Keeping kids safe in a digital world
In the spirit of National Internet Safety Month, we welcomed Ernie Allen, co-founder and president of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) to the Googleplex last week to discuss child protection issues.
For those not familiar with it, NCMEC works closely with federal law enforcement across the U.S. to help prevent child abduction and sexual exploitation and to help find missing children. From serving as the clearinghouse for reports of online child pornography to issuing Amber Alerts when children go missing to reuniting families in the wake of Katrina, NCMEC is at the forefront of efforts to protect society's most vulnerable members.
In a policy talk called "Beyond Milk Cartons: Keeping kids safe in a digital world", Ernie provided an overview of NCMEC's work and chatted with Googlers about the ever-changing landscape of child protection challenges shared by parents, educators, advocacy organizations, and technology companies like Google as we work to help families make smart choices online. Watch Ernie's talk on YouTube.
Technology is an invaluable tool for addressing some of these challenges. In a recent example, a team of Google engineers dedicated their 20 percent time over the last year and a half to build cutting-edge software for NCMEC that uses image and video recognition technology to help NCMEC analysts more effectively sort and review incoming reports of child exploitation. NCMEC analysts sort through tens of millions of images in child sexual abuse investigations, and we've tried to leverage our expertise in organizing huge amounts of data to help make their important work more automated and efficient.
When it comes to keeping kids safe on the Internet, we believe that education for families, support for law enforcement, and empowering technology tools, like our SafeSearch filter and the NCMEC software, are all critical pieces of the puzzle.
Tackling online child safety issues is no small task, but we'll continue our collaboration with organizations like NCMEC, along with other partners in schools, government and industry, to take collective strides in the right direction.
Chat on your iPhone
Leo Dirac,
Product Manager
by Brian Hutchins (noreply@blogger.com) at July 02, 2008 05:02 PM
Wrapup: Google Developer Days and Google I/O
May and June were exciting months for our developer team. Not only is it the start of summer in the Bay Area, but also the start of Google I/O and Google Developer Days around the world. Many of the team dispersed to various parts of the globe to meet with developers. Here's a quick recap of where we've been, and where we're heading.
San Francisco, May 28-29
We started the summer with Google I/O. This two-day conference was our biggest developer gathering to date. While we'd love for every single software developer to come to these events, we realize that isn't possible. So we've recorded as many of the sessions as we could and made them available online. We've posted videos and presentations more than 70 sessions for you to view.
Yokohama, June 10
Shortly after Google I/O, we kicked off our 2008 Google Developer Days. The first stop was Yokohama, Japan. Andy Rubin and Takuya Oikawa started the day before 1100 developers, highlighting the Android user interface, the Earth API's 3D graphics, and announcing Japan's new Google Developer API Expert program. Videos and sessions are now available.
Beijing, June 12
Two days later, Marissa Mayer and Kai-Fu Lee opened Developer Day in Beijing for more than 2,000 developers, highlighting the effort between Google and local developer communities to collectively make the web better as a platform. Notably, we welcomed several new Chinese networks to the OpenSocial community, including 51.com, 51wan.com, Douban.com, Hainei.com, Tianji.com, Xiaonei.com, and YiQi.com. These networks join a few others that have already launched in China, including MySpace.cn and Tianya.cn, as well as CityIN.com, which has shipped a sandbox for developers. Beijing videos and sessions are here.
Taipei, June 14
Next on the schedule was Taipei's first Google Developer Day, with 900 developers. In the developer showcase, we invited three developers to demonstrate web applications they'd built using Google APIs: Wei-chih Chiang, a student of Yi Shou University and his Photo Note site, Jun-Chieh Huang, founder of ischool, a website that integrates Google services for elementary and high schools in Taiwan, and FunP, a social website integrating OpenSocial features. Here are the Taipei videos and sessions.
Sydney, June 18
Rounding out the Asia-Pacific Developer Days was an intimate group of 450 developers in Sydney right by scenic Darling Harbor. In addition to folks from Google, we were excited to have Daniel Reyes, Head of Engineering from MySpace AU, stop by to share his team's work with Gears. Also of note were six local developers who showcased their app at our speedgeeking contest: contest winners Casey and Dan Russell of CleanCruising, Nick Lothian of Scootle, Ken Hoetmer of Quikmaps, Tom Horn of the Patrick O'Brien Mapping Project, Tak Tran with the Collaborative Autobiography site, and Tim Savage with the SEQ Brisbane Water Levels gadget.
Mexico City, June 23
John Farrell and Alfonso Luna opened our first Developer Day in Mexico City. 500 enthusiastic developers joined us from all over Central and South America, with a crowd of them gathering as early as 6am, well ahead of the 9am start time. Check out sessions.
Sao Paulo, June 27
Alexandre Hohagen and Paulo Golgher welcomed 750 developers to Developer Day in Sao Paulo, the largest event in Google Brazil's history. The crowd was especially excited to hear Eduardo Thuler's announcement of orkut's upcoming support of OpenSocial in Brazil.
Our Developer Days don't stop there, though. After a summer break, look for the team to hit the road again, including a new date in Bangalore.
- September 16 - London, England
- September 18 - Paris, France
- September 23 - Munich, Germany
- September 25 - Madrid, Spain
- October 11 - Bangalore, India
- October 21 - Milan, Italy
- October 24 - Prague, Czech Republic
- October 28 - Moscow, Russia
Traffic Estimator Service Explained
As you could imagine, Google has a lot of historical data about keywords and the traffic they generate. Harnessing this data can give you a helpful starting point when you're trying to choose cost-per-click (CPC) bid ranges and keywords for a new product, for which you have no historical keyword or bid data in your own account.
AdWords API users can access our trove of historical keyword and bid data via the Traffic Estimator Service, which gives detailed estimates of how much traffic a keyword may generate at various CPC values. The service is not only useful for new products or campaigns, but it can also estimate the impact of changing the Max CPC of existing keywords as well.
Let's say you'd like estimates for keywords in a new campaign. Below are some tips on deciding whether estimateKeywordList() or estimateCampaignList() is right for you. These two methods are similar, but vary in how much control you have to configure campaign settings when requesting estimates.
<keywordRequests>
<maxCpc>1000000</maxCpc>
<text>sample</text>
<type>Broad</type>
</keywordRequests>
</estimateKeywordList>
However, it's important to understand the assumptions that are factored into that estimate, because they might not match the settings you'd like for your campaign. This method assumes that the network targeting of the hypothetical campaign is GoogleSearch, which means ads run only on Google search result pages. (Read more information on network targeting here.) Also assumed in the keyword estimates are a language targeting of 'English' (language code en) and a location targeting of 'All Countries and Territories'.
The implicit Google search network and English language targeting mean that you'll often get much lower estimates from estimateKeywordList() than you would expect--and sometimes, especially for non-English keywords, you won't get any meaningful results at all.
<campaignRequests>
<adGroupRequests>
<keywordRequests>
<text>sample</text>
<type>Broad</type>
</keywordRequests>
<maxCpc>1000000</maxCpc>
</adGroupRequests>
<networkTargeting>
<networkTypes>GoogleSearch</networkTypes>
</networkTargeting>
<languageTargeting>en</languageTargeting>
<geoTargeting>
<targetAll>true</targetAll>
</geoTargeting>
</campaignRequests>
</estimateCampaignList>
To expand on that basic example, let's say you're thinking of running a campaign that targets users in Mexico and Spain who speak Spanish. You'd like to run this campaign with both SearchNetwork and ContentNetwork targeting. A request that takes those constraints into account and provides an estimate for the Broad-matched keyword muestra with a Max CPC of 1,000,000 micros would look like the following:
<campaignRequests>
<adGroupRequests>
<keywordRequests>
<text>muestra</text>
<type>Broad</type>
</keywordRequests>
<maxCpc>1000000</maxCpc>
</adGroupRequests>
<networkTargeting>
<networkTypes>SearchNetwork</networkTypes>
<networkTypes>ContentNetwork</networkTypes>
</networkTargeting>
<languageTargeting>es</languageTargeting>
<geoTargeting>
<countryTargets>
<countries>MX</countries>
<countries>ES</countries>
</countryTargets>
</geoTargeting>
</campaignRequests>
</estimateCampaignList>
The estimates this request returns will likely be different from the results of a generic estimateKeywordList() call, and they'll be more accurate for your given scenario.
Estimating keyword traffic and CPC bids isn't an exact science, but if you use the right method of the TrafficEstimatorService, you'll often get valuable information that can help you plan your new campaigns. And although using estimateCampaignList() requires a bit more configuration than the more straightforward estimateKeywordList(), the extra effort is a worthwhile trade-off for the increased flexibility and accuracy when working with campaigns that have non-default settings.
--Jeffrey Posnick, AdWords API Team
by AdWords API Team (noreply@blogger.com) at July 02, 2008 12:33 PM
Even More Hot Videos
Justin Donnelly, Software Engineer
The "Hot videos" section of the Google Video homepage offers up the web's most popular videos, determined by how often they're being watched, shared and blogged about across the Web. If, like me, you think this feature is awesome, you'll love our latest update. Now, instead of only 12 hot videos, there are over a hundred available by clicking on the new pagination buttons on the upper right corner of the "Hot videos" section. Just like our TV view, the video you're currently watching isn't interrupted as you browse through the pages.
Note that these videos are updated throughout the day and are specific to your country. (Wondering what's hot in the Low Countries? Try our Dutch site: http://video.google.nl/.) This expanded view of what's hot can reveal a lot about what's going on in online video. For example, when Weezer released their "Pork and Beans" video recently, nearly every "celebrity" featured in the video appeared in the expanded list within the next couple of days.
Give it a try- You're sure to find something here to entertain you.
Requesting reconsideration using Google Webmaster Tools
by Mariya Moeva (noreply@blogger.com) at July 02, 2008 10:34 AM
We are retiring the pay-per-action beta
As part of Google's integration of DoubleClick, the DoubleClick Performics Affiliate network is now part of Google. To consolidate our offerings, we will be phasing out the AdWords pay-per-action beta in the last week of August 2008. As an alternative to pay-per-action advertising, Google offers two products that allow you to manage your advertising on a CPA (cost-per-acquisition) basis: the Conversion Optimizer and the Google Affiliate Network.
The Conversion Optimizer is an AdWords bidding feature that lets you specify a maximum CPA goal for ads on the Google search and content networks. It uses historical information about your campaign to automatically adjust your CPC bid for each auction to help you meet your CPA goal. In addition, the Conversion Optimizer is now supported in both the AdWords Editor and the AdWords API. You can learn more on the Conversion Optimizer homepage.
The Google Affiliate Network, previously known as DoubleClick Performics Affiliate, has been in operation since 1998. Through the network, advertisers can open their ads to all publishers in the network, or select specific publishers that match their criteria. You can set a CPA for your entire campaign or establish custom payment schedules for specific publishers -- such as a higher CPA for a particularly optimal placement. The Google Affiliate Network is currently a separate product from AdWords and AdSense. As with AdSense, publishers must apply and be accepted into the network.
If you're interested in learning more about the Google Affiliate Network, please visit our website.
by Inside AdWords crew (noreply@blogger.com) at July 01, 2008 03:31 PM
Announcing Google's official traditional media blog
About a month ago, we gave you a quick overview of Google's offline advertising offerings: TV, Print, and Audio Ads -- all of which fall under the umbrella of what we call 'traditional media'. Today, we're pleased to announce that the TV, Print, and Audio Ads teams have launched Let's Take it Offline, the official blog to help you get the most out of your offline ad campaigns. Our traditional media blog will keep you up-to-date on the latest feature launches, product updates, tips, and industry findings.
We hope you'll visit the new blog regularly to learn more and stay abreast of our offline advertising products.
by Inside AdWords crew (noreply@blogger.com) at July 01, 2008 03:21 PM
Google Apps continues to build in Europe
With Google Apps nearing the venerable age of 17 months, we have already seen more than 500,000 organizations adopt Apps as part of their business, with another 3,000 signing up every day. Many of those customers are small- and medium-sized businesses, but more and more large enterprises are also opting for the cost savings and greater flexibility that cloud computing offers.
A good example is Taylor Woodrow, a UK-based construction, facilities management and engineering company that has just moved all its employees onto Google Apps Premier Edition. Their 1,800 users can now collaborate from offices, construction sites, and client premises across the UK and Benelux. Not only has it brought greater mobility and flexibility to everyone, but Taylor Woodrow's director of IT estimates he's saved £1 million in the process. Read more on the Google Enterprise Blog.
Taylor Woodrow Migrates 1,800 Users to Google Apps
Every day more than 3,000 businesses sign up for Google Apps and move to the cloud, and today we'd like to share one of those stories. Taylor Woodrow is a construction firm in the UK that recently migrated all of its 1,800 employees to Google Apps to introduce greater mobility and flexibility to the company's communications.
Rob Ramsay, the company's Director of IT, says that Google Apps offered the perfect package: “Many of our staff are highly mobile. The ability to provide them with access on the move to email, documents, spreadsheets, and everything else that comes with Google Apps will help increase productivity.”
Taylor Woodrow’s needs are not unique to its particular business. Rob could be talking about the needs of tens of thousands of other companies when he notes that “Our employees can now get in touch with their colleagues easily from whatever location they are working at. The mobility coupled with the speed of roll-out, the lack of requirement for a physical infrastructure and the speed of new product development is very beneficial.”
Finances also came into play in their decision to move to Google Apps. Taylor Woodrow estimates that they are saving approximately £1 million on infrastructure and support costs. The products are all hosted and managed by Google, which removed the need to install any software or hardware on site.
And since no construction company can build without worrying about safety and security, it makes sense that Taylor Woodrow is also deploying Google Message Discovery, which provides email security, content policy management, discovery, and archiving services to ensure that employee email is properly protected and retained.
We’re very happy that another large enterprise like Taylor Woodrow has decided to use Google Apps as a foundation of their business, and we’re excited to continue to help businesses of all sizes build their future in the cloud.
by GooglePR2 (noreply@blogger.com) at July 01, 2008 12:22 AM
Improved Flash indexing
We've received numerous requests to improve our indexing of Adobe Flash files. Today, Ron Adler and Janis Stipins—software engineers on our indexing team—will provide us with more in-depth information about our recent announcement that we've greatly improved our ability to index Flash.
Q: Which Flash files can Google better index now?
We've improved our ability to index textual content in SWF files of all kinds. This includes Flash "gadgets" such as buttons or menus, self-contained Flash websites, and everything in between.
Q: What content can Google better index from these Flash files?
All of the text that users can see as they interact with your Flash file. If your website contains Flash, the textual content in your Flash files can be used when Google generates a snippet for your website. Also, the words that appear in your Flash files can be used to match query terms in Google searches.
In addition to finding and indexing the textual content in Flash files, we're also discovering URLs that appear in Flash files, and feeding them into our crawling pipeline—just like we do with URLs that appear in non-Flash webpages. For example, if your Flash application contains links to pages inside your website, Google may now be better able to discover and crawl more of your website.
Q: What about non-textual content, such as images?
At present, we are only discovering and indexing textual content in Flash files. If your Flash files only include images, we will not recognize or index any text that may appear in those images. Similarly, we do not generate any anchor text for Flash buttons which target some URL, but which have no associated text.
Also note that we do not index FLV files, such as the videos that play on YouTube, because these files contain no text elements.
Q: How does Google "see" the contents of a Flash file?
We've developed an algorithm that explores Flash files in the same way that a person would, by clicking buttons, entering input, and so on. Our algorithm remembers all of the text that it encounters along the way, and that content is then available to be indexed. We can't tell you all of the proprietary details, but we can tell you that the algorithm's effectiveness was improved by utilizing Adobe's new Searchable SWF library.
Q: What do I need to do to get Google to index the text in my Flash files?
Basically, you don't need to do anything. The improvements that we have made do not require any special action on the part of web designers or webmasters. If you have Flash content on your website, we will automatically begin to index it, up to the limits of our current technical ability (see next question).
That said, you should be aware that Google is now able to see the text that appears to visitors of your website. If you prefer Google to ignore your less informative content, such as a "copyright" or "loading" message, consider replacing the text within an image, which will make it effectively invisible to us.
Q: What are the current technical limitations of Google's ability to index Flash?
There are three main limitations at present, and we are already working on resolving them:
1. Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. So if your web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file, in which case it will not be indexed.
2. We currently do not attach content from external resources that are loaded by your Flash files. If your Flash file loads an HTML file, an XML file, another SWF file, etc., Google will separately index that resource, but it will not yet be considered to be part of the content in your Flash file.
3. While we are able to index Flash in almost all of the languages found on the web, currently there are difficulties with Flash content written in bidirectional languages. Until this is fixed, we will be unable to index Hebrew language or Arabic language content from Flash files.
We're already making progress on these issues, so stay tuned!
by A Googler (noreply@blogger.com) at June 30, 2008 10:16 PM
Google learns to crawl Flash
Google has been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files of all kinds, from Flash menus, buttons and banners, to self-contained Flash websites. Recently, we've improved the performance of this Flash indexing algorithm by integrating Adobe's Flash Player technology.
In the past, web designers faced challenges if they chose to develop a site in Flash because the content they included was not indexable by search engines. They needed to make extra effort to ensure that their content was also presented in another way that search engines could find.
Now that we've launched our Flash indexing algorithm, web designers can expect improved visibility of their published Flash content, and you can expect to see better search results and snippets. There's more info on the Webmaster Central blog about the Searchable SWF integration.
by A Googler (noreply@blogger.com) at June 30, 2008 09:32 PM
Making it better
Over the summer solstice weekend, Seattle/Kirkland Googlers posed this question to people attending the Fremont Fair: "How would you make our world, or our city, better?" The goal of the Fremont Fair "Make it Better" Project was to engage the Seattle community in an active discussion around improving our world. This is the second year we've partnered with Solid Ground to participate in the fair, a free event organized by The Workshop to benefit local efforts to address homelessness, hunger and racism. Check out the video responses to our question that were just posted on the Solid Ground YouTube channel.
Whether it's about ending poverty, improving equal access to education or any of the myriad of other challenges our world faces, we want to use our technology to stimulate creative discussion about the ideas that are important to Seattle-area citizens and to local Googlers.
by A Googler (noreply@blogger.com) at June 30, 2008 05:42 PM
We're retiring AdSense Referrals
We're constantly looking for ways to improve AdSense by developing and supporting features which drive the best monetization results for our publishers. Sometimes, this requires retiring existing features so we can focus our efforts on the ones that will be most effective in the long term. For this reason, we will be retiring the AdSense Referrals program during the last week of August. We appreciate your patience during this transition and here are some alternative options to consider:
- Google Affiliate Network: As part of the integration of DoubleClick, the DoubleClick Performics Affiliate Network will now operate as the Google Affiliate Network for advertisers targeting users located in the United States. Similar to the AdSense Referrals program, the Google Affiliate Network enables publishers to apply for advertiser programs and get paid based on advertiser-defined actions instead of clicks or impressions. For further details, please visit: http://www.google.com/ads/affiliatenetwork/.
- AdSense for content ads: If you have less than three AdSense for content ad units on a page, you may wish to replace the referral ad units with standard AdSense for content ad units.
- Remove the referral code from your site(s): Please take a moment to remove all referral code from your sites before the last week of August, so you can continue to effectively monetize your ad space.
- Run and save all referrals reports on your desktop: Create and save all reports related to the referrals program on your desktop, so you continue to have access to your valuable campaign information.
by Inside AdSense Team (noreply@blogger.com) at June 30, 2008 04:41 PM
Featured gadget: Olympics Countdown Gadget
Posted by Kathy Walrath, Technical Writer
Name: Olympics Countdown Gadget
Author: Kamal Singh
Description: Can't wait for the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games? Then the Olympics Countdown Gadget is right for you.
More information | Download gadget
Each week this blog features a recently added Google Desktop gadget that looks promising. If you'd like to see all new Desktop gadgets as they're published, subscribe to the RSS feed.
by Kathy Walrath [GD Team] (noreply@blogger.com) at June 30, 2008 02:47 PM
What are your SEO recommendations?
You may have noticed that we recently rewrote our article on What is an SEO? Does Google recommend them? Previously, the article had focused on warning people about common SEO scams to look out for, but didn't mention many of the valuable services that a helpful SEO can provide.
The article now notes some of the benefits of search engine optimization, and provides some guidance to site owners who are considering hiring an SEO. We'd also like to get your perspective: how would you define SEO? What questions would you ask a prospective SEO? What advice would you give to an inexperienced webmaster who's considering whether to contract an SEO? We'd like to hear your thoughts and incorporate your feedback if there's important advice that we should add.
by Susan Moskwa (noreply@blogger.com) at June 30, 2008 12:32 PM
I got married... with Google
We love hearing stories about how our products help people, and let's face it -- weddings are one time when help is needed. For many couples, planning a wedding can be an organizational nightmare. But for David and Bergin Boyle, the planning turned into a fun experiment on the web.
The Boyles used Google Calendar to pick a wedding date that fit both of their schedules. They created to-do and RSVP lists with Google Docs and shared them with their relatives and friends. And they created a site containing the wedding details for their guests, complete with a personalized Google Map featuring the local Stonington, Conn., sights as well as places of note in the surrounding metropolitan areas.
As a result, David reports he was undaunted by the planning process. And with the help of Blogger's "future-dated posts" feature, the couple was able to post their wedding story on the groom's blog at the same time that they strolled down the aisle. Here's the full story in their own words. Our best wishes to the Boyles!
by A Googler (noreply@blogger.com) at June 28, 2008 04:04 PM
Using data to fight webspam
This post is the latest in an ongoing series about how we harness the data we collect to improve our products and services for our users. - Ed.
As the head of the webspam team at Google, I'm in charge of making sure your search results are as relevant and informative as possible. Webspam, in case you've never heard of it, is the junk you see in search results when websites successfully cheat their way into higher positions in search results or otherwise violate search engine quality guidelines. If you've never seen webspam, here's a good example of what you might see if you click on a link in the search results that's spam (click on the image to see it larger).
Searchers don't often see blatant, outright spam like this in search results today. But webspam was much more of an issue before Google became popular and before we were able to build effective anti-spam methods. In general, webspam can be a real annoyance, such as when a search on your own name returns links to porn pages as results. But for many searches, where getting relevant information is more critical, spam is a serious problem. For example, a search for prostate cancer that's full of spam instead of relevant links greatly diminishes the value of a search engine as a helpful tool.
Data from search logs is one tool we use to fight webspam and return cleaner and more relevant results. Logs data such as IP address and cookie information make it possible to create and use metrics that measure the different aspects of our search quality (such as index size and coverage, results "freshness," and spam).
Whenever we create a new metric, it's essential to be able to go over our logs data and compute new spam metrics using previous queries or results. We use our search logs to go "back in time" and see how well Google did on queries from months before. When we create a metric that measures a new type of spam more accurately, we not only start tracking our spam success going forward, but we also use logs data to see how we were doing on that type of spam in previous months and years.
The IP and cookie information is important for helping us apply this method only to searches that are from legitimate users as opposed to those that were generated by bots and other false searches. For example, if a bot sends the same queries to Google over and over again, those queries should really be discarded before we measure how much spam our users see. All of this--log data, IP addresses, and cookie information--makes your search results cleaner and more relevant.
If you think webspam is a solved problem, think again. Last year Google faced a rash of webspam on Chinese domains in our index. Some spammers were purchasing large amounts of cheap .cn domains and stuffing them with misspellings and porn phrases. Savvy users may remember reading a few blogs about it, but most regular users never even noticed. The reason that a typical searcher didn't notice the odd results is that Google identified the .cn spam and responded with a fast-tracked engineering project to counteract that type of spam attack. Without our logs data to help identify the speed and scope of the problem, many more Google users might have been affected by this attack.
In an ideal world, the vast majority of our users wouldn't even need to know that Google has a webspam team. If we do our job well, you may see low-quality results from time to time, but you won't have to face sneaky JavaScript redirects, unwanted porn, gibberish-stuffed pages or other types of webspam. Our logs data helps ensure that Google detects and has a chance to counteract new spam trends before it lowers the quality of your search experience.
Update: Enlarged image.
by A Googler (noreply@blogger.com) at June 28, 2008 06:52 AM
OAuth Available for Google Data APIs
We love open standards, and we've just added support for a new one: OAuth is now supported on all of the Google Data APIs.
OAuth is an open standard for authentication that allows applications to authenticate users without ever directly handling usernames and passwords. Because OAuth is a standard, you can use the same authentication code for any of the Google Data APIs and for APIs from other providers who support OAuth.
To learn more, see the announcement on the Google Data APIs blog.
by DeWitt Clinton (noreply@blogger.com) at June 27, 2008 04:23 PM
Come See The Big Three
Faithful Analytics blog readers, I don't want to bore or alienate any of you—a diverse and geographically disperse group of intelligentsia—but today's blog post draws on something close to my heart: a professional basketball team called the Boston Celtics. Stay with me, just for a few more sentences. All will become clear ...
About a week ago, the Celtics won the National Basketball Association championship over their biggest rival, the Lakers (sorry, Lakers fans). As I say when something like this happens, "Whoo-hooot!!!"
Ahem. Anyway, the reason the Celts won is that this season their management united three of the best players in the NBA: Kevin Garnett, Paul Pierce, and Ray Allen. These players strove for years to win the title on separate teams, playing with less talented players, and finally, when they joined forces, everything fell into place.
How does this trifecta relate to web analytics, online marketing, and website management, the topics closest to our heart? Well, we've also got a big three for you, dear reader. And they're taking the stage July 8 in a one-hour webinar, presented by our team, called, "The Google Trifecta."
Who are our big three? You might be able to guess: one of them is Google Analytics, so you can start getting your "Whoo-hooot!" ready. Rounding it out are Webmaster Tools and Website Optimizer, two other free Google tools for website-owners. The first helps you improve your site's visibility in Google search results, and the second helps increase your conversion rate once visitors arrive on your site.
Individually each tool is powerful; combined, they offer you a holistic, detailed understanding of your website: how you're faring on Google, how your visitors land on and navigate to your site, and which combination of content most effectively gets them to convert. If you're already using one tool, you can use your same login for the others. And unlike the Celtics, you don't have to trade any co-workers or pay any money.
In this vein, we posted a couple of months ago about how you can identify your high-value, low-performing pages with Google Analytics, then test and optimize them with Website Optimizer to improve your conversion rates.
Here's the webinar info:
TITLE: The Google Trifecta: Webmaster Tools, Analytics, Website Optimizer
DATE: Tuesday, July 8th, 2008
TIME: 9:00 - 10:00 am PT (Pacific Time)
JOIN US: Register to attend (free)
In the webinar, team members will introduce each product for newcomers, highlight recent product developments, and discuss the benefits of using all three products together. And when you register, we'll also invite you to submit any questions you'd like the presenters to answer.
In case you didn't know about Google Webmaster Central, take a look. It's a one-page resource linking to many of the tools Google offers to help you build and maintain an effective site, including Google Analytics, Website Optimizer, and Webmaster Tools, the trifecta, the big three, the three amigos, the rule of three. Hope to see you at the webinar!
by Google Analytics Blog (noreply@blogger.com) at June 27, 2008 12:40 PM
A Google Data API for Google Finance
In case you haven't seen the announcement on the Google Data API blog, there is a new API available for Google Finance Portfolios.
The Google Finance API makes it easy to create and access investment data for your users -- ranging from updating their investment holdings and watchlists to retrieving current portfolio value and performance. With your applications, users can monitor their portfolios and transactions and keep positions up-to-date and in-sync. If you have a great idea for a portfolio application, give the new API a try!
by DeWitt Clinton (noreply@blogger.com) at June 26, 2008 05:37 PM
Antique roads-show: Google Book Search edition
Who would have thought that Google Book Search would be so useful to researchers of international roads? Hot on the heels of our series of videos from Book Search innovators comes this story from Gerald Cummins, author and proprietor of the website Old Roads of Scotland. His research calls to mind the story of Jo Guldi, another road expert who we’ve highlighted on this blog before.
We invite you to have a look at our new User Stories page, which collects all of the interesting uses of Book Search we've found so far, and to let us know if you've had a special experience yourself. As for Gerald, he's found Google Book Search useful for his work, and we asked him to highlight a few of his interesting finds for Inside Google Book Search:
Having written a book on the history of roads and tracks of Ayrshire, a county in the west of Scotland, I decided to include it in my website on the old roads of Scotland. I’ve found Google Book Search really useful for making it possible to link to original source material, as well as general research. In my own case, I’ve been able to link to the Old and New Statistical Accounts of Scotland, which provide a description of each parish in Scotland in the 1790's and 1830's. I've found various other works, some of which are very difficult to find otherwise.
One fascinating example comes from Charles Bertram, who in the early 1800s forged a document, The Description of Britain, which was allegedly written by a medieval monk named Richard of Cirencester. The document supposedly chronicled the time of the Romans in Britain, giving details of non-existent Roman roads. This work wreaked havoc amongst antiquarians 200 years ago, and is now almost forgotten, but there it was in Google Book Search.
I recently came across references to the Girthgate, an old route that led from Melrose Abbey to the medieval hospital of Soutra, in the hills south of Edinburgh. Apart from books on Melrose Abbey, Google Book Search had a superb illustration of a medieval bridge on this route that has long disappeared.
Dare we dub these interstate intellectuals "roads scholars"? Could we really stoop so low as to recycle a second-rate pun for the third time? Apparently so. I guess when it comes to inane wordplay, we're pretty sure never to take the road less travelled.
by Inside Google Book Search (noreply@blogger.com) at June 26, 2008 02:28 PM
(Ad)Word of the Day: Ad Variations
Did you know that we have an AdWords Glossary? It's a great resource for learning more about AdWords; so we're starting a new series here at Inside AdWords entitled (Ad)Word of the Day. Each post in the series will cover one term in the glossary and talk a little bit about it.
For our inaugural post, we'll start with ad variations:
Ad variations are multiple versions of an ad for a single product or service, all based on the same set of keywords. Variations are a good way to test many versions of the same message to see which works best with potential customers.One advantage of using ad variations is that AdWords can automatically show the best performing ad. If you are not sure which message will work best with your potential customers, you can simply create multiple ads for an ad group. AdWords will automatically show the best performing ad more often over time.
We hope you've enjoyed the first part of our new series. If you have suggestions for words you'd like to see, we're always listening at inside-adwords@google.com.
by Inside AdWords crew (noreply@blogger.com) at June 26, 2008 02:28 PM
Celebrating 50,000 of you
This week, the 50,000th person subscribed to the English AdSense Help Group. To mark this milestone, the AdSensePro Team would like to extend a special word of thanks to all the folks who use our forums, particularly everyone who takes the time to share their knowledge with other publishers. Thank you for providing useful help and advice, and for contributing to the AdSense community.
If you're not familiar with the Help Group, do check it out to share your AdSense experience. Members of the AdSensePro team will also be on hand to help answer questions, raise issues to our product and engineering teams, and collect your valuable feedback. And if you'd prefer to discuss AdSense in a language other than English, feel free to visit one of our international forums: Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, and Turkish.
by Inside AdSense Team (noreply@blogger.com) at June 26, 2008 01:09 PM
From the desktop to your TV
In the old days, we used to watch a simple device called a television. Nowadays, all the stuff worth watching and listening to tends to be stored on or accessed through a computer. To help remedy this, we are pleased to release the Google Media Server.
- Access videos, music, and photos stored on your PC
- View Picasa Web Albums
- Play your favorite YouTube videos
by James Yum (noreply@blogger.com) at June 26, 2008 10:40 AM
Free cross-product webinar for webmasters
Three of our most useful products for website owners are Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics, and Google Website Optimizer. On July 8, we're joining forces to bring you a free webinar about all of them so you can learn more about how they can boost your website when used together.
Here's the trifecta:
Google Webmaster Tools is a resource to gauge the visibility of your pages on Google. It shows you which of our search queries drive traffic to your site and lets you see where your site is included in the top search results. You'll even be able to identify your top content and view the words that other sites use to link to it.
Google Analytics provides further insight on how people land and navigate on your site, regardless of whether they arrive through Google search, pay-per-click ads, or other means. You can see which geographical regions people come from, view your top landing pages, and compare the effectiveness of all your ads, e-mail newsletters, affiliate campaigns, referrals, and keywords on Google and other search engines.
Google Website Optimizer then enables you to act on the information you've gathered about your site and make concrete improvements. After identifying your high-traffic but low-converting pages, you can test different combinations of content to determine which one most yields the outcome you're looking for.
To be clear, we keep a strict wall between search and ads; your site ranking won't affect your ad placement and vice versa. Still, by using all three tools together, you'll gain a complete, detailed picture of how your site's visitors arrive, interact, and respond to changes in content or design. And if you're already using one tool, you can use your same login for the others.
Our first-ever joint webinar for Webmaster Tools, Analytics, and Website Optimizer will take place:
DATE: Tuesday, July 8
TIME: 9:00 a.m. PT (Pacific Time)
JOIN US: Register to attend
If you can't make that date, you'll be able to access an archived version of the presentation via the same registration URL. And lest you forget, you can always visit Google Webmaster Central to see everything we offer to help you build and maintain your best site.
by A Googler (noreply@blogger.com) at June 26, 2008 09:33 AM
Free online seminar: The Google Trifecta
by Michael Wyszomierski (noreply@blogger.com) at June 25, 2008 09:38 PM
Free online webinar for Google's analysis products
Staying competitive in the online space can be hard if you don't have the proper tools at your disposal. That's why we offer solutions like Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics, and Google Website Optimizer to help you improve your site's effectiveness and functionality.
Used individually, each product can provide valuable and actionable information about specific aspects of your site. However, by using all three together, you can gain a comprehensive understanding of your pages' visibility on Google, where your visitors come from, how they interact with your site, and what content motivates them to take the action you want.
For the first time ever, the Webmaster Tools, Analytics, and Website Optimizer teams will join forces to hold a free webinar entitled The Google Trifecta. This session will be held Tuesday, July 8th, 2008 from 9:00 - 10:00 am PDT. Register to attend here.
During this online seminar, team members will:
Upon registration, we also invite you to submit any specific topics you'd like to see covered. We look forward to seeing you there!
by Inside AdWords crew (noreply@blogger.com) at June 25, 2008 04:43 PM
Get the audio and Q&As from our recent live chat
Last Thursday, many of you just couldn't get enough of us and joined our second live Webmaster Central chat, "JuneTune." It was an action-packed session with live presentations, questions and answers and chatting about cats and other important topics. Over the course of an hour and a half, we made four presentations, received over 600 questions and passed around close to 500 chat messages. It was great to see so many Googlers around the world involved: Adam, Bergy, Evan, Jessica, Maile, Matt (Cutts), Matt (Dougherty), Reid and Wysz in Mountain View; Jonathan and Susan in Kirkland; Alvar, Mariya, Pedro and Uli in Dublin; and me in Zürich. We had users from about as many places as Matt (Harding) has danced in: Alaska, Argentina, Arizona, Australia, Brazil, California, Canada, Chile, Colorado, Costa Rica, Denmark, Egypt, Florida, France, Germany, Greece, Hawaii, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Malaysia, Mexico, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, New York, New Zealand, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Russia, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Vietnam and a bunch from Seattle, Washington - thank you all for joining us!
To help make the most out of this session, we'd like to make the transcripts and presentations available to everyone. We're also working on filling in the blanks and have started to answer many of the unanswered questions online in the Webmaster Help Group. You'll find the full (and just slightly cleaned up) questions and answers there as well.
I presented an overview of factors involved in personalized search at Google:
Maile gave a nice presentation of case sensitivity in web search in general:
The audio part of these presentations is in the audio transcript below. It also includes Jonathan's coverage of reasons why ranking may change, Wysz's presentation of ways to get URLs removed from our index, as well as everything else that happened on the phone! Enjoy :)
Audio transcript (MP3)
We hope to continue to improve on making these events useful to you, so don't forget to send us your feedback. We'll be back!
by John Mueller (noreply@blogger.com) at June 25, 2008 04:31 PM
Bell Canada Executive Patrick Pichette to Join Google Executive Team*
U.S. copyright renewal records available for download
If I handed you a book and asked whether it was in copyright or in the public domain, you'd probably turn to the copyright page first. Unfortunately, a copyright page can't answer that question definitively -- at best, it could tell you when the book in your hands was published, and who owned the rights to it at that time. Ownership can change, though: rights revert back to authors, and after enough time has passed, the book enters into the public domain, letting people copy and adapt it as they wish.
So how much time is "enough"? It varies, often depending on the country, on when the book was published, and whether the author is living. For U.S. books published between 1923 and 1963, the rights holder needed to submit a form to the U.S. Copyright Office renewing the copyright 28 years after publication. In most cases, books that were never renewed are now in the public domain. Estimates of how many books were renewed vary, but everyone agrees that most books weren't renewed. If true, that means that the majority of U.S. books published between 1923 and 1963 are freely usable.
How do you find out whether a book was renewed? You have to check the U.S. Copyright Office records. Records from 1978 onward are online (see http://www.copyright.gov/records) but not downloadable in bulk. The Copyright Office hasn't digitized their earlier records, but Carnegie Mellon scanned them as part of their Universal Library Project, and the tireless folks at Project Gutenberg and the Distributed Proofreaders painstakingly corrected the OCR.
Thanks to the efforts of Google software engineer Jarkko Hietaniemi, we've gathered the records from both sources, massaged them a bit for easier parsing, and combined them into a single XML file available for download here.
There are undoubtedly errors in these records, but we believe this is the best and most comprehensive set of renewal records available today. These records are free and in the public domain, and we hope you're able to use them to determine the copyright status of books that interest you.
At Google, we're committed to making as many books available online to users as possible while respecting copyright, and this is one example of that commitment. Watch this space for more to come.
by Inside Google Book Search (noreply@blogger.com) at June 25, 2008 12:37 PM
Five steps to optimising your AdSense performance
"I want to improve my AdSense performance, but I don't know how to get started!"
We hear you. The myriad of optimisation tools and options AdSense offers can be a bit overwhelming. Colors, placements, channels, ad sizes -- there are more options to choose from than you can poke a mouse cursor at! Ideally, we wish you could just click a button and have a fully optimised webpage published to the Internet. But until that magical day comes, we have a solution for you.
The Australian AdSense team has put together a short video that takes the confusion out of optimising. The video goes through a step by step guide to optimising AdSense performance - from analysing your page type, to choosing the right ad sizes and colors, and tracking your results. We also cover our most popular tips to increase eCPM, without adversely affecting your community's experience on your page.
So if it's been a while since you've refreshed your AdSense ad units, or if you're confused on how to use channels to optimise, invest ten minutes into the video. It's the closest thing you'll get to that magic button.
by Inside AdSense Team (noreply@blogger.com) at June 24, 2008 10:15 AM
More real-time quotes on Google Finance
We're excited to let you know we're adding more real-time market data to Google Finance, Google.com and other Google properties. Starting today, you'll have access to real-time, last sale prices from the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), along with those from NASDAQ, which we recently launched. Here's the NYSE press release.
What this means is that you can now get the latest real-time stock quotes on Google for free. Wondering what Ford (F) is trading at today? Search for it on Google or Google Finance and keep the page up to have the quotes stream live.
If you use iGoogle, add the Google Finance portfolio gadget to your homepage, and monitor all your NYSE and NASDAQ traded stocks in real time throughout the day.
And if you're on the road with no access to a computer, real-time, up-to-the-second price quotes from these two exchanges are available from your mobile phone as well:
We hope this makes it easier for you to track your investments and make more informed and timely financial decisions.
by A Googler (noreply@blogger.com) at June 24, 2008 06:43 AM
One year of monitored European Webmaster Help Groups
A year ago Google Guides from the Search Quality Team started monitoring Google Webmaster Help Groups in European languages. It has been an interesting time and a great, rewarding experience for all those involved :o). We have enjoyed building and growing our communities with webmasters across Europe and we hope you have as well. The feedback we have been receiving since the beginning has been encouraging, with many webmasters responding positively to the opportunity to be able to solve their indexing issues in their native language. Still, we are aware that we have a lot of work ahead of us. I would like to thank everyone who has been active in our communities and invite those who have not joined yet to do so. Sign up, participate and help us make a difference.
Taking advantage of this anniversary, I would like the European Google Guides to have a chance to say a few words about their communities.
Polish Webmaster Help Group
Guglarz, the Polish Google Guide
Our group grew very fast, especially in the last few months and we are well on the way to hitting 600 users! But what I appreciate even more then our group's success, is the open, friendly spirit we have been cultivating in the last twelve months :o). I feel like this is a community that is able to help with indexing issues and beyond!
I already pointed out some exceptional community members in the last blog post about communication with webmasters in a dozen languages. Since then, a few more have joined the list of tremendously committed, group-driving contributors. Bigu has been jumping in every time I've been traveling or very busy, which is the reason why I’d like to thank him a lot.
Also I want to acknowledge Maciej Gluszek for escalating language issues we used to struggle with. You guys help to improve the Google experience for everyone.
Lastly, I want to invite all group members to the chit chat section in order to introduce yourself and share some more information about who you are and what you do. I am really curious to find out more about the people I work with! I hope to see you in the group soon :o).
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Группа помощи Google для веб-мастеров
Oxana, Tilek, Vitali, Mariya
Our Russian Webmaster Help group is growing by the day and just reached an important milestone - a whole kilobyte of members: 1024 (-:! Thanks to all our users for the great questions, the wisdom, and the humour which they bring to our community. Special thanks go to Web-Master, Crazy LionHeart, Andrey Morozov and Lmd for their spot-on comments and prolific posts - we really appreciate your dedication in helping others. We're very happy to be part of such a savvy and lively community, we look forward to more interesting questions and discussions in the future, and to reaching one megabyte of members (-:! С днем рождения!
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Google Webmester Súgó Csoport
Tibor, János
Although the Hungarian Webmaster Help Group is one of our youngest, it already counts 300+ members, and has a pretty high number of lively discussions. The atmosphere is really great and loads of issues are resolved thanks largely to our dedicated and wise users. I would especially like to thank snomag for helping greatly in building the group up in the beginning (where have you disappeared to? We miss you! :)
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Google Site Yöneticisi Yardım Grubu
Bahar
The Turkish Webmaster Help Group has grown into a dynamic and effective community of fantastic webmasters in just four months. I want to thank to everyone in the group who has been eager to share his/her knowledge to help others. Special thanks to Erkan (man_blood) who has written a huge amount of posts in the last three months; Merve who has helped the group with her technical skills as well as calm spirit, especially when I was on vacation; Salih (SesVer) who used to help a lot when the group was first launched; and many more who are not mentioned by name here. It has been exciting and a pleasure to be a part of this rapidly growing family! Desteğiniz için teşekkürler :-)
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קבוצת העזרה למנהלי ומנהלות אתרים
Alon, your Google Guide
Our Hebrew group is maturing. To date we have more than 200 users and we are gaining visibility while more users are using the well-informed discussions we produce.
It is a pleasure to see so many webmasters stopping by to ask, learn and help others. I would like to take the opportunity to thank all of you who make the group a place for discussion and collaboration. My special thanks go to Shoshanna, AliaG, Tomer and Seosos, for their great contribution.
By browsing through the “tell us about yourself ” thread you can learn more about our community where many members introduce themselves. You're also welcome to watch my short video giving some specific tips for Israeli Webmasters.
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Google diskussionsgruppe for webmasters
GoogleGuide (Jonas)
The Danish group has been slowly gaining more subscribers since its launch last year, and we still hope to attract more people. We've grown almost 100% in the past year, and we hope to keep up the steam! (: This growth wouldn't have been possible without the help of Anders who contributes equal amounts of webmaster goodness in the form of sharing his tips on 301's and moving content to a new domain (which has been the hottest and most debated topic in the group), to issues on getting your site better indexed and crawled. So a big thanks to Anders, and all the others who have made this group useful for everybody.
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Ajuda a Webmasters do Google
Pedro
The Portuguese Webmaster Help Group is now above 1200 members. The success of the group is a reflection on the great community built by every single contributor. Special thanks to Carlos Lavieri, Rodrigo Soares, Leandro Leite e João Carlos (Orquiza) who used to help so much and recently Flávio Raimundo (M&S) and