Google Print Ads expanding

There are now several dozen publications where Google Adwords advertisers can try out print advertising. More info at Google

List of Top Google Hires Grows

Last week, Google announced another top science hire, Dr. Larry Brilliant. He will be executive director of Google.org, Google's philanthropic arm. Brilliant is an award-winning physician, an epidemiologist who spent a decade in India and also the co-founder of the pioneering online community - The Well.

Read about all of Google's other great hires

Judge might rule Google Image search needs tweaking

Specifically, Google searchers are able to find free copies of copyrighted porn pictures, meaning the owners of the pics lose financially. Looks like Google will have to exclude results of some pics on a case by case basis. More...

PayPal: GBuy is real

For the last nine months, Google has recruited online retailers to test GBuy, according to one person briefed on the service. GBuy will feature an icon posted alongside the paid-search ads of merchants, which Google hopes will tempt consumers to click on the ads, says this person. GBuy will also let consumers store their credit-card information on Google.

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Web Page Creator Crashes

Another case of Google underestimating the number of people who will flock to a new Google service... (Google Reader and Google Analytics, two of Google's other applications, also went down on their first days.)

...or an elaborate plot to get double the publicity?

More...

Picasa Email in my Gmail Spam Folder

Subject: Picasa News: More languages, plus making photo stamps and gift CDs
From: news@info.picasa.com

It's an official mail from Google's Picasa, and it was detected as spam and stuck in my Spam folder. I do hope there are not other false identifications like this....

Google Announces Web Page Creator

Google Page Creator is a web based application that uses a basic what-you-see is what-you-get style of interface, designed to allow anyone to create and publish web pages, regardless of skill or knowledge level.

...Google Page Creator is a web-based application that runs on any computer or operating system. To use it, you must have a Google account and a Gmail address. Pages that you create are stored on Google servers using a URL convention of gmailname.googlepages.com.

Each user is provided with 100 megabytes of free storage space, and while there is a limit on the amount of bandwidth a site is allowed, Rosenstein says he doubts most people will ever reach the limit. The limit is primarily in place to foil the efforts of spammers, he said.

More at SearchEngineWatch

Google owners have a bad credit day

Billionaire owners of the internet search outfit Google were caught short in Rio when a local restaurant rejected their credit card on a £30 (130 Vrazilian Reals) tab.

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The Google way to bankrupt your rival

Carreras became convinced the "missing clicks" weren't from customers but from his competitors, who had been in Vegas with him. He believed his unscrupulous rivals whiled away their office hours clicking on his Google ads, knowing that every tap cost him money.

If you add in a second kind of scam, where people earn themselves a little money from Google by clicking on ads they're hosting on their sites, you can see the potential for malice.

As a result of his experience, he got out of the trade exhibition business, believing that click-fraud detection would be a more lucrative field. He now sells software under the name Who's Clicking Who? that promises to solve click fraud for Google advertisers, first by sending "we know who you are" messages back to fraudulent clickers, and then by compiling click dossiers to help fraud victims reclaim their money from Google.

More at SMH

The Google of the Future?

A great read, this article from CNN Money explores four possible futures for Google:

Scenario 1 (Circa 2025): Google Is The Media
Scenario 2 (Circa 2015): Google is the Internet
Scenario 3 (Circa 2020): Google is Dead
Scenario 4 (Circa 2105): Google is God

Google Acquires Measure Map

It's a stats service for blogs. Kinda predictable, but still an excellent move.

Is Google Manipulating Results?

Probably not, but the changed wording on their help pages suggest they might. The following words have been removed:

"The order and contents of Google search results are completely automated. No one hand picks a particular result for a given search query."

Is Google Manipulating Results?

Probably not, but the changed wording on their help pages suggest they might. The following words have been removed:

"The order and contents of Google search results are completely automated. No one hand picks a particular result for a given search query."

BMW Germany back in the Google index

They fixed up their site and have been re-included. I'm guessing smaller sites do not get such service, but hey, less people care if their site can be found. More...

VW, Google Joint Venture

The idea is to provide more than just a 2D road map:

Volkswagen's American unit said it was working on a prototype vehicle featuring Google Inc.'s satellite mapping software to give drivers a bird's-eye view of the road ahead.

The companies are working with graphics chip maker Nvidia Corp. to build an in-car navigation map system and a three-dimensional display so passengers can recognize where they are in relation to the surrounding topography

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Q Why does Image Search have no ads?

A. Because it would only earn $80 million a year in revenue, so it just isn't worth bothering with...

(According to an interview with the Google heads in Time magazine)

Google Testing Gmail for 3rd Parties

Great idea - allowing people to use their own domains to run a private Gmail service. Google hosts the data, provides the software, makes money from the ads. You control the userbase and supply the domain name. Love it! More...

Google Desktop 3 - new feature security fears

Google Desktop 3 allows remote searching of another computer, but you need to trust Google with the data:

To enable the computer-to-computer search function, a user specifies what information should be indexed and then agrees to allow Google to transfer the material to its own storage system.

Google plans to encrypt all data transferred from users' hard drives and restrict access to just a handful of its employees. The company says it won't peruse any of the transferred information.

More...

Gmail & AdBlock may cause Firefox to crash

Is this is Microsoft-type trick, or a genuine bug that will be fixed?

Google is advising customers who use Gmail with Firefox to turn of the popular AdBlock extension. This week Google introduces a new feature to Gmail that combines Gmail with their Google Talk instant messager service. Those Gmail users lucky enough to test the new feature are advised that using AdBlock with it may cause Firefox to crash. Google also says that their engineers are working to fix the problem.

Personally, the Gmail ads don't bother me at all, for I don't notice them, and I've never needed AdBlock

Google blacklists BMW's site

BMW Germanywas caught using dodgy search engine optimization practices, and has paid the penalty by being removed from Google. I figure someone will be shortly losing their job!

This is their site:
http://www.bmw.de/

And they don't appear in German search results for "BMW":
http://www.google.de/search?hl=de&q=bmw&btnG=Google-Suche&meta=cr%3DcountryDE

Full story here...

GMail - chat from within

At GMail it says:

Chat with your friends from right inside Gmail. There's no need to load a separate program or look up new addresses. It's just one click to chat with the people you already email, as well as anyone on the Google Talk network. And now you can even save and search for chats in your Gmail account.

We've started rolling this out to all Gmail accounts, so yours should have it soon. It's good to chat. Learn more

Wi-Fi Startup Gets Funding From Google etc

Fon, a Spanish startup company that plans to create a global network of 1 million shared Wi-Fi hot-spots by 2010, today received $21.7 million in venture funding from Google and Skype, as well as other investors, including Index Ventures and Sequoia Capital.

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NYTimes: AdSense pays 78.5c in the dollar

They do not say who told them, but the secret could be out. Many had guessed the figure to be more like 50%.

Google.com and the company's foreign search sites contribute more to Google's bottom line than AdSense, because for every dollar the company brings in through AdSense and other places that distribute its ads, it pays roughly 78.5 cents back to sites like Digital Point that display the ads.

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Google denies wanting Napster

The New York Post, citing anonymous sources, said the web search leader was mulling an extensive alliance with Napster, which could include an "outright acquisition" of the subscription music service.

"We have no plans to acquire Napster, nor do we have plans to develop a music store at this time," Google spokeswoman Sonya Boralv said in a statement.

I agree. Google is most likely to provide a meta-search of online music stores, and seek a commission on sales. More...

Google's Bigdaddy Update

Go to Search Engine Watch for an update on the new Bigdaddy search infrastructure that Google has been testing for several weeks. It's now rolling out to various Google data centers, but that's going to be a process that will take weeks.

World Association of Newspapers wants $$

And fair enough too! When I want to find out the latest news, my first stop is Google News. OK, Google haven't dared to make any money from this service yet, but if they (and similar news aggregators) didn't exist, I would've gone to the site of a legit newspaper, which usually has a way of generating an income. By going to Google News first, that newspaper's revenue stream will be diminished.

I look forward to using a service like Google News that makes money itself, but also pays for the news items that make their service work. More at FT.com

Profits Up; GOOG Down

Profits were up, but not as much as investors had hoped for, so the share price dropped dramatically in overnight trade, dropping as much as 19%. More...

Google Profits Up Again

Q4 Financial Summary

Google reported revenues of $1.919 billion for the quarter ended December 31, 2005, an increase of 86% compared to the fourth quarter of 2004 and an increase of 22% compared to the third quarter of 2005.

Google reports its revenues, consistent with GAAP, on a gross basis without deducting traffic acquisition costs, or TAC. In the fourth quarter, TAC totaled $629 million, or 33% percent of advertising revenues.

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