Few things which Google should do with this New Year

I want Google to introduce few more services and product this year and I wish new services and product to be like

• To connect all services and apps together. I mean when you Gmail your photo to your friend, I want Google to upload the same to Picasa Web also. And allow more integration and more space on Picasa Web.

• Google presentation should be compatible with PowerPoint. It should allow saving and editing of pdf attach from Gmail to Gdocs.

• Google should allow users to get OpenId like blogger for Google accounts and Google Apps.

• Profiles of Google should be expanded and integrated like face book.

• Google sites should be more or less similar to blogger and allow html, scripts and iframes. It should allow posting no. of comment like blogger comment function.

• Google should chrome for Mac.

• It should digitize more of old newspaper around the world.

• It should also digitize microfilm and books from the Family History Library in Salt Lake City, UT.

• There should be sitemaps for images so that it helps to get more images into image search with keywords site owners provide.

• Google should update Google Music search to include videos and song samples. Google should allow graphical AdSense ads but excluding animations.

• Google should introduce separate drive call GDrive. More and more coverage in Google Earth is required.

• Google should allow the user to send even Exe files from Gmail.

• Synchronization of Itunes/iPhone to google calendar.

• Other thing that I always wanted to see from them is a tool to locate and integrate datasets with similar axes, and then build reports and graph based on them and grand central coverage in UK and Europe.

• I want see a much better bookmark manager.

• A Google should have a central console which would contain all the Google web applications a user uses, so he logs on to the console, one button pressed would open whichever application he chooses within a shell so it easy to swop in between.

• It should gears support for Gmail and calendar.

• There should be integration between Grand Central and Gmail contacts.

• They should improve Android in order to support more than one Google Apps accounts.

• Google to take over Microsoft so that we can make a even better operating system. SMS support in Gmail for India.

• There should be Community chat room in Orkut.

• They should now introduce movies in you tube. There should be transparency in how they rank, search results is the only long term way to prove that they are not tampering with search engine to make more money.

These are the few wish which I want the Google to fulfill it as soon as possible this will help more and more users to use G-products.

Google webmaster holiday ideas

Google compiled a list of quick and simple tips for websites preparing for the holiday rush. For online and offline retailers, we understand that your website is a big part of your business, especially this time of year. Whether it’s to make the sale online or to increase foot traffic to your brick-and-mortar location, your web presence is a critical part of your business plan. The tips below are fast, free, and can make a big difference.Verify that your site is indexed by Google (and is returned in search results)Check your snippet content and page titles with the site: command [site:example.com] — do they look accurate and descriptive for users? Ideally, each title and snippet should be unique in order to reflect that each URL contains unique content. If anything is missing or you want more details, you can also use the Content Analysis tool in Webmaster Tools. There you can see which URLs on your site show duplicate titles or meta descriptions.
Label your images accurately

Don’t miss out on potential customers! Because good ‘alt’ text and descriptive filenames help us better understand images, make sure you change non-descriptive file names [001.jpg] to something more accurate [NintendoWii.jpg]. Image Search is one of our largest search properties, so you should take advantage of it.Know what Google knows (about your site)Check for crawl errors and learn the top queries that bring traffic to your site through Webmaster Tools. See our diagnostics checklist.Have a plan for expiring and temporary pagesMake sure to serve accurate HTTP status codes. If you no longer sell a product, serve a 404. If you have changed a product page to a new URL, serve a 301 to redirect the old page to the new one. Keeping your site up-to-date can help bring more targeted traffic your way.Increase foot traffic tooIf your website directs customers to a brick-and-mortar location, make sure you claim and double check your business listing in Google Local.
Usability 101Test the usability of your checkout process with various browsers. Ask yourself if a user can get from product page to checkout without assistance. Is your checkout button easy to find?

Message center info through Google API

The webmaster tool has just launched the Message Center GData API as a part of webmaster tools API. For those of you that are not familiar with GData, it’s a protocol for reading and writing Data on the web. GData makes it very easy to communicate with many Google services, like webmaster tools. The webmaster tool GData API has been updated to allow you to get even more out of webmaster tools, such as setting graphic location or your preferred domain. If your site targets user in a particular geographic location, you can actually use our geographic tool to provide us with information that will help us determine your site appears in our country-specific search results and also improve our search result for geographic queries. This feature can be used only with the top-level domain, such as .com or .org. and if no information is entered in webmaster tools, we will continue to make geographic association largely based on top level domain and the IP address of the web server from which the context was served.
The webmaster tool GData API already allows you to add and verify sites for your account and to submit sitemaps programmatically. With the help of these webmaster tool GData API you can also access and update site-specific information. This is useful when you have large number of sites. With the webmaster tool API you can perform hundreds of operations in the time that it would take to add and verify a single site through the web interface.
This message center is nothing but just to get personalized information from Google in our webmaster console. Initially the message will refer to search quality issues, but over time we’ll use the message center as a communication channel for more types of information. For our webmaster outside US we are also pleased to tell you that message center is capable of providing in all supported webmaster tools languages (French, Italian, German, Spanish, Danish, Dutch, Swedish, Russian, Chinese-Simplified, Chinese-Traditional, Korean, Japanese, etc.), across all countries.
Until now you were only able to access through the Message Center section of webmaster tools but now you can access even through GData. This way you don’t need to continually check your messages in webmaster tools, you can retrieve the messages feed automatically and be informed as soon as possible of any critical issues regarding your sites.

Source: Google Webmaster central blog

HTC PLANNING TO RELEASE GOOGLE ANDROID PHONE THIS SUMMER

The 14 new members who joined Google’s Open Handset Alliance showed their support in development of the Google Android mobile operating system. Among the fresh addition is Sony Ericsson, and it looks like the company is not wasting anytime and has hit the ground running.
By summer 2009, according to several sources Sony Ericsson is planning to release its Android Handset. A company spokesman says that first model will be on the higher end while it will release more mass market devices at a later time. In addition, HTC is asked to work on whole portfolio of Android devices and also on the release program of Android devices. HTC is the manufacturer of the first Android Smartphone, T-MobileG1, which was questionable in the Hardware department, but now HTC has acquired one & Co Design Inc. for this handset designs, perhaps we will see some sleeker device? Summer can actually get here quick enough.

SEO experiment keyword rich links webmasterworld member

A webmaster world member asks “Hi guys, I am doing an interesting experiment on two of my more throw away domains. The experiment is testing to try and determine more information about how linking to the homepage affects rankings. The testing involves various controls – linking to the root domain from the nav only using ‘home’, linking from the nav using ‘main keyword’, linking from nav using ‘variations’ of keyword, linking from content only (while nav links saying home) to home using ‘keywords’ etc, etc.
First, I should mention some points about the domain.
4 years old Owned by me Dedicated IP Canonical comdomized HTML only Ranks top 5 in Google.com for main, second and third keyword phrases. Total of 90 pages, all unique content (written by me)
Testing was done over a 3 month period, with grace periods in between testing.
Here is so far what I have found. Might tell us a little about the threshold and re ranking filters
1. Linking home from every page in content using the same keyword caused 6 page drop in rankings.
2. Linking home using keyword in nav on all pages caused the same drop.
3. Link home from every page in content using variations caused a 3 page drop.
4. Linking home from the first 10 pages listed in google.com for site:domain.com/* brought increased ranking (from 5th to 3rd)
What is really interesting is that I gotten this down to the ‘by page’ factor. When I *slightly* cross the threshold and add links to two extra pages, and then wait until they are cached, I tip the scales and drop, to page 6.
What is further interesting is that linking home from content using variations of keywords WAS quite effective to a point, after which the site plummeted.
As well, this might point to a ‘hard line’ being crossed in terms of threshold, at one point I had the website going between position 4 and 51-60 for the same keyword every second day (flipping back and forth)
My test will be about trying to -950 the website by being ridiculously deliberate in nav linking, and then seeing if I can reverse the results by removing those (and how long it takes for the trust to be reinstated to the website) “

Google calendar officially comes to Apple’s iCal

On Monday, Google announced full support for the CalDAV protocol along with the release of a small piece of software for Mac computers so that users can easily link up their Google Calendars with iCal applications.
In July, CalDAV was previously launched by Google; however still consumer had to manually add their calendars directly to CalDAV- supporting application like Mozilla Sunbrid and Apple’s iCal. The newly launched Mac utility named “Calaboration” let the user to plug in their google calendar username and password to send the Google calendar over to iCal. It provides the benefits of two way synchronization that mean what ever changes you make on either end will appear to both in every few minutes.
After all the changes made to Calaboration, when it was started it worked without any problem. With this current implementation, we are able to see other people schedules, as well as reply yes, no or may be to calendar invitations. The only problem faced earlier was syncing errors which mean it dint allow to write data to Google servers, which was remedied with a closing and reopening of the program after the initial CalDAV setup.
If you are sunbird user, you can grab the Calaboration. As there is a simple provider extention that does the same thing.

Googlebot and if-modified since

New record in processing 1 PetaByte of Data

According to Official Google blog

“At Google we are fanatical about organizing the world’s information. As a result, we spend a lot of time finding better ways to sort information using MapReduce, a key component of our software infrastructure that allows us to run multiple processes simultaneously. MapReduce is a perfect solution for many of the computations we run daily, due in large part to its simplicity, applicability to a wide range of real-world computing tasks, and natural translation to highly scalable distributed implementations that harness the power of thousands of computers.In our sorting experiments we have followed the rules of a standard terabyte (TB) sort benchmark. Standardized experiments help us understand and compare the benefits of various technologies and also add a competitive spirit. You can think of it as an Olympic event for computations. By pushing the boundaries of these types of programs, we learn about the limitations of current technologies as well as the lessons useful in designing next generation computing platforms. This, in turn, should help everyone have faster access to higher-quality information.We are excited to announce we were able to sort 1TB (stored on the Google File System as 10 billion 100-byte records in uncompressed text files) on 1,000 computers in 68 seconds. By comparison, the previous 1TB sorting record is 209 seconds on 910 computers.Sometimes you need to sort more than a terabyte, so we were curious to find out what happens when you sort more and gave one petabyte (PB) a try. One petabyte is a thousand terabytes, or, to put this amount in perspective, it is 12 times the amount of archived web data in the U.S. Library of Congress as of May 2008. In comparison, consider that the aggregate size of data processed by all instances of MapReduce at Google was on average 20PB per day in January 2008.It took six hours and two minutes to sort 1PB (10 trillion 100-byte records) on 4,000 computers. We’re not aware of any other sorting experiment at this scale and are obviously very excited to be able to process so much data so quickly.”

Search-based Keyword Tool Google launch

The Search-based Keyword Tool provides keyword ideas:
Based on actual Google search queries
Matched to specific pages of your website with your ad and search share
New to your Adwords account (typically excluding keywords matching those already in your account)What is the Search-based Keyword Tool?
The Search-based Keyword Tool generates keyword and landing page ideas highly relevant and specific to your website. In doing so, the tool helps you identify additional advertising opportunities that aren’t currently being used in your AdWords ad campaigns.
Based on your URLs, the Search-based Keyword Tool displays a list of relevant user queries that have occurred on Google.com (and on other Google search properties, such as google.co.uk) with some frequency over the past year; these suggestions can be found under the Keywords tab, in the New keywords related to (site) section. In the Keywords related to your search section, you can see a broad list of keyword ideas that are also relevant, but aren’t necessarily based on your site.
The keywords are also organized by category. Click any category to expand and view its subcategories. If applicable, you’ll also see the keywords organized by brand names

you can use it here, http://www.google.com/sktool/

Losing pages in search engine index a concern

According to a member ” I have been doing a lot of digging lately because of a site I have that has been losing pages in the index… at least I thought it was losing pages. In the coarse of investigating, I have been finding a lot of discrepancies and have come to the conclusion that though tools and search operators may be helpful, they seem to be far from accurate and do not fully portray what is in the data and returns. What I found fascinating is that while I perceived that I was losing pages in the index, I actually have been increasing position for some relatively hard to get keywords and phrases. In fact, the site in question just went to #6 for widgets. It seems the more I search and investigate, the more glaring the discrepancies.
I was having a lot of problems with the site and duplicate content. It seems there were several ways of getting to the same page (different URLs) and as we know, this can be a bad thing. The site has a forum that has generated 16,000 topics (some of them on multiple pages) so in essence, I am going to estimate that I have around 19,000 pages total on the site. Now at the height of the duplicate problem, when I did a site:mysite.com, I was getting over 80,000 pages returned. WOW! I fixed all the dupe content issues and now each page has one URL and each has a uniquely generated title, description, keywords and of course, the content is different since it is user generated. I used robots.txt to get rid of the duplicated pages and started to watch what would happen. This seemed to have corrected the problem. Pages started going supplemental and dropped, as far as I can tell. But the pendulum seemed to have swung too far! Within the past month, the number of pages returned using site: have been slowly dropping. Now when I do a site:mysite.com, it only shows 4000 pages. Huh? What’s the deal with that? Not only that, when I do a site:mysite.com/*, I only get about 800 pages. So I am confused, of course. But are the missing pages really not there? I conducted about 200 searches for the pages that I thought were missing and found every single one of them, though the searches were fairly specific. So what does this tell me? The site: operator does not work. All of my pages are there, it’s just Google doesn’t want to count them all with this operator. What does this mean? Not sure, but it is what it is. For every page I find missing, I can find in a search. The tool seems to be broken – like a lot of the tools on G. “

What causes drop of indexed pages?