Enhanced Webmaster Tools

Added to the luxurious suite are:

* the number of pages Googlebot's crawled from your site per day
* request a crawl rate
* give tags to your images, to improve indexing and search quality of those images

8 biggest Google AdSense publishers

Not authorative, but gleaned by a web researcher:

#2 Kevin Rose: Digg.com - $250,000 per month

Kevin Rose started Digg in December of 2004 with just $1000. Today Digg is one of the biggest news sites on the Net, with over 400,000 members and over 200 million page views per month.

#3 Jeremy Shoemaker - $140,000 per month

Jeremy Shoemaker is a search engine marketer who knows how to take advantage of both Google AdSense and AdWords. In the above photo, you see him with the biggest Google AdSense check he has ever received from Google. The income was earned back in the month of August 2005. Since then Mr. Shoemaker has moved to wire transfers.

...He makes his enormous Google checks using hundreds of sites and thousands of domains.

Sydney Photos - Partial Failure

Even though Air Traffic Control has indicated that the planned flight path was almost impossible to achieve, this was not mentioned to the thousands of people hoping to be photographed from above, some of who went to considerable effort. Consequently only some of the photos were taken at the expected times and places. More at The Age

More Backlash on Images ReDesign

The new Google Images is identical to the old one, except all the text that used to appear on the page, save the title of the image, is hidden, and only appears when your mouse is near the image. The redesign does not make for more space on the page, or larger images, or a cooler new look, it just removes info that was always there.

...so says Nathan Weinberg. It was pretty much perfect as it was, but it seems G assigned someone the mission to improve it, and the bosses signed off on this obviously lesser UI.

Prank calls & free long-distance via Google Maps

Prank Call: Just visit the Google Maps listing of a business like the one above, and enter the number of your target.

Free Long Distance: If you have a business listing on Google Maps, go to your own listing and enter the long-distance number you would like to call!

Design Changes

Groups is out of beta, and has a new blue color scheme, and new features.

Images - before you could see all the info for a pic on the page, now you have to hover your mouse over the image to see it. A backwards step, hopefully they'll change their mind.

New, brighter Checkout image appearing in AdWords.

google.de stolen for 12 hours

It isn't clear how, but somebody registered google.de and German surfers who tried to visit Google's site saw a page hosted by a tiny German online provider, Goneo.

Usually the only way this can happen is the domain name expires and someone else buys it. How Google could let a domain name expire is anyone's guess, but it happened to eBay once.

Battle over Sydney

More of a game than a war, but Microsoft will also have a plane above Sydney on Australia Day, as part of their sponsorship of the National Australia Day Council's "Look Up and Smile" thing. The aera being photographed is much smaller than that covered by the mighty G.

Be photographed on Australia Day by Google Maps

Google is celebrating Australia Day 2007 by photographing Sydney from the air, at a low height of 600 metres.

This will allow extra hi-resolution pictures, and when they are uploaded to Google Maps, it should be possible to spot individual people.

More info and flight timetable & map here.

Only 19% of Checkout users think it is good

Google's Checkout ranked well below rival online payment service PayPal in customer satisfaction in a survey of online shoppers conducted by J.P. Morgan.

Among Checkout users, 19 percent rated the service as either very good or good, with the rest calling it average, poor, or fair, a result characterized by J.P. Morgan as "a very low level of satisfaction with the product." By contrast, PayPal, which is owned by eBay, fared better, with 44 percent of its users saying it's very good or good.

I think this could be partly due to PayPal users having grown used to it over the years, and hadn't recently gone through the process of joining and setting it up...

Newspapers, radio, what next - Billboards??

Google have patented it, so it may happen - bid to have you ad on a digital billboard. I love it, imagine being able to flash your ad for 30 secs in Boulder, Colorado, to anyone happening to drive by....

BTW, the patent is a bit simple and silly - only showing ads for product lines that are in stock. How often do you see an ad for products that are out of stock (damn, my 7-11 is out of Marlboros... bugger, my Ford dealer has no cars left)? And who cares, because if it is out-of-stock, it can actually make you desire it more!

Blog results appearing in regular search

Yet again it is a little trial that only some people will see - 3 blog search results below regular results. Screenshot.

Buy it, forget it...

Must be hard for Google to remember all the different products they have developed, let alone the companies and products they have purchased.

Seems that one purchase has gone nowhere, and as a one reporter says, it's a shame because if they had not bought it, by now it would be out of beta - instead of languishing in alpha.

...it’s almost a year already and Measure Map is nowhere near what I’ve expected it to be. ...hasn’t been any update on the tool nor have they opened up the service to more bloggers. The only apparent change ...is with the server migration of the site.

Jet in NZ - just Eric Schmidt on vacation

Plane spotters say 11 passengers disembarked when the 767 landed in Christchurch. They walked directly to a smaller Gulfstream jet linked to Peter Jackson. Posters on popular aircraft Web forums say one of the passengers was Mr Schmidt, but the others remain unknown.

More here

Google to get real-time stock quotes

If the SEC approves of it, that is. Google (and the rest of NetCoalition including Yahoo, Ask, CNet & Bloomberg) have boldly approached the NYSE and asked if they can have the quotes in real-time for a cheap enough price, and the NYSE said yes. This is a winner for everyone!

Max CPC means just that....

Question:

I recently started a new Ad Group, running on the keyword 'flower delivery'. When I started, I had a Maximum CPC of $1.00 which was fine - but then I decided to try to improve my position, and raised my Max CPC way up to $5.00 to make it happen. In the past, I've increased bid amounts on other keywords, with the average CPC falling far below the top bid amount. I would have never increased it to $5.00 if I knew that each click could actually cost me that amount. Since I last checked, there have been a lot of clicks at $5.00! I'd be happy to pay $1.00 to $1.50 per click, but not $5.00. What happened, and what can I do?

Google Answer:

It's important for advertisers to know that AdWords is an automated system which is designed to take advertiser input, and act on it in a literal way, rather than interpret what an advertiser "really wanted". In other words, when an advertiser specifies what they want, the system does its best to give them just that.

Thus, when an advertiser specifies a Maximum CPC, the AdWords system will assume that the advertiser means it, and in fact wishes to pay up to (but not more than) the specified Maximum CPC -- in order to be as competitive as possible. And, while it is true that one's actual CPC may often be far less than the Maximum CPC set, in a very competitive (and ever-changing) landscape it remains possible that clicks can in fact cost the maximum amount specified.

Bottom line, to avoid this particular pitfall, it's always advisable to set your Max CPC no higher than you are actually comfortable paying for a single click.

Poorly Announced Site Maintenance

Whereas the AdWords blog said this:

This just in from our tech team:

We will be performing AdWords maintenance from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. PST tomorrow – Tuesday, January 9, 2007. While all AdWords advertisements will continue to run as normal and you will be able to log into your account, you may not be able to run or retrieve reports, or upload image or video ads during this time.

We apologize for the short notice and any inconvenience this may cause you.

The normal notice within AdWords did not appear! Consequently my staff, and presumably thousands of AdWords advertisers who do not happen to frequent the AdWords blog, had no idea why the system was slow and why reporting was not working...

Google needs to either make a subscription to the Adwords blog compulsory for advertisers, or stop using it as the sole source of really important information...

Of course this is probably just a glitch due to Google not having key staff working during weekends and holiday periods....

The Half-life of Dominance

This idea is doing the rounds - that as computers/internet become more integrated in our lives, and therefore the number of players increases due to growing revenue, the dominant player will not last as long until they are usurped:

IBM 1950-1980
Microsoft 1984-1998
Google 2001-

If each period is only half as long as the previous, then Google only has two years left to reign. Feels right to me - it can't take much longer for a worthy challenger to appear...

Bye-bye to Self-Promoting "Tips"

The brouhaha started December 18 when the Google Tips function went live. When searching for certain terms, such as “calendar”, “blog” or “photograph”, a line promoting a Google product, couched as a “tip”, appeared above all other links.

...[a popular blogger commented]
“Google is predicated on the idea that the democratic structure of the Web will push the cream to the top,” wrote Ross. “These ‘tips’ then can only be a tacit admission of failure: either the company does not believe in its own search technology, or it does not believe its products are good enough to rise to the top organically.”

....By January 3rd the tip function was off the website. Watson said that decision “was based on user feedback and relevance considerations” but did not say whether the company would bring back the tips.

More at Red Herring

What should Google do next?

Technorati founder Dave Sifry, Gawker Media publisher Nick Denton, founder of Findory Greg Linden, and Blogads founder Mr. Henry Copeland were each asked what they would do if they were the CEO of Google. My favourite is:

Nick Denton, publisher of the blog network company Gawker Media, wrote in an e-mail, "I would get search working, because the results are cluttered with commercial rubbish that ought really to be in the advertising zone. Try doing a search in a category such as travel, for instance, for Barcelona hotels. It's useless."

Denton wrote that Google search results would improve if they included links to archived newspaper, magazine and blog articles. "Buy the digital archive rights to every publication in the country. Buy Lexis-Nexis if necessary," he wrote.

Seriously major YouTube rival looming

YouTube would love to be the portal to all things video, including TV content. This has prompted Fox, Viacom, CBS & NBC Universal to discuss the possibility of running a joint portal, where they control directly the access to their content. Despite Disney/ABC wanting to fly solo on this, it's a very sound idea.

Can they beat YouTube? The best evidence lies in the experience of the major airlines who created Orbitz.com - they probably make a small profit, but they aren't #1.

GMail Security Glitch

A serious flaw is discovered in Google's free email service allowing hackers to steal users' entire contact lists.

To exploit the flaw, the hacker would add a piece of code to their website server, which in turn gave them access to the Gmail contacts of passing browsers, so long as they were also signed in to their Gmail account in another window.

The hacker could then add the stolen contacts to an email spam database, or sell them to other spammers.

Gmail, the third most popular free web-based email service, has been embraced by both personal and business users alike, largely because it allows for easy access to messages from any computer worldwide.

Google's security team appeared to have fixed the flaw within hours, but various subsequent reports suggested the fix didn't address the full extent of the issue.

Further, it is understood that spammers were exploiting the security hole for quite some time before it was discovered.

More at The Age

Google Earth: Archaeologist Tool

"I've spent 25 years in this region of France," Madry said. "In the whole time, I've found a handful of archaeological sites. I found more in the first five, six, seven hours than I've found in years of traditional field surveys and aerial archaeology."

In all, he recorded 101 possible ancient sites along with their longitudes and latitudes. This spring, he visited the French Ministry of Culture's archaeology office in Dijon to compare what he found on the Internet with what the French have found on the ground. The government files confirmed his hunch.

About 75 percent of his computer-screen finds were known archaeological sites, proving that what look like ancient remains on the Internet can be bona fide finds. A share of the remaining 25 percent could be new sites that -- until now -- have escaped discovery. More.

Top Searches of 2006

According to Google, the top 10 were:

Bebo
Myspace
World Cup
Metacafe
Radioblog
Wikipedia
Video
Rebelde
Mininova
Wiki

Of course they have removed the perennial list-toppers like sex, MP3 etc...

The list from Yahoo Germany is more believable:
Weather
Route Planner
Erotica
Telephone Directory
Chat
Greeting Cards
Horoscopes
Games
Web
Paris Hilton

Page & Brin in NZ

For 4 days. Nobody knows why. Were they on holiday? Were they buying the whole country, as leaked last March?