Google Beta Blog

http://myemail.constantcontact.com/Contest-Winner-Annouced---First-Canada-Wide-Deal---69--Off-Life-Coaching.html?soid=1103863315350&aid=1iJ56z-oKl8

2011-01-26T08:50:00.000-05:00

http://myemail.constantcontact.com/Contest-Winner-Annouced---First-Canada-Wide-Deal---69--Off-Life-Coaching.html?soid=1103863315350&aid=1iJ56z-oKl8

WIN 1 of 2 - $25 gift vouchers from DealCanada | Mommy Moment

2010-12-21T09:24:00.000-05:00

WIN 1 of 2 - $25 gift vouchers from DealCanada | Mommy Moment

2007-01-18T13:02:00.000-05:00

Well its not new but if you haven't been over to the Google Code Search it's pretty cool.

http://www.google.com/codesearch

Google Gadgets unleashed at Google Press day!

2006-05-10T14:46:00.000-04:00

So far not much has come out of Google press day, but the few new things are an update to the Google Desktop that contains Google Gadgets. (Think Yahoo widgets)

Another potential that came out of Eric's mouth was being able to take a camera photo of someone and searching to see who they are. A creepy new way to pick up chicks. "Hey Michelle, long time no see!" "Do I know you?" "Sure I met you at that party last weekend"

More updates as them come in...

Google Health: Probably coming next week

2006-05-05T14:45:00.000-04:00

Google Health: Probably coming next week

Marissa Mayer, Google's VP of search products and user experience, mentioned that there would be a couple of big announcements next Wednesday at the annual Google Press Day

"Health is an interesting one -- keep your eye out for that next week." But that was about it. Considering that hint, though, an announcement of a Google Health site seems a good bet. Rumors about just such a site have been bouncing around the Web on sites such as SearchEngineWatch

-- Later this year, Google will start integrating video into its results in Google News.

2006-04-15T09:55:00.000-04:00

Google has filed a patent in the USA covering voice search technology, potentially allowing users to search the internet vocally.The patent, filed on Tuesday 11 April, covers a number of aspects relating to voice recognition technology, including specific elements of how a search would be constructed from a spoken command.This patent is the first step in the process of Google offering a voice search service to users, although such a service is unlikely to be made available in the near future. Google has made a number of attempts to branch out from internet searching, but the vast majority of its revenues come from advertising alongside searches. The IT giant’s stock price has recently suffered under speculation that the online advertising search market is maturing.“To satisfy the average user, a voice interface to a search engine must recognise spoken queries, and must return highly relevant search results. Several problems exist in designing satisfactory voice interfaces. Current speech recognition technology has high word error rates for large vocabulary sizes,” the authors stated in the background section to the patent.Summarising their invention, the authors went on to describe “a method that provides search results includes receiving a voice search query from a user; deriving one or more recognition hypotheses from the voice search query, each recognition hypothesis being associated with a weight; constructing a weighted boolean query using the recognition hypotheses; providing the weighted boolean query to a search system; and providing results of the search system.”Google co-founder Sergey Brin and three others are credited with the invention of the voice search technology .Google released a calendar and personal organiser service last week, the latest in a long line of services outside its core search business, which also include Google Earth, Google Video, and the popular Gmail email service.

Google related links

2006-04-04T14:51:00.000-04:00

Well google has come out with another new applet that may be useful to your site visitors, called 'Google related links. ' You can see that I have in fact implimented it on this site, there on the right nav bar. It includes, related webpages, news and searches, and you can choose which ones you want to display. I set mine to the default on 'Related News', and opted to remove the 'related searches tab. Time will tell if I keep it or dump it.

2006-03-30T13:58:00.000-05:00

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.

2006-03-29T11:43:00.000-05:00

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

2006-03-21T17:35:00.000-05:00

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.

2006-03-19T09:33:00.000-05:00

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'

2006-03-16T08:59:00.000-05:00

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

2006-03-13T10:24:00.000-05:00

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

2006-03-08T14:48:00.000-05:00

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

2006-03-07T13:31:00.000-05:00

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

Google Mobile news

2006-03-02T17:15:00.000-05:00

Get the news you want when your on the go...
http://mobile.google.com/news/promo.html

GoogleTestAd

2006-02-28T13:34:00.000-05:00

What is googletestad? Well the verdict is still out, but by all accounts it looks like a simple in-house keyword testing tool that the Googleboys use.
Not very likely that it is just someone pulling a prank, as it would be a very expensive joke by the vast amount of useless clicks that it would receive.

This is the ad that shows up in the search results for googletestad:
Congratulations!
This is a family safe ad.
All systems are go!
www.google.com

Google Page Creator

2006-02-23T17:09:00.000-05:00

Ouch, this is the first stumble that I have seen from the behemoth in a while. These horrible designs are right out of the 90's. Talk about retro. Not much of an innovation, more like a trip down memory lane.

Measuremap

2006-02-15T16:20:00.000-05:00

Measure map coming soon from the folks at Google...

http://www.measuremap.com/

Google Radio ads

2006-01-17T12:11:00.000-05:00

Online, Print, Newspaper, now Radio. I guess Google TV ads are next?

http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/060117/20060117005666.html

Google mobile gets personal

2006-01-13T16:48:00.000-05:00

http://mobile.google.com/personalized/index.html

Google to Launch Video Marketplace

2006-01-09T21:41:00.000-05:00

CSI, Survivor, NCIS, Amazing Race, I Love Lucy, The Brady Bunch, Twilight Zone and more!

http://www.google.com/press/pressrel/video_marketplace.html

Google Pack

2006-01-09T09:05:00.000-05:00

This just randomly appeared today on Google, but not every time, you have to refresh or just get lucky to see it.

http://pack.google.com/pack_installer_required.html

Also listed that are new features are the Google pack screensavers and what looks like a new partnership with Adaware.

Google Stock Crashes!

2006-01-05T16:02:00.000-05:00

447.382 2.142 (0.48%)

Well it keeps going up and up, and the market experts say it will hit $600. Well these so called experts might know all about market cap and P/E ratios, but do they know what CPC is?

My prediction for 2006...

CRASH.

Why? First off, Google has all of their eggs in one basket. 97% of their revenues are generated from one thing. Advertising. Google adwords and Google adsense. Right now they have a near monopoly on the market with a weak product at best. Yahoo which purchased Overture last year and still underutilizes it must be re-developing it or else why buy it? And you don't think Microsoft is revamping MSN paid search to cut into Googles' pie? Of course they are. New and alterantive CPC searches will finally take a bite out of the big G.

2nd reason. Googles adsense. Google adsense doesn't even make any sense. Well, we can't tell you how much we get paid each click, and we won't tell you what percentage you will get paid, we will just pay you whatever we want, and you will have to be happy with that, because no one else has this service. Ah, OK.

3rd reason. CLICK FRAUD. Everyone is getting tired of getting raped from users clicking over and over on their ads and not buying anything, and then Google says, oh well, more money for us. Click farms in 3rd world countries, and click spamming software will cripple the CPC industry and take Googles stock price right down with it.

I told you so.

Ninja~

Google Extensions for Firefox

2006-01-05T15:36:00.000-05:00

New! Google Safe Browsing (BETA) - December 14, 2005

New! Blogger Web Comments (BETA) - December 14, 2005

http://toolbar.google.com/firefox/extensions/index.html

2006-01-04T11:36:00.000-05:00

Google PC's!!!

Well it is official. Google is NOT going to produce $200 PC's.
It is officially a rumour.

2005-12-16T15:39:00.000-05:00

Google Music

Well another stab at the most popular thing to search. MUSIC! Everyone listens to it, and everyone searches for it.

This is one of the most recent lack luster product releases from Google and I'm not too impressed. I think they need to spend a little more time in hidden Beta and try not to release something everyday.

lame.

2005-12-01T15:42:00.000-05:00

Here is a fun one, Google suggests:

http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en

2005-11-20T09:05:00.000-05:00

Google introduces "Onsite Advertiser Sign-Up"

Full story
http://www.whatistheword.com/story/SciTech_235.html

2005-11-18T10:12:00.000-05:00

Google Sitemaps

Google's new collaborative crawling system that helps get you better coverage.

https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login

2005-11-18T09:57:00.000-05:00

Google Book Search

Here is the controversial new service, where Google is scanning up everything in print. Welcome to the Google world library.

http://books.google.com/

Google Base

2005-11-18T09:33:00.000-05:00

Google Base take a direct attack on the famous Craigslist.

http://www.googlebase.com/

2005-11-18T09:24:00.000-05:00

Google Video

Just as they have the image search, now you can search for video's.
(Sorry looks like it has a built in 'porn filter' :)

http://video.google.com/

They also have a video Blog search:

http://googlevideo.blogspot.com/

2005-11-18T09:06:00.000-05:00

Google Reader

Well this is yet another hidden Beta program that I tripped across. It'll help you keep track of all those RSS feeds that you enjoy reading.

http://www.google.com/reader/things/intro

2005-11-18T09:01:00.000-05:00

Google Analytics

Google is spanking the entire analytic industry this week and I'm sure a few companies stock just tanked with Googles newest 'free' service. Google Analytics. They recently bought out Urchin, so it looks like they want to give the 2nd last version out free to get people hooked up and reel more people into adwords.

http://www.google.com/analytics/

2005-11-17T15:50:00.000-05:00

This Blog to keep up date on what new Beta programs Google is up to. Each day they launch a new service and most of them are not only in Beta stage, but often displayed on hidden URL's that you have to be 'in the know' to find out about. They contine the path of of viral marketing to have anyone find out about the new services and test them out. My goal is to keep you informed about these Beta's.