Dating Results

Google are experimenting with providing a dating profile search box for relevant queries. It will be interesting to see how far they take it. Story at Revenews

GOOG & eBay shake hands on big deals

1) Google to supply text-ads for non-USA eBay sites
2) Google Talk & Skype to join forces and get click-to-call happening

More at News.com

"Apps for Your Domain" - Monday Release

"Workers will be able to send e-mail with Gmail, Google's two-year-old Web-based mail service, but messages will carry their company's domain name. The package also includes Google's online calendar, instant-messaging service, and Page Creator, a Web page builder." More...

Count me in! We already use GMail and having our domain name as an email address, but with GMail functionality, is precisely what we need. And once we are using that, I'm sure Google will be able to convince is to use their other apps.

Prediction: In 2 years time GMail will have a large percentage of the small business email market, at the expense of Outlook and Microsoft's Live stuff.

Mountain View WiFi Screenshots

5 screenshots that give you an idea of what you are missing if you don't live in Google's home town of Mountain View, CA

GoogleMaps Adds Coupons

In an effort to prove that online ads actually do lead to brick-and-mortar purchases, Google today will start allowing merchants to distribute printable coupons via its mapping service, Google Maps.

For the new service, merchants that wish to distribute coupons can arrange to have an icon placed next to their listings on the Maps page. Users can then click on the icon to load and print the coupons. Currently, Google displays listings of businesses--gleaned from directory services and merchant submissions--alongside its map of an address.

More at MediaPost

Google prosecuted in Brazil

Google is in danger of being shut-down in Brazil and faces a possible US$61 million fine for refusing to hand over user information associated with its Orkut social networking site. It's all about child p*rn and other criminal activity. So the prosector wants a federal judge to order Google Brazil to hand over the data on users associated with those pages. More...

Exec sell-off = GOOG price slump?

Reported in The Australian:

WONDERING why your investment in Google has lost 18 per cent since the shares peaked at about $US475 in January?

...Its managers have dumped a truckload of stock since February 14, 2005, the expiration date of the biggest and final restriction on insider sales following its initial public offering. As of August 9, they had sold almost 23 million shares.

That means Google's top executives offloaded about $US7.4 billion of stock, equal to about a third of the company's starting market value when it sold shares at $US85 each in the August 2004 IPO.2

Nevertheless, it is remarkable that not one Google insider has bought a share of the company in the 18 months since the IPO lock-ups expired, according to data compiled by Bloomberg from the Washington Service, which tracks insider sales.

Philip Remek at Guzman and Co is the only equity analyst with a "sell" rating on Google. You could argue that he's not such a lone wolf, given the behavior of the company's owners.

...Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who founded the company, have led the exodus.

Page's share sales have sucked about $US2 billion out of the market, while Brin has pocketed a bit more than $US1.9 billion.

To be fair, if I had $12 billion GOOG, and I didn't receive a salary, and I came from humble beginnings, and the stock is in an industry notorious for wild price swings & over-exuberant investors, selling just $2B of my shares over 18 months seems quite expected and normal. At that rate it would take 9 years to sell them all...

I'm very impressed that someone I have never heard of, who is only a VP, can achieve this:

Omid Kordestani, the company's senior vice-president of sales, has sold $US1.1 billion of stock.

Click Fraud Not So Bad?

Google claims it has discovered some key flaws in the way that third-party research firms have been estimating click fraud statistics, and as a result, the dire click fraud numbers we’ve all been seeing are exaggerated.

...Google says that many research companies don’t count actual clicks, but estimate the number of clicks by other factors like the number of repeated page loads, which can simply be the result of a user hitting the back button on their browser or visiting the advertiser’s site multiple times. Google also says that research companies that use cookies to track users may actually attribute clicks that are made on ads for one network to another. In other words, if a user clicks on a Yahoo ad, the click may be attributed to a click on a Google ad. More...

I don't buy it. I check for click fraud and it is really easy, you use click-tracking software. A "research company" surely wouldn't be stupid enough to make such mistakes. Click fraud is where you get less clicks than you pay for, not more!

AdWordsAdvisor2: How Currencies Are Converted

This was previously a secret:

"For competitive reasons, our AdWords product team does not want to release the source of our currency conversion calculations."

Now, in response to questions at WMW, AdWordsAdvisor2 says:

"To convert currencies for ad ranking, we receive a daily feed from Citibank and use the average of the buy and sell prices to determine the exchange rate."

Go Ogle Checkout?

Google routinely disputes the ownership rights of many domain name that incorporate their trademarks. Most are probably register by kids or foreigners who do not appreciate that they can't win from such obvious trademark breaches. Most never respond to the dispute, and Google gets the domain name.

But someone recently did dispute things (but they lost, but they may have fun doing so...)

Respondent states that her intended business name is not "GOOGLE Checkout," which ostensibly is identical to the disputed domain name , but rather the term "Go Ogle Checkout," which Respondent contends is not. She intends to use this term in conjunction with an online dating service....

More...

For StarTrek Fans

In connection with the 40th anniversary of the Star Trek convention, Google has launched a specially created site for Star Trek fans. More...

Super Duper Trial Search Results

Basically, results are expandable to show more information by clicking on a blue arrow. Extra long text snippet, related links, search this site.

I expect that one day it wil be customizaable, so if you want to see a thumbnail of the site, you can. And if you want to see the Whois data, or DMOZ entry, you can...

Screenshots at Yellowpipe & CyberNetNews

Free Wi-Fi for Mountain View

Google is about to (due Sep 23) give its hometown a municipal wireless network covering all of Mountain View, with free Internet access for both residents and visitors. You'll need a Google account to log on.... More here

My best guess is that they are using the local population to trial what they intend for all the USA. I doubt that requiring people to log in to a Google account is worth Google's while, unless they figure that:

a) Once a huge range of Google services are available, all ad-supported, providing a free Wi-Fi service is worth it to gain customers

or...

b) There will be ads appearing that relate to every page the user visits, in a window that you can't get rid of

New Blogger Features (beta)

- drag-and-drop interface
- make your blog private
- new templates
- RRS feed for all the comments posted on a blog
- support RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 standards
- categorize your posts with labels

More info at blogger.com

Better not say you "googled" something

Google are worried that their brand is suffering from genericide - generic use of a trademark, and are asking publications to refrain from using Google as a verb. More at The Register & News.com

Google Video - Porn Outlet?

People watching Google Video closely noticed a change this week in the upload area - the restrictions on uploading “pornographic or obscene” material is now just a restriction on “obscene” material. They’ve also added a “mature and adult” category to the genres and removed (I believe) a box on the initial uploading page that must be checked where the uploader certifies that the “video is not pornographic or obscene material.

If anything, being able to find porn on Google saves folk from visiting unsavoury sites that have the nerve to:

- give us viruses, trojans, dialers
- give us never-ending pop-up ads
- are step 1 in a long path to nasty/illegal stuff
- have the nerve to charge for porn!

More at ZDNet

$1 Billion Server Farm for Andhra Pradesh, India

Search giant Google has revived its plans to set up a server farm in India. The $1-billion back-office, its second facility in India and seventh globally, is likely to be located in Andhra Pradesh, industry sources said.

More...

GOOG shares sold at $38 each

Once again someone who should be more careful mis-typed a number and some GOOG fans got some extremely cheap shares. More here

Chinese Model Terrain

Spotted by one avid Google Earth user, a strange Chinese military installation, with a "900x700m scale model of a mountainous landscape..."

Of course another Earther (Earthee?) found the location this training ground uncannily copies, on the Chinese/Indian border. More at The Register

$900M Deal with MySpace.com

The integration of Google's services including consistent search navigation across Fox Interactive Media's network of properties is slated to begin in the fourth quarter 2006.

Under the terms of the agreement, Google will be obligated to make guaranteed minimum revenue share payments to Fox Interactive Media of $900 million based on Fox achieving certain traffic and other commitments.

More...

A LOT of Data Available for R&D

Google have decided to share some data with the wider IT community, in the form of:

That's why we decided to share this enormous dataset with everyone. We processed 1,011,582,453,213 words of running text and are publishing the counts for all 1,146,580,664 five-word sequences that appear at least 40 times. There are 13,653,070 unique words, after discarding words that appear less than 200 times.

It will fill 6 DVDs. Presumably there will be a small cost, but that's fine.

Safe(r) Searching

Google launched a feature this week that will alert searchers when they visit a site suspected of distributing badware/malware. The service is a partnership between Google and StopBadware.org, an organization aimed at stopping the spread of malicious software.

AdSense Triple Verification

New and sensible way of verifying new AdSensers, to weed out bad eggs:

Mail - a Personal Identification Number (PIN) is sent to you via standard mail.
Email - telling you where to enter your PIN
Phone - their system phones you and you enter a code

A List of Google News Sources

Courtesy of Philipp Lenssen, who has "found over 8,600 unique news sources in Google News"

Google Compensating Newspapers?

Google News has no ads, otherwise the news sources could claim that Google is making a profit from their content. One would expect Google to at least try to monetize Google News, and the first signs of that are appearing:

"The people who own the content did a lot of work to generate the content," Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said in an interview with the Mercury News. "We want them to get the majority of the revenue from advertising."

My guess is that Google will get as many news sources as possible to agree to be paid per click-through to their site, and then, after they have signed up as many as possible, start placing ads on Google News.

They will then drop all non-agreeing news sources from Gogole News, with the expectation that, when they realise they are getting fewer visitors, and missing out on revenue, they will sign as well in the near future.

What sort of ads? I'm unsure if Adwords ads are best suited to news. My guess is that a banner ad along the top will be supplemented by Adwords ads halfway down the page.

More at SearchEngineGuide