab (M-Lab) is an open, distributed server platform for researchers to deploy Internet measurement tools. The goal of M-Lab is to advance network research and empower the public with useful information about their broadband connections. By enhancing Internet transparency, M-Lab helps sustain a healthy, innovative Internet.

When an Internet application doesn't work as expected, how can you tell whether the problem is caused by your broadband connection, the application or something else? It can be very difficult for professional network administrators, let alone average Internet users, to answer this sort of question today.

Transparency has always been an essential component of the Internet's success, and Internet users deserve to be well-informed about the performance of their broadband connections. For that to happen, researchers need resources to develop new analytical tools.

Link:
http://www.measurementlab.net/

Google Desktop fills harddrive

Get message that Google Desktop has stopped working and searching the Temp folder I find Gigs of Zip files that are being left behind (in C:\ Users/[username]\AppData\Local\Temp) by some GD function (indexing not working?)

See others discussing:
http://groups.google.com/group/...

Google Earth adds Photorealism to New York

Link:
http://earth.google.com/

Google Book Search searches magazines

Over the past couple of years, we've made an effort to bring specialized content like Patents, News Archives and the LIFE Photo Archive online. Today, that effort continues--we're beginning to add magazines to the Google Book Search index, so that when you search on Google Book Search, you'll be searching across the full text of both books and an ever-growing number of magazines, which will appear tagged with the keyword "Magazine" in search results.

Not the newest magazines around but it a step the direction of everything indexed by Google.

Link:
http://books.google.com/

Notable software releases

WordPress 2.7 "Coltrane":
http://wordpress.org/development/2008/12/coltrane/

Google Chrome 1.0:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/12/google-chrome-beta.html

Google Sketchup 7

Link:
http://sketchup.google.com/

LIFE photo archive hosted by Google

Search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today. Most were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of LIFE and Google.

Link:
http://images.google.com/hosted/life

Yahoo web analytics, who knew?

Yahoo! Web Analytics is an enterprise site analytics tool that provides real-time insight into visitor behavior on your website. With powerful and flexible tools and dashboards, Yahoo! Web Analytics helps online marketers and website designers enhance the visitor experience, increase sales and reduce marketing costs.

Google Analytics needs to step up and start offering a more real-time stats. Yahoo is now doing it (see below)...

Get detailed reporting within minutes after an action occurs on your website. Quickly identify dips in key site metrics or monitor the performance of new content. Seeing the impact of website and marketing changes immediately makes it much easier to optimize them. Yahoo! Web Analytics also maintains historical data so you can go back at any time to review old data for new insight, or compare the present to the past without any changes to your page tags.

Link:
http://web.analytics.yahoo.com/

Followup: Convert Excel and PowerPoint to webpage

The Google trick for converting a Word document to clean HTML also works pretty well for Excel documents and PowerPoint presentations.

Much better than anything provided by Microsoft for saving Office documents as a webpage (HTML).

How to easily monitor your Adsense account

AdSenseLog will help you improve your AdSense ad performance, using several monitoring, tracking and analyzing tools, all built into one easy to use software.

I have AdsenseLog running all the time and minimized to my system tray. It lets me monitor the performance of my Adsense campaigns that span many domains. This tool makes it dead easy to watch the performance.

Link:
http://www.metalgrass.com/adsenselog/

Google Analytics Gets a Major Upgrade

Google Analytics just got better. Google will begin rolling out a set of major upgrades today to the free Website measuring tool. The new features include the ability to create custom reports, better ways to look at audience segments, the ability to track and measure AdSense inside Google Analytics, an API (on it’s way), the introduction of cool bubble “motion charts,” and some user interface improvements. Let’s take these new features one at a time.

Link:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/22/...

GMail gets auto-replies and canned responses

Gmail already lets you create filters based on a combination of keywords, sender, recipients, and more in your incoming messages. Turn on Canned Responses in Labs, and you can set a filter to grab one of your saved responses, create an automated reply, and hit the Send button for you.

You can set up different automated messages for different keywords, just like you said you wanted. (We're friends, so I trust you to use this power responsibly.)

How to Enable it:

1. Click on Settings in the top right corner of Gmail
2. Click on the Labs setting
3. Enable Canned Responses
4. When you are composing an email a Canned Response option will appear. This lets you save the email as a canned response.
5. For auto-replies you would setup a filter (under the account settings) using the saved canned response.
   

Link:
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/10/

Convert a Word document to HTML (easy and free)

HowTo: Convert a Word document to clean HTML

Ever have a need to convert a Word document to HTML knowing that Word itself produces some of the worst HTML code ever? There is a simple, easy trick to get this done.

1. Make sure you have a Gmail account
2. Send the Word document, as an attachment, to your Gmail account
3. Sign in to Gmail and view the email with the attachment
4. Click the 'View as HTML' link at the bottom of the email
5. With the page opened, 'View source' from your browser
6. Copy the code

That's all there is to it. Google produces some pretty clean HTML from a Word document. It may have to be updated to XHTML 1.0 specifications (Google uses some deprecated tags)

I had a pretty complex tabled document with lots of text styles and it did a very good job.

Search Google like its 2001

Not sure why anyone would want to but Google has made their 2001 Google index available for searching. Its another thing for honoring their 10th anniversary - basically bringing back the oldest index they have available.

Link:
http://www.google.com/search2001.html

Google Moderator launches

It lets a collection of users post questions and the group votes the questions up. Great for company wide meetings where each employee can post questions and vote the questions up to be answered.

Collect questions in one place Everyone has a chance to propose a question to the group.

Vote for the questions you care about The blue featured question gives everyone's submission the chance to be voted on.

Use at any event or gathering Google Moderator works in any group setting, from lectures to town hall meetings.

Link:
http://moderator.appspot.com/

Be sure to check out my Big List of Google websites.

Google's 10th Birthday website

Link:
http://www.google.com/tenthbirthday/

View the Google Timeline:
http://www.google.com/tenthbirthday/#start

Crawling through HTML forms

In the past few months we have been exploring some HTML forms to try to discover new web pages and URLs that we otherwise couldn't find and index for users who search on Google. Specifically, when we encounter a <> element on a high-quality site, we might choose to do a small number of queries using the form. For text boxes, our computers automatically choose words from the site that has the form; for select menus, check boxes, and radio buttons on the form, we choose from among the values of the HTML. Having chosen the values for each input, we generate and then try to crawl URLs that correspond to a possible query a user may have made. If we ascertain that the web page resulting from our query is valid, interesting, and includes content not in our index, we may include it in our index much as we would include any other web page.

Link:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/...

Google Chrome User Agent

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.A.B.C Safari/525.13

I am already seeing Chrome hit around 1% of my web traffic. Luckily Veign renders fine in Chrome and the website I checked, that I designed, work fine too. No worries for me, yet.

Link:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-chrome-user-agent/

Answers to common Google Chrome objection

• This browser is going to have AdSense hard-coded into a browser frame that I can’t delete, right?
• Hmm. Well, I bet you hard-code Google as the default search engine, don’t you? I’ll bet you can’t even select other search engines!
• Okay, but this browser is tracking everywhere I go and sending that information to
• Another browser? Geez, I’m a webmaster/search engine optimizer/front-end
• Clearly launching a web browser means that Google is losing its focus on core search quality, right?
• Does this mean that you don’t love/support Firefox or the Mozilla Foundation?
• Speaking of Macs and Linux, why no Mac/Linux support yet?
• This is going to be some buggy, crashing piece of beta download, isn’t it?
• Google has some selfish motivation for doing this, right? I’m sure that there’s some angle here--there’s gotta be?
• Will Google stop actively working on Google Chrome and let it stagnate after a few months?
• Dude, this anonymous commenter said that Google claims that they own everything you touch when you run Chrome! Should I be worried?

Read the answers at:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/

First screenshots of Google Chrome

Link:
http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2008-09-02-n72.html

Google Chrome?

Google just officially confirmed that it will release a new open-source web browser, called Google Chrome (that link should go live sometime tomorrow).

Link:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/...

Chrome Link:
http://www.google.com/chrome

Create a search engine tailored to your needs

Have a website or collection of sites you'd like to search over? With Custom Search Engine, you can harness the power of Google to create a search engine tailored to your needs.

To see this search in action just look at the Search used on this blog.

Link:
http://www.google.com/coop/cse/

See what the world is searching for with Google Insights

With Google Insights for Search, you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, and time frames.

Great tool for SEO as it gives you not only the search term you requested but also breakout search terms relating to yours.

Link:
http://www.google.com/insights/search/#

Added to the big list of Google

1 trillion web page milestone hit

We've known it for a long time: the web is big. The first Google index in 1998 already had 26 million pages, and by 2000 the Google index reached the one billion mark. Over the last eight years, we've seen a lot of big numbers about how much content is really out there. Recently, even our search engineers stopped in awe about just how big the web is these days -- when our systems that process links on the web to find new content hit a milestone: 1 trillion (as in 1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs on the web at once!

Link:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/...

Google to acquire Digg for 200 million?

Google’s on and off negotiations with Digg have been back on in a big way for the last six weeks, we’ve heard from multiple sources inside and outside of Google. The two companies have reportedly signed a letter of intent and are close to a deal that will bring Digg under the Google News property. The acquisition price is in the $200 million range, says one source.

Link:
http://www.techcrunch.com/...

Video: Google's Matt Cutts on Spam, Ranking, and Your Search Future

How Google detects Malware

White paper (pdf):
The Ghost In The Browser Analysis of Web-based Malware

Google Map Maker

Google Map Maker is a Google Maps service that allows you add or edit features, such as roads, businesses, parks, schools and more. Using Google Map Maker tools, you can visually mark locations and add detailed information about these locations. Once you have submitted content, this information may be edited by other users or moderators. At a later time, this content may be published in Google Maps for others to see and use.

Link:
http://www.google.com/mapmaker

Media Management in Gmail with Xoopit

Firefox extension Xoopit turns Gmail into a robust, searchable media management tool for every piece of media that comes through your inbox. By indexing every attachment as well as every link to photos and videos from sites like Flickr, Picasa, and YouTube, Xoopit allows you to easily search for and find any picture or video and view it from directly inside Gmail.

The only thing that makes this questionable is they want your Gmail login password. Not sure how many people are comfortable with that, but I'm not.

Link:
http://lifehacker.com/374651/...

Code Snippet search result from Google

New to me.

Google’s latest Android prototype

Google’s latest Android prototype is miles improved over the versions we last saw. Back at CES the GUI was clunky and the whole thing looked relatively primative; Google themselves asked us to keep an open mind and instead concentrate on the OS’ potential. Now, they’ve brought out a device that you could, frankly, mistake for production hardware.

Link:
http://androidcommunity.com/...

Google Earth Gets Layer for News

Google Earth has a new layer: Google News. Writing on the Google LatLong blog, Brandon Badger, Product Manager said, "By spatially locating the Google News' constantly updating index of stories from more than 4,500 news sources, Google Earth now shows an ever-changing world of human activity as chronicled by reporters worldwide."

Link:
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/080521-090559

Filter Google Results by Date with a URL Trick

Link:
http://lifehacker.com/384375/...

How much does Google pay

Google Programmer in Phoenix - $174,000/year
Google Programmer in California - $197,000/year
Google Programmer in Chicago - $222,000/year
Google Programmer in New York - $242,000/year

...and thats just in salary. What other financial benefits does Google offer it's employees?

Read More:
http://www.cherryav.com/articles/technology/...

(source of salaries from Indeed.com)

Where Are All The Google Data Centers?

Google’s data infrastructure is massive and spread across the world. All that Web crawling, indexing, and searching takes enormous amounts of computing power, not to mention everyone pounding away at Gmail, Google Apps, Blogger, Google Reader, and every other project dreamed up at the Googleplex. But where are all of these data centers and how many are there?

Link:
http://www.techcrunch.com/...

Google App Engine

Google App Engine gives you access to the same building blocks that Google uses for its own applications, making it easier to build an application that runs reliably, even under heavy load and with large amounts of data

So they can get at your data and know everything about your website.

Dynamic webserving, with full support of common web technologies, Persistent storage (powered by Bigtable and GFS with queries, sorting, and transactions), Automatic scaling and load balancing, Google APIs for authenticating users and sending email, Fully featured local development environment.

Seems powerful enough.

Google App Engine packages these building blocks and takes care of the infrastructure stack

Nice

During this preview period, applications are limited to 500MB of storage, 200M megacycles of CPU per day, and 10GB bandwidth per day. We expect most applications will be able to serve around 5 million pageviews per month. In the future, these limited quotas will remain free, and developers will be able to purchase additional resources as needed.

That's pretty large.

Link:
http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/

Secrets of Google News exposed!

Often publishers ask us why Google News didn't include one of their articles, or skipped the image associated with an article. In the search for answers, we've noticed that there's a lot of confusion about how we include and rank articles. We'd like to share some of the facts, and debunk the myths.

Quick Points:

• Having an image next to your article improves your ranking MYTH
• Updating an article after posting it will create problems with Google News TRUE
• Timing the publication of your article improves your article ranking MYTH
• Articles that are just images or video won't be included TRUE
• There's no way to see why my articles weren't included in Google News MYTH
• Publishing a sitemap helps my rankings MYTH
• Redesigning my site may affect my coverage in Google News TRUE
• If I put AdSense on my site, my article rankings will improve MYTH

Read about each point above:
http://googlenewsblog.blogspot.com/...

Google turns the lights out

Google is now blacked out for Earth Hour.

(picture posted incase the lights get turned back on)

Leaked Google Document will change the game for SEO?

Do you believe that this internal document to Google is real? A lot of SEO experts seem to think so. Whether you do or your don't is does give some pretty good information and is worth a glance.

What is interesting is, if this document is true, how much more humans have an affect on the SERPs.

Link:
http://.../quality-rater-guidelines-2007.pdf

(download it while you can as it may not last long)

How GoogleBot interacts with your website

If I'm [googlebot] indexing for regular web search, and I see links to MP3s and videos, I probably won't download those. Similarly, if I see a JPG, I will treat it differently than an HTML or PDF link. For instance, JPG is much less likely to change frequently than HTML, so I will check the JPG for changes less often to save bandwidth. Meanwhile, if I'm looking for links as Google Scholar, I'm going to be far more interested in the PDF article than the JPG file. Downloading doodles (like JPGs) and videos of skateboarding dogs is distracting for a scholar—do you agree?
---
After actually downloading a file, I use the Content-Type header to check whether it really is HTML, an image, text, or something else. If it's a special data type like a PDF file, Word document, or Excel spreadsheet, I'll make sure it's in the valid format and extract the text content. Maybe it has a virus; you never know. If the document or data type is really garbled, there's usually not much to do besides discard the content.

Very interesting read on how and what GoogleBot will do when accessing your website.

Link:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/...

Google releases new Search in Website feature

If you do a search some results will contain a 'Search [website]' form right inline with the SERP result. A neat little feature that could making searching that much easier.

Give it a try by searching for Amazon:
http://www.google.com/...

Howto: Hack a web server using a Google Search

The "Cult of the Dead Cow" hacker group – cDc for short – has published a tool that searches for vulnerabilities and private information across the web. Using well-chosen Google search queries, Goolag Scan discovers links to vulnerable web applications, back doors, or documents inadvertently put on the internet that contain sensitive information.

This kind of "Google hacking" is already well known: a hacker using the pseudonym Johnny has already published quite a collection of these "Google Hacks" or "Google Dorks" on his web site ihackstuff. What cDc has done is create an automated tool that allows an unskilled hacker to use these same techniques.

Read about it:
http://.../Cult-of-the-Dead-Cow-Google-into-a-vulnerability-scanner

Some standalone hacks for Google (no application required):
http://johnny.ihackstuff.com/ghdb.php

Google Sites released

Google Sites, a new offering from Google Apps, makes creating a team site as easy as editing a document. Use Google Sites to centralize all types of information -- from videos to presentations -- and share your site with just a few people, your entire organization, or the world.

Link:
http://sites.google.com/

Curious about what else Google has to offer then check out my Big Google List.

The Gmail CAPTCHA has been cracked

The Gmail CAPTCHA has been cracked—albeit not easily—raising new concerns about spammers' ability to abuse Google's e-mail services. Websense Security Labs pointed out the security breach late last week, noting that spammers have a lot to gain by being able to use bots to automatically sign up for new accounts.

Link:
http://.../gotcha-captcha-gmail-bot-detector-system-cracked

All Gmail Users Are Given Two Separate Email Addresses

You probably know how to create multiple email aliases in Gmail by adding the plus symbol and dots to your Gmail username but there’s something more interesting.

When you create a Gmail account, you actually get two email addresses - one is the regular @gmail.com while the second email address has @googlemail.com in the domain.

Link:
http://.../gmail-email-alias-two-separate-gmail-address/

How Veign appears in Google now

Searching on the keyword Veign brings up a much better serp result now for Veign. Nice.

Link:
http://www.google.com/search?q=veign

Webmaster tools from search engines gives valuable information

If you've never signed up for the various webmaster accounts at the major search engines (Google, Live Search, Yahoo!) then you're missing out on a lot of very valuable information on your website. These are great tools to help increase your position within the various search engines.

Where to find:

• Google Webmaster - Help you with your crawling and indexing questions, introduce you to offerings that can enhance and increase traffic to your site, and connect you with your visitors.
• Yahoo! Site Explorer - Allows you to explore all the web pages indexed by Yahoo! Search. View the most popular pages from any site, dive into a comprehensive site map, and find pages that link to that site or any page
• Live Search Webmaster - Use the Webmaster Tools to troubleshoot the crawling and indexing of your website, submit sitemaps and view

How Google Ended Up with Their Logo

Ever wonder how Google ended up with the logo that they did? The designer of the logo, Ruth Kedar recently talked about what went into the process and even shared some of her early ideas. Surprisingly it started out more complicated and ended up as the more simple logo that is known around the World today.

Link:
http://.../how-google-ended-up-with-their-logo/

Google introduces an Apps tool for sending forms via e-mail

This morning, Google unveiled an intriguing new collaboration feature that lets users embed forms in their e-mails. It involves the company's existing Spreadsheet platform, and it could be a new tool to expand its online apps' user base.

Link:
http://.../Google_introduces_an_Apps_tool_for_sending_forms_via_email

Ever hear about Personalized Google Maps?

What you can do with Personalized Google Maps:

• Mark your favorite places on your map
• Draw lines and shapes to highlight paths and areas
• Add your own text, photos, and videos
• Share your map with friends and family

Link:
http://maps.google.com/help/maps/mymaps/create.html

The user guide to Google Maps:
http://maps.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=68480

20+ practical and ethical tips to earn more revenue from Google Adsense

Making money online is the hot trend nowadays. In coming days I am sure you will see many working professional quit their day job and seat at home in their pajamas writing some blog posts to make their living.

There are tremendous opportunities to make money online. Currently Google Adsense is the best option for most of the publishers. Some basic optimization tips can double your Adsense revenue. Two sites having same traffic can have huge adsense revenue difference depending on the ad optimization.

Link:
http.../tips-to-earn-more-revenue-from-adsense/

Google Sitemaps FAQ

A great collection of common questions you may have when it comes to the use and need for a Sitemap on your website.

Link:
http://.../sitemaps-faqs.html

Bombshell: Google and Facebook Join DataPortability.org

The DataPortability Workgroup announced this morning that representatives from both Google and Facebook are joining its ranks. The group is working on a variety of projects to foster an era of Data Portability - where users can take their data from the websites they use to reuse elsewhere and where vendors can leverage safe cross-site data exchange for a whole new level of innovation. Good bye customer lock-in, hello to new privacy challenges. If things go right, today could be a very important day in the history of the internet.

Link:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/goog-fb-data.php

Is the new Google Analytics code buggy?

Not sure if you heard that Google has released a new code to insert in your website so you can benefit from the new metrics Google has stated that Analyitics will provide. Well, it would seem that some users, myself included, have experienced major issues with the new code.

For me it started when the code causes a major glitch if you run it on an ASP page running through IIS (page will crash). Ok, this was pretty easy to fix but the next issue was not possible. The new code would not register any stats. That means for the 4 days I had the new code installed I registered 0 for everything. I fixed that problem by going back to the old code.

So be warned as the new code may not be ready for primetime yet.

See other discussing problems:
http://groups.google.com/group/analytics-help-troubleshoot/topics

Gmail's old security flaw still may pose a problem

Read about what can happen:
http://www.davidairey.co.uk/google-gmail-security-hijack/

Then go and make sure you have no unwanted filters in your Gmail account:
Login -> Settings -> Filters

The Ultimate Fate of Supplemental Results

Now we're coming to the next major milestone in the elimination of the artificial difference between indices: rather than searching some part of our index in more depth for obscure queries, we're now searching the whole index for every query.

Link:
http://.../ultimate-fate-of-supplemental-results.html

Microsoft co-founder on 700 MHz bidders list, Verizon Wireless not

Thus far, the preliminary list of bidders in the US Federal Communications Commission's 700 MHz auction is a veritable cavalcade of small telecom companies, plus small and large companies alike looking to become telecom companies. Google Airwaves, Inc. is the least surprising, and perhaps most spotlighted member of the group thus far.

Link:
http://.../Microsoft_cofounder_on_700_MHz_bidders_list

The list of bidders:
http://wireless.fcc.gov/auctions/default.htm?job=auctions_home

Google Adsense ads offers ad scrolling

Seems like Adsense ads offer a new feature where you can scroll through ads in an ad block using provided arrows. This is something I have not heard about before and just noticed in one of my ads.

Basically, when you click one of the arrows the ads scroll away and new set of ads scroll in. Cool feature but not sure how many people will actually use it.

New code for Google Analytics

The new Google Analytics tracking code (ga.js) has been launched and is now available for you to use when you set up a profile. Installing the lighter ga.js code snippet instead of the old tracking code (urchin.js, "legacy") lets you take advantage of upcoming advanced features and sophisticated reporting while keeping the reliable tracking capabilities of urchin.js. For these reasons, we recommend installing ga.js instead of urchin.js. For more information on the new ga.js code, including information on migrating over from "urchin.js,"

Link:
https://www.google.com/.../answer.py?answer=55488

Migration Guide:
http://www.google.com/analytics/GATCmigrationguide.pdf

Google to bid on 700MHz spectrum

Google's interest in the 700MHz spectrum auction has not been a secret. Google chief executive Eric Schmidt said back in August that the company would "probably" bid in the auction, and Google announced several weeks ago that it was preparing all the necessary materials to make a bid. Now, at last, Google is making it officially official.

Google Phone, Google Broadband. Its all coming...

Link:
http://...-really-truly-official-google-to-bid-on-700mhz-spectrum.html

This blog makes it into a Google blog directory

In a directory under:
Computers > Programming > Resources > Weblogs

Pretty cool. Hopefully this will help bring more traffic.

Link:
http://.../Top/Computers/Programming/Resources/Weblogs/

Google Maps Adds Terrain View

See more:
http://searchengineland.com/071127-110049.php

Breakdown of a Google search result

Page Title: Usually pulled from the TITLE tag set on the page. Can also be pulled from the Open Directory Project's (DMOZ) title. Setting the META tag NOODP prevents the Open Directory Project (DMOZ) information being used and will default back to onpage information. Limit of 63 characters.

Snippet: Pulled from the page content or meta description. If the search keyword is located further down in a page Google may pull the snippet from within the page, around the keyword. If for some reason the page was not accessible then Google may pull the information from the Open Directory Project (DMOZ). Limit of approximately 156 characters.

Plus Box: Used to expand the information shown for a company. Examples of why a plus box is shown would be: Stock Information, Map of company address

Url: Url of where you will be taken when clicking the search result

Filesize: Size of the page you will be taken to.

Cached: A snapshot of the last time the page was crawled. Sometimes next to the Cached link will be an indicator of the time of last crawl (like 1 hour which means it was crawled one hour ago)

Similiar pages: Pages that are similiar to the page displayed in the search result

Note this: Saves the result in Google Notebook. Displayed when you are logged into Google.

Site links: A helpful list of links within a domain that a user may want to go to beyond the presented result from a keyword search. This is a completely algorithmic result (not done by hand or evaulated by a human).

More results: Provides a search result for your keyword that limits the search to within the domain of the search result.

- Digg it -

(as extracted from the video from Matt Cutts)

How to Migrate Your Custom Domain’s Email to Google (And Maintain Your Addresses)

Google Apps allows those with their own domain to move their entire mail infrastructure to Google. That means keeping your email addresses exactly as they are today (e.g. daniel@dmiessler.com) while gaining the benefit of being hosted by Google. Here are a few advantages to consider:

Link:
http://.../how-to-migrate-your-custom-domains-email-to-google...

gOS

We're creating an OS ecosystem that is complete. We come with all the software you need to browse the web, email, instant message... play movies, music, and connect to iPods... create and edit documents, spreadsheets, presentations, databases, images... out of the box. Plug and play!

What can you do with it?

Turn Your Old PC into a Webapp Monster with gOS:
http://.../turn-your-old-pc-into-a-webapp-monster-with-gos


Link:
http://thinkgos.com

Google's phone announcement

A few hours after Google's dramatic announcement which some sources had still been anticipating as a mobile phone bearing the Google brand, we actually know less about Android than we did -- or thought we did -- at 11:00 this morning when it was announced. During a midday press conference featuring key Google executives including CEO Eric Schmidt, reporters called into question most of the principal facts surrounding the new Open Handset Alliance - most importantly, the ingredients of the Android platform.

Link:
http://.../Googles_Phone_Platform_Its_Not_an_OS_So_What_Is_It/

Gatineau is Microsoft's answer to Google Analytics

Microsoft will be releasing an analytics program similiar to Google Analyitcs at some time in the future. Right now its in an invite only beta called Gatineau.

Read all about it:
http://www.liesdamnedlies.com/2007/10/its-here.html

Link to beta invite:
http://advertising.microsoft.com/microsoft-adcenter-gatineau

Google releases Code Search sitemaps

Google's Code Search helps users find function definitions and sample code by enabling them to search publicly accessible source code hosted on the Internet. You can tell Google about source code on your site by creating and submitting a Code Search Sitemap. A Code Search Sitemap is just like a regular Sitemap, and is submitted in the same way, but it does include some additional, Code Search-specific information.

Link:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/...

Google has a 'Supported IMAP Client List' help section

Does this mean Gmail will provide support for IMAP?

Link:
http://mail.google.com/...

New Google Analytics features

Whats new:

• Google Analytics to track site search activity
• Google Analytics Event Tracking capability
• Outbound Link Tracking feature

Read up:
http://.../exciting-announcements-at-emetrics.html

How to Fake a Google Page Rank 10

1. Buy a domain.
2. 301 Redirect the domain either in you .htaccess, PHP header (anything server side) to a page with the desired page rank. It’s better to redirect to something relevant. For example, if you are doing a mortgage site, redirect to a mortgage site.
3. Link to the page with the redirect from another of your sites that gets regularly spidered by Google. Since you use the Alexa Toolbar, you should have several sites that are spidered daily by google.
4.....

Full story:
http://.../how-to-fake-a-google-page-rank-10-or-any-pr-you-want/

Urchin may not be so dead

I posted last week about the story of Google acquiring Urchin stats and letting the application die. Well it would seem that Google may be releasing v6 of Urchin shortly.

In case you are wondering, Google acquired Urchin and used an Urchin product to produce and release Google Analytics.

Link:
http://.../google-urchin-v6-rumored-to-launch-today/

Feed me Seymour: Gmail to 6GB by Jan 2008

The Official Gmail Blog has announced that Gmail's storage counter has received a much-needed bump in its storage growth rate, which will put Gmail storage at 6GB by January 2008. Additionally, the premium Premier Edition is seeing a jump to 25GB from 10GB.

Link:
http://.../gmail-storage-to-6gb-by-january-310231.php

When Google acquisitions go wrong: the disappointing story of Urchin

In March of 2005, Google acquired Urchin Software Corporation, a San Diego-based web analytics company. A few short months later, Google Analytics was unveiled, which was based on "Urchin On Demand," Urchin's javascript-based "Software as a Service" (SaaS) web traffic analytics solution. Urchin customers were generally thrilled about the acquisition, because it was assumed that it meant great things were in store for all of Urchin's customers. In reality, Urchin's core customers have been ignored, product development has stopped on everything but Google Analytics, and companies are wondering why Google took the money and, well, ran.

Link:
http://google-acquisitions-go-wrong-disappointing-story-of-urchin

Webmaster Tools gets an update

• No more tabs! Navigate through the new sidebar.
• Breadcrumbs in the page title for easier product navigation.
• A sidebar that expands and contracts to show and hide options based on your current goal.
• New sidebar topics: Overview, Diagnostics, Statistics, Links, Sitemaps, and Tools.

Link:
http://.../2007/09/subscriber-stats-and-more.html

How many pages

A quick search for page file types in Google yielded these results:

• HTML: 3,810,000,000
• ASP: 860,000,000
• ASPX: 475,000,000
• PHP: 1,100,000,000
• PDF: 230,000,000
• CFM: 399,000,000

HTML is first followed by PHP.

In case you wondered about the advanced searches on Google.

TouchGraph Google Browser

The TouchGraph Google Browser reveals the network of connectivity between websites, as reported by Google's database of related sites.

Link:
http://www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.html

Google Sky lets you see a galaxy far, far away

Google Earth just keeps getting better. This time it adds Google Sky which lets you explore the universe. From see distant galaxies to putting the planets in motion, Google Sky hits a homerun with me.

Link:
http://earth.google.com/sky/skyedu.html

Screenshots:
http://earth.google.com/gallery/kml_listing.html#csky#s1#e10

Google Likely Bidder in 700MHz Auction

After lobbying the FCC to ensure open access stipulations for the upcoming auction of 700MHz spectrum last month, Google indicated at a conference in Colorado late Tuesday that it would likely submit a $4.6 billion bid for a portion of the spectrum to be auctioned off. The frequencies would be made available following the successful transition of television signals from analog to digital.

Link:
http://.../Google_Likely_Bidder_in_700MHz_Auction/

Google improves its Robots.txt tools

We've improved Webmaster Central's robots.txt analysis tool to recognize sitemap declarations and relative urls. Earlier versions weren't aware of sitemaps at all, and understood only absolute URLs; anything else was reported as Syntax not understood. The improved version now tells you whether your sitemap's URL and scope are valid. You can also test against relative URLs with a lot less typing.

Link:
http://.../new-robotstxt-feature-and-rep-meta-tags.html

Talk like a Googler: parts of a url

Let’s dissect the parts of a URL (uniform resource locator). I’ll tell you how we typically refer to different parts of a URL at Google...

Link:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-glossary-url-definitions/