SEO
Google and Yahoo Ad Deal Discontinued
After Microsoft opted for a bid for Yahoo in February, Google and Yahoo began several conversations to see if Google could help Yahoo to remain independent. Thus came the advertising agreement which the two companies signed in June. This deal was supposed to deliver Yahoo $250 million to $450 million in additional operating cash flow in the first year.
However,Google chose to abandon this controversial deal after the Justice Department notified the companies that it would file an antitrust suit to block it.
Google’s Chief Executive Eric Shmidt said in an interview which was posted in a blog,”We canceled the deal with about one hour to go before a lawsuit was going to be filed against our deal. We concluded after a lot of soul-searching that it was not in our best interest to go through a lengthy and costly trial which we believe we ultimately would have won.”
On the contrary,Yahoo said it would have preferred to defend the deal in court. “Yahoo strongly believes we would have prevailed in court if the Department of Justice had filed a lawsuit, but unlike Google, we were prepared to defend our agreement,”said Tracy Schmaler, a Yahoo spokeswoman in a blog.Yahoo’s Chief Executive Jerry Yang said that he was upset that Google had chosen to walk away.
Third Beta update of Google Chrome
Google Chrome version 0.3.154.9 is released.This release fixes several issues,especially with regard to plugins which people have put forward in the top issues.Check the following site http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel/release-notes for details on the changes that have been made since 0.2.149.30.
Following issues have been fixed:
1.Scrolling with laptop touchpads works fine now.
2.Improved performance for plugins (like Flash, Silverlight, QuickTime, and Windows Media).Several issues like video not loading, stopping after a second, and slowing down were fixed.
3.When you close a tab that was showing PDF using Adobe Reader 9,a ‘chrome has crashed’ message appears.This has been fixed.
4.Data from secure sites are not stored.We can still search the history for the site contents.
5.Performance Improvement for people who use web proxies.
Scanned Documents are available through Google Search
Google turns PDf files generated from scanned paper into digital text using OCR optical character recognition(OCR) technology.
Google product manager hasaid in a blog post “In the past, scanned documents were rarely included in search results as we couldn’t be sure of their content.We had occasional lues from references to the document, so you might get a search result with a title but no snippet highlighting your query. Today, that changes. We are now able to perform OCR on any scanned documents that we find stored in Adobe’s PDF format”.
The converted text of scanned files are available in search pages through the “View as HTML” link.
Free Microsoft Speech Recognition component
The program can be installed through the Internet Explorer add-on.Once the installation of this add-on is complete,users with thier voice can enter a search phrase.Then when the voice command “search” is said or when the click button is searched,the user will be redirected to the site www.voicesearchbar.com.In this location,the results of Google will be visible.
In order to improve the quality of speech recognition, we need around 3 to 4 launches of the training mode program.This new program is dedicated to Bill Gates who has been a great supporter of speech recognition softwares.
Google Earth for iphone
Google releases a version of Google Earth for the iPhone as well as for ipod Touch,which allows users for zooming in and out of a virtual globe.Though Google Earth was available for the desktop for nearly 3 years,the iphone deployment is its first mobile version.
The other familiar comparative product for iphones is Google Maps for Mobile (GMM),which emphasises more on localised street mapping and less on a visual reproduction of the earth’s topography.In a blog post by Peter Birch, product manager for Google Earth, the iPhone’s touch interface allows a user to “swipe [their]finger across the screen and fly to the other side of the globe”, while the in-built accelerometers make it possible to adjust the viewing angle by tilting the phone.
Brute Force SEO Software
The release of Brute Force SEO has become a success story for Australian internet marketer Peter Drew.The sales statistics for the first release is a 10% page conversion.It also brought a 60% retention after the 7 day trial.
The software combines all the previous versions of Drew’s software products and have evolved as a complete website tool.The full 1000 trial memberships has sold out in less than 3 days.Those who hacve missed out this can secure a membership spot which will be opened again in the forthcoming weeks.
In one of the blogs,this is what Peter Drew has mentioned.”Search engine optimization is ever-changing and can be difficult, particularly for those new to search marketing. However, the combination of Brute Force SEO software, the members-only forum and bonus software tools,even a newbie can effectively compete in the search engines.”
Users exhibiting a lack of contentment over the new iGoogle Home Page
Google ,which was formerly Google Personalized Homepage and Google IG,is a personalised service of Google.The main features of iGoogle is that it allows the users to include web feeds and Google Gadgets. Google on July 8,2008 had announced that it was beginning the testing period for a new and improved version of iGoogle, which includes several additional new features .On October 16, 2008,Google released its latest version and retired its old version.The new features to be included were replacing tabs with left navigation,including chat functionality ,as well as a canvas view gadget for RSS.
Unfortunately,users have complained of this redesign as most people have disliked this change.The main changes to iGoogle include the ability to increase a gadget application to a full screen, called canvas view and a new left-hand navigation bar.Until now,there had been at least one online petition, requesting that iGoogle users get the option to reset their pages to the previous design,which they preferred.A common complaint is towards the new left-hand navigation column,which many gripe that it takes up valuable screen space and causing a hindrance to their user experience.Another complaint has been that the Gmail gadget had made links in e-mail messages inactive.Above all, there has been objection to Gmail messages which is showing up by default via Gmail gadget.This is a major hindrance for people at work, who don’t want their information to be viewed by others.In one of the discussion forums, Google’s representative had responded in one of the forums that Google is trying hard to sort these issues.
Recession,one of the cause for boost in Internet search
Google CEO Eric Schmidt brought forth the following view point when he spoke to analysts on October 17th in a conference call.He reported that there has been a 26 percent increase in third quarter profits and attributed this to the efforts of all his employees.He mentioned that in some ways search engines have benefited from the slow down and every year search queries traffic have been seen to increase in every vertical.
In one of the websites,Eric Schmidt quotes “We believe that these results reflect the fact that as marketing budgets are squeezed, targeted, measurable ads are becoming more valuable to advertisers. As consumer budgets are squeezed, people use the web for comparison shopping to hunt for bargains online and in stores.” However he hinted that it would be difficult even for the search engine giant to compete during the harder times of recession in future.
Google launches AdSense for Games.
A recent survey by Comscore showed that 25% of Internet users play games every week.This records to around 200 million users worldwide.Following this survey,Google has launched adSense for Games.Through this,online game developers and online game sites get an opportunity to gain additional revenues.
Adsense for Games will be displayed on specific parts of a game chosen by game developers.The ads displayed can be either video ads,image ads or text ads.The ads can be displayed in the form of interstitial frames which would occur before a game starts,middle of a game or at the end of a game.
Crawl Error Feature of Google’s Webmaster tools has been improved
Google Webmaster Tools lately had launched the Crawl Error feature,which gives information about various site URL’s for which Google’s crawling was not a success.Previously,this tool displayed only the URL’s which couldn’t be accessed, along with the errors.Later administrators had to trace the cause of these errors.
Now,the Webmaster Tools has been improved to include additional features.The site diagnostic portion of the Webmaster Tools currently includes a “Linked From” column in addition to the “Not Found” and “Errors for URLs in Sitemaps” reports.The Linked From column specifies the number of pages which link to a specific “Not Found” URL and the date when the error was found.All the above details can be downloaded from webmaster tools.
The above features are very helpful for tracking crawling errors.With the help of this tool specific URLs can be identified.In this way,webmasters can detect if the errors were caused by any external links.In that case , they will be able to contact webmasters of the external sites in order to correct the errors.