Google Talk - 3 New Features

1. File Transfer
2. Voicemail
3. Music Status

All new, all good, more here.

Adwords Reporting by the Hour!

This is one of those nice touches, something I never thought of myself, but now that it is there, I can't wait to use it!

What are hourly reports? How do I run one?

Hourly report views provide data about your account or campaign performance on an hourly basis across a 24-hour period. This helps you see how well your account or campaign is performing at different times throughout the day. You can use these insights to schedule your ads for the hours during which they are most likely to receive the greatest number of impressions and clicks.

Ann Arbor houses to rise in price

Why, because Google is moving in, and they have a lot of very rich staff:

At a news conference in Lansing, the company, based in Mountain View, Calif., said Tuesday morning that it would bring 1,000 jobs to Ann Arbor by creating a headquarters facility for Google AdWords, its main advertising unit, which offers pay-per-click ads.

Google said it would begin hiring immediately for the jobs, which will pay an average of about $50,000 a year -- more than Michigan's average household income of $44,667.

Which says to me that, at least in a small way, house prices will start heading towards those in Silicon Valley...

AdWords To Display Fraud Stats

Well, as far as I see it, they'll just give the numbers for double-clicks on ads that seem to happen frequently anyway, without any intended fraud (I don't know why this is, but I do check my logs, and I doubt that 75% of people who click on my ads are deliberately trying to make me pay...)

I cannot see Google telling us things like:

- click not counted because IP address is from Nigeria
- click not counted because IP address is a known baddy

The changes are coming in this week

AdWords Landing Page Algorithm

For an in-depth look, visit SearchEngineWatch.

Before Google launched the latest incarnation of the landing page algorithm, Google had human evaluations of ads and their landing pages, to determine what people thought was a good user experience, and what made for a poor one. I asked Michael Mayzel from Google on how this tied in with the end result of the current landing page algorithm. "We first start with human evaluators and end user feedback to determine a sample of landing pages that provide a low quality user experience. We then build computer algorithmrithms to accurately detect similar types of pages, verify the accuracy, and then deploy those algorithmrithms to evaluate all advertiser pages," Mayzel said.

Expandable "More" Box

Another nifty little idea that Google is trialling on a limited basis, as found at Blogoscoped - go there for a screenshot.

This one gets rid of the Groups and Froogle links on top of the search box and replaces them with a link to Google Video... and when you click on “more,” you’ll see a box open up on the page listing a couple of Google services (along with an “even more” button).

How to Hide & Be UnGoogleable

Last year News.com published some fairly lame, but still personal details on Eric Schmidt, Google's chief executive officer, that was found by searching for his name on Google. Google subsequently banned News.com for a year (showing that along with "do no evil", they also "do no humor").

To save this public humiliation and potential outing from happening to you, adhere to these tips from Wired. In a nutshell, use an alias for everything that will never matter - and give that alias a fake everything - hobbies, location, phone, address, DOB and so on. Your online altered-ego.

I do this, his name is Robert Bast :)

GOOG profits keep growing

Google more than doubled its profits in the second quarter, beating the expectations of analysts. The search giant generated net income of $721m (£390m) in the three months to the end of June, compared with $342m for the corresponding period last year.

Even so, the GOOG share price continues to head downwards. More...

AdWords Removing Affiliate Ads?

Indirectly by charging $10 minimum per click... I can't think of a single affiliate that can cope with $10 a click, so why doesn't Google just say they are banning "thin-affiliate" sites, rather than this psuedo-ban. According to one Adwords customer, a Google rep said:

Google is deliberately removing all affiliate programs from adwords listings. They had a quality team go through and rate their experience on a whole wide group of sites, including affiliate sites. The over-all score for affiliate sites was not high enough to pass their new guidelines therfore they are all being flagged and when found are being removed. Indirectly of course with the $10 min bids.

Little Known AdSense Feature

section targeting:

Just put some code similar to this on your webpage to instruct Google to either ignore or add importance to that part of your content:

-- google_ad_section_start --

-- google_ad_section_end --

(Blogger won't display the real code)

Also on the info page for this, it says:

However, please be aware that we can't guarantee results, and that it may take up to 2 weeks before our crawlers take into account any changes you've made to your site.

Is that an admission from Google that by joining AdSense you are guaranteed the spiders will visit at least fortnightly?

Judge Tosses Ranking Lawsuit

KinderStart sued Google because the company suddenly found itself fall in Google’s search ranking system. KinderStart accused Google of unfair business practices and sued not just for damages, but to force Google to reveal its well-cloaked PageRank algorithm to the public.

Judge: "Kinderstart has failed to allege facts sufficient to support a claim of anti-competitive conduct..."

More...

Google Now Supports NOODP Tag

If your site is listed in Open Directory, what is says there could show up for your site in Google search results. Now Google, following the lead of MSN, lets you have control over whether they do or not. More at SearchEngineWatch

--use_query_classifier --use_spamscore

pacemaker-alarm-delay-in-ms-overall-sum 2341989
pacemaker-alarm-delay-in-ms-total-count 7776761
cpu-utilization 1.28
cpu-speed 2800000000
timedout-queries_total 14227
num-docinfo_total 10680907
avg-latency-ms_total 3545152552
num-docinfo_total 10680907
num-docinfo-disk_total 2200918
queries_total 1229799558
e_supplemental=150000 --pagerank_cutoff_decrease_per_round=100 --pagerank_cutoff_increase_per_round=500 --parents=12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23 --pass_country_to_leaves --phil_max_doc_activation=0.5 --port_base=32311 --production --rewrite_noncompositional_compounds --rpc_resolve_unreachable_servers --scale_prvec4_to_prvec --sections_to_retrieve=body+url+compactanchors --servlets=ascorer --supplemental_tier_section=body+url+compactanchors --threaded_logging --nouse_compressed_urls --use_domain_match --nouse_experimental_indyrank --use_experimental_spamscore --use_gwd --use_query_classifier --use_spamscore --using_borg"

This showed up on a Google error page and is being discussed here. Lots of juicy possibilities have been raised.

Google likes PayPal - eBay don't like Google

Whereas Google say they hope to include PayPal as a payment option in Google Checkout, eBay won't accept Google Checkout:

...the executive in charge of Google Checkout [says] ...Google has PayPal under consideration as a payment method for the new service, which currently works only with credit and signature debit cards.

Google CEO: Click Fraud is Self-Correcting

In essence he says if an ads ROI drops, then the advertiser lowers their bid to compensate. And this is true and harms no-one (except for Google), if click fraud happened to every ad equally. It doesn't. More opinion...

My solution is to get all countries in the world onto equal terms economically, taking away the ability to pay someone 50c an hour to click on ads :)

Poor landing pages = higher Adwords costs

Google may have decided that the folk doing click arbitrage have the capacity to pay more per click - so that Google can have some of their easy profits.

Thus, over the coming days a small number of advertisers who are providing a low quality user experience on their landing pages will see increases in their minimum bids. It is important to note, however, that the vast majority of advertisers will not be affected at all by this change, as they link to quality landing pages.

More...

eBay - Google Checkout not accepted

Not unaccepted, considering that Google is PayPal's sole threat at present. Interesting, where this is mentioned on eBay, the title has changed from "Safe Payments" to "Accepted Payments", so as to not imply that Google Payments is unsafe.

The war is on!

Payment Services permitted on eBay: Allpay.net, Bidpay, Canadian Tire Money, cash2india, CertaPay, Checkfree.com, hyperwallet,com, Moneybookers.com, Ozpay.biz, Paymate.com.au, Propay.com, XOOM

Payment Services not permitted on eBay: AlertPay.com, anypay.com, AuctionChex.com, AuctionPix.com, BillPay.ie, ecount.com, cardserviceinternational.com, CCAvenue, ecount, e-gold, eHotPay.com, ePassporte.com, EuroGiro, FastCash.com, Google Checkout, gcash, GearPay, Goldmoney.com, graphcard.com, greenzap.com, ikobo.com, Liberty Dollars, Moneygram.com, neteller.com, Netpay.com, Nochex.com, paychest.com, payingfast.com, Payko.com, paypay, Postepay, Qchex.com, rupay.com, scripophily.com, sendmoneyorder.com, stamps, Stormpay, wmtransfer.com, xcoin.com

Google is now officially a verb

Google, v.
Oxford English Dictionary

If I paid Oxford their annual subscription of £195+VAT, then I'd be able to give you the definition...

...and if Oxford was aware of the income they could get from displaying AdSense alongside their dictionary definitions, they'd be doing that instead and getting RICH. I mean, if a webmaster wanted to link to a definition, or someone in a forum needed to point out the true meaning of the word, surely they'd link to the best of all dictionaries?

Sub-domains are a problem

Hot on the heels of a brand (spammy) new site getting millions of pages listed in Google, is this:

Want to see Craigslist really rockin the house with subdomains look up [queer forum], that's gotta be 95 out of the top 100! Need another example look at [wedding forum] and scroll down to number 50 or so. You'll see Craigslist jammin' with subdomain dominance controlling about 50 listings! More...

Google need to spend more time and effort on their core business - search. I have a blog site that ranks very well because it is a subdomain of the blog service that hosts it... nobody links to it, but as the subdomain of a PR7 site, it does well. A simple tweak of the algorithm could easily fix this problem...

Google Coupons

They'e pretty good. Spend over $20, get $10 off. That's a saving of up to 50% on whatever you want at top stores like CD Universe & Starbucks. Coupons here