Goats

Anything to get in the news, this time Google have hired goats to mow their lawn. What next, bikini babes washing cars?

Beta Label Lifted Finally

Citing it as a hindrance to corporate uptake, while not citing anything that has changed that makes any difference... Google has dropped the beta tag from Gmail, Calendar, Talk & Docs.

Showing they can still laugh at themselves, there is now a setting in Gmail that lets geeks restore the beta tag.

Embarrassing Spam in Groups

I use Google Groups to follow discussions on the AdWords API, as do many other users of the API. For the last few days, every day, there have been 25 or so porn spam posts appearing. If it were a less serious group, maybe I'd have less reason to complain, but this is a discussion group hosted by a Google product, discussing a Google product, linked to from the official AdWords API blog, and all we are getting is spam. Surely Google can fix this?

In parallel, Gmail is doing a sterling job catching spam, and there are very few genuine emails ending up in the spam folder. Except that is, for various official Google emails. Go figure!

What doesn't Google know about you?

Of course this only applies to those few who actually use Google's products, but I found it interesting that the blog post at e-Justice is titled 25 Surprising Things That Google Knows About You. It would be a much quicker read if they just called it Things That Google Doesn't Know About You (yet).

Google Car Hits Deer

It is one thing to hit a wild animal in your car, but something else to leave an reminder of the accident in Google Maps for the world to see:



More at The Guardian

Google Falling Apart?

Valentine's Day: AdWords reporting was down for 10 or 11 hours.
Feb 18: Google News had a variety of problems resulting in messages of "Please try again shortly. We apologize that this section is currently unavailable."

Has Google run out of space or bandwidth? Do they have a virus? Have they fired too many key staff? Are interns in charge?

Hopefully these two outages in the space of a few days are just a coincidence!

UPDATE: On President's Day, phone support for Google AdWords were on holiday (unlike most of the USA), but instead of a message stating such, you were either stuck on hold permanently, or you were connected to a fax machine.

And today, Feb 24, Gmail was down for a few hours.

Gmail to overtake Hotmail real soon

Here are the latest figures:

Gmail 29.6 million (unique visitors per month)
Hotmail 43.5 million
Yahoo 91 million

However, Gmail has grown by 43% in the last year, whereas Hotmail have lost 5% of theirs. If that trend continues, Gmail will be the #2 provider in just over a year.

Makes sense, it is by far the superior product.

Add Google News to Your Site

Just released by Google, a simple way to present ad-free news headlines to your website.



Get the code here:
http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/documentation/newsshow/wizard.html

Google's New Image Satellite

This is the first image from Google's brand new satellite, which promises to provide Google Maps with the highest resolution they can legally show us (higher resolutions will be sold to government agencies).

The A to Z of Google Results

Search for a single letter in Google, and these sites come up first. The interesting results are in bold:

a = Links in HTML documents from www.w3.org.
b = Physical Review B from aps.org.
c = C (programming language from wikipedia.org.
d = Physical Review D from aps.org.
e = E! Entertainment Online
f = Ford Motor Company Stock from Yahoo! Finance.
g = Gmail from Google.
h = Hydrogen from wikipedia.org.
i = Apple: iPod + iTunes from apple.com.
j = The Letter J from wikipedia.org.
k = The Letter K from wikipedia.org.
l = The LaTeX project from latex-project.org.
m = M (1931) from imdb.com.
n = Nitrogen from wikipedia.org.
o = Cirque du Soleil - O - Las Vegas from cirquedusoleil.com.
p = Phosphorus from wikipedia.org.
q = The Letter Q from wikipedia.org.
r = The R Project for Statistical Computing from r-project.org.
s = Craigslist.com.
t = Massachussetts Boston Transit Authority from mbta.com.
u = The Letter U from wikipedia.org.
v = V Magazine from vmagazine.com.
w = W. (2008) from imdb.com.
x = X.Org Wiki from x.org.
y = Yahoo.com.
z = The Letter Z from wikipedia.org.

Farewell to Six Google Products

Google has been doing this since the end of Google Answers - removing products that either lack popularity, didn't get to be fully developed, or lose money. Obviously this is a trade-off between pissing off the people that use it, and keeping their credibility intact, and pleasing shareholders.

This week it was announced that these products are being discontinued, or no longer supported:

* Google Video
* Google Catalog Search
* Google Notebook
* Dodgeball
* Jaiku
* Google Mashup Editor

More details here

Google Free Hosting Spam in Gmail

Watch out for this one, it ended up in my Gmail account, and I almost fell for it. As usual poor grammer is the giveaway. These phishers will have all you Google accounts if you sign in after following the link:

Hello,
Dear Gmail customer
After our free email services we offer you to sing up for our free hosting services.
This service currently is in beta test.
And we choose you to test this services and report us any bug you may find.We give you unlimited webspace on your own domain name you must only change your dns services to ns1.google.com and ns2.google.com and enter your domain name in our special control panel.
Our servers are linux based and we support PHP, SSL (Secure Shell),FTP,Stats,CGI,Perl,Unlimited email address and finaly 500 MySQL Database.

Notice :
Dont sell this invitation code in auction website that may cause we disable your account in the future.

Your invitation code :
http://google-promotions.com/Acvw2p99ah7dtV1bFJyacSHUQcdROroysWeaIkkATEXaZUJ7n6wwXjzlyFVEYfJyB74Y66qln8VSP1Njjbp4zWS/

New Favicon for Google

You've undoubtedly already noticed it, but do you like it? I don't and I didn't like the last one either... but maybe it will grow on me.

The original, and the last one:


The new one:


Read the full story straight from Marissa Mayer

Top 40 Google Subdomains

According to Compete, Google.com gets 126 million unique visitors each month.

Of Google's subdomains, images.google.com has 43 million, maps has 36 million, and mail has 24 million. The next most popular are video (surprisingly), books, picasa & groups. To see the full list, pop over to Slackerology.