125 posts filed under this category, page 1 of 5.
Google updated its webmaster recommendations for smartphone-optimized websites. You may need to change your site HTML and server headers to help Google's various crawlers find your smartphone content and better associate the same pages optimized for various screen sizes.
Chrome 15 and above supports mapping input fields to specific types of data to improve the accuracy of autofill tools. The new WHATWG autocompletetype attribute proposal from Ilya Sherman of Google proposes 36 mapped tokens and two sections for autofill agents entering name, address, contact, credit card, business, or birthday data in a web browser.
Google's mobile search engine crawler now uses an updated User-Agent string designed to trigger iPhone-specific renderings of web pages.
Google released Chrome 13 into its stable channel this morning with over 5200 revisions including Instant Pages. If your webpages are not already differentiating between attended and unattended pageviews using the Page Visibility API for site analytics (and other functions assuming live eyeballs and the opportunity for interaction with page elements) your pageview numbers are now likely inflated.
Google search result pages now trigger a prefetch of top search result links in an effort to make navigating search results as easy as changing channels on your television. If Google's search algorithms determine there is a significant probability of user click-through on particular result they will instruct supporting browsers to preload the entire destination page including images, JavaScript, advertisements, and analytics. Update your web pages to be aware of the current page visibility state and track interactions, not background tasks.
Google will roll out a change to its search results pages later this week designed to better capture outbound clicks. Google search result pages will link to a gateway URL before delivering the visitor to his final destination. These gateway URLs will replace search result URLs exposed via the Referer HTTP header.
Google released its second web browser yesterday afternoon, adding additional headroom for web applications stretching the limits of what it's possible to accomplish within a web browser. The Google Chrome team assembled domain experts in various fields over the past six years, both through direct hires and acquisitions, to create a new browser and its critical components from scratch. GMail and Google Maps pushed the Web to its limits, taking advantage of browser technologies invented in Redmond but left dormant for far too long. Contributing to Firefox's core, writing browser extensions, and championing HTML could only take the $150 billion company so far: they needed to own the full browser to push their Web efforts forward at full speed.
On June 30 Adobe announced a partnership with Google and Yahoo! to better index SWF content on the Web. Search engines can now look inside the binary SWF format to extract text, links, and possible actions. In this post I will take a deeper look at search engine Flash interpreters and provide a few tips for successful indexing.
Google App Engine lets any Python developer execute CGI-driven Web applications, store its results, and serve static content from a fault-tolerant geo-distributed computing grid built exclusively for modern Web applications. In this post I will summarize Google App Engine from a developer's point of view, outline its major features, and examine pitfalls for developers and startups interested in deploying web applications on Google's servers.
Google released a new version of its Google Analytics tracking code last month. In this post you will learn about the new features available to webmasters and how to move away from the deprecated libraries.
Google is currently processing over 20 petabytes of data per day through an average of 100,000 MapReduce jobs spread across its computing clusters.
Google Desktop widgets can now be embedded in your iGoogle personal start page. This new functionality adds OS-level functionality such as CPU utilization, currently playing tracks in iTunes, or a battery indicator inside a Web interface. Google Desktop 5.5 is now available in a widget-only version to bridge these two worlds.
Google introduced a new advertising unit tonight: Google Gadgets.
In this post I'll outline different ways you can take advantage of Google's architecture to serve your widget content to the world. I'll cover various depths of integration and their branding and licensing issues.
Google is directly investing in small companies to expand the popularity of its iGoogle product. Google Gadget Ventures grants popular Google gadgets $5,000 for further development. Popular widget businesses are eligible for $100,000 in seed capital with Google taking an equity stake in each company. Google expects to invest $700,000 or more in third-party widget development over the next year. About 9% of Google's gadget directory would be eligible for the grant consideration based on the Google Gadget pageview analysis I last conducted in April. How it works A gadget must have at least 250,000 gadget views per week to…
Google's search result ranking algorithm received a major upgrade yesterday, incorporating its vertical search properties directly in the main search result page. The new design, Universal Search, integrates results from specialized Google verticals such as blogs, images, news, maps, and video. Results we've previously expected to find inside of a OneBox now appear anywhere in the users' result listings thanks to rewritten ranking and content examination algorithms. Examining vertical search Google and other large search engines crawl the worldwide web for new information every minute of every day. The modern web consists of billions of documents expressed in multiple formats…
Webmasters will soon be able to auction off widget space on their sites and blogs managed and marketed by advertising powerhouse Google. Advertisers will produce a Google Gadget in standard IAB unit sizes for distribution across the Google network at CPC or CPM billing rates. Google will bolster its current Google Analytics package to support better tracking paid and free widget campaigns in this sub-page and asynchronous pageload environment. The Google Gadget advertising beta program was publicly announced during a marketing summit for the automotive industry according to Online Media Daily. By the end of 2007 Google will offer its…
Google Reader finally has its first official API. Any developer in the world can request the entire history of a web feed from Google's geo-distributed server cloud in a normalized response for inclusion in their websites or products. I've been hoping for such an API since I first deconstructed the Google Reader backend in December 2005. Most users will likely interact with the Google AJAX Feed API through a JavaScript library included on their site or a pre-configured badge generated on the Google site. The Feed API wrapper is part of a larger effort by Google to extend its search…
Gadget platforms have many levels of integration and customization beyond a metadata wrapper and some markup. Beginners and tinkerers might stick to the basics, but some gadget authors go beyond the plain essentials and add support for multiple languages, tabbed views, and specify any requirements a gadget may expect. In yesterday's post I provided an overview of the Google Gadgets ecosystem, detailing the types of content and authors producing Google universal gadgets. Today I'll dive into developer features and observed implementations. Language support Content types Gadget height Top built-in libraries Gadgets produced by Google Extra requirements Summary Language support Google…
Last week the Google Gadgets team released page view numbers for gadgets in its directory, giving outsiders their glimpse of gadget activity across Google Personalized Homepage, Google Desktop, and syndicated throughout the web through Google Gadgets For Your Page. Over the weekend I crawled the entire Google Gadget directory, collecting information about every listed gadget to create a better and more complete understanding of a widget/gadget ecosystem including its level of health, geographic diversity of authors and supported users, popular categories, and some of the most popular gadget programming methods (just to name a few). In this post I'll share…
Google will host a conference this summer focused on building scalable websites. The one-day conference takes place on Saturday, June 23, at the Google offices in Seattle, home to Google Webmaster Tools, Google Talk, and a few other teams. The conference organizers are currently accepting applications for 45-minute talks, and hopefully we'll be able to learn a little more about concepts behind MapReduce, Bigtable and some large-scale data management issues from the Google staff. Registration is not yet open, and it's unclear whether the conference will be held in the downtown sales office or the engineering office in Kirkland, so…
If you walk into any of Google's 500 bathroom stalls you might notice some Python on the walls. Google places tips for its developers above every urinal and bathroom stall to help expounding the virtues of well-tested code, helping a Google engineer stay productive even when nature calls. Google is releasing its "Testing on the Toilet" series on a new testing blog under a Creative Commons license, so now anyone can decorate their bathroom walls to look just like Google. No, it's not a April Fools joke, Google really does promote 100% coverage in its bathroom stalls….
A few more details about Google's possible analysis of page text is now available thanks to a recently published patent application by Googler Anna Patterson from June 2006. The application details how a search engine like Google might analyze text phrases, date-based topics, and associate a web page with related topics, even if the specific topic does not appear in the document itself. The 22-page document further emphasizes Google's current work on "shingle" analysis to discover important phrases and concepts. (via Search Engine Land) Highly ranked websites are more likely to receive in-depth analysis through multiple index passes and phrase…
Guido van Rossum unveiled his first Google project, Mondrian, tonight during a Python tech talk at the Google campus in Mountain View. Mondrian is a web-based code review system built on top of a Perforce and BigTable backend with a Python-powered front-end. Mondrian is a pretty impressive system and is currently in use across Google. Shared Development Environment Google uses a company-wide Perforce depot with almost no developer branches. Each developer has their own NFS workspace readable by anyone in the company, including automated processes. An administrative process takes snapshots of each developer workspace including local development environments accessed…
Users of Google Apps for Your Domain can now add a homepage with a custom set of configured gadgets for their users. The new feature lets companies configure mail messages, calendar data, specialized web feeds, and more as their employees' portal to the web. The group customization feature was previously only available to large partnerships such as Dell and Gateway. The Apps for Your Domain program launched in August and includes custom branded and custom addressable access to Google Mail, Talk, Calendar, webpage creation, and now your own start page to bring it all together. The Google search box…