Google's moves into application bundles and collaboration software are setting it up for a bigger enterprise play, taking on Microsoft in an area that consistently feeds their R&D. Maybe you read about the JotSpot acquisition this morning on the Google enterprise blog. We look forward to putting those wikis to work. Google currently searches the enterprise through its search appliance, a brightly colored box you place in your rack and configure to crawl behind the firewall. Just one application on this box seems like a waste of space and could perhaps open up some more applications for small to…
Google Alerts now supports blog search content. If you subscribe to a Google News alert for your brand or topic of interest you can now receive the same style alerts for content in the Google Blog Search index. Google Alerts tracks news, blogs, Usenet groups, and Google Groups discussions using the same search syntax found on their respective website. The new blog search e-mail notification will be an easy extension of vertical search for existing users. Advanced users can setup an advanced search, or choose to receive general updates via web feeds and critical updates via e-mail. I expect Google…
Google has added new features to its tools for webmasters, allowing us to request Google index our site faster and more thoroughly than before. Crank it up! Control Googlebot crawl rate You can now control how frequently Googlebot crawls your site over the next 90 days. Webmasters can ask Googlebot to slow down or speed up for the next 90 days. Your choice may affect your total bandwidth usage but the tradeoff is possibly more frequent visits from Google's discovery and indexing tools. Enhanced image search Webmasters can now opt-in to Google enhanced image search. If you opt-in Google may…
Google shocked the online world this weekend with its acquisition of leading video site YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google stock. YouTube will maintain its brand and site, and move into its new San Bruno offices this week as planned. Hitwise estimates YouTube's market share in September at 46%, an even stronger share in Europe. Google Video had an estimated market share of 11% in the same period. The $1.65 billion acquisition places YouTube at about the same purchase price adjusted for inflation as eBay's acquisition of PayPal in 2002 for $1.5 billion. I'm sure the similarities are not lost…
Google Blog Search is now accepting pings and republishing the updates it observes. You can submit an update using XML-RPC or REST, similar to other blog services and easily added to your weblog's ping configuration. RPC endpoint: http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2 Google publishes the last 5 minutes of ping activity in its changes.xml file. It is possible to receive pings of different recency by adding the last parameter to your request with a number of seconds between 1 and 300. The new service is a change in Google's view of the web, accepting the value of fresh index content within minutes instead…
Google has a new search product focused on source code. It peeks inside tarballs and other recognized formats, allowing you to search the index by regex, license, or language. It's pretty easy to see how many projects are using a given library (such as feedparser or magpie) and keep inventing new ways to explore software. You can access the code search engine through a GData Atom feed for easy integration wherever you choose. I find Google Code Search is easier to use than Koders, and may come in handy when looking for different ways of approaching a particular programming…
Google "Universal" Gadgets are now available for blogs and pages around the web. A single Google gadget can now be deployed on Google Personalized Homepage, Google Desktop, Google Page Creator, or via a JavaScript embed on any editable webpage. You can add PacMan to your blog sidebar or display photos uploaded to Picassa on your MySpace page, or add a Google Reader viewer anywhere. Google's support for webpage embeds brings the Google Reader story full circle. The team originally envisioned an RSS widget available on a blog sidebar and the project grew into much more. You can now access the…
iGoogle users can now add a Google Gadget to their homepage showing recommended searches, pages, and gadgets based on behavior across Google search properties. The new service builds on top of Google's search history trends data by adding recommended destination pages and new homepage gadgets. The widget was written by "Beverly Y." in Google's New York office. I found the recommendations useful with some expected content and a few surprises thrown in as well. "Burning Man" might be geo-targetted since I live in San Francisco, but three RSS recommendations in the top 5 is right on. I was researching…
Google CEO Eric Schmidt is now an Apple Computer board member. He joins Fred Anderson of Elevation Partners, Bill Campbell of Intuit, Millard Drexler of J. Crew, Genentech CEO Arthur Levinson, politician Al Gore, and Jerry York of Harwinton Capital. The group was already interconnected outside of the Apple boardroom. Al Gore is a Google advisor and Google invested in Current TV, Gore's television station. Bill Campbell was an early management advisor to Larry Page and Sergey Brin and helped hire Eric Schmidt. Arthur Levinson is on Google's Board of Directors. Are closer times ahead for these two powerful brands?…
Jason Goldman, product manager of Google Blog Search and Blogger, is leaving Google at the end of this week. No more commutes from San Francisco, but he'll instead be on a jet plane traveling the world for a bit before starting somewhere a bit smaller. I could have taken time off or switched to a different project, but I feel that after I'm finished doing the nothing I've got planned, I'm going to want to do something somewhere small. And, to be honest, I can't really imagine being at Google but not being involved in Blogger. Jason's departure comes shortly…
Google switched on its public WiFi network in Mountain View less than an hour ago, its first experiment in location-based services covering 11-miles of tech-saavy real estate in the heart of Silicon Valley. Each WiFi user must have a Google Account and Google can pinpoint your location on the network based on your current access point. Every Google account is GTalk enabled, including the just announced new GTalk client with free file transfer and voicemail. Every resident of Mountain View can now have free Internet access, email, voicemail, and much more. Google also announced its first killer app for location-based…
Google will power search and advertising across Fox Interactive's online properties for the next three years. The deal includes guaranteed minimum revenue share payments from Google of $900 million based on Fox Interactive Media meeting its traffic numbers and "other commitments." Fox Interactive Media includes social network MySpace, news sites Fox News and Fox Sports, gaming network IGN as well as content distribution and advertising on local TV stations owned by Fox Broadcasting. The agreement calls for Google to power web, vertical and site specific search for MySpace.com and the majority of Fox Interactive Media properties. Google will be the…
Google has just launched project hosting inside of its Google Code effort. The Google Code Project Hosting center allows any developer to create and host a new project powered by Google management and hosting tools. The new service features a reworked backend for Subversion built on top of Google's Big Table file system. The robustness of Google's backend will power the code repository. The site features a new issue-tracking system utilizing AJAX techniques for quick and responsive feedback for its users. The issue-tracking interface is similar to Gmail's table layout, and allows customization through open tag fields. Developers on…
Saul Hansell of The New York Times examines Google's current product offerings and feature gaps and comes away a bit puzzled. According to quotes in the article Google goes for the wow factor with stand-alone products that do not integrate well with the work of others. Marissa Mayer says it's a lot easier to get engineers to spend time developing new features than fill in a feature gap. Sergey Brin says he is now encouraging engineers to develop their ideas as add-ons for existing Google products instead of as stand-alone products. Former Yahoo! executive Toni Schneider is quoted saying Yahoo!…
According to comScore Media Metrix numbers cited by the San Francisco Chronicle Google Blog Search had 94,000 unique visitors in May versus 3.3 million unique visitors for Technorati in the same period. Google Blog Search has less than 3% of the number of users as Technorati under those metrics. Either that's a typo or Google is not very competitive in both blog search or shopping comparison verticals….
If your site currently generates an Atom feed for use as a Google Sitemap you may want to hold back upgrading your feed to Atom 1.0. Google Sitemaps currently accepts Atom 0.3 only and will throw errors when it encounters the Atom 1.0 feed….
Vic Gundotra, Scoble's (former) boss' boss, is leaving Microsoft to join Google. Vic is taking a year off to allow his non-compete to elapse without legal issue. Vic is a general manager for platform evangelism and helped build Channel 9, 10, and other general developer evangelism efforts within Microsoft….
Access to Mountain View's upcoming Google-powered WiFi network will require a Google account when it launches later this year. Users of the public WiFi network will land on a specially configured Google homepage for the city of Mountain View upon successful login with local modules such as weather, news, Chamber of Commerce, and school information. Requiring an account for every user means almost every person in Mountain View will have a GTalk account. Not only will you be able to likely connect instantly to people you know, but it will also be possible to browse users on nearby nodes if…
Google is releasing a payments and certification service named GBuy on June 28 according to a report on Forbes.com. Merchants enrolled in the program would receive free payment processing during the beta period and, according to RBC analyst Jordan Rohan, 1.5% to 2% after the beta period expires. GBuy will reportedly process orders on Google's domain, similar to PayPal processing, and hand the user back over to the requesting site once the transaction has completed. The new service would give Google a more complete view of commerce search conversions, ultimately allowing the company to charge higher or lower rates to…
The Wall Street Journal reports Google will release a web-based spreadsheet application tomorrow on a limited test basis. Combined with Writely and Google Base it gives Google a mini office suite in what might be compared to Microsoft's Word, Excel, and Access offerings. Is there room for an online PowerPoint (Google Pages + S5 perhaps) to complete the suite?…
AdSense has a new API, allowing users to create and manage AdSense accounts programmatically using SOAP. Sounds ideal for all the spam bots creating new scraper pages for asbestos and cancer news. If your bot creates a new bot account and earns over $100, you get $100 too! Yes, there are more serious uses such as a reputable blog provider creating an AdSense ID for its members, put I just see the piles of web spam getting worse….
Google Reader Mobile is now available on your mobile phone. The pages are served using XHTML 1.0 for mobile, including access keys for each list item. The mobile reader is a good blend of what you would like to configure on your desktop but still access on a more limited input device such as a mobile phone. The mobile interface is purposefully barebones but utilizes features made possible by the full desktop experience such as browsing tagged posts….
Nokia announced an upgrade to the 770 Internet tablet operating system and bundled hardware this morning at the VON Europe Conference in Stockholm, Sweden. The new operating system, now named Internet Tablet OS 2006, features Google search and IM functionality built-in, including prominent display on the homepage and task bar. Nokia 770 owners can now chat with friends using text and voice from their Internet tablets. Nokia developed the IM and VoIP based on XMPP and Google's libjingle extensions. The voice and text screens are branded with the Google Talk logo, including the beta designation. The Gizmo Project will…
