Google is using YouTube to post videos that explain how, when, and why they collect information about searches, and how you can protect your privacy while using our search engine.
In the first video, you can learn about some of the information collected eg. IP addresses, cookies, and search queries and how they this information is used to improve your search experience as well as prevent against fraud and other abuses.
Google's search algorithms are designed to take your personal preferences into account, including the things you search for and the sites you visit. They provided the example about the Louvre in Paris. You are more likely to get results about the French capital than about Paris Hilton.
In the second video the are offering a closer look at personalization and the privacy tools available when you choose to personalize your search. Personalization has been an area that raises concerns about privacy, and Google wants you to understand how they personalize search results while protecting your privacy with tools such as “pause” and “remove” buttons designed to help put you in control of personalization.
Microsoft yesterday announced additions to its search engine and the company believes that they have done it. It was seriously over hyped.
The company introduced new features such as; - auto-spell correction, with the option of leaving words misspelled - mouse over capability on links and images - better word handling (sometimes you need the "the" when searching: Office or The Office), they felt this was critical
Just as they said the new improved search was more relevant things started going wrong. After entering the word “dog” into Live Search, the number three result shows a paragraph from Wikipedia’s entry concerning digital on-screen graphics. The fourth result is also from Wikipedia, and relates to the dog’s place as a zodiac animal. Google’s top ten results all connect to dogs in the sense of dachshunds, collies, and golden retrievers, which is what everybody had in mind.
Microsoft also spoke of significant enhancements to core algorithms and expansion of Rich Answers and substantial improvements in understanding queryintent. What does that mean? In other words they are trying to do Universal Search like Google. Too much time was spend by management inventing new search terms to convince the crowd that they understood search.
Doug Caverly was unimpressed. Danny Sullivan said the improvements were incremental. I am sticking with Google.
There is the transcript of the statement made by David Drummond, Chief Legal Officer, Google on the proposed acquisition of DoubleClick by Google (GOOG).
It explains in simple english Google's existing online advertising business and DoubleClick's display ad technology and business.
David went on to say that "Google’s business model has focused on what’s known as the “long tail” of the Internet – the millions of individuals and small businesses that cater to niche interests and markets. We lower the barrier to entry for these small publishers and advertisers, and we match them up with users who are interested in what they have to say or sell."
Smith said, "While there are millions of web sites and advertisers on the Internet, there are actually a very small number of “intermediaries” that provide the tools and services that connect them. If you are a web site and want to sell ad space on your site, or if you are an advertiser who wants to display your ads online, you have to work with them or one of their intermediaries."
Happy 9th B'Day Google! It's hard to imagine that only 9 short years ago Google was birthed. And what a journey it's been for the company. With its mission "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful", Google started like most other startups in the Valley from humble beginnings in a Stanford University dorm room by Larry Page and Sergey Brin to become a force that "is now widely recognized as the world's largest search engine -- an easy-to-use free service that usually returns relevant results in a fraction of a second". Their name has even become a verb with Google it being a very common expression to hear.
Google has since and continues to make its foray into every area imageinable: video, social networking, mapping, payments, mobile, email, docs, and much more. (Google Products)
Their philosophy as stated on their site is:
Never settle for the best "The perfect search engine," says Google co-founder Larry Page, "would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want." Given the state of search technology today, that's a far-reaching vision requiring research, development and innovation to realize. Google is committed to blazing that trail. Though acknowledged as the world's leading search technology company, Google's goal is to provide a much higher level of service to all those who seek information, whether they're at a desk in Boston, driving through Bonn, or strolling in Bangkok.
To that end, Google has persistently pursued innovation and pushed the limits of existing technology to provide a fast, accurate and easy-to-use search service that can be accessed from anywhere. To fully understand Google, it's helpful to understand all the ways in which the company has helped to redefine how individuals, businesses and technologists view the Internet.
Ten things Google has found to be true: 1. Focus on the user and all else will follow. 2. It's best to do one thing really, really well. 3. Fast is better than slow. 4. Democracy on the web works. 5. You don't need to be at your desk to need an answer. 6. You can make money without doing evil. 7. There's always more information out there. 8. The need for information crosses all borders. 9. You can be serious without a suit. 10. Great just isn't good enough. (Source: http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/tenthings.html)
The next nine years is shaping up to be equally interesting.
Out Googled is a period series covering the strategies of companies and even entire industries to counter the enterance of Google (GOOG) in to their domain.
At its core Google is search and advertising, however the company has many tentacles and its looming presence can be felt in many areas such as; - online applications - mobile & telephony - ecommerce & content - social networking - gaming & virtual worlds - hosting services - measurement & analysis - publishing & broadcast - space technology
Google is rapidly moving into new markets and reshaping existing industries. As long as there is a web component to a product, given its sheer reach and power, Google is possibly better positioned to serve the needs of the 6 billion plus addressable market for web based products independent of platform.
So what is your Google strategy? Send us your story.
Users typically tend to click on images as they are naturally drawn to pictures. And the color blue is typically associated with links. So, it should come as no surprise that there would be a merging of the two - the user behavior with the web convention.
There is a growing trend towards making iconic images blue to reinforce the clickability of the icon with the blue serving as a visual cue to the user that the icon is clickable. This is fantastic because you get your imagery to do more than look pretty and serve double duty as an actionable object. Photographic images are being similarly treated with a blue hairline border around it. We see this on Google News and MSN.com for example. Of course, this is not a rule of thumb so you always get the anamolies like on the NYTimes.com homepage where the video icon is blue and beside a text link but not itself linked. Icons like print, email, arrows, and plus signs are common examples where blue is used. But more complex icons that are less obviously intuitive as being actionable are also going blue.
This can be hard to do all the time as it may not fit into your branding LAF or calls too much attention to an item (of course you don't need to use royal blue unless you are looking to have it really stand out). But it is probably a model worth following for icons which consume more real estate and are more of a focus and for which you wish to serve as a definite call to action. So, whether this is a passing trend or here to stay, it is nonetheless clever.
In a recent book published by O'Reilly called High Performance Web Sites, author Steve Sounders, Chief Performance Yahoo!, outlines tips, tricks and best practices to increase the speed of your web site. He outlines 14 specific rules that will cut 20% to 25% off response time when users request a page. According to the author even highly optimized pages, such as Yahoo! Search and the Yahoo! Front Page, were able to benefit from these surprisingly simple performance guidelines.
The book explains how you can optimize the performance of the Ajax, CSS, JavaScript, Flash, and images that you've already built into your site -- adjustments that are critical for any rich web application. The book focuses heavily on the display time taken up on the browser side and by the communication between server and browser as opposed to focusing on tuning web servers, databases, and hardware.
According to eMarketer CEO Geoff Ramsey online ad spending will expand 28.6% this year and 32% next year, amounting to nearly $28.8 billion.
Branded and video advertising are fast on their way to matching the budgets spent on search.
"With video, you can do a heck of a lot better job of storytelling," he said.
Web videos are watched by 72% or 135 million people on the web every month. Ad spending on web video is expected to reach $775 million this year, and $1.3 billion by next year.
Google's (GOOG) YouTube is poised to lead the web video market, and grab the bulk of ad dollars flowing into the medium, according to Ramsey.
I recently posted an article entitled, Really Idiotic Approaches to RIA to point out how 1980s the proprietary Rich Internet Application solutions from Microsoft (Silverlight) and Adobe (Flex) are.
Not surprisingly, this elicited predictably troll-ish "contributions" in my comment section, including one which opened with "you are an ignoramus." After I had looked up ignoramus in the dictionary (no, it is not an absent-minded dinosaur), I thought a bit about how Ajax looks from troll-land.
The argument for Silverlight and Flex is that Ajax is bad because it is not cross browser. Let’s examine that for a second. Cross browser at this point is really shorthand for “runs the same on Firefox and Explorer.”
When we parse that a bit more, we find that many of the cross-browser problems come from Microsoft’s poor implementation of the standards. And hey, whadda you know, Microsoft benefits from its poor implementation by getting witless developers to adopt their proprietary, Microsoft-only solution as a reward for Microsoft’s poor implementation.
And if you feel that Microsoft should not be rewarded for this kind of behavior, but do not have the weight of the EU behind you to slap a $600M fine on them, you can always choose a different proprietary solution and get locked into Adobe forever.
So the argument against Ajax, if I understand it, is that this open-source thing is just a crock, that nobody will ever get the cross-platform right, and the sooner we all just capitulate and fold up our tents, the sooner the caps-lock trolls will leave us alone? I think I'd rather stay an ignoramus.
We are very excited at WebGuild to announce the launch of our Social Networking Community exclusively for Web Professionals.
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There is a high correlation between online video ads watchers and an increase in web site traffic. Online video watchers are more likely to act after watching web video ads. This is according to an online survey conducted by Google and AOL, as part of larger effort to get marketers to move their ad budgets from other mediums such as television to online video advertising.
- 78% of respondents said that online video ads provide as much or more of an opportunity to learn about an advertiser than television - 64% of respondents indicated they have taken action after seeing an online video - 44% went to a company's Web site after watching an online video ad - 33% searched for the product or service after watching an online video ad - 22% visited a bricks and mortar store - 21% discussed the advertised product with friends or family
75% of respondents survey said they watched more video online than they did a year ago and more than 50% expect to watch more online video in the next year. Further, 32% characterized the feature product as "innovative", 32% said it was "creative" and 30% said it was "fun".
Google is set to scrap its subsidy payments for European search advertising agencies.
The program, called Best Practice Funding, which has made subsidies to the tune of US$100M, will wind up at the end of 2008. It is in effect across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
The program gives agencies that used Google's search engine to book ad dollars, a percentage of money back based on how much they spent on behalf of clients.
The goal of the program was to drive search advertising across the region by allowing investment in technology, training and research to create better campaigns.
Agencies get from 3% to 8% of their ad spend returned each quarter depending on how much money they place with Google and other qualifying factors.
The program is similar to incentives TV and other media ad channels offer agencies, discounts for buying ad slots and rewarding agencies that do higher volumes with more discounts.
Participating agencies get to train two staff members as Google Advertising Professionals and approximately 2,000 have gone through the process to date.
"Agencies are now at a level where they don't need a subsidy," said Damian Burns, head of agency relations for Google EMEA.
Mr Burns did add that there had been a "mixed" reaction from some agencies at the news.
For those agencies that have based their business model on using subsidy as profit in place of the traditional discount for volume buying, will have to rethink their business model.
Google's rival Yahoo! last year modified its agency discount system for search campaigns to offer a maximum of 10% rebate, down from 15%.
MSN has maintained its discount rate at 10%, according to one media agency source.
Google has launched a link sharing service called Google Shared Stuff. It is very similar to the bookmarking service (Google Bookmarks) released in 2005 and Delicious.
The service allows you to add links to your "shared stuff page" by adding a bookmarklet to your web browser's "Links" or "Bookmarks" bar or by clicking this Share button, which currently only seems to be available on Google Video but is likely to be made available for embedding on any website.
Upon clicking the icon, a popup allows you to choose whether you want to share a thumbnail image and article preview taken from the website or just the link.
Two years ago the NY Times began a subscription program charging $49.95 a year, or $7.95 a month, for online access to the work of its columnists and to the newspaper’s archives.
Yesterday, the NY Times abandoned this program and opened up its entire site to all readers. In addition archives from 1851 to the present will also be free.
“But our projections for growth on that paid subscriber base were low, compared to the growth of online advertising,” said Vivian L. Schiller, senior vice president and general manager of the site, NYTimes.com.
Most of the NY Times readers ended up on the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYTimes.com. These readers, unable to get access to articles because of the subscription model quickly left the site. The Times hopes that opening up the site will increase page views and in turn on-line advertising revenue.
“What wasn’t anticipated was the explosion in how much of our traffic would be generated by Google, by Yahoo and some others,” Ms. Schiller said.
This is also a win for the writers and columnists who were not getting any visibility due to the restricted access.
According to Nielsen/NetRatings, the web site gets about 13 million unique visitors each month, thus the potential for increased revenue from advertising, versus subscriber revenue, is so much more attractive.
Now the Times can also deploy better SEO strategies to increase traffic and better target its advertising to get premium rates.
Google launched widget ads – this mashup of a widget with a traditional banner ad creates exciting possibilities. There are a few examples here – I particularly like the movie ad – ‘A Mighty Heart’ and the Honda ad.
I like these two for a few reasons:
It’s basically a shrunken micro site – it serves as a great source of information. But also (probably because of the size limitations) is meant to present only the most important/relevant information, which is really all most of us want anyways.
If created properly the content provided may serve as a source of information that may be of interest to special interest groups, partners and hopefully customers. If the right information is put into the ad people will want to post it to their sites and why not let them? Google even thought of that and included an ‘embed this ad’ script (as shown here).
It’s interactive –they even have video components! Unlike a “pass through” ad, these ads combine the best elements of full web-apps with the portability and size of the traditional Google ad. Videos, forms, games, all possibilities creating an interactive experience for the user.
What would you put in your ad? I think it would be cool to show a 3D model or interactive diagram in there. Or if I were promoting an event it would be nice to embed the registration page in the widget itself.
Needless to say, this opens the door for a new use of the traditional Google Ad budget. The early question is whether this will be part of our existing Google Ad campaign or require a new strategy with a totally new campaign. Either way, I’m sure it means more marketing.
Google announced the availability of AdSense for Mobile, its service for placing contextual ads with mobile web content.
AdSense for Mobile is identical to AdSense for Web sites, which places ads on participating publishers' sites that correspond to the publishers' content.
"We've just launched AdSense for Mobile, which can help you expand your online content to new platforms," said Alex Kenin, AdSense product marketing manager, in a blog post." If you have a Web site optimized for mobile browsers, or are interested in creating one, you can start monetizing your mobile site by accessing a growing number of our mobile advertisers."
Mobile advertising is expected to generate about $3 billion by the end of the year and $19 billion by the end of 2011, according to ABI Research. There are about 6.6 billion people in the world and about half that many mobile phone subscriptions, according to The Mobile World, a U.K. mobile phone consultancy.
Publishers of Web sites designed for viewing on mobile phones now have the option to make some money through Google's (GOOG) AdSense program just like publishers of non-mobile Web sites.
AdSense for Mobile will be available in 13 countries: England, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Ireland, Russia, Netherlands, Australia, India, China, and Japan.
Baidu, has launched "Baidu TV", an online video advertising service, expecting it to be a new profit driver to help widen the gap with its rivals, Chinese versions of Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO).
Baidu TV is the result of a partnership between Baidu and Ads it! Media Corporation, a Chinese online video advertising platform provider.
Baidu will provide advertisers access to about 160,000 domestic websites under the Baidu Union, where they can post online video ads.
Ads it! mainly deals in advertising-related technical and marketing issues.
"Baidu has been dedicated to developing its core business by maximizing its customer resources ... Baidu TV is a logical step in that direction," said Shen Haoyu, Baidu vice-president, business operations.
Baidu's revenue mainly relies on text ads, but this is "far from enough, and it should try to find more niche markets to fuel growth", said Tian Xin, search engine analyst with iResearch Consulting Group.
The San Jose Mercury is reporting that the Google Jet (NASDAQ: GOOG) or GForce One will use Moffett Field. Google Jet To Use Moffett Field as part of an earth sciences-related agreement struck last month between NASA and a company called H211, LLC, space agency officials confirmed Tuesday. Brin and Page also are involved in H211, but NASA spokeswoman Dolores Beasley declined to say how. A Google search of H211 did not yield any information. Moffett Field is reserved for the powers that be, such as heads of state and other dignitaries. These days, that is Google.
Reports are that Marissa Mayer, (NASDAQ: GOOG) will head up Google Health from Adam Bosworth. Bosworth , is on vacation and has decided to pursue other opportunities after that. Google is moving forward with work on our health products.
Earlier this year Microsoft enter the health search arena via the acquisition of MedStory.
Physicians are increasingly turning to search engines for answers and this is expected to increase with the growth of Tele-Medicine.
There has been so much talk about the Google GPhone (NASDAQ: GOOG), that I feel like I have one. Google has also assembled many of the requirements for a next generation internet mobile company such as mobile search, mobile maps, web based voice mail, voice enable directory service, mobile advertising and many other offerings that I am probably not aware of. So a device is not that much of a stretch. Google could give a struggling device manufacturer a significant boost in distribution. Google could offer free calls anywhere in the world subsidized by ads of course, and running off its massive internet backbone. I already use GrandCentral and it is an amazing tool. For more on GrandCentral please Google it. Also, does Apple know something we don't? Is the gphone launch imminent or are the cutting the price of the 8G iPhone simply because it is not moving? In the meantime I am Gruuving with my iPhone and GServices.
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Happy 9th B'Day Google! It's hard to imagine that only 9 short years ago Google was birthed. And what a journey it's been for the company. With its mission "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful", Google started like most other startups in the Valley from humble beginnings in a Stanford University dorm room by 
At its core Google is search and advertising, however the company has many tentacles and its looming presence can be felt in many areas such as;
Google is set to scrap its subsidy payments for European search advertising agencies. 
There has been so much talk about the Google GPhone (NASDAQ: GOOG), that I feel like I have one. Google has also assembled many of the requirements for a next generation internet mobile company such as mobile search, mobile maps, web based voice mail, voice enable directory service, mobile advertising and many other offerings that I am probably not aware of. So a device is not that much of a stretch. Google could give a struggling device manufacturer a significant boost in distribution. Google could offer free calls anywhere in the world subsidized by ads of course, and running off its massive internet backbone. I already use GrandCentral and it is an amazing tool. For more on GrandCentral please Google it. Also, does Apple know something we don't? Is the gphone launch imminent or are the cutting the price of the 8G iPhone simply because it is not moving? In the meantime I am Gruuving with my iPhone and GServices.
