Navigation

Google

125 posts filed under this category, page 4 of 5.

Google searches local store inventories

Google’s shopping comparison service Froogle will now contain inventory information from local brick-and-mortar retailers like Best Buy, Circuit City, Home Depot, Bombay and CompUSA. Google will also populate the database with local merchant information from Google Base in addition to Google’s existing merchant feeds. Users searching for a product will be shown a map with local an overlay of local stores carrying the item. Google is in a unique position to offer the service because unlike traditional shopping comparison engines that make most of their money when a user leaves the site, local search does not provide easy lead and…

Google Base blog import instructions

Google Base launched last Tuesday as a new repository of information for distribution across Google’s network of sites including Google search, Froogle, and Google Local. You can add your existing content to the Google Base for broad distribution with only a few easy steps. I’ll show you how. You need a Google account associated with Google Base to submit items. Sign-in to Google Base to get started. Complete your extended profile. Market yourself with your full name or the name of your site, a description up to 400 characters in length, your URL, location and contact information. Create a…

Google Sitemaps adds search stats

Google added some new features this week to allow webmasters to learn more about what Google knows about their sites. Once you verify ownership of your weblog you can view the top Google search queries displaying your site as well as the top terms generating click-throughs. You can also few statistics such as PageRank distribution across your pages, the amount of content on your site in various formats such as podcasts versus text, and errors encountered by Google’s search crawler when accessing your site. Check out my Movable Type Sitemap entry if you would like to provide Google with an…

Google purchasing Riya?

Photo service Riya has been acquired was being acquired by Google for close to $40 million according to sources involved with the company. Riya uses face recognition technology to identify people in photos. The system can also recognize text such as street signs. Google likes using algorithms to solve complex problems, so the acquisition seems like a good fit. Om Malik has done some additional digging on the deal’s details. Riya has approximately 12 employees in Redwood City and an additional 10 employees in India. Riya is set to launch this week with a party in Atherton this Friday. Update…

Google Maps API Blog

The Google Maps team just launched a blog to talk directly to developers using Google’s APIs. I had no idea the API changed weekly, but it’s good that the team will be communicating those changes and highlighting implementations of their APIs. Tags: googlemaps…

CIA sells Google shares

In-Q-Tel, the venture capital of the CIA, recently announced a planned sale of 5,636 shares of Google stock worth over $2.2 million. The stock was most likely a result of In-Q-Tel’s investment in Keyhole, a earth visualization software company acquired by Google in October 2004. In-Q-Tel is also invested in search companies Intelliseek and piXlogic, and Verity. Tags: inqtel…

Google spam suite primer

Google provides a full suite of services for the entry-level blog spammer. There are plenty of legitimate uses for all of these Google services, but Google’s market-leading position in search creates a spam ecosystem that inflates corporate revenues, index size, and user data. Google’s blog hosting service, Blog*Spot, received a lot of attention this week as blogosphere neighbors threw up their arms in protest of the host, which is like the seedy motel at the edge of town that rents by the-hour. It’s cheap and inviting to those who know no better, but those in the know don’t want anything…

Google Reader

Google just released their web-based feed reader named Google Reader. Users can login using their Google account and track web feeds in a two-column layout with a default sort of “relevance.” Google is not currently pulling from its archive of past blog entries and only displays the items currently present in the feed. The first column displays a list of subscribed feeds and switches to a list of posts when you click an item. Posts are displayed in the sidebar drawer using title and publication date only. The complete entry display contains the entry title, author, publication date, link, and…

Visit to Google

Today I visited Google to talk about web spam. I had never been on the Google campus so although I was busy I did make a point to note many details. Just about every meeting room I saw was video enabled. The spam summit met in a medium-sized room with array microphones hanging from the ceiling tiles, three video cameras in the back of the room, and one video camera in the front of the room for crowd shots. Smaller meeting rooms had phones with eye-level cameras. Lunch was really good. I had a chicken breast pesto panini with roasted…

Google Blog Search infrastructure thoughts

I have been reading through some of the posts about Google Blog Search and have some new thoughts on possible infrastructure although nothing has been officially stated by Google. I’ve read about how fast Google’s results come back. I would hope so, their entire index covers only about 90 days. Powered by Google Fusion? We already know that Google Blog Search is indexing only feeds, and the index does appear to separate from the main Google index. We also know that Google’s feed search index only contains posts since June 2005. We also know that Google plans to add a…

Google Blog Search is live

Google Blog Search is now live. I spent some time clicking around and searching for terms and phrases where I expected a certain result. Some early thoughts: Query time is very fast, at around half a second for most queries. The database only goes back two months, so a quick response is to be expected. The related blogs search for “George Bush” suggests “George Bush doesn’t care about ugly hoes” which cracks me up. No advertisements. Is this another “mistake” like Google claimed for Google News? I don’t think so. Google exposes results as RSS and Atom feeds in…

Google launching feed search tonight

Google is launching a feed-specific search interface tonight for both all feed producers as well as a search interface specific to Blogger. It’s important to note that from what I have read on Search Engine Watch and others Google is specifically restricting its search to feeds, and not using the HTML of the blog. Why? Googlebot is designed to swallow a page whole and not break the page up into individual entries or items. Feeds come prepackaged as individual items or entries allowing for easy digestion by parsers and indexers. Google would need to overhaul its indexer or design a…

Vint Cerf joins Google

Vint Cerf will join Google starting October 3 as their Chief Internet Evangelist. Vint already posted to the Google blog to let us know he is “committed to the vision of Google’s criticality to the daily lives of hundreds of millions of people.” Vint Cerf is currently working on the Interplanetary Protocol and may be working with Google to create the first Earth node at the top of the often rumored Google space elevator. :) Tags: vintcerf…

The Onion on Google

The Onion posted an article on Wednesday about Google’s plans for world domination. In the Onion’s satirical account Google will index all of the world’s information by destroying anything it cannot index. The Onion also speculates about Google Sound, a global network of microphones to index the world’s emitted sounds, and Google’s vast army of laser-equipped robots that will scan the DNA of every living organism. (via Doc Searls) Tags: theonion…

Google Talk client now available

The Google Talk application is now available on Google for Windows 2000 and Windows XP. It features voice and text messaging and loads all of your contacts from Gmail. The application is only 900 KB in size. Google Talk supports voice codecs PCMA, PCMU, G.723, iLBC, ISAC, IPCMWB, EG711U, and EG711A. They are evaluating the Speex codec. They currently use XMPP-based signaling but plan to support SIP signaling in the near future. Google is currently working with EathLink’s Vling product as well as Sipphone’s Gizmo Project for integration with Google Talk. Google also has a page listing Jabber/XMPP clients…

Google Talk is live

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…

Two Google announcements this week

The New York Times reports Google plans to introduce a new version of Google Desktop on Monday and a “communications tool” on Wednesday. The new Google Desktop will feature live content panels allowing developers to write their own widgets associated with Google Desktop. A beta version of Google Desktop version 2 is now available on the Google Desktop site. What communications tool will Google introduce on Wednesday? Google mobile? Google IM? We have a few days to speculate. Tags: googledesktop…

Google site search highlights

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 Sitemaps using Movable Type

It’s pretty easy to make an XML Sitemap of your blog for easy parsing by Google or other search engines. Just create a new index template and copy the code below. Choose an output file that is easy to remember such as sitemap.xml. Save and rebuild your new template file once you paste the code. 1.0 Now you need to let Google know where to find your sitemap. Open up your web browser and enter http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap= + the URL-encoded location…

Google announces sitemaps, ping beacon

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 introduces Founders Awards

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 joins Google

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 on Google user experience

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…

23 Years of Usenet on Google

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…

Google on 60 Minutes

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

All categories