Category Archives: Google

Want to chat with your friends using Google’s instant messaging platform? Do you have an instant messaging client that supports Jabber messaging and a Google ID? Here’s what you need to do: Open a client supporting Jabber (AdiumX, Gaim, etc.) Your server name is talk.google.com Your username is the same as your Google ID. Example: user@gmail.com Your password is the same as you use to login to Gmail or other Google login locations. That’s it! You can add your friends using their full ID and encrypt your messages to be safe. I am sure Google will introduce a nice UI…

I was searching Google this morning and I noticed some new links under the top search result. I was searching for FTP software Transmit and I noticed four screenshots immediately below the search result for transmit. How interesting! People searching for Transmit can immediately view screenshots of the application. A search for Technorati reveals a few chosen links within Technorati’s many web pages as well. So what’s going on? My guess is Google is experimenting with ways of surfacing multiple results within the same domain. We currently see this exposure of up to four links for the top search result…

Google today unveiled Google Sitemaps, a way for webmasters to let Google know about the files on their site as they are published. Webmasters can create a XML file describing the files available on their site and ping Google or simply ping with the location of a RSS or Atom file with each update. You can sign in to your Google account to add and track sitemaps. Update: User-Agent seems to be new: “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)” coming from 66.249.66.1….

Google employees are now eligible for quarterly awards of restricted Google stock worth $12 million vested over four years awarded to teams but distributed based on individual contribution. More details will be available after Google’s conference call with investors later today. The new plan is a way for Google to provide incentives for new employees with a $190 strike price….

Ben Goodger, lead engineer for Mozilla Firefox, just announced he started a new job at Google. He will still be “devoted full-time to the advancement of Firefox, the Mozilla platform and web browsing in general” and work out of the Mozilla Foundation offices regularly. Interesting move and it’s good to see Google giving back to the open-source community….

Marissa Mayer of Google spoke at PARC on Tuesday night. Marissa is product manager for Google.com and formerly the technical lead for the user-interface team. Alan Williamson provides a good summary of the event. Some interesting bits of information: The Google copyright statement was added to the bottom of the home page as an end of page marker after users expected more page content to load. If at least 20% of people use a feature Google will include it in the full site. At least 5% of users need to use an advanced feature before it is included in Google’s…

Google has an archive of Usenet postings since 1981. Google has a page full of memorable moments from twenty years of postings. First mention of the term “search engine” was in March 1988. Linus Torvalds’ Linux announcement First post from an AOL account was in May 1992, almost three years after the first mention of AOL. Yahoo! and Lycos mentioned in December 1994. Altavista announced in December 1995. Lots of interesting reading and a reminder I have not yet been to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. I plan to attend the Steve Case and Walt Mossberg event on…

CBS News will air a segment about Google on this Sunday’s 60 Minutes. John Battelle is a featured commentator….