Googlist

Google Updates Enterprise Offerings

2006-04-19T01:02:00.000-05:00

Fresh from the Google Enterprise Blog, Google announces its updated Google Mini and Google Search Appliance.

Google Mini is now half the original size and apparently 25x as powerful. It continues to provide a joint hardware/software solution for corporate search needs.

Google Search Appliance now features the OneBox for Enterprise, which displays relevant/current info from a variety of external and internal information sources for a given query. Additional enhancements for file crawling/indexing and user authentification seem very similar to the processes mentioned in the patent granted earlier today.

These new developments point to Google's increased interest in organizing corporate information as well as in maintaining a small, though very important hardware sector.

Google Gets 2 New Patents

2006-04-18T22:59:00.000-05:00

After finally getting its Voice Search patent last week, Google gets more good news: 2 more patent grants.

U.S. Patent 7031954 - "Enterprise Search"
Document retrieval system with access control
[full text]
Filed: September 10, 1997
Granted: April 18, 2006

The patent text describes the indexing of all documents across remote servers that pertain to a query. That index list is then served up to the user who made the query, based on the user's level of access privileges. Documents located on a level for which the user does not have access rights will not be shown in the file list. This synchronizes document availability and security across all parts of the storage system. The patent text makes many references to "corporate intranets" and the existence of security levels and a corresponding spectrum of user accounts. It looks like this patent was filed to protect developments in the Google Enterprise search division.

U.S. Patent 7031961 - "Social Bookmarking"
System and method for searching and recommending objects from a categorically organized information repository
[full text]
Filed: December 4, 2000
Granted: April 18, 2006

The patent text describes a social bookmarking system like del.icio.us -- but with some more developed capabilities. In addition to storing bookmarks for indivdual users and collecting data for the entire population of users, the system aims to "learn" from user clickstreams and bookmarking activity. The information gathered from this monitoring enables the system to better understand the quality of bookmarked information and then serve that up as new bookmark suggestions. The text also describes the value in the "distillation" of all of the web's content by the collection of users, essentially calling this a human-driven information filter. One implementation of the system described might be to influence the relevancy of heavily bookmarked items to related search queries (so they'd climb the SERPs).

Google Office - 2 Domain Registration Clues

2006-04-18T09:29:00.000-05:00

When Google acquired Writely we saw that Google is interested in either building components for its own "office suite" or at least staving off competitors' access to these tools and their masterminds through acquisition.

Here are 2 more clues that Google might be developing Power Point and Excel competitors:

GoogleGrid .net .org .info (.com owned by 3rd party)
GoogleLecture .com .net .org .info

Google registered the top-level domains for GoogleLecture and GoogleGrid on the same day last year, January 14, 2005. Google's domain name registration patterns indicate that when a set of related domains is registered on all of the major top levels on the same day, a product release is coming. (Although Google may never release its products at GoogleProduct.com, it registers the names to prevent spammers/competitors from redirecting traffic otherwise meant for product.google.com.)

Google Grid
The phrase "Google Grid" was popularized through the video Epic 2015 as a futuristic look at Google's storage project - GDrive. But it also sounds like a perfect name for a web-based spreadsheet and data app that organizes data through grids. (Google might want to look toward NumSum or Dabble DB [review | demo] as acquisition targets.)

Google Lecture
This could be a red herring as Google refers to certain in-house video talks as "Google Lectures" (over on Google Video). But thinking bigger picture, Google Lecture also sounds like a potential name for a presentation app like Power Point/Keynote or the group work apps from 37 Signals. I do feel Google Lecture is an unfortunate naming choice since "lecture" has more of a drudgery connotation than words like "present." But certainly the registration of the name, so closely relating to lecture and presentations, is interesting.

In sum, since Google registered all top level domains for 2 office-related names on the same day last year, I'm betting that Google Office is very much in the works.

Google Calendar Finally Released

2006-04-13T12:00:00.000-05:00

At long last, Google Calendar was released last night. It matches almost perfectly the leaked screenshots and information from various sources throughout these past few months. I'll be posting a further review of Google Calendar after some testing so stay tuned for that and a roundup of the responses to Google's long-awaited scheduling app.

Rumor: Google Acquires Dulance

2006-04-12T01:53:00.000-05:00

Techworld is reporting that Google has quietly acquired shopping engine Dulance. (And apparently, Sergei Burkov, Dulance's former CEO, will head up Google's R&D projects in Russia.)

Why would Google buy Dulance?
Dulance was an RSS-powered shopping site that spidered and scraped retail sites to find product prices -- without relying on retailers to upload product data feeds. It is estimated that because shopping engines use these opt-in retailer feeds, they only serve up 10% of the web's available product inventory (see Wikipedia on Dulance). Incorporating Dulance's technology would extend Froogle's reach into the uncrawled depths of retailer websites where the other 90% of products are waiting. Most importantly, the Dulance technology would give shoppers substantial justification for choosing Froogle over other shopping engines like Shopping, PriceGrabber, NexTag, etc, which currently still rely on retailer feeds. (Related Reading: See my post Froogle Local Finds No Socks in NYC for understanding the need for auto-discovery of products on retailers' websites.)

What happened to Dulance?
The domain dulance.com, where the shopping engine was once located, no longer resolves. You can, however, see previous versions of the shopping site on Internet Archive. SearchEngineWatch noted Dulance's disappearance briefly last month, which means it is possible the acquisition took place silently several weeks ago. To date, Google has made no comment on Dulance, so keep in mind this acquisition is just a rumor.

Writely Invite Giveaway

2006-04-11T17:55:00.000-05:00

Need a Writely invite? I now have 50 invitations for readers thanks to the more generous invite limits! To claim yours, just leave your email address in the comments. I'll do my best to accomodate everyone!

Related Reading:
Google's Writely: An Inside Look

Gmail as Art

2006-04-11T14:51:00.000-05:00

Gregory Trefry recently wrote an intriguing vignette in PopMatters ("Gmail: Art and Design?") that explores Google's Gmail as an aesthetic feat. Greg reviews the way Gmail has helped him better understand not just email storage but his brain's organization of "real life" information. Here's his revelation on Gmail's message threading:

"With Gmail, when you reply, the program does not even offer a field to change the subject line...This...seems to be exhorting us to order our thoughts more tidily. Gmail is saying to you, "This is a conversation, not a message. It's ongoing and related, not singular and disconnected. You will think of this message as part of that conversation." This line of thought eventually becomes baked into our mental organization. Now when I look at an inbox in another e-mail program, all of those repeated subject lines seem messy and scattered."

[This article also appears on Greg Trefry's blog I am the economy.]

Froogle Local Finds No Socks in NYC

2006-04-10T18:45:00.000-05:00

So I'm in New York City.
And I need some socks.

To find some, I type the query in Froogle Local:

Sorting results by distance and glancing at the map, I can see what's available. Hm, one result for New York City socks. That's one lonely pair of socks for almost 8 million inhabitants of New York City (I've circled just Manhattan below).

Zooming in I see my socks are part of an iDog Chill Set from J&R Computer World. While it's one of NYC's greatest discount stores, J&R is an electronics retailer. And those iDog socks are actually two inches long and belong to a stuffed toy I can hook up to my iPod. Baffling. So, I click around for more NYC socks, and there a few other listings, but it's more iDog sets and hampers from Home Depot. Does no one in New York need socks?!

As it turns out, the most relevant/proximal socks I could find using Froogle Local are at a Target in New Jersey. That's a couple train rides away, the expense of which is insupportable just for buying socks. Froogle Local, instead of pointing out a handy retailer near my home, has just convinced me I should shop online. Tricky, eh? Here's why this is happening:

Froogle (Local) is inefficient, because it relies on retailers to upload inventory
Froogle's usefulness is dependent on heavy retailer participation -- this involves a retailer laboriously uploading a warehouse of product info and keeping it updated on the Froogle site. Experiments like this one show that enormous sector of retailers are not participating in Google's Froogle program. It also means that I won't get any socks in NYC until some vendor proximal to me uploads a pair.

Blogger Tip: Related Content Module

2006-04-10T16:19:00.000-05:00

I mentioned in 18 Ways for Blogger to Beef Up that Blogger should support related content sharing in blog sidebars via feed headline publishing. Google seems to realize that this is a good idea -- but its two attempts to provide something similar have so far fallen short (Google Reader publisher module doesn't let you customize appearance much and Related Links doesn't let publishers control content). Google is still working on a successful, combined product, so I've suggested a quick solution for bloggers' related content: Google Reader shared feeds + Feedo Style feed publisher modules.

Make Your Own Related Content Module

1. Create a customized feed in Google Reader
Use Google Reader's labels and stars to create your own stream of news articles that focus on your information niche. Make the feeds under that label public as a single shareable feed URL. (You can also skip this step and just select the URL for your own blog's feed to share as a stream as I've done above.)

2. Create a customized feed headline box in Feedo Style
Paste your customized feed URL into Feedo Style's generator, customize the look and feel of the widget, then paste the provided code into your site. The result is a blendable news stream that instantly updates with the latest news from the specified feed. Note how this is much more nicely integrated into site design than the Feedburner headline generator, for instance, and much more easily added than currently available RSS-to-website scripts. Again, we're using a 3rd party tool here since Google Reader's publisher slaps everything with "Read in Google Reader" and doesn't let you change the style much. Feedo Style is friendlier to all varieties of newsreaders and CSS styles.

(After you're done making your blog's related content stream, check out the nifty scrolling headline module for Google.com/ig from Feedo Style.)

Google Snatches Orion and Ori Allon

2006-04-10T10:35:00.000-05:00

Although it happened weeks ago, we’re finding out that Google acquired search tool Orion and its PhD creator Ori Allon from University of New South Wales. In a quick summary, Orion is a complimentary tool for search engines that increases relevancy and breadth of results (see Ori Allon's September 9, 2005 press release).

No working demo is available, but Orion works to improve search relevancy by making sure results pages use keywords appropriately. Results pages for which the keyword is used relevantly get returned, everything else gets weeded out. The search results pages are then beefed up with highly relevant contextual snippets. Orion also displays results related to the keyword query so that one search can yield results for other searches of equivalent purpose. For example:

"Take a search such as the American Revolution as an example of how the system works. OrionTM would bring up results with extracts containing this phrase. But it would also give results for American History, George Washington, American Revolutionary War, Declaration of Independence, Boston Tea Party and more. You obtain much more valuable information from every search."

I find this an interesting but unconvincing example as the range of key phrases returned is far too broad. But this is useful for commonly synonymous terms like “web design,” “website design,” “site design,” etc if that’s what we are being led to believe this search tool can do. Another example of Orion’s “intelligence” (source MachineDesign.com):

"For example, a key-word search on the engineering resin "nylon" using a current search engine results in a list of over 100 hits. Seven, of the top 10, however, point users to Web sites selling women's hosiery. In contrast, reports Allon, with Orion when "nylon" is entered the search engine returns results with extracts containing the word nylon along with the associated keywords with the relevant text extracts — adipic acid, du Pont de Nemours, Dr. Wallace Hume Carothers, carbon, atoms, synthetic fibers, Nylon 6,6, and many more."

Here I see that the Orion technology is attempting to make human decisions on its own. It is true that for certain sectors of users, nylon as a subject of science and materials would be the priority but for another sector of users those ladies stockings pages would be the primary interest. Stockings and science are both highly related to “nylon,” it’s just that they relate in a different way. If Orion makes this preference automatically, then it’s a biased technology. This bias, however, could certainly be used neutrally to provide a set of "grouped" search results that allow the user to make his own bias, selecting only results from the search results group he feels is most relevant.

Perhaps Orion, touted as “revolutionary,” does contain some mysterious juice that would greatly improve Google. On the other hand, Google’s quiet acquisition might be viewed more as a competitive maneuver to ensure that none of this potential juice goes to other search players (Yahoo, MSN, Ask, etc). The easiest way to keep competitors from getting nubile technology is to snap it up yourself. If Orion were as good as it claimed to be, then Google no doubt wanted to be the only search player with access to the technology and to the brain of its creator.

So there you have it. Another day, another Google buy! And, oh yeah, another hire.

9 Notes on Google Related Links

2006-04-03T23:35:00.000-05:00

Google introduced Related Links in its Labs today. Here are 9 notes on the project followed by a few conjectures on its potential uses. (As this tool has been released for publishers to implement, most of these statements favor the publishers’ perspective.)

Fun for some users, just like it's supposed to be
Just as it is intended to do, the Related Links unit makes it easy for casual readers to quickly jump onto other information sources that discuss similar topics. The unit is somewhat fun to browse, seems to provide mostly relevant links on initial inspection, and does not cause annoying popups or sluggish load times.

But, publishers get no money
Web publishers do not normally provide contextually generated (and editor-unapproved) links without collecting referral payments. Currently, Related Links modules include links to 3 categories of information: Blogs, Searches, and Web Pages. Ads are not among these which means publishers will not be getting paid for the page real estate they surrender to these modules. On the upside, the FAQ says only that payment is not happening “at this time” which does not rule out a future revenue model. If ad integration happens, then it’s a brilliant way of mixing transparent/useful content with paid links in a way that combats ad-blindness (and potentially increases click through rates and thus revenues for publishers).

Without money, publisher incentive is low
Assuming these boxes remain un-monetized, publishers have little reason to provide link units to content that they have not personally selected or written. Such a module may, however, work for sites that are less concerned with providing original content or retaining visitors.

Related Links modules look like ad units
The units are available in 4 sizes: 728x90, 300x250, 468x60, and 180x150, all of which are standard IAB ad unit sizes. Either Google has designed these to easily replace existing ad units without breaking layouts or these are originally intended as ad units and have been repurposed as information modules for their introduction.

Actually, they look like Chitika eMiniMalls
Chitika has been doing these AJAXy, tabbed contextual link units for awhile now, only for profit. Google’s Related Links modules for contextual content and search queries look a lot like Chitika, an ad unit design that I have found to be oversized and unconvincing. Google would have done better to design these more as streamlined list modules rather than as box modules.

Some users will ignore Related Links
A) Many users have acquired ad-blindness, hence these ad-like units may be ignored. B) The units serve so few suggestions that it seems preferential to conduct one’s own Google News or general search in order to find related content, and a whole lot more of it. These units are targeted toward “impulse clickers,” who like shoppers in the checkout aisle, choose whatever seems interesting as they glance around.

Google is tracking referrals
The click URLs for the link units contain “client=ca-rlu-yoursite.com” where yoursite.com matches the publisher’s domain name. The click URLs also contain information that sends the link unit size and type of related link (search, web page, news) that is clicked. This means a few things: A) Google is keeping close tabs on how these link units are used, to be expected of course B) Reporting for Related Links units by size and placement may be available at some point C) Referral payments may not be far away should this graduate from Google Labs.

Related Links, not Related Content
Two reasons why this is interesting: A) Google has trouble being consistent with their naming. Script source for Related Links shows the product referred to as RC, related content, which is a bit confusing as the project has been discussed as “related content” around the web for weeks. Even the root URL for the program is googlesyndication.com/relcontent. B) The name does not cater to publishers in that it suggests links that drive away traffic rather than content that retains it.

Not customizable by domain
Related Links should have a “site-flavored" feature. Imagine that a blogger could publish a link unit in his post footers that serves up related content from his site only. This automates (in a way that WordPress plugins already do) the ability for publishers to suggest to their readers related reading on their own site rather than driving traffic away to related content elsewhere. Publishers should be able to isolate the related links to a smaller set of domains or just their own. Additionally, some publishers might wish to exclude competing sites from the Related Links unit with inverse targeting.

Better Ways to Implement Related Links
While the above notes are for the most part critical, I do see potential success for this Google Labs project:

A. Related Links could be used on sites that are less concerned with creating content and more concerned with presenting it. This, along with editor-selected RSS feeds, could make content "creation" nearly painless for certain types of web pages.

B. Related Links could be mixed with ads in the same unit. Web-savvy visitors begin to ignore ads, but if the same ad units will sometimes show relevant news stories, they might be more interested in glancing over those same ad units. (Publishers, of course, would finally win with this implementation.)

C. The technology behind the units could be integrated into Google's own search pages (providing contextual, Amazon-like suggestions for search queries and results). This has long been something I think Google could integrate subtly at page footers and with much success.

Google Sun (Google Galaxy Update)

2006-04-03T18:56:00.000-05:00

My earlier post on Google Galaxy | Google Universe | Google Solar System exposed Google's registrations of its company name appended with names of the planets and other astronomy terms. In that list, I overlooked another set of domains that Google registered on the same date as the rest of the planets: Google Sun (.com .net .org .info). Here's the updated list:

Planets:
GoogleSun .com .net .org .info
GoogleMercury .com .net .org .info
GoogleVenus .com .net .org .info
GoogleEarth .com .net .org .info (already released of course)
GoogleMars .net .org .info (.com currently owned by another party)
GoogleJupiter .com .net. org . info
GoogleSaturn .com .net .org .info
GoogleUranus .com .net .org .info
GoogleNeptune .com .net .org .info
GooglePluto .com .net .org .info

Possible Project Names:
GoogleGalaxy .com .net .org .info
GoogleGalactic .com .net .org .info
GoogleUniverse .net .org .info (.com currently owned by another party)
GoogleSatellite .com .net .org .info (created earlier on 4/08/05)
GoogleSolarSystem .com .net .org .info

Related Reading: Google Galaxy Starts with Mars

Ghosts of Google Labs

2006-04-03T02:49:00.000-05:00

The disclaimer on Google Labs says its projects "may disappear without warning or perform erratically." As a result, more Google Labs projects have disappeared than you might have guessed. The question is--have these apps been kicked to the curb or just removed for revision?

Google Voice Search
Search on Google by voice with a simple telephone call
The Idea: Pick up the phone, dial the Google Voice Search number, then say your query. Hang up and watch magically as the results appear in your browser.
Read More: Site | Review (w/ screenshots) | Research Paper | ZDNet

Keyboard Shortcuts
Google without the mouse
The Idea: Use the keyboard to sift through search results. Back, next, and entry-by-entry results page scrolling were the main features. U and J to go up and down, H and K to go right and left. View Google caches with C and similar pages with S.
Read More: Google Groups | SEW Article

Google Toolbar Experimental Features
Browser Control
The Idea: A popup blocker for the toolbar.
Combined Search
The Idea:Toolbar button for searching many of Google's channels simultaneously, e.g. one query would return results from Images, News, Directory, Groups, and general search combined.
Navigation
The Idea: Keyboard Shortcuts redux: mostly back/next functions.
Read More: CNET | SEW | ZDNet | Internet.com

Google WebQuotes
See what people are saying about your site
The Idea: A flavor of Google search that let you enter a website and see snippets of conversations about that site from other places around the web. This tried to illuminate a “conversational” aspect of the Web—sort of like a searchable trackbacks database.
Read More: Screenshot | Google Groups | SEW | Google Guide | ResearchBuzz

Google Compute
Your computer's idle time is too precious to waste
The Idea:Google Compute was an opt-in feature of the Google Toolbar. Its purpose was to donate Google users' CPU idle time to the distributed computing project Folding@Home. The Stanford Folding project aimed to harness CPU's everywhere as computing workhorses toward its goal of better understanding protein structures (thus the name "folding" as in how proteins are folded).
Read More: CNET | kuro5shin | FAH Teams | FAH Google Team | Wikipedia

Google Viewer
Look Ma, No Hands
The Idea:Type in your query, press submit, then sit back and watch as Google's results scrolled up your screen in an "automated slideshow." You could adjust the speed of the scroll (more tortoise or more hare?) and see images and context snippets of all linked pages in the search results.
Read More: Screenshot 1 | Screenshot 2 | Google Groups | SEW | ResearchBuzz

Google X
Roses are red. Violets are blue. OS X rocks. Homage to you.
The Idea:Access Google's services more easily with an OS X-like zooming mouseover dock. Google X was removed hours after its publishing on Google Labs. Even the Official Google Blog posting disappeared (see the cached post), making it seem like Google X never existed. Apple trademark threats are rumored to be the reason.
Read More: Google Blog (cache) | Mirror | Google Groups | Slashdot | Wikipedia

While some of these projects have been removed and have not reappeared (Voice Search, Viewer, Google X). Some like Keyboard Shortcuts and Browser Control have been repurposed (as Gmail keyboard shortcuts and the Google Toolbar's popup blocker respectively).

Other projects like WebQuotes could be reworked as a feature of Google Blogsearch or Blogger backlinks. Google X showed the usefulness of having more Google products accessible from the homepage, perhaps influencing the homepage's next redesign. And Voice Search is certainly a useful idea for the handicapped or multitasking cell phone user if perfected.

Let's hope we see some of these rough sketches re-released as fine-tuned products in the future.

1 RSS Feed for All Google Blogs

2006-04-02T02:55:00.000-05:00

Google added a new module to its Official Google Blog today that tracks RSS feeds from all of its official blogs (Inside AdSense, Blogger Buzz, etc) in a single feed. The mashup feed works by extracting all RSS entries that have been tagged "officialgoogleblogs" by a Googler who has made his feeds public.

The module has an easy link for adding the new feed to Google Reader, but if you use Bloglines, Newsgator, or another RSS reader, you can subscribe also by entering the below link into your feedreader's 'add feed' tool:

http://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user/10949413115399023739/label/officialgoogleblogs

Done and done. It's an easy way to keep up with all of Google's projects without adding 20 individual feeds to your newsreader. I've dragged this new feed to the top of my subscription folders and deleted subscriptions to the individual Google blogs, which will keep me better updated--with fewer clicks and less load time.

2 Years of Gmail

2006-04-01T16:22:00.000-05:00

Gmail celebrates its second birthday today, on April Fool's Day 2006. Here are some of the popular webmail app's biggest milestones with approximate dates:

April 1, 2004: Gmail introduced as April Fool's Joke--free, searchable webmail with 1GB of storage--a seeming impossibility that Google quickly affirms is real.

April 25, 2004: Active Blogger users invited to Gmail.

A long dry spell in feature releases begins as Gmail is slowly circulated via invitations. Invites come 3 at a time to certain users, then perhaps 5 or 12 at a time, and many months later, nearly unlimited invites are available to users. New features pick up again in 2005 as you follow the timeline.

August 20, 2004: Gmail Notifier (Win-only) released.

October 4, 2004: Gmail adds atom feeds and more ads to the interface.

April 1, 2005: Gmail doubles inbox storage to 2GB+ (from 1GB when it was introduced).

February 18, 2005: Google sends direct invitations to users who have signed up for accounts, rather than having them wait to be invited by other users.

March 1, 2005: Around this time, Gmail introduces its standard view and basic HTML view selector for feature-lacking browsers, like Opera.

August 26, 2005: Gmail begins tracking packages and mapping addresses.

September 1, 2005: Gmail Notifier for Mac OS X introduced.

October 19, 2005: In the UK, Gmail becomes Google Mail due to a legal issue over the name Gmail.

December 1, 2005: Gmail adds virus scanning to incoming and outgoing attachments.

December 8, 2006: Gmail gets Web Clips, small bites of RSS at the top of the inbox.

December 14, 2005: Gmail introduces automatic vacation response and contact groups.

December 19, 2005: Approximately this date, Gmail introduces the Switching Guide for moving from Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.

January 17, 2006: Gmail finally adds a delete button.

February 7, 2006: Chat hops onto Gmail.

February 10, 2006: Hosted Gmail for domains is introduced, invitation-only/beta style.

February 14, 2006: Gmail Chat and then Google Talk add emoticons.

February 18, 2006: Gmail nixes the Chat popups and rolls out Chat functionality to all users.

February 22, 2006: Gmail adds smart reply feature to fix mail flow for messages forwarded from other addresses.

March 2, 2006: Teen blogger finds supposed Gmail javascript security flaw--hole is quickly patched.

March 17, 2006: Gmail user's current and deleted email subpoenaed by DOJ, privacy discussions ensue.

March 22, 2006: Gmail Notifier for Mac OS X updated.

Of course, not included here are mentions of the incredible grassroots style third party plugin/extension building that has both beefed up Gmail and led to many of its official feature releases! Nor does this timeline hint at Yahoo's (and in a limited way MS Hotmail's) moves to match Gmail's offerings over the course of its existence. Nonetheless, this timeline serves to show that Gmail has indeed progressed from its "foolish" infancy into a robust web app.

So, Happy Birthday to my favorite Google product (after Search of course), Gmail.

Google Deletes Own Blog

2006-03-28T03:12:00.000-05:00

Sometime before 9:29 PM (PST): Trey Phillips goes to the URL googleblog.blogspot.com and finds a 404 not found error instead of the Official Google Blog. Opportunist that he is, Trey guesses that the blog has been deleted and races to register the username and blogspot hosting.

9:29 PM (PST): Trey Phillips makes his first post to the Unofficial Official Google Blog at googleblog.blogspot.com, complete with a standard Blogger template.

Google, fix your blog pleeasssee! <3

(P.S. Just to clear things up, I'm not associated with Google at all. I just wanted to take advantage of this before someone else with less worthy intentions did. The username was giving a 404, so I tried registering a new blog with it. Surprisingly, it worked. Oh, and no posting URLs in the comments or else they'll be deleted.)

POSTED BY TREY: 9:29 PM (PST)

[View screengrab of Trey's blog entry and the incomplete original post.]
[Link to Trey's post which is now a 404 not found.]

Between 9:29 and 11:15 PM (PST): Mass hysteria overwhelms the Google Bloggers. Trey Phillips has apparently hacked the Official Google Blog. Hysteria gets even more mass as it spreads to the blogsophere, audience to it all. Figuring out what happens, the brave Google Bloggers wield their power of eminent domain and wrest the Official Google Blog registration from Trey Phillip's hands just as he punches in another update to his unofficial version.

11:15 PM (PST): Official Google Blog comes back online (replete with all archives and original template), announcing that the Google Bloggers have rescued their blog and the rest of the world's bloggers have no evil forces to fear. Whew! Google is saved. Mid-celebration, the Google Bloggers quietly update their post to admit their blunder was little more than errant clicking on their Blogger interface.

And we're back
The Google Blog was unavailable for a short time tonight. We quickly learned from our initial investigation that there was no systemwide vulnerability for Blogger. We'll let you know more about what did happen once we finish looking into it.

Update: We've determined the cause of tonight's outage. The blog was mistakenly deleted by us (d'oh!) which allowed the blog address to be temporarily claimed by another user. This was not a hack, and nobody guessed our password. Our bad.

***

Most notable about all of this is that Google was able to quickly repair the deletion with saved versions of its post archives and blog template. Impressive, but expected from the communication channel of a large operation. Surprising to me, however, is that Blogger blogs are available so quickly after their deletion. Many accounts that issue individual usernames and URL's hold deleted accounts for a short period of time before re-releasing the names. Not so with Blogger apparently.

Thinking about what happened tonight, it is both humble and daring of Google to use its rather unsophisticated blogging tool to write one of the tech industry's most important blogs. But then, it would be ludicrous if they used a beefed up installation of say, WordPress, wouldn't it?

Googlewhacking Shows Confusion in Google's Redesign

2006-03-25T23:33:00.000-05:00

Over in Google Blogoscoped, I found the trick to set my computer's cookie to load the Google test layout that is currently circulating to random IPs. Thanks to Kickboy who wrote in with clues about the workings of this cookie several weeks back.

Q. What do the green bars mean?

The biggest thing to note in the experimental redesign is the appearance of green bar graphs for each of the major Google search types on the left sidebar of the SERPs. Because the metric of these bar graphs is not given, I set up a quick test to see if I could figure it out.

~~A. Number of Results~~

My first thought was that the graphs were meant to depict the number of search results available in each search product for the given query. So if the bar was almost fully green for Images and almost fully grey for Groups, you would instantly know that it was almost pointless to check your query in a Groups Search as there were almost no results available in that area. To test this, I hunted for a recent googlewhack ("speedwriter clockwork" via googlewhack.com) that would provide easy to work with results numbers, and then compared the numbers of types of search results to the graphs in the left sidebar. Here's a screenshot of the search results page:

And here are the numbers of results for "speedwriter clockwork" for each of the search types:

1 Web
0 Images
1 Groups
0 News
0 Froogle
0 Local
0 Scholar

As you can see, no results were retrieved in Images, News, Froogle, Local, or Scholar despite the green bar graphs on the SERP having prominent green areas. I find it a bit deceiving (or perhaps just inconvenient), that the green bar would even begin to suggest existing results in these categories if clicking over to those categories shows absolutely nothing. To make sure I hadn't hit a wonky query (which certainly googlewhacks can be argued to be), I tried a few more terms. Each experiment showed similarly: the proportions for actually available search results varied greatly from the proportional usefulness suggested by the green bars. So much for that idea.

~~A. Relevancy~~

With my initial hypothesis disproven, my next suggestion is that perhaps these green bars are meant to suggest comparative relevancy of the different masses of results? But if that's true, then low traffic terms need some adjustment. For the googlewhack example above, search relevancy should be nil for categories for which there are no results.

A. Something else

So what are the green bars, then? Search results numbers and search relevancy seem to be out (though maybe this feature is still error-ridden enough to throw us off).

What other thoughts are people having about the meaning behind the bar graphs?

Why to stop asking "Is Google a Portal?"

2006-03-25T22:21:00.000-05:00

Any time it releases a product that makes information access more comprehensive, more meta, or more personalized, Google gets labeled as a portal-in-progress. The recent news of Google Finance, with its practical applications, channel functionality, and similarity to the portal offerings of the early 2000's, has added to this Google-as-portal discussion with new noise.

Most articles frame these discussions with hesitant interrogatives: "Is Google already a portal?" "Google Finance: A Portal Play?" and uncertain suggestions: "Google Finance Sparks Portal Talk". Such discussion isn't new; Google has been a "suspected portal" for years now. And overall, the tone of these articles makes it sound like portals are a scary thing that Google wants no part in. With all the disagreement over whether or not Google is a portal, what's really going on here?

1. "Portal" is a sloppy word.
2. The portal, as we know it, is dead.

1. "Portal" is a sloppy word.

Here are a bunch of ways that portals have been described. They're all somewhat valid, and they're all somewhat inapplicable to what Google's end design seems to be. Take a look:

A start page
The page you set as your homepage, and most likely the one you use to jump to most of your web activities. Millions of people have Google.com as their initital browsing turf, so this must not be it...

A directory
A meta- or super- site that lists "all" other sites by topic, made most relevant in the days before search could retrieve more specific channels of information.

A collection of standard web tools in one place
A site with its own brands of email, news, search, weather, homepages, etc all neatly collected for its users. AOL's channels are the perfect portal in this sense. But Google's got its own "channels." So this must not be the key to portaldom...

A content aggregator
A site that combs the web for info on specific topics (though not through rigid categories) and displays it for your clicking fun. All content links lead to external sites. Google News anyone? In fact, Google's information retrieval system is one giant conglomeration of aggregation!

A personalized page
A page that customizes its offerings to your selections or surfing habits has been called a personalized portal. This peaked with the "my" services: MyYahoo, MyExcite, MyAOL, etc. But Google's already got this: Personalized Homepages at google.com/ig. Your Google account now lets you do all kinds of things tailored to your preferences: write email, blog your thoughts, make homepages, track stock portfolios, manage your website, and even make money!

A content aggregator + content provider
A step above a content aggregator is the one that adds its own content into the mix. Yahoo! is precisely such a site. This is, to me, one of the most interesting areas to project in Google's future. Will there ever be content provided? I would not count it out, but this is not part of Google's mission statement, "to organize the world's information." Organizaton neither implies nor requires creation. The new Google Finance is said to tiptoe into this territory with its group discussion moderators and highly specific company profile descriptions. I say that ain't content. Content is what's made when you hire salaried people to write information you can't find anywhere else. But if a portal is a way of getting somewhere, then should the portal's content--what it says--even matter?

A search/directory page strewn with links and ads
For those who say Google is not a portal just because it isn't messy like Yahoo, should clutter really be the defining characteristic in web terminology (portal or other) that implies information organization?

A browser's default start page
This is certainly a specific, outdated definition of a portal. But it's the idea that when you opened Netscape or AOL you were greeted by a page that Netscape or AOL had created with links and search fields that it felt would serve your browsing needs. When GBrowser talks were loud, Google Portal talks were just as vociferous. But adding a browser into the mix would probably not answer "Is Google a portal?"

A gateway to a collection of specialized information
FirstGov is an example of a site that claims to provide anything and everything you need to know about a certain topic. It's basically a search + directory for a specific category of information. Examples of Google's contribution to these specialized information sites are its News and Finance searches.

A site that labels itself a "portal"
Obvious. It really seems that the world will only agree that Google is a portal if Google steps up and calls itself one. But the company has no plans to release "Google Portal" and it will never activate the subdomain or directory portal.google.com or google.com/portal. So, if they're just waiting for a product release under the monicker "Google Portal," my hunch is, it ain't comin'. (For the record, Google's CEO Eric Schmidt has firmly denied "plans to become a portal.")

In summary: The reason no one can agree on whether or not Google is a portal, is that the word portal is just a sloppy description for services that Google already provides. Google (and many other companies) are pushing beyond portals.

2. The portal, as we know it, is dead.

In the internet sense, a portal was introduced as a way for net users to find information when the path to that information was otherwise unclear. The internet was in toddler phase and its users wanted to find the weather report without having to know URL's to get it. So a portal with links to everything, including weather, was the answer for that generation of the internet. As netizens grow increasingly more aware of the paths to the information they desire, then the idea of providing a page for people who don't know what's going on is increasingly of less use. Knowing URL's is much more commonplace than it used to be and the pre-eminence of search and specialized information hunting sites has made wading through hierarchies of links and pages of unrelated content a dead idea.

Jeremy Zawodny really poked at the endangered state of the portal when he said that the question isn't really whether or not Google will become a portal (assuming the collective conscious thinks it's not one yet), the question is what will the next generation portal look like? The comments on his thoughts include notes about discovery as the next great portal/path. Sites like Amazon use discovery to show you products that you may not have searched for but that probably relate to your interests. Google's related content tests show that the incorporation of discovery process into Google's many operations is not far away. Further speculations (as shown in highly customizable homepage interfaces like protopages and pageflakes) are that personalization at the individual's own discretion is also where the future of the "portal" is. In that sense, it's no longer a gateway, but instead a user's own guide map, written and discovered by themselves rather than forged by a company's static webpage vision for what information is interesting. We're leaving the days of company-forged content, and beginning to forge our own.

So whether or not Google releases channels for every type of information and whether or not Google collects all of these channels all on one page (Google.com only links to a few) with perfect personalization (the uber-Google Personalized Homepage), the concept of a portal is poorly defined and outdated. And so is trying to fit Google into it.

Error Message in Google Chat

2006-03-22T22:10:00.000-05:00

Google's record of "uptime" has always impressed me. I'm not saying there's never downtime or delayed product roll out, but rarely do I log in to any Google application and see an error message. It surprised me, then, to log into Gmail this afternoon and see this error which blends seamlessly into the Chats interface as if it expects to be displayed every once in awhile:

"We're experiencing technical difficulties that may prevent your chats from being sent."

I do not expect this connection fault to be a recurring problem, but I do wonder if it is in any way indicative of some revisions to the interface going on behind the scenes.

Ctrl + Ctrl to Quick Search

2006-03-15T12:52:00.000-05:00

Google's newest announcement is Quick Search, a Google search box that you can call with a quick double-tap on the Ctrl key during any computing task. No browser loading required--great efficiency hack! Quick Search is bundled with Desktop, which Google says has just left beta. Now before you get yours, here's the good and bad:

The Good:

Search Google without grabbing the mouse.
Quick Search works well if you're rapidly typing into your blog engine or word processor and need to run a query. Quick Search eliminates the annoying tasks of switching windows or even needing to run the browser initially at all. Now, you might be remembering a project that Google once had in its Labs--Keyboard Shortcuts. Before Google Labs dropped these, you were able to key through your search queries and pages. Imagine if Quick Search could initiate keyboard shortcuts on the resultant Google page so that calling a query and going through results could be handled entirely through the keyboard? Something to watch for.

Search interface is sleek, small, and loads (almost) instantly.
You might also notice that Google has enabled slight transparency on the Quick Search box so you aren't completely sidetracked from your active window.

Search News, Images, Groups, etc using additional Ctrl commands.

Instead of just hitting enter after your query, you can hit another Ctrl command to narrow your search to one of Google's specific search types:

Desktop Ctrl+D
I'm Feeling Lucky Ctrl+K
Images Ctrl+I
Groups Ctrl+U
News Ctrl+N
Froogle Ctrl+F
Local Ctrl+L

Google Earth is also available, but only through the drop down menu (use the arrow keys) that lists these search options.

Also search your desktop.
Since it's bundled with the Desktop product, this is just obvious. I haven't activated file indexing, but it looks like Quick Search uses a Google Suggest-like dropdown to show you potential file matches to your query. You can choose these instead of doing a web search by arrowing down to select the appropriate file or by hitting Ctrl+D as shown above.

Same shortcut toggles it on/off.
Ctrl+Ctrl opens the Quick Search box, and the same shortcut hides it if you don't feel like finishing your query. See the next note for some implications of these actions.

Query history clears after 30 seconds.
At first I was concerned that when I typed in "mongoose" then hid the window and instantly popped it up again, "mongoose" was still in the search field. All kinds of problems that could cause you in the office or on shared computers! But after some experimentation, I discovered that when you hide Quick Search rather than hitting enter to load the results, a 30 second timer is started. After 30 seconds, re-opening Quick Search will present a blank field.

If you re-open Quick Search within that 30 second window, the search will be saved and hiding the window again will activate a new 30 second count. So, unfinished searches are saved only in the very short term and you shouldn't run into problems with the next users seeing your uncalled queries.

The Bad:

Only comes bundled with Google Desktop.
Despite being a huge Google fan, I don't have Desktop installed on my computer. That meant I had to get it to try Quick Search. It's my feeling that Quick Search should be a separate, tiny tiny download that just integrates with Google Desktop should you prefer. If you share that qualm, you can download Desktop then disable everything (the sidebar, file indexing, etc.) and just enable Quick Search. The Desktop will run in your system tray (obviously in order for Quick Search to work), but you won't give up screen real estate or let your files be crawled.

The resulting browser window is a bit startling.
I was hesitant to hit enter on my first Quick Search query. Where would I be taken? If I had both Firefox and IE open, which browser would Quick Search choose? From my experiments this morning, it looks like Quick Search just goes with your default search engine preference. That means that in Firefox, it will simply open a new, active tab in the window you're working on. In IE, it will open up a new window. Score another for tabbed browsers that use less load time. No real way to fix the "startle" issue, but just be aware that your browser will "jump" to the top of your window stack in order to show your search results in the top active window.

How Google Gains:

Plus one (two, ten thousand?) for Google in search engine share wars.
Forget having to make you set your browser preferences in numerous places like your IE and Firefox browsers and your various browser toolbars. Once you've installed Desktop and if you've enabled Quick Search, Google has locked you into their search engine. They are building their SE share over Yahoo, MSN, Ask, etc.

They make you download Desktop.
Obvious. But it forces you to try and possibly adopt another Google product.

In the end, increases revenues all the way around.
The easier it is to search, the more you'll do it. And with more search comes more of Google's booming ad revenue.

SketchUp to Make Google Earth 3D

2006-03-14T14:14:00.000-05:00

Today, Google made the not so surprising announcement that it has purchased friendly CAD software company SketchUp. The 3D modeling company owned by @Last Software has been friendly with Google Earth throughout this past fall--holding a conference with Google Earth experts, submitting lots of 3D models to the program, and creating a plugin for Google Earth so that users can create their own placemarks. With SketchUp, you can take 2D drawings (scanned or computer generated) then push and pull them in various directions to bring them "up"--into 3D form. The program also allows for much more complicated surface rendering, shadow creation, and other tools of 3D modeling, but here is a screencast demonstration I have created to show how SketchUp software, at its most basic level, makes 2D drawings into 3D models. The link goes to a Flash demonstration in a new window:

Click to view a SketchUp screencast demo

SketchUp is currently not free (priced at $495), though it does have an 8 hour trial version. And so begin the monetization questions:

1) Will SketchUp still be available for purchase as an independent product for non Google-Earth related projects?

2) Will Google offer a free version of SketchUp (perhaps with reduced capabilities) for users to make their own Google Earth placemarks? (It's doubtful that the entire program will be released for free as the pay version parallels quite nicely to the paid version of Google Earth--Pro.

3) Should we expect a next generation Google Earth that has many of these placemarks native in the interface?

Looking forward to seeing what Google decides! Now here's some more SketchUp fun:

Sketchup drawings on Flickr
SketchUp's video tutorial
Sketchup models gallery
Sketchup one of the coolest products at MacWorld
Sketchup drawings on Google Image Search
Directory of Google Earth placemarks, some made with Sketchup

Google Galaxy Starts with Mars

2006-03-13T02:03:00.000-05:00

Google is one step closer to announcing a Google Galaxy (Universe/Solar System) product. Today Google introduced Google Mars, its Maps-like exploration of the surface of Mars. (This is likely an extension of Keyhole's Mars exploration that was quietly forgotten once Google acquired the company.)

But forget Earth or Mars, Google is going to the outer limits! Between July 19 and 21, 2005, Google, Inc. registered the .com/net/org/info domains for Google's name plus all of the planets and words like galaxy, universe, and solar system:

Planets:
GoogleMercury .com .net .org .info
GoogleVenus .com .net .org .info
GoogleEarth .com .net .org .info (already released of course)
GoogleMars .net .org .info (.com currently owned by another party)
GoogleJupiter .com .net. org . info
GoogleSaturn .com .net .org .info
GoogleUranus .com .net .org .info
GoogleNeptune .com .net .org .info
GooglePluto .com .net .org .info

Possible Project Names:
GoogleGalaxy .com .net .org .info
GoogleGalactic .com .net .org .info
GoogleUniverse .net .org .info (.com currently owned by another party)
GoogleSatellite .com .net .org .info (created earlier on 4/08/05)
GoogleSolarSystem .com .net .org .info

I have been sitting on this knowledge for awhile, and now it pays off with the release of Google Mars, making it almost certain that Google Galaxy (or some similar project that lets you flyover and explore all of the planets) is in the works. A few other things have tipped us off..

It is no coincidence that on July 20, 2005, one day after registering these domain names, Google released its Google Moon product (with moon-is-cheese joke) as a quirky yet sneaky foreshadowing to its coming project...

Apparently Google Mars was made in collaboration with NASA (view the flyover video that marries all the info), so Google's announced partnership with NASA last September must be yet another clue to what is coming....

Earth, Moon, Mars, and what next? Most certainly, the Universe!

[Digg this]

Google's Writely: An Inside Look

2006-03-12T22:10:00.000-05:00

Google's acquisition of Writely has been widely speculated to be its sharpest bite yet at the Microsoft Office suite. With signups closed until Google re-releases the app, it will be awhile before most people can test the program's functionality. To get your mouths watering, here's a rundown of Writely's features and performance (with some appropriate comparisons to Microsoft Word and a few speculations on where Google is going with this).

Click for a full-size screenshot of my document in the Writely interface.

Overall Impression:
Writely is a powerful editor for online documents. I say online documents because Writely is primarily for documents that will be created, edited, presented, and shared via the web. Microsoft Word, on the other hand was designed for print materials (think measurement toolbars, header/footer layouts, paper size controls, label/envelope support, etc). Writers who create printable materials like pamphlets, college essays, and and portfolios will still require the advanced print editing features in software like Word. But webby types will enjoy the simplified, web-ready documents that can be created, shared, and filed in an instant. In sum, Writely takes some hints from Microsoft Word, subtracts some of its advanced print features, and then adds some exciting web capabilities to inhabit its new niche in word processing.

Test Documents:

In Writely, you can export your document to the following formats: HTML, Rich Text Format, Word doc, OpenOffice doc, PDF, and posts in supported blog clients. Below are links to Writely's exports of my test document in some of these formats (all open in a new window).

HTML (on Writely's server)
Word doc
PDF

I gave Writely a rather detailed layout to work with, and I am impressed with the way it was able to port these styles to the various document types. The line spacing and other typographic elements are off (stressing again that Writely is not for designing print documents), but legibility is retained across platforms.

Document Editing:

When creating a document, you can instantly add collaborators.

You then type directly into the Writely interface to create your document. Traditional text styling features like bold, italics, underline, sub/superscripts, text colors, highlights, left/right/center/justify, and ordered and unordered lists are all available. You can also insert tables, drag and drop images, and cut and paste text from other documents.

Here are screenshots of the expanded toolbar menu items:

Export/save/copy/or subscribe to RSS. A functional and powerful file menu.

The future is tagging...tagging everything. Writely's document tags are user created and accessible only to the users that create them--e.g. you won't see tags for "motorcycles" or "avocado growth report" if you haven't created them.

The table insertion tool is HTML-based rather than "document-based" as in MS Word. You get to specify rows/cols but also padding and cell spacing. Writely's link insertion lets you add links to other Writely documents, URL's, email addresses, and bookmarks.

Bookmarks are Writely's name for HTML's page anchors. You can insert bookmarks at any point in the document and then create links to those anchors via the hyperlink tool. Easy referencing within the same document, done web-style.

You can apply text classes like HTML's H1, H2, H3, block quote styles or erase formatting altogether. Line-spacing works well but is only applicable to the document as a whole rather than highlighted sections of a document.

The pre-selected fonts are for the most part websafe, familiar, and easy to read onscreen. It just sucks that Writely even bothers to provide Comic Sans.

No customized 100 pt headings here. Writely chose font sizes that work with the web.

Basically, Writely gives you control over most text styling elements that you would use when creating a classy HTML doc, except for link colors, page or div background colors, complicated mouseover effects (tooltips are editable though), and direct insertion of video or other non-image file types.

Spell check and an editable dictionary are included as well: Writely uses Word's squiggly red lines to indicate mistakes. No sign of grammar help, though.

And for those who must be brief, Writely also provides the standard word count.

Writely is still working on advanced features (like find and replace) and I expect more tools on par with Word's functionality to crop up over time.

Document Organization:

Writely's most surprising bonus features are its support of tagging for documents and storage and prioritizing similar to the Gmail system. Each document can receive single or multiple user-created tags. When sifting through Writely files, you can view active documents, starred documents, documents pertaining to a single tag, and all documents at once. You can then copy/edit/delete/re-tag from there. Last edited dates are also given for each document. The interface is intuitive and responds instantly to your changes.

Document Sharing:

In addition to saving your document to various formats, you can choose to make documents public, private, or shareable amongst invited email addresses.

Users whom you invite will have access to that specific document as well as to their own Writely interface for creating new documents. Commenting is provided (see my test document) to identify changes and to track suggestions between users. (Comments are lost, however, if you export the doc to Word format.) You can also view a document's revision history in a list of its saved versions, making it easy to revert to previous versions.

Finally, Writely lets you track changes to documents via associated RSS feeds (with some warnings about privacy of course). While it seems an obvious step for those accustomed to using RSS feeds, it's an astonishly new concept in the creation of documents which are seldom seen as "evolving" but rather seen as being in draft mode until they are saved /printed in final, fixed copy. When our feedreaders are full of document change feeds that require our constant monitoring, we'll hate this feature, but for now it's innovative.

Document Accessiblity:

Don't forget that Writely lets you upload files, including Word docs for editing within the Writely interface. After uploading a few folders of Word docs, you have instant access to all of your work online in an interface that both supports Word and exports (most of) your changes back into that format for office printing.

While it may seem to have fewer features than Word, Writely does allow you to access documents from anywhere. This is a natural extension of web-based content creators like MT and WordPress which have made us accustomed to composing and publishing strictly on the web. Certainly this is also the future of workplace document creation and accessibility as well.

What Writely Is Not:

Writely is not a fully-featured, traditional desktop publishing program. It does not provide features like those in Word and InDesign that let you create custom paper sizes, apply multi-page layouts, design your own greeting cards, or import custom font families.

Writely is not (yet) a term paper machine. There is no support for automatically updating footnotes, automatically updating tables of contents, or page numbering for that matter. It's just not that kind of app at this point.

Where Google's Writely is Going:

The major hypothesis is that Writely will be the MS Word of Google's predicted office suite. While this is surfactorily correct (in all likelihood), it ignores the fact that Google is probably not trying to create the next great word processor. Google is more probably trying to create the next great text engine that we haven't yet seen: a fully featured, strongly robust, always portable, platform-independent way of creating documents. We're talking reports that are written entirely online, edited seamlessly by multiple authors, saved securely on failsafe servers (GDrive anyone?), viewable on all machines, and instantly integrative with websites and email. (Connecting the Writely product to Gmail, Calendar, Google Groups, the hoped for GDrive, etc. is most certainly a long term goal for the project.) In sum, we shouldn't be too quick to call Google's Writely the next MS Word. It should be recognized for what it is, a new kind of document creation.

Lesser discussed is Writely's potential effect on Blogger (and Google Pages). I wrote recently on things that Blogger can do to get back in the game, and integration with Writely would be a quick way for Google to assess those shortcomings. Writely already supports posting to Blogger, Google has already released an MS Word extension for posting from Word to Blogger, so why not stronger, more streamlined integration between the eventual Writely project and Blogger? We just may see it.

As for "monetizing" the Google office suite, Writely provides no immediate answers. The service is currently free though it could eventually charge monthly/annual access/storage fees (not Google's style though). Google's tried and true advertising revenue model probably would not fit well here just as it does not with Blogger. Users won't want ads slapped at the top of their content and they probably will not be seeing ads in a document-creation interface. That doesn't mean users can't opt-in and put Google ads on their Writely documents if they wish. That is, after all, exactly the way that Blogger blogs are voluntarily monetized and that some books on Google's Book Search are monetized. How Google gets its money back with Writely (and I have no doubt it will, cleverly and many times over), we'll just have to wait and see.

Google Newsbites 3/10/06

2006-03-10T11:44:00.000-05:00

Writely goes to Google, read more: Official Google Blog, Writely FAQ, Writely Blog: Word 2007, get on your knees and suck it

Google's testing of related content is open to beta testers--see an implementation of the related content scriptlet on this blog, verdict: looks like Chitika

Camphone picks of the Googleplex (including Eric Schmidt's office), warning: many images being blocked by ImageShack's lame bandwidth policy

Search makes people rich--see where they live

Designing Flash pages so Google will index them

Squash thinks Google Lighthouse is file management system

Fuzzy referral URL evidence that Google might be buying Sun Microsystems

Seems like Yahoo is updating del.icio.us

Why Brazil loves Orkut

India getting blurred out on Google Earth

Yahoo Leaked Google Calendar Pics to TechCrunch

2006-03-08T17:58:00.000-05:00

Update: Mike Arrington has said he did not get CL2 screenshots from Yahoo, updated article is here.

Always with the steamiest, most scintillating stories, Valleywag reveals that TechCrunch's screenshots of Google Calendar (CL2) came from Yahoo.

Apparently a participant in Google's Early Tester program gave login info to a Yahoo contact who then leaked the CL2 screenshots and information to Michael Arrington of TechCrunch (who has many friends at Yahoo). To Yahoo's credit, it did alert Google to the leak of the login info, and Google was able to cancel the turncoat tester account. Good deeds aside, Yahoo probably took copious notes and made all kinds of screenshots that will enable it to make Yahoo Calendar evenly competitive with CL2 the day it is released.

Of course, we're now struck with questions:

Has Yahoo had access to all of Google's Early Tester programs? If so, for how much of Google's product history? Arrington says that 200 users are testing CL2, but I get the impression that the Early Tester program is larger than that number. CL2 was, however, listed on the Tester links page that was turned up a few weeks ago, making it seem like all testers must have been aware of CL2's availability.

Also, how much can we expect that Google gleans from its "spies" in Yahoo's beta programs? The "sameness" of releases across the major search engines (maps programs, calendar programs, video search, fully featured webmail, blog and social community spaces) starts to make you wonder if they're not all working off a commonly shared beta list and just releasing products at different times and levels of completion.

Regardless, this Google > Yahoo > TechCrunch slip reveals that much is to be learned by paying close attention to all available routes to information! Behold the power of company secrets, competitive strategy, and fast moving technology.

18 Ways for Blogger to Beef Up

2006-03-08T14:58:00.000-05:00

After Google acquired Blogger from Pyra Labs in February 2003, Blogger was re-released with new features and a wider user base. Pyra's Blogger had been simple yet buggy while Google's new Blogger was clean and stable--but Blogger was still elementary in comparison to more powerful tools. In the years since the "Great Blogger Relaunch" of 2004, Google has made few improvements: RSS feed support, moblogging, a Blogger version of trackbacks, a Blogspot navigation bar (like Bloghop's original blog browsing version), AdSense integration, and various Blogger extensions for Firefox. Despite these improvements, Blogger remains roughly the same simple blog press and splog hoster as before its Google acquisition. Here's what Google can do to beef up Blogger and reintroduce it to the sophisticated set:

Categories and Tagging: The dearth of tagging and categories has become to Google's Blogger what the lack of commenting was to Pyra's Blogger--a monument to antiquity! Tagging as an organizational "folksonomy" has become the accepted way to group online information in the age of "Web 2.0." There are many Blogger categories workarounds out there, but it's time Google built an elegant categories system into Blogger itself. (Subcategories would be brilliant as well but mayhaps we're asking too much.) Given Google's penchant for the world "label," (see Gmail and Search History), we might see this organization system under that monicker.

Tag-level Feeds: The addition of a tagging system would allow Blogger to support feeds gleaned from single tags. Rather than subscribing to a Blogger user's entire site feed, users could subscribe to feeds for just "News" or any other single tag name. This follows the popular practice of many linkfiltering sites and online newspapers where you can subscribe to a single author's articles, for instance.

Post Scheduling: Blogger Pro had this feature (being able to set posts to publish to the past or future) but for the life of me I don't know where it went. Bloggers want chronological control of their content.

Blogger Analytics: We've got Google Analytics, but I am anticipating that Google's recently acquired MeasureMap will be integrated into Blogger. Imagine that you could log into the Blogger dashboard and click a tab that says "Stats" or something similar and see uniques, pageviews, traffic graphs, referring URLs, referring search queries, and geolocations organized by blog title and viewable for a title's entire existence (wthout signing up for SiteMeter/Statcounter). This is easy and likely.

Plug-in Support: Opening up Blogger's backend to its developer fans would bring an impressive collection of plug-ins, much like the mods that have made WordPress and MT uber-customizable.

Blogsearch Zeitgeist: Google's Blogsearch has proven itself useful and popular. But it still has to compete with Technorati, Icerocket, and other blog search tools and rankings. Googlist pines for a sort of "Zeitgeist" (like the Google Search Zeitgeist), for the blog world. Most read blogs, most linked blogs, most popular blog topics, most popular blogsearch queries, days of the week with the highest volume of posts, etc. The eventual purpose is to map each blog into its relevant position in the context of an online conversation. Technorati has attempted to do this with blogger "authority," and I think Google's Blogsearch could eventually improve upon this by providing further stats upon which to base these authority/knowledgeability/popularity judgments. The enhancement would continue to encourage traffic between blogs and the building of a social community amongst Blogger's (and other blog tools') users.

Blogger + Google Pages: The ability to create both dynamic blog pages and static site pages with matching CSS layouts would please many an online content provider. This also happens to be an area where many other blogging tools fall short, making it prime territory for Blogger to move in for the kill.

Blogger + Gmail: This is most probably in the works, the only question is in what way specifically? My idea for the integration of Blogger and Gmail is to add more than just "post via email" capability. It's to allow pages created in either tool to be ported into the workspace of the other. For example, say you're having an email conversation and need to link to a blog or create a paragraph of text for possible publication. Inserting an editable Blogger page into the Gmail conversation thread might be a simple and powerful solution. Importing mail into a blog would be another useful feature.

Blogger + Google Groups: If you've used Basecamp or Writeboard from 37 Signals, you can appreciate documentation of groupwork. Currently, single blogs can have multiple authors (see author groups for official Google blogs), but there are no real controls for attributing ownership to a group or passing unpublished suggestions to group members about blog posts. Definitely something for Google to look into.

Blogger + Google Calendar: The world awaits Google Calendar, and the Googlist awaits Blogger integration with the mysterious scheduling app. One way? A referring link to a Blogger post could appear on each date of the Calendar that a post was made.

Photo Archives: Blogger currently has an image uploading/inclusion form, but it does not integrate that with its blog archives. For photobloggers, Blogger could call these image URLs, render thumbnails, and then display the thumbnails in a simple array for the post archives. Blog authors could then choose between text lists or image arrays for their archive pages, depending on blog content. (See Wists for an excellent example of visual blogging and archiving.)

Multiple File Type Uploading: MT allows users to upload various types of files and create usable URLs to these files for integration with posts. Want to upload a Power Point presentation or screencast? You can't do it with Blogger, which supports only image uploading via its Hello/Picasa arrangement. There is the argument for "those files take up too much space," but if Google is planning to store all of the world's information (see GDrive rumors), then let's hope we're going to see some GDrive integration with Blogger.

Feed rendering: The ability to burn/render recent headlines from other Blogger blogs into the sidebar or a single post would encourage Blogger's social aspect and the discovery of new content within the blogosphere. This could easily be done via a copy/paste code snippet in Blogger and would be something like a better Rojo.

Enhanced/Comprehensive "Trackbacks": Blogger's version of MT's trackbacks are "Links to this post." There are 2 issues here: 1) "Links to this post" never comprises all of the linking blogs that Google searches and the Blogger Comments Firefox extension find for site links. 2) "Links to this post" does not include contextual snippets like MT trackbacks do (the Web Comments extension does however). The solution here is just boosting the "Links to this post" feature with functionality of the Web Comments extension, rendering the information on the post page, and making the feature post-specific (rather than blog site-specific).

Favicon Editing: It currently takes a bit of icon-making and HTML-wrangling (that is not always successful) to change a hosted Blogger blog's favicon. Since many feedreaders use site-specific favicons to distinguish titles in users' feed lists, it would benefit Blogger authors to be able to customize blog favicons via a simple image uploader. (Of course, this feature is not in Blogger's interest as it detracts from the Blogger brand, but the suggestion is there.)

Elimination of Blogger Comments Interface: The bulky navy and brown page that Blogger presents for comment writing distracts from blog authors' discussions. Comment fields should be available within the post page to keep the reader's experience contiguous.

Aggressive Spam Control: That means both splogs and spam comments. Blogger currently offers captchas for comments, but it has a real problem on its hands when a large minority of its blogs are spam infestations. Splogs denigrate Blogger's validity in the blogging world, and they should be controlled through user sign-ups and more diligent use of the "flag this blog" option.

Alternate Hosted Domains: Currently, Blogger lets you FTP your blog to your own server or use its own hosted service--BlogSpot. As blogs grow in prominence professionally (think resumes, small biz blogs) and are referenced more often in traditional media (think WSJ, The Economist) it would be less awkward to refer higher-ups to URL's that do not contain the word "spot." Just a thought.

As even recreational blogging grows more sophisticated, Google's Blogger must keep up by making Blogger more robust. The features above are by no means the divine answer to Blogger's woes, but many are necessary steps to maintaining Blogger's user base, and therefore its relevancy to Google, Inc. Google's revenues depend on ads, ads depend on rich content, rich content depends on intelligent/adept writers, and those strong writers depend on a powerful, versatile blogging platform. Better Blogger = better content = more ad revenue. Yes, it all goes back to green.

[Before tackling many of these improvements, Google must decide whether or not to merge Google accounts profiles with Blogger user profiles. When Yahoo acquired Flickr, it inconveniently began to require all new users to register with Yahoo in order to use Flickr (rather than just registering on Flickr itself). This caused a stir among original Flickr users but the purpose was to provide universal login to all of Yahoo's properties. Google will face this same accounts decision when deciding how to integrate Blogger with its other apps, if it does decide to.]

Google Newsbites 3/08/06

2006-03-07T23:25:00.000-05:00

Screenshots of CL2: Google Calendar, apparently far from public release (thank you TechCrunch)

Google retracts mistaken financial info from website

John Battelle (of The Search) discusses his publisher's opposition to including the title in Google Book Search

New Microsoft Live Search available, verdict: the scroll mechanism is possessed

Brits discover they use the Internet more than their TVs (though 2 hours online time per day is hardly an addiction...)

Possible new Google patent points to intelligent browser helper that "infers" user's next action, via Google Blogoscoped

Trisha Weir wins Valleywag's "utterly shallow and prizeless" Girls of Google faceoff

Pico to be the world's smallest search engine. Wait... what?

Google News Israel is just what it says

"10 reasons why YouTube is better than Google Video"

Official Google Blog announces a caboodle of new 'plex videos

P2P sales on Google Video coming soon?

Teacher's lesson plan on "mashups" uses research through Google and Wikipedia--at once behind and ahead of the times, but this is excellent effort toward modernizing education

Mozilla confirms it gets millions from Google, fuzzy on the numbers

Google Community

2006-03-07T16:26:00.000-05:00

I first came across Google Community, a Google-specific collection of message boards, on Digg many months ago and it has since grown to nearly 15,000 registered users.

While Google Community doesn't reach the technical depth that WebMasterWorld's communities do, GC provides a comfortable place to ask any and all questions relating to keeping up with Google's corporate dealings or implementing the latest Google tools. Most useful is the site's categorization of message threads by Google product (nearly 800 messages have been posted on Gmail alone so far).

Thanks to Elliot of Google Community for his note on his site.

Google Newsbites 3/07/06

2006-03-07T16:04:00.000-05:00

Wanna work for Google? Bust a move to Britain!

TechCrunch puts it all together: Google Drive: What we know so far

JenSense shows us how to do AdSense background checks on newly acquired sites

Google = Yahoo say the French, but search overall is lackluster

Google's Marissa Mayer: hologram or android? (Valleywag)

MSN may take a bit longer than expected to catch up to Google

1/3 of net users are on Google Video, study neglects to mention Google Video's badass big brother: YouTube

Want to use MSN Ad Center? And you're a Firefox user? Yeah, don't bother applying

Google Newsbites 3/06/06

2006-03-06T01:51:00.000-05:00

Videos from the Googleplex via SEB

Mozilla made an estimated $72 million off its integrated Firefox Google search last year

More users finding Google's test layouts

Amazon may get more pressure than Google Book Search over copyright and publishing ambitions

Google may be slowly rolling out the "z-axis," time-constrained searches

Inspired by the Google Maps public API, AIM to open its coding for plugins, developers

Gmail security hole has been patched up

Google Maps based package tracking

Sergey Brin talks to a UC Berkeley class (Google Video), admits he finds Wikipedia a curiosity

GDrive probably not a rumor

"Draw Google's homepage from memory" contest

Official Google Blog plugs their mobile search features

Academy Awards winners plotted on Google Maps, winners are mostly from, well, Middle America

Ask v. Google and the blogs as rivals to search results

Google Newsbites 3/02/06

2006-03-02T13:54:00.000-05:00

Google Zeitgeist for week of 2/27/06 features mostly Olympians

Google intros mini-est Mini for Enterprise users (with weird Geico car insurance reference) see press release here and go on the Google Mini tour

Google banishing search storage from China

Javascript flaw in Gmail?

Google Search soon to include related content

Xooglers explains Google's realtime scrolling search toy

The Onion interviews dejected Google users

How can Google make more money? Follow the Yahoo-brick road!

College Humor on keeping search results private, via GB

Recycling content or creating anew to get to the top of Google

Ogle Earth is another blog about Google Earth, with fewer flyovers and more tech grit than the touristy Google Sightseeing

Ask.com Ad: Quit Wasting Time on Google

2006-03-02T12:47:00.000-05:00

Just spotted--a Flash ad for Ask.com on Gizmodo that criticizes Google's all-text search results. Earlier this week I mentioned the lack of preview options in most search engine's all-text results, and here Ask.com is playing directly to that sort of complaint. Here are screencaps and a narration of the ad:

Search results (obviously intended to be Google's) fly up the screen in a blue/green text blur as the ad tells you to quit wasting time on dead-end results. Instead, query Ask.com and mouse over the binoculars to see a popup preview of the site before you click on it.

Ask has had this Binoculars feature since June 2004, but the required mouse overs make Binoculars less than perfect. (Much easier to see all thumbnail shots at once as the page loads.) It also seems odd that the new Ask.com sans Jeeves would be calling its tools "human." Nevertheless, Ask is highlighting its differentiating features to affirm its loud announcements earlier this week that Ask.com would climb to the top of search.

Related Reading:
February 27, 2006 - New Ask.com Press Release
February 28, 2006 - The New Ask.com Blasts Off

AdSense Interface Gets a Facelift

2006-03-02T12:30:00.000-05:00

As announced on the official Inside Adsense blog, AdSense users can now see a new control panel for creating and managing their ads. The disparate ad unit generators and help files have been reorganized into a decision tree:

Want to set up a new campaign? Choose AdSense for content, AdSense for search, or referral options. Inside those categories, you'll find better organized options for ad units, link units, or code snippets.

This redesign looks as if it's meant to appeal to many new AdSense users, providing clear directives to these users on how to get what you need out of AdSense (and hopefully how to profit more).

Google News Adds Feeds in More Languages

2006-03-01T12:37:00.000-05:00

Until now, Google only supported English RSS feeds for its News site--meaning only Americans, British, Australians, and users in other English-speaking countries had RSS feeds for their editions of Google News. So when a friend asked me to create a Google News Mexico feed in Spanish for Mexican soccer player Borgetti, I had to whip up an email alert that parsed into RSS for his Bloglines account. That was less than optimal and only delivered daily updates, at most.

Now, Google has finally rolled out Google News feeds for the rest of the languages in its News arsenal. Just pick your favorite flavor and add to your newsreader.

To subscribe, go to Google News, select your international edition from the dropdown menu at the top, then find the RSS feed for the page in the left sidebar.

After selecting your edition, you can also enter a search term or click on a news topic, load the results, and select the RSS feed for the search or topic specific page.

Happy international newsing, finally! Thanks Dirson, for spreading the word.

Google Newsbites 3/01/06

2006-03-01T12:16:00.001-05:00

Microsoft search to be "more relevant than Google in 6 months"

With its recent volatility, Is GOOG a buy or sell?

Forbes article covers abyss between falling GOOG stock and rampant new Google product announcements

Pirillo's not the only addict, Wired article finds more Google junkies

Valleywag's Google Girls competition continues with its first Google Girls Faceoff

Are ad agencies missing out on search? (from SES 2006)

Microsoft releases Street Side (street level maps) and updates Expo (classified listings)

Social community Yahoo! 360 compared to cruising the loop

Google intros Google Japan Blog

Google Newsbites 3/01/06

2006-03-01T12:16:00.000-05:00

Microsoft search to be "more relevant than Google in 6 months"

Is GOOG a buy or sell?

Forbes article covers abyss between falling GOOG stock and rampant new Google product announcements

Pirillo's not the only addict, Wired article finds more Google junkies

Valleywag's Google Girls competition continues with its first Google Girls Faceoff

Are ad agencies missing out on search? (from SES 2006)

Microsoft releases Street Side (street level maps) and updates Expo (classified listings)

Social community Yahoo! 360 compared to cruising the loop

Google intros Google Japan Blog

Add Previews to Search Results

2006-02-28T17:41:00.000-05:00

Foremost in the Googlist's collection of Google-related productivity tools is a Firefox extension called GooglePreview, which allows me to see inline thumbnail previews of Google search results. These previews help me filter out spam sites, splogs, and completely off topic search results at a glance. I can also quickly identify search results that link to trusted sites I visit often. Overall, previews boost research efficiency by improving relevancy and decreasing experimental clickthroughs. Eventually these thumbnails should be a standard feature in the big search sites, but for now, here's the Googlist's list of tools for building your own search previews (feel free to suggest additional solutions in the comments):

Add Previews in Firefox:
GooglePreview adds thumbnails to Google, Yahoo, etc, one click turns extension on/off
BetterSearch adds thumbnails to Google, Yahoo, del.icio.us, A9, etc, adds more site info per result

To really maximize your search power, set your Google search results per page to 20 or higher so you can scan more results at once. Even though image loading causes a short delay, equivalent text results load immediately, so you don't lose time with these extensions, you just gain efficiency in your click throughs.

Add Previews in IE:
Girafa Toolbar adds thumbnails to Google, MSN, Yahoo, AOL, etc, collect thumbs of favorite sites in a sidebar
MSN Search Toolbar Add-in only for MSN, must have MSN Toolbar

Access Thumbnail Databases:
Girafa
Thumbshots
Alexa

Search Sites with Preview Features:
Alexa
ICQ Search
Find Forward
Exalead
Don Busca
Search (user must activate thumbnails)

Google Newsbites 2/28/06

2006-02-28T01:34:00.000-05:00

Google to Wall Street: "Clearly our growth rates are slowing...We are going to have to find new ways to monetize the business"

YHOO and GOOG stocks plummet after Google's announcement to analysts

GOOG stock sold by insiders at high rates recently, coincidence or did Googlers know it was going bearish?

Google Code Jam India has just opened registration, qualified southeast Asian coders can win fabulous cash and prizes

Google announces Google News for mobile devices

USAToday summarizes Google's ambitions to become advertising brokers for "old media," TV, radio, print

MIVA ad system to take on AdSense/AdWords, lets publishers target ads both manually by unit and contextually to the page

Jeremy Zawodny notices that the new Ask.com copies Google.com

CEO Barry Diller says Ask will battle Google

DoJ rejects Google's privacy concerns in releasing its users' search information

Google Earth fans meet NASA's World Wind

PC Magazine picks up the Valleywag social bookmarking rumor

Lawrence Lessig, tech lawyer and IP expert, lectures on Google Print and Book Search (YouTube 30 minutes), conclusion: Google's projects constitute "fair use" of the copyrighted materials they scan/store

From SES 2006, "The Search Landscape"

Google and Yahoo offices are inches apart in Santa Monica

Google Factory Tour Video

2006-02-27T20:20:00.000-05:00

Another Google Video feature on Google operations. This 5 and a half hour film covers presentations on pagerank, AdSense, AdWords, and many other Google features at a Googleplex tour on May 19, 2005.

Video Highlight: "People really care about their information, moreso than their hair gel or their toothpaste." -- Sergey Brin

Google Recruiting Video for Female Engineers

2006-02-27T20:14:00.000-05:00

Straight from Google Video--a recruiting video for Google's female engineers. Engineer Jen Fitzpatrick interviews a number of enthusiastic and pleasant Google employees. Of course, the talk isn't all technical, the video spends a lot of time on the perks--the free food (which causes the "Google 15"), childcare programs, relaxed atmosphere, 20% time, small company feel, and Sergey Brin's effeminate footwear.

Video Highlight at 6'43":

Interviewer: "Okay, so I have one last burning question. Tell me what kind of shoes you're wearing today!"

Sergey Brin: "These are my Z-coils. They're my shoes that have a little bit of extra spring on them. And, uh, they're sort of high heels for men, so, uh, they accentuate my calves nicely."

Google Newsbites 2/27/06

2006-02-26T23:59:00.000-05:00

Google Calendar is in beta test mode as CL2, via GB -- this will be Google's most talked about release for awhile, and perhaps its most functional if it integrates with Gmail as expected

Google Rumors spots Video Ads by Google prompting speculation about payouts to publishers and concerns about distracting from content

Ask.com sans Jeeves is up and running, via SEW, the right sidebar looks a lot like the Google Links feature used to discover Google Calendar

Farkers make Google logo parodies, vulgarity ensues

National Archives on Google Video, bonus points if you watch the space videos

GBuy / Google Wallet / Google Payments rumors somewhat confirmed with announcement of Google Base Payments

Days 2, 3, and 4 of Chris Pirillo's Googlefast, verdict: Yahoo and MSN are lackluster and Pirillo misses him some Google

Google Toolbar helps persons with ADHD

Google Hiring for Print Ads Production

2006-02-24T13:28:00.000-05:00

The Google Jobs center has many recent listings that relate to the upcoming production of its print ads campaign (previously: Google Announces AdWords for Print Publications, Magazines). Media people, update those resumes!

Director, Publication Ad Sales - New York
Partner Manager, Publications - New York
Media Buyer, Publication Ads - New York
Publication Advertising Sales Representative - New York
Print Media Planner, Publication Ads - New York

Account Coordinator, Publication Partners (Temporary) - New York

Print Production Coordinator, Publication Ad Sales (Temporary) - New York

Google Widgets for Mac

2006-02-24T12:37:00.000-05:00

To quickly butter up all those Mac users who complained of Safari-incompatibility for Google Page Creator, the big G just announced a set of Mac Widgets for the Dashboard in OS X. The 3 widgets are shortcuts for Gmail, Blogger, and Search History. MacLive suggests that a News widget that scrolls realtime RSS headlines would be more useful than the latter two of these, and he certainly has a practical point there.

Mac users, you can download the Mac Widgets here.

And for PC users, more info on the Dashboard features and uses in OS X.

Update: Read the comments by the Blogger Mac widget developer, Pete Hopkins.

Google Newsbites 2/24/06

2006-02-24T11:36:00.000-05:00

Google Blogoscoped points out that spam will run rampant when address harvesters use Page Creator URL's to find Gmail addresses (spam filtering should take care of it though...)

Google Analyst Day is March 2, here's what Slashdot / Search Engine Watch said about Google Analyst Day '05

Case Study: Technorati v. Google Blogsearch from T's founder Sifry's POV

Valleywag is on the inside, and the insiders say Google social bookmarking is coming... probably an upgrade for their current search history tool?

Yahoo to begin serving Wikipedia links

Jeeves rides into the sunset, see the final film farewell: Jeeves Leaves

Google is showing realtime searches on a projection screen in the Googleplex lobby

GOOG v. BIDU

How to delete a lot of Gmail messages at once (YouTube)--set your message view # to 100, sort email into labels using filters, then view a label, select "all" and press delete, voila 100 of your most recent newsletters disappear, then repeat... (video is a bit dull)

Google Page Creator mirror site on Pagetastic.com

2006-02-23T14:09:00.000-05:00

The new Google Page Creator renders mirror pages for your googlepages.com sites on the domain pagetastic.com. Check the links for my site:

Google Pages: hellogooglist.googlepages.com/home

Pagetastic: hellogooglist.pagetastic.com

Go ahead and try it on your own Google Page as well. Perfect mirror, right? Now you can have easier access to your Google Pages without the Google name.

Now for the investigation: The URL Pagetastic.com points to www9.google.com (which gives a Google Server Error). So what is Pagetastic.com? Here's what I've discovered:

The Internet Archive has nada on the domain as it has no real history. A search reveals a few previously published Pagetastic.com pages, probably created by Google testers before the February 23, 2006 release of Page Creator. (A blog entry dated January 21, 2006 uses a pagetastic.com hosted jpeg in its post. The Pagetastic.com site for this user references Stanford, meaning that this person might have had access to Page Creator as a Google tester (by virtue of connections, perhaps). Also, a forum posting dated February 19, 2006 links to a pagetastic site. The site looks like it was created in Page Creator and belongs to Anna Ravenscroft, who is married to Google employee Alex Martelli (with whom she wrote the popular tech manual Python Cookbook). My searching also reveals a link to what is most probably a copy of a Google FAQ page in "beta" that lists a question as: "Why aren't the changes I'm making in Google Page Creator being reflected on my Pagetastic.com site?" The current FAQ edits this to googlepages.com instead of Pagetastic.com.

Looks like Google testers were for the most part obedient in not sharing their private betas, but a few slipped out...

Now, here is the WHOIS lookup info on Pagetastic.com:

Registrant:
Data Docket Inc. (DOM-1367820)
391 N Ancestor Pl.
boise ID 83704 US

Domain Name: pagetastic.com

Registrar Name: Markmonitor.com
Registrar Whois: whois.markmonitor.com
Registrar Homepage: http://www.markmonitor.com

Created on..............: 2005-Apr-14.*
Expires on..............: 2006-Apr-14.
Record last updated on..: 2005-Nov-09 15:09:25.

*Looks like Page Creator has been on Google's to-do list or project bonus time for at least a year...

And here is the WHOIS lookup info for Google.com:

Registrant:
Google Inc.
(DOM-258879)
2400 E. Bayshore Pkwy Mountain View CA
94043 US

Domain Name: google.com

Registrar Name: Markmonitor.com
Registrar Whois: whois.markmonitor.com
Registrar Homepage: http://www.markmonitor.com

Created on..............: 1997-Sep-15.
Expires on..............: 2011-Sep-14.
Record last updated on..: 2005-Jul-25 20:14:20.

Pagetastic.com is registered using the same company, MarkMonitor, that Google uses for its domain registrations. The similarities end there: Google, Inc. is listed as the actual owner in its google.com registration but in the Pagetastic domain, DataDocket.com is listed as the owner. But DataDocket.com is just an "under construction" site that looks more like Geocities (which is what a lot of people are comparing Google Page Creator to).

A WHOIS reveals that DataDocket.com is also registered by MarkMonitor, but its contact info is a cryptic Japanese address. The relationship of MarkMonitor, DataDocket, and Google has been discussed before. Intelligentsia from the forum discovered at that time that

Data Docket Inc. is a Delaware Corporation that is qualified (registered) to do business in Idaho. It was incorporated 4/17/2002 and registered to do business in Idaho on 11/17/2003...MarkMonitor is a dba for eMarkMonitor, Inc. which is also a Delaware Corporation that is also qualified to do business in Idaho. Both companies have the same corporate officers as reported on the annual reports filed in Idaho.

This information was apparently from state records and so confirms that Google's registrar MarkMonitor is indubitably tied to DataDocket, which seems to be Google's disguise domain. The Googlist's speculation: It could be that some Googler was charged with creating a mirror domain for the Page Creator project and thought that taking "Page" and adding a catchy superlative suffix suited his purposes perfectly. He then registered that page under DataDocket.com, which a user in the forums linked above suggests is used as a registration/management tool for Googlers in their 10% creativity time. This way, Googlers can make their projects live without having them explicitly attached to Google, Inc.

Ordinarily this discovery wouldn't be revelatory as Google does all kinds of backend work to support its sites and software. But, the Pagetastic.com discovery provides 2 useful tools: 1) an instant pagetastic.com mirror for your googlepages.com site with a shorter subdomain URL than yoursite.googlepages.com/home.html and 2) it gives us more solid ground for connecting DataDocket projects to eventual Google releases as discussed above.

Google Newsbites 2/23/06

2006-02-23T12:35:00.000-05:00

Google's Page Creator repeatedly compared to Geocities Geocities Geocities and MySpace MySpace MySpace

Google Podium lets you browse past presentations by Google execs and researchers

Google Research guys launch official Google Research Blog

AdSense now serving animated .gif ads

Google and Earthlink to bid on Wi-Fi in San Francisco

GOOG up almost 4% today on Page Creator announcement

Take a tour of the Tokyo Googleplex

Internet legend Chris Pirillo goes on a Googlefast

Google Page Creator Is Here!

2006-02-23T03:23:00.000-05:00

Google has just rolled out its Google Page Creator. Unfortunately I encountered an error (called a case of the Google hiccups by the subsequent error message) a few minutes after trying the application. Screenshot above and the current version of the page I'm playing around with: Googlist Makes a Page. I'm still dabbling in this, but here's the scoop so far:

Page Creator lets you create a number of pages (notice how Google stays away from "site" or "web" to make it sound more antigeek) and then publish them to hosting at googlepages.com (hm, interesting). I am betting this static page creation will eventually be integrated with a Blogger reintroduction to let you create entire sites with static and dynamic blog pages. For page editing, you get a WYSIWIG interface to work with as well as an option to edit some of the HTML (selected content sections only, not much CSS). You can choose pre-made looks and layouts (they remind me of the Blogger templates) and then type directly into text boxes in the WYSIWIG editor. Options for adjusting fonts, text formatting, colors, images, links, etc. are all available through buttons on the lefthand sidebar.

Publishing your page is remarkably quick. My changes published instantly as I resolved the URL right after pressing publish. (Not at all like the publishing lag on Blogger.) Right after I published (quite hastily), however, I had a quick freak out--would I be able to make changes just as quickly, or even more importantly, could I delete the page I had just created? Thankfully, yes, Google had provided that. Google Page Creator also smartly autosaves your page as you work (most probably because of the incredible usefulness of this draft saving on Gmail).

Like many Google spies, I made sure to check the HTML source code for my new Google Page. Amongst tiers of CSS files and divs, it looks like the coders left some chatty little reminders to each other in their coding:

"fix ie6 "peekaboo bug" using the "holly hack".
Note, this style only gets applied to ie6"

...

"IE5 mac - overrides the IE/Win hack"

...

"Extra divs hidden by default. The custom CSS can override this though"

...

"Hack to avoid flash of unstyled content in IE"

Googlers are hax0rs and messy coders! But no doubt we'll see those comments shoved aside soon by some nice clean source code. Actually, the real reason I checked the page source was to see if it would be possible to "lift" Google's autogenerated HTML and upload it to your own site (to avoid using the googlepages.com domain). Looks like they've taken a few pains to prevent that.

Googlist's reaction to Page Creator is indifferent at present. It's either an incredibly quick/easy way to add static pages to the web or it's Geocities with a mad injection of Web 2.0 serum. As one Digg user commented on the Page Creator release, "I feel like it's 1997 all over again." Me too, me too.

PS - This confirms the Valleywag rumor that a Google site creator would be released soon. Previously posted in Google Newsbites 2/09/06.

Google Newsbites 2/21/06

2006-02-21T22:12:00.000-05:00

Google admits Desktop 3 has privacy issues, and the Enterprise blog says little to assuage our fears

Associated Press intros an AP News + Google Maps mashup, via GMM

Surprising that Google Image search hasn't had more copyright problems, but here's the latest: Google infringes on porn site's copyrights

Spend your college days stoked on booze and Google

Valleywag opens nominations for "Google Girls" (attractive ones, that is)

Google's users are the most loyal

Good list of search-related patents, papers, etc

Trailer Trash Swag at the Google Store

2006-02-20T12:28:00.000-05:00

I can't say I'm a regular at googlestore.com, but since it is Google's official retail outlet, the Googlist feels compelled to browse occasionally.

Most wares are the usual fare: mousepads, crummy logo tees, and silly briefcase bags for Googledrones. But the drab doesn't last for long! Google has rolled out what the Googlist is calling "trailer trash swag." The first installment in this vintagey collection is the Trailer Tee: a Threadless/emo-esque image of two lovers sitting in front of their parked RV in presumably plastic lawn chairs. The Bob looks over at his Bobette and drawls in his gravelly twang, hey, guess, what? "I'm feeling lucky!" Don't feel obliged to accessorize with the unmatching trucker hat.

More weird Google sh*t: Armwarmers. Vase speakers. Purse hooks. And my favorite: Goo.

Google Newsbites 2/20/06

2006-02-20T11:29:00.000-05:00

Google gives the finger to the DoJ

Huge "how Google works" leak: Google Trusted Tester Program, from Googling Google

Gmail to get Voicemail, and maybe some Evite action?

Jeeves finally fired, see his miserable Ask.com cubicle here, probably going to a vineyard for retirement

Google Print Ads auction delayed?

Google Earth is a geodesic globe composed of 2D landscapes

Employee headcounts for Google, Yahoo, Microsoft

Google Sightseeing widget for Mac OS X

Google tracks every single click on every single search via javascript

Google Maps for your tube addictions

Frogger comes to life on Google Maps, no kidding

Google books 2 job interviewees for one time slot

Sending Google Book Search URL's also sends your Google Account login, yikes

Google Chat popups have slithered away, embarassed and ashamed they ever existed

Interesting thread on embarassing Google search autocomplete queries via GB

Geeky Google stuff from the Computer History Museum

10 Weird Places on Google Maps

Google Newsbites 2/17/06

2006-02-17T11:13:00.000-05:00

Proposed law makes internet biz with China illegal, via Google Blogoscoped

A Yahoo-ite's pyramid for social software

You've probably already seen it, but that shouldn't make you feel any safer...

Xooglers trace the design of the Google UI, also see my post on Google circa 1999

Hire Me, Google is back, only he wants to get you a job this time

Local search expected to grow by $10 billion by 2010

Google has an image problem

A Google tattoo

Contest to find "the biggest site" using Google's site: operator

Google Newsbites 2/16/06

2006-02-16T11:42:00.000-05:00

Surf the Olympic athletes' homepage via Official Google Blog

Current Communications also has their own Google start page (remember Dell's?)

Google Maps on the Sopranos

Google Maps Racing

Congress goes berserk on Google and others about the China issue: "Your abhorrent actions in China are a disgrace."

Mad Money's Jim Cramer says "GOOG still a go" at below $350

Google's forays into print media are "a new, empirical way of proving the ROI of traditional media advertising deals" -- see my post on the print ad auctions

Another take on the Scoble brrreeeport experiment

Search engine advertising to grow 26% this year

MSN's contextual ads to be called, not so creatively, ContentAds

Target your AdWords to India!

Xooglers say Googlers bad at compliments

Google Testimony on Internet in China

2006-02-15T14:44:00.000-05:00

As just announced via the Official Google Blog, VP of Global Communications and Public Affairs at Google, Elliot Schrage, testified before the Committee on International Relations at the House of Representatives this afternoon. The speech is available in full text at the above linked blog post or in a .pdf file (that froze my Firefox browser, ahem). The major issue is the announcement of Google's new Google.cn to the also available Google.com in China.

For an outline of the testimony, read on:

Until now, Google had been providing non-specific Internet service to China, just giving them the services you can get in America from Google.com. After awhile, China started censoring queries and results, sometimes redirecting Google searches to local Chinese search engines. The censorship significantly slowed the performance of the Google site in China, with the site being far from expedient most of the time and absolutely unreachable 10% of the time.

Political, business, and ethical concerns about Google's accessibility and services in China led to two decision prongs: 1) stay out of China or 2) establish a specific, local presence in China. Google opted for the latter and has now rolled out Google.cn. This decision was guided by Google's traditional operating guidelines and the addition of a new concern:

1) Satisfy users.
2) Expand information access to all.

The added third concern for China and other difficult markets is

3) Respond to local conditions (i.e. editing Google to work with Chinese censorship)

The components of the new part 3 include disclosing points where search results have been omitted, not maintaining personal data (Gmail, Blogger included) on Chinese soil for Chinese users, but still offering Google.com to China in addition to the new Google.cn. This keeps the approach honest yet localized.

The major issues that Google grappled with in rolling out Google.cn were political, business, and ethical as mentioned above:

Political: Google faced the issue of whether or not it would intitiate self-censorship in order to do business in a country that does not hold similar political beliefs with regard to information exchange. Self-censorship is contrary to the political beliefs of the country under which Google operates and contrary to the beliefs of the spirit of the Internet. Recent difficulties with information storing and unapproved information ability in China, though, have made this political issue one that must be dealt with.

Business: Basically Google would lose tremendous market share (Schrage says to nearly zero) if it did not respond with an improved Google China service. This is becaues of the earlier mentioned slowness and redirection that was occuring with Google.com in China. The need to satisfy stockholders and to continue to operate competitively in the Asian market means Google must offer a localized Google service to the Chinese.

Ethical: Google mentions that its goal is to provide the greatest access possible to the greatest amount of information in the world. Both self-censoring and refusing to localize affect the fulfillment of that ethical idealism. Schrage states that the decision then had a very strong ethical element, but it was eventually decided that self-censorship would be most in line with the pressing need to satisfy the above business concern.

The rest of the testimony outlines the need for Internet services in China and the world in general. There are 105 million Internet users in China--half of them on broadband and hundreds of millions more using mobile phones with net capabilities. The number of Internet users is projected to jump to 250 million total users in the near future. A survey of Chinese users indicates that Internet usage will "increase political transparency." With this growing market and sub-par performance compared to local Chinese Internet services, Schrage states, "There is no question that, as a matter of business, we want to be active in China. It is a huge rapidly growing and enormously important market, and our key competitors are already there."

Schrage then outlines what it sees for the future of Google in China and Google's services to censoring nations: roll out the localized product, disclose points at which censorship has occurred, and limit the storage of personal information on users. Action by relevant governments should follow. And almost assuredly, backlash from the individual users as well as cultural change over time should have the effect of slowly changing the way in which countries view information storage. Or at least it is hoped as such.

Google Newsbites 2/15/06

2006-02-15T11:56:00.000-05:00

Blogger Buzz officially welcomes MeasureMap, blog stats are on the way (related Googlist post)

Vodafone to be Google's pimp, sort of

Digital "dig" into the data Google and Yahoo keep

Marketwatch asks, "Is Google cursed by too much cash?"

Bill Gates tops Brin/Page's daily money grab of $43 million with a Microsoft-as-monopolist-worthy $298 million day

Has your Blogger blog been flagged?

Craigslister has bad Google job interview

In 1859, a Google was the warbly part of a hog's throat, via Kraneland

Google mag covers throughout the years, show founders' uncanny resemblance

SEO contest nets thousands of relevant links in a few days, months still to go, via WSJ

Harold Davis says static content pages rather than blog pages draw search traffic for monetized blogs

Google shuts down Logogle, which is a Google text engine like the one used to make the Googlist logo

Late but worth it for the ugly dog: Adsense Hearts You

Google Acquires MeasureMap (probably for Blogger)

2006-02-14T19:22:00.000-05:00

Just as I had hinted to my readers last week in Google Newsbites 2/10/06, Google was indeed eyeing the blog analytics company MeasureMap. The press release is here from the Official Google Blog, and MeasureMap is now Google's latest buyout. It looks like the acquisition may be incorporated into the Blogger service as the first major improvement to the blogging giant since its own acquisition by G.

Currently Blogger offers very little in the way of features, making it extremely friendly to end users but not altogether as powerful as it was originally intended. Look forward to a whole new Blogger, I'm guessing. Let's hope that the introduction of Blogger Categories (or Labels as Google prefers its tagging term) will accompany the rollout of new services also, hah.

Anyways, stay tuned for how MeasureMap services may or may not affect the very Googlist blog you are reading now, which is of course powered by Blogger.

Google Celebrates Valentine's Day

2006-02-14T14:42:00.000-05:00

My note in today's Google Newsbites 2/14/06 said that the big G was ignoring Valentine's. That's not quite accurate. Around noon we got word of a few small Valentine's Day celebrations from Google:

Embedded heart .gifs in Gmail Chat when you type carat + 3 or <3:

Heart .gifs decorating AdWords for "Valentine's Day" and similar terms (like the candy canes from the holidays):

Google hires BearingPoint to boost Enterprise Search "Best Practices"

2006-02-14T11:28:00.000-05:00

Rare is the day when Google announces a partnership with a top tier management consulting firm (well more accurately, Google never does that and this firm is Top 20 or so). Neverthless, the Official Google Blog and Google Enterprise blog announce today the collaboration between Google and BearingPoint in offering Google's Enterprise search products to BearingPoint's clients. Google Enterprise's product portfolio currently comprises the talked up Google Mini, another larger scale search appliance, and Maps, Toolbar, and Earth integrations for corporations.

The alliance is a huge boon to BearingPoint's name in the consulting world as top players like McKinsey, Bain, and BCG usually manage to make the high profile corporate headlines far more often than BP. The number of headlines BP will see in the paper today will be payoff enough for this respected but not quite top of the charts management consulting group. As for the actual collaboration that will occur between the two players, it seems like Google is basically just training BearingPoint to analyze companies' information storage quandaries and to suggest and install Google's Enterprise products as the tenable solution for most companies. For Google, in addition, the announcement has the benefit of further legitimizing Google's search products in the traditional corporate world outside of tech. Consider that this announcement can bring a very bubbly but robust tech product to staunch, staid finance and pharmaceuticals companies (who would often choose less widely known custom corporate solutions to their information problems). This pattern, in turn, enhances BP's ability to court new clients, thereby boosting its own portfolio as a direct result. Further, BP will take much of the current upkeep and installation work out of Google's hands, leaving the search company's resources to bigger and better things like improving the Enterprise search products themselves. BearingPoint promises to provide extended search capabilities, lots of customer service, and extra security measures to the Google Enterprise Search solutions it will be installing for corporate clients.

Incidentally, Google's stock rose with this accompanying announcement to fend off the bears of yesterday. The stock rose over $350 again in the early morning hours of trading. Certainly the price will drop again, but Google never fails to have a stock price-saving announcement... just in the nick of time!

Google Newsbites 2/14/06

2006-02-13T20:40:00.000-05:00

Google says no to Valentine's Day

Google Sitemaps tips for improving your site indexing and ranking, via SERoundTable

Forbes Magazine is bullish on Google, despite the hundreds of bears yesterday after Barron's report

Google China Blog at googlechinablog.com: seems fake, but is apparently legit

Greasemonkey script to remove chat popups in Gmail

"hot lemur on tarsier action," via Wired article on suspicious Google searches

Picasa to be ported to Linux by Google and CodeWeavers

Tag taxonomy applied to Google: GoogleCloud.com

Financial Times reveals Amazon and Google in talks to make iTunes clones

MSN Rolls Out MSNSearchandWin Prizes

2006-02-13T20:11:00.000-05:00

Yet another shady move in the King-of-the-Search competition! MSN has announced (undoubtedly as part of its plan to trounce Google's share of search) that users can now win prizes if they choose MSNSearchandWin.com as their search portal. More details on the announcement in SearchEngineWatch's post and MSN's official press release. Prizes include dozens of gift certificates, Netflix subscriptions, hotel stays, and more cheap miscellany.

MSN's announcement follows recent speculation about a similar Yahoo! Rewards program, which surprised many with its idea of buying users. MSN is certainly not the first site to offer rewards for search behaviors, but it is the first of the major corporate players in the search game to offer monetary rewards in an attempted buyout of user share. Amazon's A9 offers 1.57% off all Amazon purchases, but it still struggles to claim search share as it is tied to a seemingly irrelevant commercial giant. Blingo popularized the search and win idea by offering gift certificates, movie tickets, and electronics to users who search from a Google-powered portal--and it proved itself both legitimate and successful. Despite these already existing incentive programs, MSN's announcement seems like desperate strategy. Whether the goal is to increase clicks to the MSN search ads (thereby encouraging more ad buys) or to actually capture new users, paying people to use a free service rarely begets profit.

Time Article on Google Reveals...Nothing

2006-02-13T14:52:00.000-05:00

I opened my Bloglines this morning to find all of my feeds suggesting links to the Google story that was just released by Time Magazine ("In Search of the Real Google." None of these links seemed to have reviews, so Googlist will give you the quick rundown. For those of you who have read John Battelle's The Search or David Vise's The Google Story and/or read any other tell-all feature article on the company, the information is duplicative.

Basically, you get a glossed over description of Google's fetus stage at Stanford, its toddler year 1998 in a Silicon Valley garage, and the description of Google's formative years spent paying rent for a real office, garnering multiple venture capitalisters, and hiring the best of the best available management execs and engineers. You get to hear more about the ubiquitous toys, games, and banquets inside the Google campus and the laidback culture designed for comfortable, freeing, innovation. And then you have to muck through ruminations, speculations, and agitations about the future of GOOG stock, the ability of the company to stay on top of all of its diverse forays, and the general problem with being an "underdog" while at the same time being a billionaire corp. Don't forget the requisite Google v. Yahoo page and the "It's so damn hard to get a job at Google" paragraph. Yeah, has Time been following the tech industry at all for the past few years? This whole article really fails at delving into new territory for anyone remotely familiar with the company. So what's actually groundbreaking in terms of this article's informational content? What new stuff did we learn?

Here are the few things that made the article worth reading for Googlist:

Google's top 2 voted no on adding contextual advertisements to Google's image search. Something like under relevant pictures of bananas you might find text ads for Chiquita?

We do hear a cheeky little tid bit re: that ubiquitous slogan: "'There's a subtext to 'Don't be evil,' and that is 'Don't be illegal,'" says Vint Cerf, an Internet founding father who now serves as "chief Internet evangelist" at Google." Obvious, but admittedly I chuckled.

The article makes a conjecture over GBuy. So it's not just Digg readers who are passing this stuff around. "Real media" (in whatever way you want to think of it) is willing to dabble in the rumors as well.

Despite the less than revelatory feature article, Time does include a hilarious interview segment ("Meet the Google Guys"> with its questioner's interrogatives in blazing capital letters. Brin and Page do a predictably good job of avoiding tough questions, playing with legos, and generally courting nonchalance and ambiguity. I was hoping the top 2's answer to the question "HOW DOES IT FEEL TO SUDDENLY BE SO WEALTHY?" would include something about Boeing 767's rather than "money doesn't buy you happiness," but unfortunately no juicy bits there. Other bloggers are talking about the porn figure, though. The interview reveals that porn searches via Google apparently only number into the single digit percentages. If Zeitgeist weren't censored for non PG-rated searches, maybe we'd be able to back that up, but for now it's just positively skewed hype.

As for the third piece in Time's Google trilogy ("How to Be a Google Expert"), we'll just say that the included instructions on how to use quotation marks in a search are insulting to the readers of this blog.

In summary, Time's tell-all article really should just be one sentence: "Sorry, if y'all already know all this, but I'm gonna write it in a 10 page web article anyways..." This is probably all explained by one simple fact: that the author Adi Ignatius got his journalism stripes covering economics in Asia and Europe. Oh yeah, did we forget to remind you that Time is owned by AOL which understandably has reason to f*ck with Google? Not that the article sways that way exactly. I'm just saying...

Google Newsbites 2/13/06

2006-02-13T12:02:00.000-05:00

GOOG dips below $350, projected to drop to 50%, analysts freak out

VC firms dropped $263 million on new niche search proposals last year

MySpace gets 2 1/2 times the traffic of Google, Tom Anderson gets wasted!

Traffic Power confirmed banned by Google, get talking here

Google's Sergey Brin thinks transparency in business is as easy as clear legos.

Google-Olympics courtship steals clicks from AdWords advertisers

Ask Jeeves axes Jeeves, because he looks like CEO Barry Diller

Google Blogoscoped has not been banned in China, thank goodness! (worry was over his posts on Google's China-censorship)

"Yahoo! that bitch!" (Y's requisite exclamation mark makes this hard to understand at first)

Google trains for the Olympics

2006-02-10T16:50:00.000-05:00

Here's a quick rundown of Olympics-related fun on Google (other than the usual daily doodle for the Google logo):

Videos from NBC Olympics, includes interviews, showcases, and replays of top performances and US athletes as the Games get underway

Virtual flyovers of Olympic sites in Torino using Google Earth and Local

Winter Games athletes, schedules, and results search

Most of these features are highlighted at the tops of relevant search pages in boxes that usually house ads. This marriage of sport and tech seems quite smart on Google's part. A huge props to NBC for agreeing to the partnership and providing all of the amazing content that is sure to come. Definitely looking forward to this!

Newsbites 2/10/06

2006-02-09T22:04:00.000-05:00

Yahoo to launch Rewards Program?

Banned AdSense user gets his AdSense account back

Hosted Gmail for universities starts with San Jose Community College

Fuzzy blobs on Google Maps are UFO's or weather balloons, you decide

FUCK Google Maps, literally

Inside Google analyzes Chris Gilmer's post on Google Jobs for what it really is, weak

50% of searches are done through Google, if not more?

Unsatisfied with its acquisition of Urchin, Google may bid for MeasureMap

Newsbites 2/9/06

2006-02-09T17:07:00.000-05:00

You can now browse employment at Google by tossing job apps and descriptions in your Google Jobs Shopping Cart.

Mockup or actual screenshot of the Dell start page provided by Google.

John Battelle, operator of Searchblog and writer of The Search, receives a cold call from AdSense sales. Whoops.

Lifehacker judges the new Google Desktop 3.

Adsense users finally figure out why some ad units say "Ads by Google" and some have the more hilarious "Ads by Goooooogle"

What's next? Valleywag's Google source says Trogdor, calendar, and wifi everywhere.

Google does good in Africa.

AdSenseTaxes.com Simplifies Google AdSense Taxes

2006-02-08T21:38:00.000-05:00

Resource for paying taxes on Google AdSense revenue

Google Announces AdWords for Print Publications, Magazines

2006-02-08T19:15:00.000-05:00

Wow. Every couple of product releases, Google comes up with something to really shake us up. The latest in this series of "Hmm.. where are they going with that?" announcements is AdWords for print publications. Google has announced, via its Inside Adwords blog, that it is auctioning off whole page, 1/2 page, and 1/4 page ads in 25 premium magazines for 3 issues per magazine. You can bid online through an AdWords account until February 20, 2006, after which winning bidders will be emailed creative specs for the ads that will appear in the publications. Interestingly, one caveat for these ads that Google has established is that no ad should resemble a traditional online AdWords ad.

While the wide release of this strategy is new as of today, Google has tested some ad sales programs in other media before: see Google's newspaper print ads in the Chicago Sun-Times and Google's purchase of dMarc radio advertising.

While you can view the official print publications AdWords FAQ, here are some other issues Googlist has pondered and attempted to answer:

Q. How much will these ads cost?
A. The FAQ states "it's in your best interest to bid the maximum amount you're actually willing to pay for the space you select" since bidding works like AdWords online to reduce to your "minimax" payment amount. The example given is that a person might make a $12,000 bid for 3 1/4 page spots, which approximates to $16,000 for a whole page and $8,000 for a half page. Experimentally, hypothetically, and completely underestimatingly speaking. I'm betting these ads will go for much more as it's very unusual that independent advertisers would have the opportunity to put creatives in these publications without agency representation and waiting in a queue for availability.

More reasons to think the Google print ads will auction to much higher rates comes from the standard rates charged by the magazines themselves. Here are the typical rates for a Conde Nast publication, Vanity Fair. (Conde Nast is not a participating publisher, but they are effectively the omniscent deity of print mags and so a valid source for rate estimations.) Choose additional publications from the dropdown on that site and click Rates on the left sidebar to view rate cards for other publications. For a 1/4 page advertisement, you can expect to pay between $20k and $100k across Conde Nast titles. The advertising rates for PC Magazine, which is included in the Google print ads test and which is likely to be a top target for online ad bidders, run $45k to $75k for a full page under normal contract terms. In another genre, the Martha Stewart rate card (.pdf) quotes advertising from $40k to nearly $160k for various page sizes and arrangements. Google is most certainly paying an extreme premium to reserve the ad space and is presumably auctioning the space off at what will be a lesser price for independent advertisers, but it remains to be seen whether or not this will be the case. It could be seen as such a novel idea that the opportunity will become a showcase of those who can pay as much as possible for tiny ad spaces just to be a part of the Google test. We shall see! But whatever the prices end up being, they will be much more than $4k for a 1/4 page. (I think that number is just suggested to weed out people who think they can get a spot for $100.)

Q. Who can advertise?
A. Google terms the advertisers in this test "businesses," which indicates that the advertisements are expected to be for technology products, web services, or particularly well financed brick and mortar enterprises. The Google AdWords Content Policy indicates that well-behaved political and non-profit organizations can participate in regular AdWords bidding. As the print publication seems to be following the same policy, I see no reason why a smart political candidate or indignant political cause wouldn't submit bidding for upcoming issues. Google has only forbidden particularly discriminatory or attacking ads, leaving the question of whether or not politicos can swipe the space open to interpretation. I expect that the majority of the advertisements will be what one might expect, but a small few will be surprising "make you think" spots.

Q. Will there be analytics?
A. Google's short answer is no. But I'm betting they'll roll out something that will surprise us all like an end analysis of the success of this program versus the costs of traditional print media buying. Anyways, unlike the online AdWords program and more sophisticated ad serving programs used by corporate websites, print ad pages do not carry the ability to count clicks, impressions, and uniques. While circulation counts and newsstand sales can estimate impressions, that data is only valuable insofar as readers actually flip through every page and pass their eyes across every advertisement. A suggestion for creating a redirect URL for the specific advertisement to count resulting impressions has been made, and I think it's a good one. The only issue is what portion of readers will actually go their computers and type in the URL? Only a select number of those which have viewed the ad, some of which may be saving action for later. In the future, the use of paper-like computer screens for the news and mags will allow computer-based analytics for traditionally print publications. Perhaps the two will be merging sooner than we can guess. That's quite the rumination!

Q. Why is Google doing this?
A. Google states in its print publications FAQ that this is "an experiment" much like its previous experiments that have resulted in full-fledged implementation (AdWords site-targeting being one of those it says). It looks to me like Google is buying up ad containers in various media markets in order to provide more distribution channels for the ad sales it conducts on the Internet. (Not coincidentally, these more traditional media markets can give Google much higher profit margins...) Perhaps its vision is for anyone to login to AdWords and have the capability of bidding on ad spots for television, radio, newspaper, magazines, and various other kinds of new media like streaming radio, etc. This would begin to democratize the purchase of ads and eliminate the necessity of agencies as the advertiser to publisher middlemen. So, for instance, the inventor of a brand new technology widget could (with sufficient funds available) take on the marketing and advertising of his widget within media markets without use of expensive agencies or connections. This sounds like just what the world's entrepreneurs and small businesses have been waiting for. It also sounds like just the print revolution that magazine and newspaper publishers have been waiting for. A multitude of parties can benefit from the freshness of Google's idea here.

This is certain to tip even more people to the side of "Google is taking over the world!", but for the rest of us, let's just sit back and wait for the first of these Google print ads issues to arrive on newsstands to see the results.

Google.vc is the Unofficial Google

2006-02-08T02:38:00.000-05:00

An anonymous web developer with a passion for Google has created this functional Google mockup at URL http://www.google.vc. The portal style page uses an OS X-like rollover toolbar for selecting Google subdomains (like Froogle and Local) which is quite a slick improvement on Google's current incomplete set of text links. Latest Zeitgeist queries are featured along with Google specific feeds from the Google Blog, Google Press Releases, and GOOG stock. Links to Gmail and Google News are also there. Seems like a fun but harmless way of enhancing your Google experience if you're too lazy to modify your personalized search homepage similarly. Some comments on Google Blogoscoped suggested that the site might be "malicious," but after examining the source and link outs I can see no sign of bad code, non-google.com domains, or affiliate links even. Have at it.

GoogleVideoDownload.com Takes the Streaming out of Google Video

2006-02-07T13:31:00.000-05:00

After MyTunes defiled iTunes by providing shareable songs for download, it couldn't have been long until Google Video was attacked by the same "stream capture" trend. GoogleVideoDownload.com allows you to copy the URL of a Google Video into its interface and then provides you with options for viewing the video and/or downloading it in a variety of formats (.flv, .avi, .mp4). Voila all that amazing content is yours!

Perhaps more interesting is that the site provides a relative ranking system for its downloads--favorites, top 100, 500, etc. and newest downloads available. Currently, Google Video doesn't give quite that laundry list, instead just offering "15 popular" videos for you to view. GoogleVideoDownload's rankings reveal what we've always suspected: females in various states of undress will always top media viewing/downloading lists. Google Video chooses to highlight select groups of 15 family-appropriate videos rather than reveal to the net that everyone just uses their service for the soft porn (and crappily lip-synched home videos).

Expect this to be shut down nearly immediately due to copyright concerns, but I thought I'd point it out as an example of how the trendlords are following not just iTunes, but Google as well. Expect to see copycat sites revving up their stream capturing engines quite soon... And also expect iTunes to take very serious notes as the growth and development of Google Video into its pay format will be serious competition for Apple folks.

Gmail Is Way Too Kinky

2006-02-07T03:13:00.000-05:00

Justin Blanton just popped up a post, "On using Gmail exclusively," that outlines fourteen irksome problems with the Gmail system that plague (mostly GTD) users. Justin really bangs some sore points here, and I fully agree that most of these are easily fixed by Google engineers and should be soon!

Google Chat = Google Talk + Gmail

2006-02-07T02:36:00.000-05:00

Here it is, ready or not! The cohabitation of all of your Google Talk conversations inside your Gmail interface as a searchable collection of message threads. This is a significant step toward amalgamating two useful yet until now separate conversational modes: email and instant messaging. Google, of course, sees the value of organizing and search-izing every single communication, regardless of formality or mode of sending, and so the Chat feature which now appears in your Gmail sidebar will enable you to keep these many thoughts collected.

Googlist has mixed feelings about the cohabitation. Strongly mixed sentiments actually. The greatest excitement is the idea of searching "Ned" and having everything Ned has ever said, whether it be "lol" or the emailed photos from his Botswanan vacation available for perusal in less than a second. Then there's "The Privacy Issue." The debate most people are having now is whether or not to grant Gmail the ability to record these chats in their email. Googlist points out two things in saying this will soon be an irrelevant concern:

1) The ability to save conversations within Google Talk will very soon be fully functionalized such that users of just that program can have a fully logged album of mesages. This is nearly promised with Google's mention in the Chats feature that chatting within Gmail will be available shortly.

2) The password schemes used to access Gmail and Google Talk are the same for a given email address. So there is no way, outside of creating an account like hellogooglist48390089023@gmail.com, to prevent access to saved Google Talk messages from users who have hacked the Gmail account (once feature #1 has been fully realized).

So, for the most part, the mashup isn't really going to be the privacy concern we think it is. Googlist recommends getting yourself an alias email account for Google Talk if you are concerned about privacy so much that you do not wish to enact the Chats feature in Gmail. Because without that safeguard, the douche that knows your email password is the same douche who can chat online as you and read all your online conversations. Soon, anyway.

Update: As soon as I posted this, the Gmailers updated their login page with a message about the new "Chats" feature. Sounds like Google Talk will be shoved aside to make way for a sort of communication one-sheet that combines email and chat in the same place. Forget the two apps, this is total amalgamation!

Google Trends is your personal Zeitgeist

2005-12-21T12:38:00.000-05:00

Deftly capitalizing on the hype and press of its release of the 2005 Zeitgeist yesterday, Google today sedately announced on its blog that it is providing a diluted version of these Zeitgeist stats for individual users. Log into your personal search in Google, then click Trends in the sidebar.

You can view your top queries and clicks as well as monthly, daily, and hourly search summaries. Top 3 searches for these increments are also available. There is also a feeble Amazonian mentioning of queries that people with similar searching habits have searched.

Clearly, my suspicions that I am an insomniacal Internet user are confirmed!

I was surprised to see that my top 2 searches are related to the MTA in NYC (subway and Metro-North schedules), which means I should probably bookmark those pages rather than search for them so frequently! I was a bit confused to see Six Apart as my "top site" as I rarely visit the domain. I do a great deal of publishing on Movable Type, however, so predict that this is the link. (Although none of my MT activity is redirected from a Google search or other aspect of the Google domain...) Strangely, I did not see the site that I use every day in my work mentioned anywhere in these lists, as if it's been discounted for being so incredibly pervasive in my activity. (Again, I don't often view that site as a direct link off of Google, so perhaps that is explanatory in some way as well...)

Disappointingly, these stats are still rather void of numerical usefulness. For instance, the top ten lists are not labeled as "top ten for the month" or "top ten for the day," so I have no relative idea of what these superlatives represent. I would also like to see my average number of hits on Google per day (just how many searches do I usually conduct) and the average amount of time I spend on the Google domain. I am left to assume that the numbers capping the bars on the graphs represent "number of searches," but I have no hint as to whether this accounts for multiple searches for the same term or dozens of hits on the search pages for a single term.

Interestingly, and as one might have suspected, Google has been collecting this information for nearly as long as it has offered personalized search (perhaps longer). Query information is available for review back to August (in my Trends summary, yours may be more or less inclusive).

Lastly, this is only useful so long as users are signed into their Google accounts during search activities. I sign in and out of several Google accounts per day (to check my Gmail addresses), and so my personalized search information is dispersed across several accounts and/or not recorded in the event that I have signed out of all of my accounts. I will give Google tremendous credit for giving me one of the most effective encouragements yet to remain logged into my Google account. These trends, as elemental as they are, still hold quite a bit of interest for me as a frequent searcher. I will definitely be revisiting and crossing my fingers for updated analysis. I'm hoping for a summary utility combining the ease of use of Site Meter and the query information of past years of the Google Zeitgeist.

Link to another searcher's revelations: "Things I've Learned from Google Trends" by Brian Vargas.

AOL deal means Google Talk synchs with AIM

2005-12-21T12:13:00.000-05:00

I've been avoiding discussing the AOL deal due to massive media coverage, but a recent Google press release has given me something to exclaim over. (One billion dollars was definitely something to exclaim over, but it was mostly just terrifying considering the purchase property was AOL.) Google announces a subtle detail in the Time Warner AOL + Google deal: the synchronization of Google Talk and AIM. The press release remains vague on the specifics of this link, stating only that one of the agreement's features is "Enabling Google Talk and AIM instant messaging users to communicate with each other, provided certain conditions are met."

So what are these conditions? My first estimation is that in order to synchronize with Google Talk, the user must also be a paying AOL subscriber (or at least an AIM subscrber). Alternatively, the condition may be an acceptance of AOL-provided or targeted advertising on the Google Talk interface.

While I am leery of the necessary conditions for synchronization, I am hopeful that this could be a step toward creating Google's version of a Trillian application--the messaging client that combines the features and accessibility of multiple programs.

"Yahoo! poaching Google users?"

2005-12-20T23:58:00.000-05:00

Firefox lets you choose your toolbar search engine by selecting from a list, but Google is pre-selected as your "first choice." Via a post on Digg, it looks like Yahoo is striking out at this defaulting and suggesting to any Firefox user who loads the Yahoo homepage: "Search with Yahoo! right from your browser." Screenshot of the offending rolldown layer below.

If you note, the layer is of course coded on the Yahoo homepage, but looks like a merging of grey and rounded-edge Firefox system design and the Yahoo purple. But the real question is, what on earth is that yellow jokester being stroked by a Mickey Mouse hand?

Including a popup on the Yahoo page is quite the giant step in Yahoo's attempt to reclaim search. I'm bowled over, frankly.

Google Modules gathers modules for the Google Homepage

2005-12-20T22:58:00.000-05:00

I earlier wrote about the Google Homepage API and mentioned its insufficiency of applicable modules. The honorable Philipp Lenssen (of Google Blogoscoped) and his associate Alex Ksikes have put together a gorgeous new listing of available modules--GoogleModules.com. The design is sleek and the interface intuitive, a simple download directory of currently available modules. An excellent response to Google's inability to add new modules to the module directory in a timely fashion. Gracias, Philipp and Alex.

Google releases Zeitgeist 2005

2005-12-20T21:44:00.000-05:00

Google has released the 2005 Zeitgeist, and it is a splashy summarization of the year's top search trends. With new graphs, paragraph reviews, and tabbed title bars, Google has created more of a pamphlet than its typical list review. (This design style is in line with its recent design for new product introductions and support pages, see Google Analytics for another new mode of Google design.) The Googlist interprets this as a step toward legitimizing Google's information in the eyes of potential "customers." That is to say, Google may eventually package information and sell it in similarly niche packages for industries. But enough with that surmising on my part, let's get down to the rankings!

The first pieces of information are provided in easy list format with no supporting numbers given:

Top Gainers of 2005
It's no surprise that Myspace takes it all here. The lewd personal profile site has at times had more pageviews than any other web entity, even Google. Google's own orkut taking #5 in the Top Gainers category, however, seems highly inaccurate. But who are we to judge?

Top Google News Searches of 2005
Janet Jackson beats out Hurricane and Katrina to round out the top 3. But we already knew the world was superfluous and other-obsessed in all of the wrong ways. No surprise that the year's other top headliners Xbox 360, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, and Harry Potter file in below to create the top 10.

Top Froogle Searches of 2005
Unquestionably the ipod products and various digital camera and gaming devices fill the top 10. Awkwardly, however, "computer desk" has managed to slide in at #9--a feeble attempt at purchasing productivity in an otherwise entertainment dominated category.

Subsequent information is provided in an attractive line graph format comparing search terms across time. Although no Y-axis labels are provided, that metric is something similar to "# of searches per day" or "# of unique IP addresses querying the term per day." We really have no idea...

What we do know is that the Google web design team doesn't quite have their image alt tag thinking caps on. The mouseover tool tips for a lot of the graphs have erroneous tidbits:

Hah! Bizarre, on to the query roundups:

World Affairs
Google selects the London attacks, weapons of mass destruction, the Pope's death, Rove's CIA leak, and Rosa Parks as five news stories (notably Western in concern) exemplary of search spikes and trends. Expectedly, searches follow the passing of newsworthy current events with traffic increases as one might expect. Unexpectedly, I was surprised to see that in its news provider comparison, BBC searches outnumber CNN searches by nearly 50%. My estimation for this disparity is the dispersal of American news sources across a variety of trusted sites (NYT, MSNBC, etc.) while the BBC has managed to nearly monopolize the European news sector. Google's summary of ths section is a rather benign and uninteresting statement: "In tumultuous times, people turn to news sources to track events." Oh?

Nature
The Zeitgeist analysis here focuses on the hurricane and tsunami disasters with brief commentary on the avian flu. No comparisons to other current events are made, so it is unclear on what scale Google considers these searches to be notable. How did the term "Hurricane Rita," for example, compare to the earler discussed "weapons of mass destruction" in search popularity? We are left unsure.

Movies
It's a bit upsetting that our global culture finds so much searchable interest in movies that Google felt the necessity to create an entire category (following the natural disaster category just previously) to discuss the relevant trends. Summary from this section: "The Force" beats "The Dark Side" with triple the search interest, "Yoda" was more often searched than "Skywalker" (either Luke or Anakin), Harry Potter drew competing book and movie searches, Harry Potter terms beat out Lord of the Rings terms, and apparently March of the Penguins made quite the search splash. Clearly Zeitgeist writers found Star Wars to be the most interesting fodder.

Celebrities
Another fluff category, but validly so as the top gaining and top overall searches include numerous celebrities (so help us in our cultural recession). In sum: Britney is still the Internet's pop diva, Jennfer Aniston loses out to both Brad and Angelina in search popularity, Martha and the Donald duked it out for Apprentice prominence, and no one cares about Camilla Parker Bowles anymore (or Prince Charles).

Phenomena
Perhaps the most "timely" of the categories, showing how queries distinctive to this particular year fared in popularity. Conclusions: Black Friday is a purely seasonal interest, surfing beats skateboarding which just beats out snowboarding, this was the "Year of the Wiki" for Wikipedia but noticeably there was no true spike during the recent Wikipedia scandal, and podcast made a tiny showing while ipod and mp3 continued to sail steadily through the search field.

While I love piecing the year together through the Zeitgeist, I found Google's fluffy graph analyses to be misrepresentative. Axes were obviously not to scale across all graphs which would lead many readers to think that "Karl Rove" and "The Dark Side" were similar performers, when in fact let's hope for the sake of all too perfect irony that they were not.

Would love to see actual numbers on these, Google.

Update: Google HTMLers fixed the alt image tags so they now correspond to the graphs, rather than to pop culture phenomena Star Wars and Harry Potter...

Search is a form of intelligence

2005-12-19T11:29:00.000-05:00

Elizabeth Weise of USA Today suggests to us this morning (in an article with well-meaning but unsuccessful focus), that Google is replacing our long-term memory. Unfortunately, she spends much of the time sounding amazed that someone would think to search Google for a recipe or country capital before turning to a recipe book or encyclopedia. Despite her luddism, Weise does excite an argument that has increasingly frustrated my trust in the U.S. education system--it stems from her assertion that Internet users are more likely to quickly research the answer to a query than to retrieve it from or install it within their memories.

Throughout my schooling, I recall being tested nearly 100% of the time on how accutely I could recall a fact from memory. While I put myself to work memorizing for those tools of the teaching system, I always felt jaded in that an entire aspect of my intelligence was being shorted on what should have been high marks. It irked me that the kid with the mindless ability to replicate a piece of paper in his head after staring at it while studying for an hour would always win out over the student who could track down the same information and present it keenly within 2 minutes of being asked (using Google, a reference library, or any other compilation of sources).

There has always been an inherent bias toward rewarding replication, rote memorization, and what I often heard in the classes themselves, regurgitation. I even sat for "regurgitation quizzes." Never was I given what to me would be a more appropriate estimation of total understanding--a research test. How aptly can you wield the sources at hand and provide a holistic or detailed solution to this query? There is a significant level of fact relating, problem solving, and solution creation that takes place in the event of a layered search project. You may say "hey, that's a research paper, idiot!" but to that I say, then why is the focus of 75% of those exercises grammar and style? There's a place in our education system for encouraging and rewarding the ability to accumulate a base of knowledge, regardless of one's ability to correctly punctuate appositives. (This is not to denounce the importance of grammar. It is just to point out that the focus of other coursework should be more substantive than it currently is.) I've always thought that "resourcefulness" would be an excellent addition to the current categories of scholarship rewarded in education.

My hope is that Google's overwhelming revolution of the way students develop will eventually permeate the teaching side of education and bring us an entirely new style of learning. Let's hope that someday we're hearing our kids talk about their latest Google test! Maybe then these schools would be churning out real geniuses rather than fact-spewing idiots.

Switching to Gmail

2005-12-19T11:18:00.000-05:00

Not sure how long this Switching to Gmail page has been lurking in the Gmail support base, but Lifehacker exposed it today. And if this February 2005 study by ReturnPath continues to predict the switching, most users will be abandoning Hotmail in order to sign with Gmail. Similarly, I switched from Hotmail in the summer of 2004 when Gmail first surfaced and have since condensed my dozen superfluous email accounts from spurious providers into a trio of compartmentalized Gmail accounts. Gmail's providing this feature is almost more out of necessity than marketing (although of course, it's never far from the latter).

Opera CFO denies Google acquisition rumor

2005-12-15T14:01:00.000-05:00

Opera CFO Christian Jebsen has quashed the rumor that Google and Opera are in collusion talks. The rumor has doggedly persevered through blogs across the net, apparently having originated in ex-Yahoo Europe president Pierre Chappaz's blog. He writes, (translated from French), "According to a very well-informed source, Google is on the brink of purchasing the Opera browser." He accompanies it with a terrifying word assimilation: "operagle."

Considering that Google just announced new extensions for Firefox, that Google's search toolbar is integrated in the Firefox browser itself, and that Google is the default home page for Firefox, it's just absurd in my estimation that Google would trounce its high-profile relationship with Mozilla in order to purchase Opera. Much better to be a "hanger-on" for what is fast becoming the world's most adored Internet surf tool than to be the owner of a tech browser that most people outside of Slashdot have never heard of.

Thank you, Christian Jebsen, for humbly admitting that Google has no interest in acquiring the Opera organization. Also thank you, Joe Clark, for your honesty, "Google wants to get in bed with these people? I think not."

Gmail sends you on vacation

2005-12-15T13:16:00.000-05:00

The Googlist dreams of taking more vacations, but frankly, that's just delusional fantasy on my part. Instead, thanks to Google's introduction of Automatic Vacation Response for Gmail, I can now pretend to take vacations. The setup is simple, just go to Settings > General, and then merrily scroll down the page. Enter tantalizing descriptions of your destinations and stunts, then designate whether or not only Contacts should receive the message.

I'm thinking of just having this activated all the time with obnoxious quips about pig roasts in Fiji and the pressure of the altitude on my lungs in the Andes. Feel free to write and see what I'm up to.

In addition to free vacations, Gmail has also introduced a group email function. An excellent description of these new features is available here, which I found via Unofficial Google Blog.

Woot or Yahoo? Guess who's number one on Google?

2005-12-14T20:51:00.000-05:00

Who googles "Google"? Well, I'd have to say that plugging "Google" into its own search engine without any accompanying modifiers is not a search I do regularly. But today I did it (mostly to check on the number of hits, currently around 753 million). The Adsense bids in the accompanying right column, however, were the real folly--whoever googles "Google" is in for some mind games:

Woot, the one-awesome-product-a-day gadget store, seems to have nearly a 100% share voice on the AdWords keyword "Google." Their ad popped up effortlessly in Position 1 for all of my refreshes of the page. Their tagline is "Filthy rich? We'll help" which is quite the appropriate reference to Google's skyrocketing stock price and subsequent millionaire-creationism. Woot's cheeky ad strategy is confirmed when Woot again pops up in near-the-top positioning for searches of Google's stock ticker "GOOG" and again at Position 1 for the phrase "Google stock." ++Woot for its sly suggestiveness.

Close contenders for Position 2 in the "Google" keyword were proxyconn.com, dreamkitty.com, and submiturl.blogspot.com But only one site outranked the underlings in maintaining the highest share voice in Position 2. Who else but Yahoo? The perpetual Number Two.

Makes me wonder if Yahoo is somehow blocked from ever attaining Position 1, regardless of how much they bid for that slot in AdWords. I find it highly doubtful that Woot could maintain such an expensive campaign at 100% share voice as I'm guessing that the CPC for keyword "Google" is a far cry from the 5 cents minimum bid.

Google is not "the man"

2005-12-14T19:24:00.000-05:00

In case it wasn't already obvious that Google is an enormously successful corporation that doesn't consider itself anything of the sort, its bloggers report that Google is indeed something quite different than that faceless corporate figure: "the man." In suggesting a shortcut to customer service phone numbers for bureaucratic corporations, Google bloggers write "OK, here's a secret "the man" doesn't want you to know. Some companies have a toll-free number that's buried deep on their website -- but it would take like a thousand clicks to find it, and these days, who has the time? One way to get to it more quickly is to search Google for the company name and the phrase "customer support." Like this: TiVo Customer Support.

So I did the same search for a different large corporation: Google Customer Support.

I think I had to jump 6 or 8 pages in search results before finding anything useful for contacting Google. But in all fairness, the search results may be ironic but the information is easy to come by. Just 2 clicks from the Google homepage is physical and virtual contact information. I suppose the right message here, then, is that Google's customer service is the model of accessibility: it's so easy you don't need to search! Despite the irony, I continue to appreciate that the underwriting motto of all Google operations is transparency.

Now here's the Google phone number for your quick reference: 650-253-0000. Any reports out there on efforts to call this number?

Note: When I need such customer service numbers, I usually turn to this forum thread on Fat Wallet. Of course I found it through a Google search, long long ago.

Google takes a turn for TV with NOVA commercial

2005-12-14T00:13:00.000-05:00

Via ZDNet's Google blog, the first known Google TV commercial is attractive screen candy. The spot feels like a trip through the galaxy with a search field populating with "egyptology" and then panning video of pyramids. To further titillate the explorer in you, the search field then populates with "astronomy" and zooms into a starry space scene followed by a sedate image of the Google homepage and the search field populating with "NOVA."

I think it's easy to see that a NOVA sponsorship is an appropriate placement for Google and just happens to be a convenient way of making a baby step into capturing an audience from a new medium. Other similar comments are available in this discussion of the ad spots. NOVA targets well-educated and deep-pocketed middle-agers, and so a sponsorship by Google of this program is really just a way of pointing out to this audience sector that Google can bring them the same kind of exploration that NOVA does. If ever Google were to take that step of a first advertisement on a medium, then this is the way to do it: sleekly, responsibly, and with targeting that doesn't waste a dollar.

Google Homepage API takes on Yahoo Widgets (and Microsoft Gadgets)

2005-12-13T23:02:00.000-05:00

Borked by Yahoo's takeover and subsequent re-relase of Konfabulator as Yahoo Widgets, Google has had a bit of catching up to do in the user-customization area. Even Microsoft has had its Microsoft Gadgets without Google suggesting a competitor. Google has finally responded in its latest Google Blog post with the announcement of the Google Homepage API. (Yes, they've had customizability with Google Desktop, but that wasn't quite in the same vein as Widgets/Gadgets/Dashboard.)

On first glance, the Google offering seems shoddy. All that's currently available are a time module, an eyeball module, a Google maps weather module (which has been far outdone by individual Map mashers), and some useless other modules. Yahoo's (ex-Konfabulator) Widgets are the most useful things after Firefox extensions with search mods, GTD mods, MP3 mods, and any number of other useful widgets.

On second glance, the Google Homepage API release will probably mean extraordinary things in terms of developer response and eventually evolution of module capacity. For non-developers, if you're willing to sit on your hands for a bit, I bet we'll see some elegant little applications popping up in the module directory. So, developers get to work! For non-techies, Google suggests that you can start by making your own with the traditional first programming project's "Hello World" output.

A couple of other quick comparison notes: Google's modules are intended for inline rendering on the personalized Google homepage. Yahoo's are take-along desktop modules. Each has his own estimation of what's more convenient in the long run, so pick and choose as you will. But unless developers can move the Google modules off the homepage, then their usefulness is only as strong as users' desire to use the personalized Google homepage. Also, in terms of pure aesthetics, Yahoo's Widgets are based on Konfabulator's bubbly/chromey/machinistic styling while Google's concept here is its familiar "no design is good design." For GTDers, that simplicity might appeal more while for the younger video game crew, the Widgets will better suit. Next, Google takes a real loss here in the naming race. With Yahoo already squeezing out Widgets and Microsoft creating Gadgets, Google could have at least done "Mods" or "Gizmos" or found some other cute and familiar name for these things. This is an uncharacteristic naming misstep for Google, but one I think that was made out of necessity in order to keep from sounding like a Widget/Gadget wannabe (and also to make it seem more like a developer opportunity than an entertainment subcategory). On a positive note, Google wins in the accessibility category with Google modules open to users on all platforms--Yahoo's are open to users who take time to download their Widget app and MS Gadgets are only useful to surfers who like Windows-centric Live.com. Most people use Google independently of their operating system preference, so, ++Google in that regard.

It will be interesting to see how quickly Google's module directory will grow. The process for seeing a new module to completion is creation, submission to Google for review, and then hopefully approval and addition of the new module to the directory. No word on what qualifies as a good or useful module other than the coding requirements of robustness and security. If they can speed things up a bit better than Firefox's extensions gallery, then they've got a sure winner. My bet is that they have a couple dozen backloaded and ready to pop up in the directory at timed intervals over the next few weeks (in order to provide function while developers get their feet wet).

But, I for one, welcome our new Google API overlords. Here's to hoping some amazing tools surface as a result.

Does Alexa's Web Search Platform threaten Google?

2005-12-13T18:00:00.000-05:00

Richard MacManus astutely posits that the opening of Alexa's backend API to developers will probably have little to no effect on Google's share of the web. To remain competitive with the freedom allowed to Alexa developers, however, MacManus recommends that Google move toward loosening its API restrictions to developers. web2.0blog wonders what new tools the Alexa opportunity will inspire. And in a plea for adding usefulness rather than just a competing search applicance: "If you think that the service is just good for creating mini-search engines then you will probably fail in creating anything successful."

Speaking of Alexa v. Google, I use a Firefox extension called GooglePreview which places relevant website preview thumbnails provided by Alexa next to each Google result. While GooglePreview is nowhere near as powerful a solution as could be created by mining Alexa's new data resource, it certainly is an example of an instance in which Alexa's data could be tooled to create an apparatus ultimately more useful than Google's search. (This is not to say that Google couldn't quickly provide this thumbnail service itself, just pointing out a difference between the two resources.)

In sum, this should just fuel Google to produce "something better." What that something will be, and even what contenders Alexa's platform offers will be quite the exciting time in search development.

Update! A few hours after the Alexa announcement, the Official Google Blog had this to say: "Oh yeah? Well, build your own Google homepage." Pretty quick announcement (and not many apps to show for it) for the Google Homepage API and a very speedy (semi-response) to the increased developer capabilities recently announced by Alexa. The best app so far? "Eyes" that follow your mouse cursor around. Not that there's anything useful about that. Should be interesting to see where these "widgets" will go. (Yes, I just referenced Yahoo's new widgets. More on those in the next post...)

Gmail Manager Firefox extension for multiple Gmail accounts

2005-12-13T01:01:00.000-05:00

After the big upgrade to Firefox 1.5, we are all scrambling to update existing extensions and see what's new. I am quite pleased with the updated Gmail Manager 0.4, created by Todd Long.

I have several Gmail accounts and dislike logging in and out of each of them in order to view messages for every account. Gmail Manager takes that multiplicity of actions and streamlines them into an elegant notifier in the status bar. Clicking on the notifier looks something like this:

You can set Gmail Manager to automatically login to each account and create alerts for new mail such that one click on the notifier will give you a list of your accounts and the subsequent will open the inbox.

Happily, there are a good number of options to customize for Gmail Manager like exactly where you want to place the notifier and how it should respond when opening your Inbox:

Heavenly idea for an extension, thanks, Todd.

Find all unread messages in Gmail

2005-12-12T23:11:00.000-05:00

If you're like me, you probably have a few messages lurking in your Gmail Archive that you forgot to read. These are the wayward emails which you never read and never labelled. (All unread messages that are labelled are counted and listed next to each label.) The lefthand Gmail sidebar will not display the number of unread messages for All Mail, however, so you need some way of uncovering unlabelled, unread messages.

To uncover these hidden archived messages, simply search "is:unread" in the top Gmail search field.

You'll be presented with every single unread mail that is stored on your personal Gmail server. You can also perform this search by clicking "Show search options" to the right of the search field and selecting Unread Mail in the dropdown box on the next page. Then click search and you're again presented with all of your unread mail.

For a full list of Gmail operators, see Gmail's Advanced Search Operators.

How to mash with Google Maps

2005-12-12T21:49:00.000-05:00

The fun folks at Google Maps Mania just posted a neat collection of tutorials and tools for creating your own Google Maps. Includes a webcast for those of you who need auditory assistance as well.

Lastly, here's our favorite map from the GMM sidebar: Dig a hole to the other side of the Earth and find out where you'll surface.

Google Desktop adds del.icio.us plug-in

2005-12-12T19:54:00.000-05:00

Fresh from the official Inside Google Desktop blog, innocence marches on in the form of a new del.icio.us plug-in for Google Desktop that loads and sorts del.icio.us bookmarks. With Yahoo's recent acquisition of del.icio.us just days before, you would think that Google would silently boycott all Yahoo-owned projects rather than announce GTD tools for them through the official blog. But instead, Google is taking the "who gives a damn, we're gonna create the best damn net experience" approach to improving their projects. I applaud Google's damn-it-to-hell confidence in the face of direct competition!

It's interesting to note that Google's Stock Quote feature, which I wistfully discussed previously, redirects to a group of finance sites, the primary source being Yahoo Finance. Another instance of their upfrontness about the best information always trumping, regardless of its source.

Oh, and don't forget they have that really tongue-in-cheek yet unavoidably honest link on the Official Google Blog under "What We're Reading": Yahoo Search Blog.

Google Holiday Party 2005

2005-12-12T15:45:00.000-05:00

A friend of a friend of a friend of mine was a guest at a Google Holiday Party this year and reported it was an enchanting time. The theme? "Jetaway on a Google Holiday!" Revelers arrived at the Pier 48 complex and were greeted by Google AIR check-in desks. After checking-in and receiving boarding passes, guests were then "flown" around the world to places like London, Dublin, Sao Paulo, Tokyo, and Bombay. Apparently there was lots of world cuisine and random hired capoeira, karaoke, and dance entertainers.

The Googlist is a bit jealous of this "friend." Oh, and two more words: Open. Bar.

Photos of the bash are available here, here and here. Also blog posts here and here

Still waiting for Google Finance

2005-12-12T04:55:00.000-05:00

Because of its simplistic stock tracking, Yahoo Finance has managed to grab about 5% of my daily surfing time. Each day when I load the portal, I'm silently asking the question "When the heck will Google get on this Finance thing?" I would so love to use Google as my primary financial research tool, simply because I know they would make it clean, speedy, and supported by customizable charts and RSS feeds. (Well, I would hope so, anyways.)

It's been months since the first big Google Finance rumor circulated the net as a result of insider speculation at SiliconBeat. Google has also had its own subtle Stock Quotes feature for nearly a year, which returns a basic chart and numbers for queries containing a stock quote.

How much longer will we have to wait for Google Finance? Oddly enough, my premonitions tell me it might have something to do with the much talked-up Google Wallet. Personal finance tracking at its most micro and macro levels (unless of course "Wallet" is Google's do-no-evil term for "Finance" meaning they would be the same project).

GOOG to join NASDAQ-100 stock index

2005-12-12T04:21:00.000-05:00

The NASDAQ Stock Market announced on Friday that Google will be added to the NASDAQ 100 on December 19, 2005. (Also included in this addition are Monster.com and Expedia.com.) The NASDAQ 100 (QQQQ) is comprised of the 100 largest non-tech companies (that are not finance companies). With Google stock having dropped regularly over the past week, this will be good news for GOOG shareholders. Why? Because the NASDAQ 100 index fund "is the most actively traded equity security listed in the United States" and its fund holders will be effectively forced to purchase Google stock when it joins the fund. This could send GOOG inching up a bit more than normal towards the latter half of the month. Congrats, Google!

Yahoo snags Six Apart hosting deal

2005-12-12T02:50:00.000-05:00

Reuters announces that Yahoo wants you to move your type over to its servers, and to do that they've created an exclusive deal with Six Apart's Movable Type to be their recommended small business host. Google's Blogger is primarily a personal blog tool, so the deal does not directly affect its bloggers. This bit of news reinforces, however, the earlier projection I made that Yahoo is eyeing the web's intelligent users as the necessary capital for building a net company on par with the perceived intellectual status of Google. MovableType is considered amongst bloggers and web publishers to be the premiere (though now being challenged by WordPress) professional publishing tool available.

More generally, it seems Yahoo's growth strategy as of late is to attach its name to successful web entities that are already in existence rather than attempt to copy them as new Yahoo projects. Seems smart in some senses, but not quite in line with Google's higher-brow vision of creating and innovating its products.

Cool Google Maps

2005-12-12T02:24:00.000-05:00

Yet another kid (see the Google Maps Mania) is scouring the net for every possible Google Maps mashup. He calls the resulting blog what else but Cool Google Maps. At first only useful for those days when nothing but a proximal Japanese castle or Velodrome cycling arena will do. But here are some gems from the archives:

Most useful Google Map: Craigslist Housing Map which seems like the most logical way of finding housing anyway.

Most terrifying Google Map: MySpace User Map each MySpace person on the map represents a zip code rather than a single profile, so be sure to scroll down when viewing a map detail.

Yahoo buys del.icio.us to capture smarter, richer Google users

2005-12-12T00:44:00.000-05:00

We've all heard it: Yahoo bought del.icio.us! Much more than the large-web-corp acquires independent-techie-user site, this acquisition is about recharacterizing Yahoo's public image. The Yahoo buy was actually a bid to slowly capture Google's more sophisticated user base.

Ironically though certainly not causally, the Yahoo.icio.us deal was sealed one day after Yahoo News itself aggregated an article headlined "Study: Google users wealthier, more Net savvy." The article made the blog rounds and was even Slashdotted. In it, researchers concluded that 52% of respondents chose Google as their search engine of choice, and that net users in this sector of the sample were more likely to make over $60,000 than in other sectors of the sample. We can all sit here and question the merits of the study or we can just fess up and admit that we all know that Googlers tend to be more information-driven and tech savvy which generally correlates to income and intelligence. This has been obvious to most of us for a long time.

Although the article seemed really late (and culturally unaware) in pronouncing Yahoo merely a tweenster rival to well-read, adult Google, it highlighted the distinction between the user bases at precisely the moment that Yahoo was fighting to lessen the gap. Its buyout of del.icio.us closed the deal: Yahoo is officially searching for smarter searchers. Yahoo's other recent acquisition, the social photo tagging/hosting service, Flickr, was an unmasked attempt to bolster its position in the schema of relevant internet applications. The one failure with Flickr is that all of the early-adopters and tech savvy users whom it hoped to capture with the deal had already been longtime Flickr users and therefore were not forced to create Yahoo accounts in order to use the application. Regardless, it was a step in the right direction for the company in perpetual adolescence.

The silly thing in all of this is that while del.icio.us has always been lauded for its easy to wield technology, the buyout had nothing to do with acquiring a technology. And for that reason, I anticipate that Google has, somewhere down the line, plans to integrate a bookmarking/linking system into one of its existing applications. Perhaps somewhere in the personalized Google search or Gmail, even.

For now, though, Yahoo users can still pine for their 21st birthdays, as they're nowhere near having drinks with the big boys (who just happen to have bigger brains and fatter wallets).

Snapshots in Google history 1999

2005-12-11T22:47:00.000-05:00

Tracing Google circa 1999 with primary source assistance from the Internet Archive.

December 2, 1998 finds the unlikely startup in a yucky teal phase that barely lasts a few months. It's entirely too hideous to like at, but it does offer some promising features. Immediately from inception, the simple formula of a centered logo and search box are native components to the Google flagship. Also foreshadowed here is Google's University Search (Stanford, anyone?) and what is today's Google Friends Newsletter (for which the rudimentary April 1998 issue is still available). And not that anybody is sad that this is gone, but here's some of that last vestige of Google's original exclamation mark logo. But they, unlike Yahoo, would eventually kick that late 90's Internet hype in the balls with a play for real users and serious money.

April 28, 1999. finds Google wiser and less turquoise. This is the Google, that will always be the search home page's archetype. Everything you need is here: centered logo and search field, one search button, one lucky button, an enticing link to more features, and the requisite copyright statement. All else will just be fluff, well, except for all that useful stuff that eventually comes along like Image searching... but you get the idea. Google admits that this fat beta logo was a mistake, but it sure is fun to see it in place. All retrofitted and exclamatized. Terrifying, but not as terrifying as it could have been. (For some reason, Internet Archive can load this logo image for a split second before returning an image not found blank field. I sat here for 7 minutes trying to capture it with Alt + Print Screen, and finally succeeded.)

November 29, 1999 says hello new logo! A crisp new serif font (Catull) is in place along with enterprising new links for Jobs and corporate info. We even see that Google has won a PC Mag award! Hooray! It's just the beginning of a half-decade of ruling the world. But the real hottness will be when the G kids get it together and shove that logo back to the center again. Left-leaning media? They won't admit to it!

G-Write : one click to compose in Gmail

2005-12-11T21:41:00.000-05:00

G-Write is a click-to-compose tool for Firefox and Gmail users. It's basically a dumbed down version of G-Link that quickly opens a blank message in Gmail, ready to be composed and sent to whomever you wish.

To get started, simply drag the link below onto your Firefox bookmark toolbar.

G-Write

Note that you can also use G-Write to start composing a draft and save it for later like you would in the regular Gmail interface. Great for on the spot thoughts that don't yet merit full emails.

G-Link : send quick bookmarks to your Gmail

2005-12-11T20:54:00.000-05:00

There are a variety of shortcuts to using Gmail for bookmarks, but G-Link, which creates a bookmarklet in Firefox, is how the Googlist does it.

It's a personalized version of the GmailThis! bookmarklet, made even more useful by this post on Lifehacker. (This is for Firefoxlings only, kids!) For this to be useful, just make sure you're always logged into Gmail under your own email address (otherwise you have to login every time to create a bookmark). To install G-Link yourself, simply drag the link below onto your Firefox toolbar.

G-Link

Next, right-click on the G-Link bookmark you just created and select Properties. Cursor across the location field until you find HEYDUDE@gmail.com and replace with your own Gmail address. This autofills your address in the To: field for every bookmark you send. Now all that's left is customizing Gmail.

Open up that sucker and create a new label called "G-Link." Then create a filter for all email that meets these criteria: from your email, to your email, has "G-Link" in the subject.

Then tell Gmail to let all those emails skip the Inbox and go straight to your G-Links label.

Now you're ready to see G-Link in action! Simply find a bookmark-worthy page while browsing in Firefox. Select any interesting text if you like by highlighting with your cursor, and then press the G-Link button on your toolbar. A window will open up addressed to your own email with the title and subject fields populated with the page title, link, and any text you selected. Press send and the temporary window flies away. The next time you open Gmail, you can click on your G-Links label and find your new bookmark!

Simple, fun, G-Linking. (Also see my other personalized Gmail tool, G-Write.)

Choosing the Googlist name

2005-12-11T19:33:00.000-05:00

Things to consider when naming a blog are

Is the identical domain name available as a .com? Secondarily, as a .org or .net?

Is it short enough or cute enough to be memorable?

Is it spelled how it sounds and is it easy to spell?

How sexy does it look in your favorite fonts?

Etcetera. In the process of sifting through name prospects, I for awhile relished the idea of Googlish. "Google-like, similar to Google, encrusted in the ancient odors of Google." It just sort of sounded cool. Plus it was cute, memorable, phonetic, and all of those other optimal attributes.

But sadly, the domain name had been wrested from my grasp.

Even more tragically, Googlish.com was about balloon hats:

Creating the Googlist Logo

2005-12-11T18:30:00.000-05:00

Google's font (having been chosen before G would understand the value of branding exclusivity) is publicly available as Catull for $99 or for free, depending on your scruples. Not one to brandish either a wallet or questionable morals, I opted for Googlefor--a site that obediently creates Google search portals complete with personalized Google-fonticized logos.

(Quick Technorati and Google searches revealed that the link hadn't been well distributed yet, hence why my Googleified webhabits hadn't yet discovered it. It had really just popped up in some self-links from its founder, primarily on Digg and some relevant blog trackbacks. Also, it's not to be confused with the less well-executed Logogle. Anyways...)

So, I promptly put Googlefor to work. "Make me a Googlist logo!" I commanded. And it worked its magic:

"Agreeable," I said, "even impressive." But the bot had mixed the colors up. The traditional Google logo is blue-red-yellow-blue-green-red. So I instructed Googlefor to make me some additional letters so that I might edit the logo into sublimation:

"Super!" I stroked my editing skills. Now for some thinking. The thing looked like a damn Kinko's experiment, a regular copy (not that I had qualms about that in any other area of this site.) So, I wittily employed a color trick! I greyed out the -ist, thinking I could say that Googlist is a detached source of news and analysis on a colorful entity. Yes, the logo would even have intelligent design! All that was left was slapping on "Blog" in Google's favorite sans-serif font, resizing appropriately, and popping out the logo baby:

Thus was Googlist released upon the world.