Did you know that Google provided a tool to test your website to see how it will view in a mobile browser? Probably not as most don't.
Its not the best but will give you an idea of how a limited browsing device will show your website.
If you're interested in testing in more modern mobile devices this is what I use:
iPhone: Because I'm on Windows I use Safari for Windows and reduce the width of the browser down to around 320px (the lowest width it will go). Gives you a great idea of how it will look - probably 99% accurate.
In Italy today, Judge Oscar Magi convicted three U.S.-based Google (GOOG) executives of violating the privacy of a disabled boy in 2006 when a video was posted on Google Video of students bullying a disabled boy. The judge handed down six-month prison sentences to David Drummond, senior VP and chief legal officer; Peter Fleischer, chief privacy counsel; and George Reyes, the former CFO.
Google Spreadsheet is a powerful and free tool to manage complex spreadsheets. This tutorial illustrates ten useful formulas you must know to help you simplify the way you work in Google Spreadsheet.
Google Buzz is a new way to share and discover inside of Gmail. It is akin to a whole new environment inside of Gmail, a “new world” in Google’s words. Buzz has a feature called auto-following (sound familiar?), to let you find a new social graph without all of the work behind actually looking for those people. Buzz will follow all of the people that you already email with, building on your current Gmail contact list.
GOOGLE is developing software for the first phone capable of translating foreign languages almost instantly — like the Babel Fish in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
By building on existing technologies in voice recognition and automatic translation, Google hopes to have a basic system ready within a couple of years. If it works, it could eventually transform communication among speakers of the world’s 6,000-plus languages.
Many other companies have already stopped supporting older browsers like Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers. We’re also going to begin phasing out our support, starting with Google Docs and Google Sites. As a result you may find that from March 1 key functionality within these products -- as well as new Docs and Sites features -- won’t work properly in older browsers.
Hopefully this will push it over the edge so Veign will no longer have to design websites with IE6 in mind. My stats still show enough usage that I have no choice but to support it.
We're launching the initial phase of an algorithmic driven Intelligence engine to Google Analytics. Analytics Intelligence will provide automatic alerts of significant changes in the data patterns of your site metrics and dimensions over daily, weekly and monthly periods. For instance, Intelligence could call out a 300% surge in visits from YouTube referrals last Tuesday or let you know bounce rates of visitors from Virginia dropped by 70% two weeks ago. Instead of you having to monitor reports and comb through data, Analytics Intelligence alerts you to the most significant information to pay attention to, saving you time and surfacing traffic insights that could affect your business. Now, you can spend your time actually taking action, instead of trying to figure out what needs to be done.
Very powerful feature that many users probably don't take advantage of.
Simply put. If you want to check out the OS provide by Google, called ChromeOS, then its far easier to test within a Virtual PC. Chris Leeds has provided a complete Virtual Harddrive for Virtual PC with the ChromeOS already installed. Simple.
As developers, it is useful to know that Google hosts a lot of open source projects. Today, let’s have a look at the 10 most awesome projects hosted on Google code.
a 3.7-inch screen and runs the latest version of Google’s Android operating system. It is just 11.5 millimeters thin, or about the thickness of a No. 2 pencil, and weighs 130 grams, or no more than a small Swiss Army knife, said Erick Tseng, a senior product manager. It has a 5-megapixel camera and an LED flash and can shoot both still images and video
Google URL Shortener at goo.gl is a service that takes long URLs and squeezes them into fewer characters to make a link that is easier to share, tweet, or email to friends. The core goals of this service are:
Stability – ensuring that the service has very good uptime Security – protecting users from malware and phishing pages Speed – fast resolution of short URLs
Analytics Intelligence with Custom Alerts Using an algorithmic driven Intelligence engine, Analytics Intelligence monitors data patterns over daily, weekly and monthly periods. Significant changes in data trends and insights you may not have noticed are surfaced directly in your account. You can also create your own Custom Alerts that monitor your selection of dimensions and metrics that can be sent by email or displayed in the Intelligence reports.
Expanded Goals and New Engagement Goals You can now track even more conversions by creating up to 20 goals per profile. Measure user engagement and branding success on your site with Time on Site and Pages per Visit goals. Set up your first Engagement goal in minutes.
Expanded Mobile Reporting Google Analytics has expanded support for mobile websites and tracking for iPhone and Android mobile applications tracking. Adding server side code to your PHP, JSP, PERL, or ASPX mobile websites enables you to track non-Java-Script enabled phones. For mobile application developers, access the SDK and technical implementation details here. You'll also be able to see breakout data on mobile devices and carriers in the new Mobile reports in the Visitors section.
Unique Visitors Metric Include the Unique Visitors metric in your Custom Report or Advanced Segments to see how many actual visitors (unique cookies) visit your website. You can select Unique Visitors as a metric against any dimensions in Google Analytics.
Advanced Analysis Features Dive deeper into your data with Pivoting, Secondary Dimensions, and Advanced Table Filtering. These combined features enable you to perform in-depth, on the fly data analysis within your account.
Share Advanced Segments and Custom Report Templates Share the URL link for an Advanced Segment or Custom Report with anyone who has an Analytics account. Sharing the link will automatically import the pre-formatted template into the person's account. Also available now is the ability to share or hide your Advanced Segments and Custom Reports by profile.
Multiple Custom Variables Custom variables provide the power and flexibility to customize Google Analytics to collect the unique site usage data most important to your business. Define and track visitors according to visitor attributes (member vs. non-member), session attributes (signed in or signed out), and by page-level attributes (viewed Sports section). Use custom variables to classify any number of interactions and behaviors on your site. Start learning more about them now.
Interesting the way Google makes you 'think' during an interview in way that you might not be expecting. You can tell they want intelligent people who can think outside of the box.
Until yesterday, signing up for a Google Voice account required you to pick a new phone number -- not a pleasant option for those who have kept the same digits for years. Now Google has enabled users to keep their existing phone numbers and get (most of) the features Google Voice offers, including Google's excellent voicemail service.
I have been using Google Voice for a couple of months now and now its powerful but I just haven't switched to the phone number yet. Still trying to decide exactly what to use my Google Voice number for. Veign's business number?
The homepage of Pirate Bay disappeared from Google’s search results Friday, after Google allegedly received a DMCA takedown notice targeting the site.
The move is unexpected because, while the Pirate Bay is rife with pirated material, the site’s spare landing page contains no content to speak of — just links, a logo and a search box. By law, DMCA notices are targeted to specific infringing content.
Bet you didn't know about the App Status Dashboard by Google. Amazing at how many things are available from Google that it seems like weekly I come across something new.
A large collection of some great Google Analytics tips. Google Analytics is a great way to track your visitors and how your visitors interact with your website. This collections some powerful features to your Analytics results. From tracking 404 errors to get full referral links to tracking outgoing links and downloads.
This is a great way to play around with the many Google API's. You can select from one of the APIs, a method or function of that API and edit the code provided by Google to see the results live. There is even a debugger and quick links to the documents on the API.
Cloud computing means you can store your data in web applications and access it from any browser, anywhere—but that doesn't mean you don't need a backup plan. Safeguard your data when a storm's a-brewing in the cloud with these tools.
If you use Gmail as your primary email address and don't already backup then its an accident waiting to happen.
As smart and popular as Google may be, the success of Chrome OS is not a fait accompli. Sometimes the smartest and most popular kid at school simply falls on his face. Google Chrome OS could very well turn out to be that kid.
Will Chrome OS be the promising upstart that fails to thrive in the real world? It's much too early to tell, but here are five reasons that Chrome OS could fail
Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we're already talking to partners about the project, and we'll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.
Did you ever doubt that Google would someday release an Operating System? I didn't.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
Click on Settings in the top right corner of Gmail
Click on the Labs setting
Enable Canned Responses
When you are composing an email a Canned Response option will appear. This lets you save the email as a canned response.
For auto-replies you would setup a filter (under the account settings) using the saved canned response.
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.
Make sure you have a Gmail account
Send the Word document, as an attachment, to your Gmail account
Sign in to Gmail and view the email with the attachment
Click the 'View as HTML' link at the bottom of the email
With the page opened, 'View source' from your browser
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.
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.
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 placeEveryone has a chance to propose a question to the group.
Vote for the questions you care aboutThe blue featured question gives everyone's submission the chance to be voted on.
Use at any event or gatheringGoogle Moderator works in any group setting, from lectures to town hall meetings.
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.
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.
Google just officially confirmed that it will release a new open-source web browser, called Google Chrome (that link should go live sometime tomorrow).
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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?
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Simply put. If you want to check out the OS provide by Google, called 
This is a great way to play around with the many Google API's. You can select from one of the APIs, a method or function of that API and edit the code provided by Google to see the results live. There is even a debugger and quick links to the documents on the API.
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.
Link:
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.
