Official Google Blog: "What do you get when Google and Nike get together and brainstorm? A sneaker-shaped server? A great TV ad for web search? No, you get Joga.com, an online football community that combines Google technology with Nike's unique sports content and access to players. Joga brings people all over the world together to celebrate their shared passion for the game of football (for you Americans out there, by 'football' I mean 'soccer')."

D'oh! Google deletes its own Blog.

Yes, that is correct.  In the biggest bonehead move so far of 2006, and with literly hundreds of scientists, engineers & security experts on the payroll, Google thought someone hacked their own 'Official Google Blog'.  But after closer scrutiny, they realized that some dumbass at the Googleplex itself, in fact DELETED the Googleblog by mistake.   Some student from Texas who tried to access the site and found a 404 error decided to try to register the old name himself, and to his surprise it worked!  So for a short time, it was in fact owned by someone else.  I'm sure they will publicaly laugh it off as a funny mistake, but how funny would it be if that was your adsense account?

Google Finance

http://finance.google.com/finance
Yet another product hitting public Beta way too soon.   The home page of finance itself is a useless tool, but a search of any stock, provided that you even want to look up a specific stock, will provide you with some new and a slightly (very slight) innovative layout of more information.  Things that are of use that are not on most financial sites are Blog posts, Discussions, & related companies.  The chart itself is the one feature that is quite cool.  Yahoo Finance still has them beat hands down.  Keep working G.
 

 

Kinderstart sues Google over lower page ranking
March 18th, 2006

We'll this could set a benchmark and open doors for other companies getting hit with lower page ranks.

A parental advice Internet site has sued Google Inc., charging it unfairly deprived the company of customers by downgrading its search-result ranking without reason or warning.
The civil lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in San Jose, California, on Friday by KinderStart.com seeks financial damages along with information on how Google ranks Internet sites when users conduct a Web-based search.
Google could not immediately be reached for comment but the company aggressively defends the secrecy of its patented search ranking system and asserts its right to adapt it to give customers what it determines to be the best results.
KinderStart charges that Google without warning in March 2005 penalized the site in its search rankings, sparking a "cataclysmic" 70 percent fall in its audience -- and a resulting 80 percent decline in revenue.
At its height, KinderStart counted 10 million page views per month, the lawsuit said. Web site page views are a basic way of measuring audience and are used to set advertising rates.
"Google does not generally inform Web sites that they have been penalized nor does it explain in detail why the Web site was penalized," the lawsuit said.
While an entire sub-industry exists to help Web sites feature prominently in Google results, the company is known to punish those who try to trick the system into boosting their search rankings.
The lawsuit notes that rival search systems from Microsoft Corp.'s MSN and Yahoo Inc. feature Kinderstart.com at the top of their rankings when the name "Kinderstart" is typed in.
The complaint accuses Google, as the dominant provider of Web searches, of violating KinderStart's constitutional right to free speech by blocking search engine results showing Web site content and other communications.
KinderStart contends that once a company has been penalized, it is difficult to contact Google to regain good standing and impossible to get a report on whether or why the search leader took such action.
The suit was filed the same day a federal judge denied a U.S. government request that Google be ordered to hand over a sample of keywords customers use to search the Internet while requiring the company to produce some Web addresses indexed in its system.

Google faces pressure from 'impression fraud'

Peter Kang, Forbes.com 16 Mar 2006

Bear Stearns maintained an "outperform" rating on Google and said the Internet search giant could see pressure on advertising click-thru rates from a variation of click fraud known as "impression fraud."

Impression fraud, which has reportedly increased over the last few years, involves a competitor who repeatedly searches for certain terms which displays a company's advertisement but does not click on the ad. This is intended to lower the click-thru rate for the ad and drive down the cost of certain search words.

"This will have a negative effect on sponsored search rankings in Google which uses a combination of the bid price and the click-thru rate to determine placement," wrote analyst Robert Peck.

"Impression fraud does not currently affect Yahoo! which uses a pure auction format to determine sponsored placement. This will be important to monitor as we look at Google's click-thru rates going forward."

Meanwhile, recent industry data released by comScore indicated that the click-thru rate on Google.com declined to 13% in January from 14% in the previous month, according to Bear Stearns. Yahoo's click-thru rate remained flat at 12%.

"While this may appear negative for Google, we note that searches on Google.com increased 8% from December 2005 to January 2006 while Yahoo's increased 2% and at the same time sponsored clicks on Google.com was flat compared to a 1% decline for Yahoo," he said.

Google Mars

The product you have all been waiting for...Google Mars??  Well it is slightly interesting if your into that thing, but is it just me, is Google losing it's focus?  Its seems like they are trying to do everything half -  fast, instead of doing a few thing great.

http://www.google.com/mars/

CL2 - Google calendar

Screenshots and whispers of the new google calendar have been popping up in various Blogs for a while and now it seems official. The new Google calendar, code names CL2, will be tightly integrated with Gmail and promises to make organizing your life, easy and effortless. Around 200 lucky Beta testers are tight lipped about this new product, and not supposed to talk about it. Yah, right.

I'm sure Bill and the boys at Microsoft are not happy to hear this, I can imaging Steve Ballmer's veins bulging out of his neck yelling at everyone on why they have not crushed Big G yet.

Apparently it is a long way off from going public Beta, but I'm sure we'll see a whole bunch of 'accidental' leaks over the next few months.

G-Drive

Well is it fact or just a hoax? Rumors are whirling that soon you will be able to store anything and everything that you want on your Google G-drive. My guess; Fact. Storage space gets cheaper by the day & Google has so many servers with millions of left over Gigs, why not? Just one more step towards ultimate world domination.

Details about the GDrive product leaked onto the Web after Google accidentally posted notes online from a slide presentation given by executives during the company's analyst presentation day.
Bloggers quickly picked up on the notes, which stated that "with infinite storage, we can house all user files, including e-mails, Web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc., and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc.)." Google subsequently took the original presentation, and the notes, offline.
While bloggers were excited about the possible new product, the prospect of people trusting 100 percent of their data with Google raised recurring privacy concerns

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