Google acquires urchin web analytics software – Google Agrees To Acquire Urchin

press release on Urchin site,

Google Agrees To Acquire Urchin
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – March 28, 2005 – Google Inc. today announced it has agreed to acquire Urchin Software Corporation, a San Diego, California based web analytics company.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Urchin is a web site analytics solution used by web site owners and marketers to better understand their users’ experiences, optimize content and track marketing performance. Urchin tools are available as a hosted service, a software product and through large web hosting providers. These products are used by thousands of popular sites on the Internet.
Google plans to make these tools available to web site owners and marketers to better enable them to increase their advertising return on investment and make their web sites more effective.
“We want to provide web site owners and marketers with the information they need to optimize their users’ experience and generate a higher return-on-investment from their advertising spending,” said Jonathan Rosenberg, vice president of product management, Google. “This technology will be a valuable addition to Google’s suite of advertising and publishing products.”
The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions. Google anticipates that the acquisition will close before the end of April.

http://www.urchin.com/company/news/03282005.html

Google guy responds to Attack on google for potential cloaking of some pages of their site

Many forums and blogs blame Google’s is keyword stuffing, cloaking their title etc in their support, that page was fixed and removed from google index now, Googleguy immediately responded explaining what has happened behind the screen,

Hey everyone, I’m sorry that it took me a while to post about this. I
wanted to make sure I completely understood what was going on first.
Those
pages were primarily intended for the Google Search Appliances that do site
search on individual help center pages. For example, http://adwords.google.com/support has a search box, and that
search is powered by a Google Search Appliance. In order to help the Google
Search Appliance find answers to questions, the user support system checked for
the user agent of “Googlebot” (the Google Search Appliance uses “Googlebot” as a
user agent), and if it found it, it added additional information from the user
support database into the title.
The issue is that in addition to being
accessed via the internal site-search at each help center, these pages can be
accessed by static links via the web. When the web-crawl Googlebot visits, the
user support system thinks that it’s the Google Search Appliance (the code only
checks for “Googlebot”) and adds these additional keywords.
That’s the
background, so let me talk about what we’re doing. To be consistent with our
guidelines, we’re removing these pages from our index. I think the pages are
already gone from most of our data centers–a search like
[site:google.com/support] didn’t return any of these pages when I checked. Once
the pages are fully changed, people will have to follow the same procedure that
anyone else would (email webmaster at google.com with the subject “Reinclusion
request” to explain the situation).

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/08/1621206

Google desktop search API now open for developers for developing unique tools,

Google recently introduced API feature for desktop search, this enables users to do unique applications for desktop search,

http://desktop.google.com/developer.html

Read the developer guide for more information on how to work with the API,

http://desktop.google.com/developerguide.html

Is Google Toolbar and other search engine toolbar useful – Search engine optimization tip 3rd March 2005

Google toolbar is a BHO ( Browser helper object ) which has pagerank display and other unique features, Some features of google toolbar are autolink, highlight button, blog this button, pagerank display , news button, backlinks button, auto fill, spell checker etc,

Auto Link: Auto link automatically changes certain part of the text in a site you browser into hyperlinks to other sites, This feature sometimes changes the links and points to specific maps or to other sites like amazon,

Pagerank Display: Pagerank is the technology of google in judging a quality of a site based on the links pointing to that pagerank, The more the links and the better quality the links are the pagerank passed with be more, Pagerank display helps in judging the quality of a site to a certain extent,

highlight button: Highlight Button helps in highlighting certain text specified in the search box,

Search Box: helps in searching the web,

Auto Fill: Helps in filling out online forms much faster,

Yahoo, MSN, A9, Teoma all have their unique toolbars,

Search engine toolbars helps in search engine optimization in various ways, options like the highlight button helps in judging the keyword density and keyword distribution of a page, Pagerank display helps in determining the pagerank of a site etc,

Google Maps Now supports Safari and Opera, from the official Google Blog,

Official google blog has announced that google maps their great product is now available for safari and opera browsers, Initially when it was launched it supported only Internet explorer and firefox,

From the google blog,

The Maps team was excited to see all the ideas and feedback that hit blogs around the Web after Google Maps launched a couple weeks ago, and we’ve been listening: Maps now supports Safari and Opera. Keep the feedback coming…

Google introduces new command movies:, Google’s movie review search hits the ground

Google has introduced a new feature search the movie: This new search helps users to find movie related information, For example we can find reviews, movie related etc using this search,

Movie: search also helps to find movie names you happen to forget, read what google says about movie: command,

Just in time for the Oscars, we’ve created a new “movie:” operator that enables you to find movie-related information faster and more easily, whether you’re looking for titles or actors, director or genre, famous lines or obscure plot details. Can’t remember the name of that film where Tom Hanks made friends with a volleyball? Search for [movie: Tom Hanks talking to a volleyball] and Google will tell you: it was Cast Away.

Google is reaching great heights and their new feature will be absolutely helpful,

Giving up Google is easier said than done. – A well written article,

Allan Hoffman reports how much he is addicted to google search engines, He describes he is a major google addict and performs 100s of searches in an active business day,

Yahoo seems to be the next priority to him, he likes yahoo’s integration of email notification while doing a search,

read more on what he has to say about other search engines too,

http://www.nj.com/columns/ledger/hoffman/index.ssf?/base/columns-0/110887143416190.xml

Google Zeitgeist Now displays country wide searches, Includes India, Ireland etc,

Google Zeitgeist has listed the top searches countrywide for certain countries, They have listed top searches in india,

Top 10 searches in India,

Popular QueriesJanuary 2005
1. tsunami
2. indian railways
3. sania mirza
4. trisha
5. aishwarya rai
6. anara gupta
7. ignou
8. bollywood
9. ndtv
10. australian open

Search For information on tsunami has topped the table, Tsunami ofcourse caused massive disaster in south asian countries, Weird listing is sania mirza who is a rising star in tennis in India,

Gmail now available to all users who left their email ID to google

Gmail an ultimate product from google is now rolled out to all users who gave their email ID to google, Initially gmail was registered only be invites, First set of invitation was sent out to adwords and adsense advertisers slowly a massive webmaster crowd started using Gmail,

Got the following mail to one of the account where our email ID was given to google,

Hi there,
Thanks for signing up to be updated on the latest Gmail
happenings. We hope it’s been worth the wait, because we’re excited to finally
offer you an invitation to open a free Gmail account! Just click on this link to
create your new account:
gmail.google.com/**** Since last April, we’ve been
working hard to create the best email service possible. It already comes with
1,000 megabytes of free storage, powerful Google search technology to find any
message you want instantly, and a new way of organizing email that saves you
time and helps you make sense of all the information in your inbox.
And here
are just some of the things that we’ve added in the last few months:
– Free
POP access: Take your messages with you. Download them, read them offline,
access them using Outlook, your Blackberry or any other device that supports
POP
– Gmail Notifier: Get new mail notifications and see the messages and
their senders without having to open a browser
– Better contacts management:
Import your contacts from Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, Outlook, and others to Gmail in
just a few clicks. Add phone numbers, notes and more. Even use search to keep
better track of it all.
We also wanted to thank you. For showing us your
support and for being so patient. And to those who have already signed up for
Gmail, thank you for giving it a try and for helping us make it better. Our
users are what have made this product great. So whether you’re just signing up
for your account or you’ve been with us since the beginning, keep letting us
know how we can build you the best email service around.
That’s it for now.
We hope you like Gmail and will share it with your friends. We’ve got lots of
cool new stuff planned and we can’t wait for you to see our work in your Gmail
accounts! Stay tuned…
Thanks,The Gmail Team
==We sent you this message
because you signed up to be updated on Gmail. If you do not wish to receive such
updates in the future, you may opt-out of receiving Gmail updates by visiting:
(If clicking the URLs in this message does not work, copy and paste them into
the address bar of your browser)
1600 Amphitheatre ParkwayMountain View, CA
94043

Now it has started reaching not too web savvy users too,

Google has recently sent out 50 invitations per active User ID,

Think slowly gmail will be available to general public, If they make it
public they have to handle 1000s to millions of registrations, So they will give
a deep thinking before making it public, Anyway everything is google news,

Google offers Google hosting for wikemedia / wikepedia network of sites,

Google Inc the ultimate search engine company has offered to host wikepedia one of the largest human edited encyclopedia on the internet, It seems the board of directors of wikemedia are discussing this offer,

wikemedia says,

Google Inc. have made a proposal to host some of the content of the Wikimedia projects.
The terms of the offer are currently being discussed by the board. The developer committee have been informed of some of the details via email. A private IRC meeting with Google is planned for March, 2005.

An interesting replies well to this offer from google in slashdot.org,

“I fear that authors/editors would withdraw from Wikipedia if it were
under the arm (or in the iron-fist) of a for-profit company. If these people
felt like Google was profiting on the backs of their freely-contributed content,
these content creators would leave and the Wiki would whither for lack of
fresh/updated content. Donating time so that other may profit does not seem
likely.
What is interesting is that Amazon makes this work. The company is
clearly a for-profit entity. Yet its crown jewels are the volunteer-created book
reviews. I’m not sure what makes this work. It might be that friends-of-authors
are motivated to post glowing reviews, it might be that people who disliked the
book are motivated to post scathing reviews, it might be that some reviewers
simply like to publish, or all of the above. Perhaps Wiki/Google-pedia could
borrow this model to mix free-labor with for-profit.
Looking further into
the future on an alternate path, I wonder if Googlepedia could become a fully
for-profit (or at least self-sufficient) professionally run and staffed
encyclopedia. With micro-royalties to authors/editors (and moderation-based
revocation of payments for “bad” content), the organization would attract
content creators on a for-pay basis. This aligns the motivational underpinnings
of the organization with those of the content creators. The current Wikipedia is
for-free people creating for-free content. A future Googlepedia could by for-pay
people creating for-pay content.
One overriding lesson from Wikipedia (and
Slashdot for that matter) is the ultimate necessity of sources of hard currency
for online sites. As long as something is small (and below a certain scale of
popularity) it can survive on donated hardware, bandwidth, or the benevolence of
a monied patron (someone who pays the hosting bills out-of-pocket). But once it
reaches a certain scale, the cost of serious server power, bandwidth, and
professional administrators pushes the budget far beyond the hobby scale.
Although pleas for donations can help, I suspect large-scale sites must,
ultimately, turn to ads, tie-in product sales, and subscriptions.
What is
fascinating, in a long-term trend sense, is that the cost of scale are steadily
declining. Cheaper hardware, declining bandwidth costs, and improvements in
systems management tools mean that sites can reach ever-larger scales before
generating prohibitive burn rates on costs. The number of visitors that a
hobbyist/free-site can support continues to rise. Perhaps Wike need only wait
for the singularity point when the cost to reach (and serve packets to) the
entire world is within the reach of a home-grown, volunteer-run
organization.”