Google News Updates

Bing is adjusting its search engine requirements to distinguish it from Google.

For Bing, search engine optimization (SEO) means creating an useful site that will be helpful for browsers. In order to top the Bing search rankings, SEO campaigns must focus on creating a site that has useful information for a targeted viewers.



There are several discrepancies when a site wants to optimize for Bing. First and foremost, keyword occurrence will be less compared to optimizing for Google. Plus, sites need to apply well-crafted codes in all the pages of the site.

Another useful tip is to look for authoritative backlinks for a Website. For Bing, a site’s power is measured by relevancy and helpfulness.

On the other hand, the Bing link building search engine is related to Google. Apart from backlinks, linking to other relevant sites will also assist in optimizing a Website for Bing.

For more SEO information on Bing, the search engine has posted key guidelines in its home page. The principle discusses technical information about the site’s index system. If they are followed, a site will simply be able to rank high on the Bing search engine.

Facebook, which popularized the concept of shared content for its social network, is expected to unveil a "Like" button publishers can embed on their Web sites to let users share content with their Facebook friends.















The New York Times reported that Facebook at its F8 developer's meeting April 21 will introduce a Like button that will allow the company to keep tabs on what a user linked to. Users can click the key to share favorite Websites, which will give Facebook more info on what users are interested in.

Facebook will share that information with Web publishers, which will put in front of visitors links, photos and other content that their friends like from Facebook. If that sounds confusing, imagine of this Like button as one big recommendation engine for the Web.

Facebook fuels the Like button with its social chart on the back end; Website publishers are the vehicles to promote sharing for Facebook's excess of 400 million-plus users.


This effort, which follows up the Facebook Connect tune to let users connect to third-party Websites with their Facebook user names and passwords, is a play to assist Facebook extend its tendrils as the premier social connective tissue for the Web.

One imagines social advertising will play a main role here, but we must wait until F8 Wednesday to find out whether this is so and how Facebook envisions it will work.

Facebook's effort is being preempted by a group of companies goal on not letting Facebook introduce the Web with its members-only approach to the social graph. Meebo April 19 launched XAuth, a platform for automating the method users share content on social networks, with partners Google, MySpace, Microsoft, Yahoo and others. While Facebook is paying attention on helping its users share info within the Facebook social graph, the group supporting XAuth wants to let Website visitors share facts with Facebook and myriad other social sites.

Meebo's effort is also likely a reaction to the now oldish gossip that Facebook is also planning to release a Meebo-like toolbar for Websites to put at the bottom of their Web pages. This toolbar, according to the Times story, will construct on Facebook Connect to help more users log in to participating Websites.

After the need of Flash support and the “missing” camera, one of the biggest complaints about the iPad is that you can’t print from it, with or without a wire. Google is about to solve this difficulty with cloud-printing, which will send your documents from a mobile device to any web-connected printer.

I tend to view printing as something like the floppy disk, a legacy technology that nobody actually needs anymore. And before you light up the remarks telling me you need to print receipts for your car repair shop customers, I say that’s not the job of an iPad or a cellphone. What you want is a computer. For the odd boarding pass or file I might need on paper, I just email the file to the print shop down the road and pay them 10 cents.

But if you still maintain on dead tree copies, Google hears you. To allow printing from its driver-free Chrome OS and any other mobile device, Google is putting those drivers in the cloud. Apps send produce jobs to Google Cloud Print, whereupon they are processed and sent to net-connected printers. And this isn’t just the printer in your upstairs office, either. It could be on the new side of the world.

Google has today released the code and documents to developers, so its just a matter to come for this to show up in the apps you use. In the meantime, iPad users might like this alternative solution.

Yesterday, a 6.9 magnitude earthquake smack northwest China's Qinghai Province. Hours after the tragedy, criminals spiked 18 of the top 20 search results for linked keywords, serving up Rogue anti-Virus applications.



According to state-run media reports out of China, 589 people are confirmed dead and 10,000 others are wounded. It is being reported that 60 of the lives lost are students, as schools in the area collapsed. After the initial quake, two aftershocks of 5.3 and 5.8 magnitude respectively, laid waste to the area breakup businesses and homes. Two years ago, a 7.9 magnitude quake hit the neighboring Sichuan province, resulting in 90,000 people departed or missing.

Capitalizing on the initial alarm and the need some have to get the most up-to-date information, criminals used Google Trends and related searches to poison the search results related to the quake. The methods used were so valuable that 18 of the top 20 searches were malicious.

The explore term used, “china earthquake 2010”, resulted in the huge poisoning. The next page of that search had nothing but malicious links

Google April 14 extra ability for users to replay Twitter tweets from any point in time on its search results pages, the company's latest attempt to improve the relevancy of its search results for users.

Google began including Twitter tweets in its search results pages back in December, count real-time content such as MySpace status updates, Facebook Pages and Google Buzz posts.



Users interested in tracking a trending topic, such as "New York Yankees," would sit in front of their computer and watch the statement stream as older tweets scrolled off search engine results pages (SERPs) and into the void of Google's cloud. Gone, or at least rendered invisible, was the rich record of tweets on a topic.
With Google's new replay feature, users will soon be able to find the way to any point in time on Google SERPS and replay what people said about a topic on Twitter. Think of this as records on Twitter. To do this, users must click the Show options tab at the peak of the search results page, then select Updates.

The first page will show newest tweets per usual, but now there's a new chart at the top that lets users select the year, month or day, or click any position to view the tweets from that specific time period. What Google has done is fundamentally taken the search by timeline technology in its Search Options and applied it to the glut of tweet data it gets from Twitter.

This change is rolling more to users in English over the next few days and not every tweet ever tweeted will be immediately available. In the meantime, users are encouraged to test the Google Twitter records by going to this link.
Google warned that in the early test flight, it is tracking tweets back to February 11, 2010. Eventually, the company promised, users will be able to soon seek tweets from Twitter's inception in March 2006.

Google's Twitter archive was visibly timed for the launch of the Chirp developer conference in San Francisco today, but so was Bing's new inclusion of tweets in its SERPs.

Microsoft launched Bing Twitter support in October, separating tweets from the core SERPs by putting them on a separate Web page.
But Bing has now followed Google by bringing the similar Twitter data from Bing Twitter.This will capture two forms.

First, trending topics will show under a social results banner. Second, Bing will surface the most popular shared links for navigational queries, straight into its SERPs. So if you search for topics on a well-liked Website, you'll also related tweets in these results.

Bing, which is testing this now with a small amount of users and queries, said that it is interested in bringing users "social content generated on Twitter to face the most relevant updates within seconds of a breaking news event."
Yet this is more or less what Bing is at present doing.

Google's famous recipe for determining how sites get ranked in search results has gained a new component: site speed.

Two of Google's top search engineers — Google Fellow Amit Singhal and principal engineer Matt Cutts — announced the addition on Friday, after hinting it would be approaching for several months. It's actually been live for a few weeks, they said in a blog post on Friday, and Google is using a variety of components to ascertain how much sooner one web page responds compared to another.

In general, one of Google's operating philosophies is that quicker is better. It's not just Google, either: the increased order for real-time information shows just how much people want sites and pages to load quickly, and the world's awareness spans certainly aren't getting any longer.

Still, rate will not trump relevancy in search rankings. Search Engine Land noted that Google employs over 200 factors in considering where to rank a search outcome, and Google said the change should affect less than 1 per cent of search query results.

Site owners can use a wide variety of tools from Google, Yahoo and third-party developers to determine the speed of their web pages.

Businesses working to get better their websites and make them as user-friendly as possible may want to consider introducing sitemaps.

This is because, according to the Google Webmaster Central Blog, they are an "invaluable resource for search engines" and could be necessary for enterprises and their SEO services.

The organisation points out that sitemaps highlight any essential information contained within a domain and allow crawlers to quickly latch on to it.
In particular, this could promote firms with many pictures on their pages.
Google states: "This is particularly true for images that are only reachable via JavaScript forms, or for pages that contain many images but only some of which are integral to the page content."

At the end of last month, Newswire advised that 85 per cent of internet commerce comes from schedules that appear at the top of search engine results pages.
Introducing sitemaps may aid to boost a company’s position in these results.

You might be involved in the following related posts:

1. Google Highlight the Importance of Sitemaps
2. Google Sitemaps
3. 10 Tips for Reducing Page Load Time
4. Are You Getting More Traffic Than You Think?
5. 10 Things To Remember When Creating SEO Friendly Web Copy

New research has revealed that link-building efforts signify the most hated task related to search engine marketing among online marketers.


The poll by WordStream indicated that 37 per cent of respondents view link-building as the most complicated thing they have to do, followed by keyword research with 32 per cent of the vote.

Other tasks viewed in a negative light were found to include bid management, content creation, content optimisation and spirited intelligence.

Ken Lyons, senior marketing manager at WordStream, said the findings were expected.

"Link-building can be very laborious and frustrating, but ironically it can have the main impact on search engine rankings of any search engine marketing activity," he explained.

According to SEOmoz, the top five search ranking factors in 2009 included keyword-focused anchor text from external links, external link popularity and variety of link sources.

The use of keywords in title tags and the trustworthiness of the domain - based on the link distance from trusted domains - also completed it into the list.

Skype Technologies SA and companies that have pressed for free flow of Internet traffic suffered a setback when a court ruling undermined the government’s role in supervision the Web.

In a decision yesterday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said the Federal Communications Commission didn’t have authority to adjust Internet management practices by Comcast Corp., the largest U.S. cable company.
Backed by companies including Google, FCC officials have pressed for rules that bar network owners such as Comcast and AT&T Inc. from limiting Web traffic. Regulators now will have to intensify efforts to assert control over the Internet, said Christopher Libertelli, director of North America government and regulatory affairs for Skype, a provider of calling via the Web.

“We’re trying to set up a framework so that the government has the tools to mediate should they find conduct that harms consumers,” Libertelli said. The decision puts “the Internet, a critical division of American business, into a no-man’s land.”

Comcast’s victory may intensify argue over the role network owners can play in managing information flow over the Web. Companies such as Comcast have said regulators shouldn’t trouble them with more rules and that competition will ensure an open Internet. Advocates of so-called net neutrality, including Google, Skype and Amazon.com Inc., say Web service providers can’t be left to support some kinds of traffic over others.

In the action voided by the court yesterday, the FCC had censured Comcast for blocking subscribers using peer-to-peer software frequently used to view videos. The FCC decision had been hailed by consumer groups as a step toward keeping Web traffic free of hindrance from corporations.

Yesterday’s reversal “creates a dangerous situation, one where the health and the openness of the Internet is being held hostage” to the behavior of telephone and cable companies that own the supports used for Internet traffic to homes and businesses, the Open Internet Coalition said in an e-mailed statement.

The FCC needs to “explain” its power and should claim authority over Internet service providers under the same rules used for telephone service, said the coalition, a Washington- based group that includes Google, owner of the world’s most popular search engine; Amazon.com, the largest Internet retailer;
IAC/InterActiveCorp, which owns more than 50 Web sites; and EBay Inc.

Applying the regulations that govern more closely regulated phone services would give the FCC new basis to do things like bar Internet service providers from favoring certain kinds of content over others.

Net Neutrality

The FCC, which is led by Democrats, has planned a comment period that ends tomorrow on net neutrality rules. The restrictions would forbid companies from favoring content they own, and from overcrowding or slowing rivals’ services.
“The FCC is firmly committed to promoting an open Internet,” Jen Howard, a spokeswoman for the organization, said in an e-mailed statement.

The FCC may appeal the case, and may “seriously consider” introduction Internet services under the stricter regulatory classification used for phones, Andrew Lipman, a Washington- based partner in the media, telecommunications and technology practice at Bingham McCutchen LLP, said in an interview.
“We are gratified by the court’s decision,” Sena Fitzmaurice, a Comcast spokeswoman, said in an e-mailed declaration. “Comcast remains committed to the FCC’s existing open Internet principles, and we will continue to work constructively with this FCC.”
AT&T, Verizon

Ben Scott, policy director of the support group Free Press that challenged Comcast, said yesterday’s decision leaves FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski “powerless to stop public from blocking Web sites, unless he acts to reassert his authority” under telephone rules -- a step Scott said could be taken with a effortless majority vote at the agency.

Such a reclassification of Internet service would have “far-reaching and destructive consequences” together with years of “investment-deterring uncertainty and litigation,” companies including AT&T, Verizon Communications Inc. and Time Warner Cable Inc. said in a Feb. 22 letter to the FCC.
White House lecturer Robert Gibbs said President Barack Obama supports net neutrality.

Google is bringing in a quantity of help for its YouTube video service with the acquisition of another startup.

The purchase of Episodic script Google's fifth acquisition so far this year. Terms of the contract announced Friday weren't disclosed.




Episodic, based in San Francisco, provides a platform for streaming survive video on the Web. YouTube recently has been screening more live video besides the more than 500 million clips that are continuously available on its site.

Google has said it intends to get at least one company per month this year as part of its effort to develop more products and import more talented engineers. The company is sketch upon its cash hoard of $24.5 billion to pay for the shopping spree.

Google launched a redesign of their in style search engine for some individuals on Sunday by improving the main-page logo and sidebar navigation.




The redesign comes as Google purchased a small company named Episodic to get better Google-owned Youtube video service.



Episodic is a “comprehensive platform for broadcasting live and on-demand video to the web or any web-enabled device,” read a blog post on periodic.
According to TechCrunch, the tune will be folded into YouTube to improve on-demand video and help YouTube become profitable.


“We are excited to announce that Episodic has been acquired by Google. The entire Episodic team is extremely excited about this new partnership and what it means for our consumers and the evolution of online video,” read a statement by Google.
Google has purchased several companies this year including Picnik, DocVerse, reMail, Aardvark and a team others.

In a nod to privacy advocates, Google com. said Wednesday that they will adopt a new data retention policy so that it's harder to link users to what they search for online. Under the plan, the Mountain View Internet company will shroud the information it collects about users in anonymity, eliminating a potential treasure trove of evidence for government search warrants and subsistances.

By the end of 2007, Google expects to purge important identifying information on its computer servers about the sources of virtually all search queries after 18 to 24 months.

Subsequently, the company will have right to use only partial records, so that no one can trace the queries back to individual users.
Google's move is intended to comply with a variety of foreign laws and planned legislation dictating that Web sites must keep user information for up to two years in case it is needed for legal proceedings. Similar policy are below consideration in the United States.

Google is the first major search engine to set a time boundary for maintenance of search information, which can reveal a great deal about an article such as whether they're sick (as indicated by a number of queries about cancer) and political affiliation (demonstrated by searches for certain blogs).

Until now, the company reserved search logs indefinitely, raising criticism that the data could be misused by Google, law enforcement or marketers. Google said the changes are in response to feedback from retreat groups and government agencies, including the Norwegian Data Protection Authority, which raised concerns about Google's existing practices. The new policy, Google said, provides more transparency to users about data maintenance and better protects their privacy.

Kurt Opsahl, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, gave considered praise to Google's decision, calling it a step in the right direction.

Retention of search records emerged as a hot-button issue last year after a exact by the Justice Department that several Web sites turn over query data became public.

"By taking some scientific measures to anonymize this data, there is an extra layer of protection," Opsahl said. "You can't relate what you don't have."

As part of the new policy, Google will erase eight of the bits that create up an Internet Protocol address, known commonly as an IP address, that identifies the computer used to make a search query. It will also make cookies -- the small files that help follow user visits to specific Web sites and preferences -- anonymous.

After the plan is implemented, Google intends to keep the partial records and associated search query terms, explaining that the information will help the company get better its services and help detect fraud.

Local insurance agencies in the US need to do more to rise up their presence in search engine listings, it has been suggested.

According to Confluency Solutions, many agencies are fading to make the most of the rise of local search by claiming listings in services such as Google Maps.

It cites figures indicating that 87 per cent of web searches carry "local intent" and notes that Google results tend to include Google Maps schedule when a local query is conducted.


As such, insurance firms would do well to glance into local search engine optimisation, the company says.

"Insurance agencies need to recognise they are losing dozens and dozens of customers every month - often more - because they aren't showing up in Google Maps and other local search engines," comments Kevin McDonald, president of Confluency Solutions.

Diana Pouliot of Google recently told the Mobile Marketing & Advertising occurrence in Las Vegas that a third of all mobile queries conducted on the search engine are linked in some way to the searcher's local surroundings, Mobile Marketing Watch reported.

Some critics suggest that real-time search values quantity over quality but using it in tandem with pay per click and search engine optimisation can still give up positive results, it has been claimed.



Writing on Search Engine Watch, Kevin Gibbons said that real-time content is certainly on the increase in search results, with Google, Bing and Yahoo! all offering it in different forms.

For those involved in search engine marketing, the temptation could be to use pay per click (PPC) ads to bypass the real-time results attractive over the top of Google pages, he added.

However, Mr Gibbons said that using a mixture of PPC marketing and usual optimisation remains "the best way to attract the maximum number of visitors".

Companies looking to use real-time results to their advantage should therefore continue with "organic" efforts like blogging, but should ensure they encourage the content through Twitter and other social networks.

"If an online buzz is created around amazing you've written, then you'll benefit from real-time search," he commented.

Google announced in February that it had added Facebook fan pages to real-time search consequences.

The world's largest registrar of internet domain names said Wednesday that it was pulling out of China in the wake of firm new laws that allegedly will increase government surveillance of web sites.

'There appears to be a recent increase in China's surveillance and monitoring of the Internet activities of its citizens,' said Christine Jones, general guidance for Go Daddy, at the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC).
Jones said the new Chinese policies required every website vendor to submit photographs, business information and individually signed forms, as well as their physical address, email address and telephone numbers.

'We didn't want to act as an representative of the Chinese government,' Jones said. 'We can't let them be strong and us be weak all the time. We just have to stop it, and then we'll start offering .CN domain names again.'

GoDaddy.com, which has more than 40 million domain names under management, took the step just two days after Google announced that it was moving its Chinese-language search examination out of mainland China to avoid strict government censorship laws. The move set up a discordant clash with the Chinese government, which has already started to filter search results received from Google's Hong Kong-based Chinese-language servers.

Go Daddy has offered .CN domain names since 2005, and said it would carry on serving its existing websites. However, they, too, are required to submit the latest information or could be shut down by the Chinese government.
'We were advised that domain names of registrants who did not roll as required ... would no longer work,' Jones said.

In the most recent development in an ongoing standoff with China over censorship, Google has redirected its Google.cn assets to Google.hk, its site in Hong Kong. The move follows reports this morning that Google would declare plans to shut down Chinese operations as early as today.

Google first announced that it was considering pulling out of China in January, writing at the time that it would no longer cut search results at the behest of the Chinese government following a set of cyber attacks targeting human rights activists.


Update: Google has posted the following announcement on their company blog



“Earlier at present we stopped censoring our search services—Google Search, Google News, and Google Images—on Google.cn. Users visiting Google.cn are now being redirected to Google.com.hk, where we are offering uncensored search in simplified Chinese, particularly designed for users in mainland China and delivered via our servers in Hong Kong …

… We want as many people in the world as possible to have access to our services, including users in mainland China, yet the Chinese government has been crystal clear throughout our consideration that self-censorship is a non-negotiable legal requirement.”

Google notes that this workaround could rapidly be thwarted by the Chinese government, and has thus setup this webpage which keeps track of which services are currently accessible in the country.

Scheduling meetings is tough, but rescheduling is still harder. We all know how frustrating it can be to try to find just the right time that accommodates everyone's accessibility and preferred working hours. Throw in different time zones and conference rooms and it goes from painful to severe. We'd rather list dental appointments.

On the Google Calendar team, we've noticed that when people converse about scheduling they say things like "I'm trying to find a time" or "let's search for a new date." We wondered what would happen if we treated calendaring extra like a search problem. Just as Google search applies ranking algorithms to return the most applicable results from the web, we hoped we could rank meeting times based on criteria important to the self scheduling the meeting.



Today we're launching the result of that trial, a gadget called Smart Rescheduler, in Google Calendar Labs. Once you enable the Lab, you can find a new time for an event just by clicking on a link. Our schedule search algorithm will come again a ranked set of the best candidate dates and times based on the calendars others have shared with you. You can examine more about it on the Gmail Blog.

Dreamsubmitting Chandigarh introduces Social Media Optimization and Pay per Click services along with linkages to advance your SEO ratings.

Every search engine optimization company is prepared with the best SEO writers who ensure that your company’s product gets the most traffic but still companies lose ratings. When you have already put in so much time, effort and struggle in conceiving a design and getting a website ready for execution, it is imperative that you get a lot of traffic to bring your work to fruition.

Among this the first is called Social Media Optimization or SMO. SMO targets at linking the website content with the social network sites like Facebook, Twitter, Hi5, Friendster, blogs and many more such sites, to bring in e–commerce and more economic gains for the clients. Advertisements from different companies sparkle on the side panels of these social sites. Nearly every individual who is on any one or more of these social sites becomes the target interview for the company’s site and it increases the marketing avenues of the company.

The next is called Pay Per Click service or PPC. This service ensures that your company only pays when a person really clicks on your site for information. This service has a two fold benefit. Firstly, you get to keep a track of how many persons have visited your site for how much you spent and thus you can keep roadway of exact ROI. Secondly, you get listed in top immediately, if the bid amount is kept most favorable and campaign is designed t get maximum clicks. SEO gets you in crown after sometime, but you pay for visits and get listed in top as soon as the campaign starts.

Indian SEO Services has already got recognition among SEO segment. The company is providing the cheapest SEO services without compromising on the superiority front.

Within first year of its origin, blog has got a wide client data base ranging from Asia to Europe. According to official sources, the company has deferred its web site launch.

“We are doing more then fine with our blog itself. We have got a team of more then 50 to serve our widest of client database crossways the globe. And we are not bothered to soar in our website launch. We are pretty fine the ongoing improvement of the blog.” Mr Singal said caption in press conference.

As of today, this year's Google I/O conference has sold out and registration is closed. That means more than 4,000 developers will be joining Google on May 19-20 at Moscone West in San Francisco.

Like years past, I/O will feature over 90 in-depth sessions and the chance to meet and learn from other developers, including those from the more than 160 companies that will demo in the Developer Sandbox. For those not able to attend, video recordings of technical sessions will be available on YouTube following the conference.

From now until May, Google will continue to list new speakers, new sessions, and new Sandbox participants on the Google I/O website.

We've long supposed that personalization makes search more relevant and fun. For nearly five years, we've been tailoring results with modified search. Google has announced a new attribute in search that makes it easier for you to mark and experience again your favorite web content — stars.

With stars, you can merely click the star marker on any search result or map and the next time you perform a search, that item will come into view in a special list right at the top of your results when relevant. That means if you star the official websites for your preferred football teams, you might see those results right at the top of your next search for [nfl]. Here's what the new "Starred results" feature looks like:

The immense thing about stars is that you don't have to keep track of them. You don't even have to keep in mind whether or not you starred something. Simply execute a search and you'll rediscover your starred items right when you need them. Stars sync with your Google Bookmarks and the Google Toolbar, so you can always see your list of starred items in one place and simply organize them. Even beyond the results page, while browsing the web you can rapidly click the star icon in Toolbar to create a bookmark, and those pages will start showing up in the new stars feature.

Stars in search substitute SearchWiki. With stars, Google has created a lightweight and flexible way for people to mark and rediscover web content. For people who like annotations, Google has Sidewiki, a more influential way for people to contribute and discover helpful information next to pages across the Internet.

Stars in search are rolling out in the next couple days and will be accessible globally for all signed-in users.

More than ever before, people are sharing and storing their photos online. But until newly, you had to edit your photos using client software on your computer. Google is excited to announce that Google has acquired Picnik, one of the first sites to start photo editing to the cloud. Using Picnik, you can crop, do touch-ups and add cool effects to your photos, all without parting your web browser.

Google is not announcing any important changes to Picnik now, though it will be working hard on integration and new features. As well, Google likes to continue sustaining all existing Picnik partners so that users will continue to be able to add their photos from other photo sharing sites make edits in the cloud and then save and share to all relevant networks.

A promotion to make Topeka a test site for a new, ultrafast Internet service is gathering speed.

Google Inc. announced plans earlier to build and test new high-speed broadband networks in one or more places around the country. The company says the organization of fiber-optic cables would deliver Internet connections 100 times quicker than most systems now available.

Over the past week, Topeka city officials have announced they're finishing Google's request for information from potential trial communities. The City Council has indicated that it's behind the effort.

And a group called "Think Big Topeka" is campaigning to put together community and government support.

Google has given communities a March 26 deadline to submit the finished requests for information.

Location has become a significant part of the way we search. If you're a foodie looking for restaurant details, food blogs or the closest farmer's market, location can be vital to serving you find the right information. Starting today, we've added the capability to refine your searches with the "Nearby" tool in the Search Options panel. One of the actually helpful things about this tool is that it works geographically — not just with keywords — so you don't have to worry about adding "Minneapolis" to your query and lost webpages that only say "St. Paul" or "Twin Cities." Check it out by doing a search, clicking on "show options" and selecting "Nearby."

You can decide to see results nearby either your default location or a custom location, and you can narrow down to results at the city, region or state level.

Yahoo has joined with Twitter to make its search engine results more "real-time" in an agreement which sees the microblogging service become integrated across its complete product suite.

The partnership is alike to earlier deals Twitter has signed with Google and Microsoft's Bing.

Yahoo's search engine has previously started indexing tweets in a bid to make its service offer faster and more appropriate results - a move made by Google at the end of last year.

However, what is dissimilar to the previous deals is that Yahoo has effectively made itself a Twitter client, as Yahoo users will be able to tweet from multiple platforms across Yahoo's products.

It is unidentified how this will be carried out at this stage. There is an opportunity it could happen via widgets.

The partnership also allows Yahoo users to access their Twitter feed via the company's email service, its homepage and via its satisfied verticals - such as Yahoo Finance.

Google had lastly integrated MySpace updates from public pages into its real-time search feature, which was launched back in December at the Google Search Event in Mountain View, California. Google had initially announced that public updates from both MySpace and Facebook would be integrated into the service. Though up until now, Facebook was nowhere to be seen.

With that said, Google had announced in a tweet [pictured above] that status updates from public Facebook Pages are now part of real-time search results. Most Facebook Pages are for celebrities, events, brands, politicians, etc. and there are only about 3 million of them. That means that Google will not be utilizing public updates from the more than 400 million Facebook users.

Another thing worth mentioning is that Facebook is not charging either Google or Bing for using the position updates from its Facebook users and pages, unlike Twitter, which supposedly is making a little cash from partnerships with all the major search engines.

An example of a screenshot of the updates from Facebook Pages on Google Real-Time Search results below.

Google has announced the “next generation of ad serving technology for online publishers” with its upgrades to the Double-click online advertising system, known merely as DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP).

In essence the upgrade combines the existing DoubleClick display advertising model with enhanced Google-optimised algorithms and analytics which will maximise DoubleClick ad performance online and allow users to track the development of adverts more easily.
To put it basically, the search engine has finally come around to properly integrating DoubleClick into the Google family. Since Google acquired DoubleClick in March 2008, the service has remained basically unchanged – a bolt-on to the seemingly inexhaustible list of Google products; now DoubleClick has been “Googlefied” to mesh the product into the Google brand.

The new features of DFP comprise a brand new interface which has been changed to make it more intuitive, user-friendly and to reduce errors. Customers will have contact to more detailed reporting and analytics as well as future forecasting to measure the efficiency of current online advertising campaigns and to make the most of future campaigns.

Google has upgraded the DoubleClick algorithm to optimise ad performance and application as well as making opening up the API which will permit developers to add their own apps and modifications to the system.

The DFP will come in two separate packages, one for large online publishers and social media networks, and one for increasing publishers and small businesses. The version for small businesses will be free to download, the full DFP will have to be paid for by the superior publishers.

Google Docs is the web-based tool that has become the organizational center of the classrooms. No longer there is lost assignment problems with development of Google Docs.

Docs also teaches directorial skills. Students form folders to keep up with assignments. The most significant folder is the folder students share with the teacher. All graded writing goes into this folder, and it serves as a characters portfolio for the semester. You do not have to hunt student work; it is organized in a student folder. At the end of the day, you can leave with just a laptop, no papers to lug around.

Each student folder is in a group class folder. The class folder contains each student's writing for the semester:

Each student's online writing portfolio folder is also mutual with his or her parents. Parents can even remark on student work and participate in the revision and editing process.

For students, Google Docs is a priceless tool in the writing process. Students do not need a flash drive to bring drafts to and from home. Also, students can share inscription with peer editors. After peer restriction, students move their final draft into their English 9 folder. As the final editor, you can leave comments to assist the student in revising his or her final draft. It is satisfying to browse through the revision history and see that a student is considering each comment as they revise: Yea! They are actually reading what I wrote! Usually, students do not read teacher comments that are hand written on paper, but it seems to work in Google Docs.

Google Voice is about giving you more power over your communications, through dozens of features ranging from call screening to voicemail transcription to the facility to send and receive SMS by email.

Users love the Google’s growing list of features, and they are conscious of the fact that Google Voice can seem overwhelming to people trying it for the first time.

So Google has created a short video that gives an overview of what Google Voice can do.

In addition, Google has created a set of short videos that dive into more detail about ten features of Google Voice:

1) Voicemail transcription
2) One number
3) Personalized greetings
4) International calling
5) SMS to email
6) Share voicemails
7) Block callers
8) Screen callers
9) Mobile app
10) Conference calls

The videos show the reasons for the invention of the feature and basic instructions for getting started. And each video focuses on just one topic so you can learn about the features that matter to you.

Finally, Google has just launched the own YouTube channel at youtube.com/googlevoice. You can view all of the videos mentioned above in a custom video gadget that Google has built for this channel, which will help you keep track of which videos you've already watched.

Imagine being in a foreign country staring at a restaurant menu you can't comprehend, a waiter with annoyance tapping his foot at your tableside. You, a vegetarian, have no suggestion whether you're about to order spaghetti with meatballs or veggie pesto. What would you do? Well, ultimately you might be able to take out your mobile phone, snap a photo with Google Goggles, and instantly view that menu translated into your language.

Yesterday at the Mobile World Congress Google demonstrated a prototype of Google Goggles that has the power to do just that. It's still in a very early stage, this is a demo given by Google to shows just how powerful a smartphone can be when it's connected to the translation technologies. For more information and to watch the demo, check out the brand-new Google Translate blog.

Google has launched a couple of improvements to the way saving works in all of Google Docs. Now it's much simpler to tell, at a glance, when documents need to be saved, when documents are busy saving, and when documents have been saved into the cloud:

A clickable save button means your document has edits which haven't been saved so far and the timestamp lets you know when it was last saved. You can either wait for autosave to kick in after a few seconds, or you can yourself save at any time using the keyboard (ctrl S on PC, cmd S on Macs), save button, or by going to through the file menu.

A disabled button reading “Saving” means your document is at present being saved, and should complete in a second or two.

A disabled button reading “Saved” means that all data in this document is now saved, and the timestamp tells you when the last change happened. You can securely exit the application or continue editing the document.

These changes are now available in presentations and documents and will be coming to spreadsheets soon.

When you need an answer to a very precise question, sometimes the information just isn't online in one straightforward place. For example, let's say you want to know if there's snow on Skyline Boulevard on a given day or the finest time of year to plant beans in the Bay Area. You might find weather reports and planting guides on numerous different sites, but for these kinds of questions, a person with the right proficiency can be a lot more useful than a webpage.

Google is excited to announce that they have acquired Aardvark, a unique technology company that lets you quickly and easily tap into the knowledge and experience of your friends and extended network of contacts. Aardvark analyzes questions to determine what they're about and then matches each question to people with pertinent knowledge and interests to give you an answer quickly.

Google is very impressed with the Aardvark team and the technology they've worked hard to build, and they are looking forward to collaborating to see where we can take it. You can learn more about Aardvark's underlying knowledge and premise by reading this paper recently co-authored by founder Damon Horowitz.

In the meantime, Aardvark is accessible today in Google Labs, so try it out.

As thousands of Mac fans and developers gather in San Francisco for this week's Macworld conference, Google is particularly delighted to announce a new beta release of Chrome for Mac. The release includes some of the Google’s most requested features from the Mac community, including extensions and bookmark sync.

You can read more about these features on the Google Chrome blog, or you can try it out straight by downloading the Google Chrome Beta for Mac. If you're already using Chrome, you should be mechanically updated to the new beta within the next day.

Variety of content is one of the great things about YouTube. But some of you want a more restricted experience. That's why Google has announced Safety Mode, an opt-in setting that helps screen out potentially objectionable content that you may prefer not to see or don't want others in your family to stumble across while enjoying YouTube. An example of this type of content might be a newsworthy video that contains realistic violence such as a political protest or war coverage. While no filter is 100% perfect, Safety Mode is another step in Google’s ongoing desire to give you greater control over the content you see on the site.

It's easy to choose in to Safety Mode: Just click on the link at the bottom of any video page. You can even lock your option on that browser with your YouTube password. To learn more, check out the video below.

And remember, ALL content must still comply with Google’s Community Guidelines. Safety Mode isn't fool proof, but it provides a greater degree of control over your YouTube knowledge. Safety Mode is continuing out to all users throughout the day, watch for the new link at the bottom of any YouTube page.

Google Buzz is a latest way to start conversations about the things you find interesting. It's built right into Gmail, so you don't have to peck out a completely new set of friends from scratch — it just works. If you think about it, there's always been a big social network underlying Gmail. Buzz brings this network to the surface by mechanically setting you up to follow the people you email and chat with the most. Google has focused on building an easy-to-use sharing experience that richly integrates photos, videos and links, and makes it easy to share openly or privately (so you don't have to use different tools to share with different audiences). Plus, Buzz integrates firmly with your existing Gmail inbox, so you're sure to see the stuff that matters most as it happens in real time.

Google is rolling out Buzz to all Gmail accounts over the next few days, so if you don't see it in your account yet, check back soon. They have also planned to make Google Buzz available to businesses and schools using Google Apps, with added features for sharing within organizations.

On your phone, Google Buzz is much more than just a diminutive screen version of the desktop experience. Mobile devices add a significant component to sharing: location. Posts tagged with physical information have an extra dimension of context — the answer to the question "where were you when you shared this?" can communicate so much. And when viewed in aggregate, the posts about a particular location can paint a tremendously rich picture of that place. Check out the Mobile Blog for more information about all of the ways to use Buzz on your phone, from a new mobile web app to a Buzz layer in Google Maps for mobile.

Google is making Buzz a fully open and distributed platform for conversations. And building on a suite of open protocols to create a complete read/write developer API and you can join on Google Code to see what is available today and to learn more about how to participate.

If you want to learn more, visit buzz.google.com.

Google already runs a flourishing online translator, Google Translate, but they’ve got far-loftier ideas than merely converting the written word. They want to decode languages spoken over the phone, according to their head of translation services.

Presently, Google’s text translation service covers 52 languages, together with the addition of Haitian Creole last week. Google has developed its text translation examine by crawling and comparing millions of multi-lingual websites and documents. It then uses this translation data to offer text and website translation to users of this translation service.

On the mobile side of its business, Google has released a voice search scheme for Android’s 2.x version. Users can speak into a handset mic and Google’s voice search system will identify the spoken words and perform a search. For the live voice translation service which Google’s Franz Och is developing, this voice search method and Google’s text translation service would be combined to instantly translate spoken voice.

As of yet, no dates or technical details have been revealed about the coming of Google’s live voice translation service. This technology would be a greeting addition to Android or any mobile phone service, as our continually globalizing economy may yield a larger need for voice translation.

As hinted by CEO Eric Schmidt, Google launched a Super Bowl ad Sunday. The ad tells the story of a romance as helped by a series of Google searches which begin with a (presumably) young man looking for leads how to study abroad in Paris and ending with instructions on how to assemble a crib.

John Battelle more or less ran down Google’s intentions Saturday after Schmidt tipped his hand on Twitter. But it was an unanticipated move by the search giant which has eschewed advertising even as competitors Microsoft and Yahoo have spent 10s of millions of dollars to compete with the company that retains a search market share that exceeds 70 percent.

Google has reinvented online advertising but has done no brand advertising itself. Google’s goal was simply to make a series of short online videos about their products and their users, and how they interact. But they liked this video so much, and it's had such a positive reaction on YouTube, that so they decided to share it with a wider audience.

Google has announced their third annual Doodle 4 Google contest in the U.S. Google doodles, created have helped to celebrate events and anniversaries from Van Gogh's birthday to Valentine's Day. And since 2008, Doodle 4 Google has given K-12 kids the chance to create their own logo and have it displayed on the Google homepage for hundreds of millions of users to enjoy for a day.

In adding to the winner's art appearing on Google.com on May 27, 2010, they'll also receive a $15,000 college scholarship, a laptop computer and a $25,000 technology grant for their school.

This year's theme is "If I Could Do Anything, I Would..." and it's all about approaching the limits, dreaming big, and seeing what you can accomplish in life.

For more inspiration, you can see last year's winner, Christin Engelberth, a sixth grader at Bernard Harris Middle School in San Antonio, Texas. She titled her doodle "A New Beginning" to communicate her wish that "out of the current crisis, discoveries will be found to help the Earth prosper once more."

Google has also assembled a panel of well-known "Expert Jurors," including creative directors, cartoonists and famous animators ranging from Sesame Workshop to Pixar Animation Studios. The Expert Jurors will help to narrow down the cream of the crop to 40 regional finalists, who will come to the Google office in New York City on May 26, 2010. For the second year, Google will also be partnering with the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, where the top 40 regional finalists will get to have their artwork displayed in a national exhibit. And for the first time this year, Google has planned out to give eight Technology Booster awards to schools that submit maximum number of doodles per school by March 10th and have students in our 400 State Finalists.

Visit the official competition website for a full listing of all contest rules and requirements. Only students from registered schools can enter, so be definite that your school is registered by March 17, 2010. All doodles must be submitted by March 31, 2010.

Google made a small advancement to its Google Voice service this week, and will now allow users to send text messages to multiple recipients.

Formerly, you had to copy and paste your message into a new form for every text, but now you can just enter the names or phone numbers separated by commas and send it all at once. To prevent spam, however, there is a maximum of five recipients per message.

Replies from each recipient will be threaded into separate conversations, so you can keep trail of them in your Google Voice inbox.

The attribute is also available via the Google Chrome extension and will soon be added to the mobile app.

A couple of months back, google launched the Custom Sections Directory feature in Google News to allow users to set up sections on topics of their interest, and to share them with other users.

The web has evolved in the last ten years, from easy text pages to rich, interactive applications including video and voice. Unfortunately, very old browsers cannot run many of these innovative features effectively. So to help ensure your business can use the latest, most advanced web apps, we just update your browsers as soon as possible. There are many choices:

Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0+

Mozilla Firefox 3.0+

Google Chrome 4.0+

Safari 3.0+

Many other companies have already stopped supporting older browsers like Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers. Google is also going to begin phasing out their support, starting with Google Docs and Google Sites. As a result you may find that from March 1 key functionality within these products -- as well as new Docs and Sites features -- won’t work properly in older browsers. 2010 is going to be a great year for Google Apps.

About 18 months ago, Google published a graph presenting that Unicode on the web had just exceeded all other encodings of text on the web. The increase since then has been even more dramatic.

Web pages can use a diversity of different character encodings, like ASCII, Latin-1, or Windows 1252 or Unicode. Most encodings can only symbolize a few languages, but Unicode can represent thousands: from Arabic to Chinese to Zulu. Google had long used Unicode as the internal format for all the text they search: any other encoding is first converted to Unicode for processing.

This graph is from Google internal data, based on our indexing of web pages, and thus may differ somewhat from what other search engines find. However, the trends are pretty obvious, and the constant rise in use of Unicode makes it even easier to do the dispensation for the many languages that we cover.This graph is from Google internal data, based on our indexing of web pages, and thus may differ somewhat from what other search engines find. However, the trends are pretty obvious, and the constant rise in use of Unicode makes it even easier to do the dispensation for the many languages that Google covers.

This graph is from Google internal data, based on our indexing of web pages, and thus may differ somewhat from what other search engines find. However, the trends are pretty obvious, and the constant rise in use of Unicode makes it even easier to do the dispensation for the many languages that we cover.

Searching for "nancials"?

Unicode is growing both in practice and in character coverage. Google recently upgraded to the newest version of Unicode, version 5.2 (via ICU and CLDR). This adds over 6,600 new characters: some of mostly academic attention, such as Egyptian Hieroglyphs, but many others for living languages.

Google is constantly improving thier handling of existing characters. For example, the characters "fi" can either be represented as two characters ("f" and "i"), or a special display form "fi". A Google search for [financials] or [office] used to not see these as equivalent — to the software they would just look like *nancials and of*ce. There are thousands of characters like this, and they occur in surprisingly many pages on the web, particularly generated PDF documents.

But no longer — after widespread testing, Google just newly turned on support for these and thousands of other characters; your searches will now also find these documents. Further steps in Google’s mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Thursday, January 28th marks International Data Privacy Day. Google is recognizing this day by openly publishing our guiding Privacy Principles.

• Use information to provide the users with valuable products and services.
• Develop products that reflect strong privacy standards and practices.
• Make the collection of personal information transparent.
• Give users meaningful choices to protect their privacy.
• Be a responsible steward of the information we hold.

Google has been always operating with these principles in mind. Now, they have just put them in writing so you have a better understanding of how we think about these issues from a product perspective.

You can find out more about Google’s efforts at the Google Privacy Center and on our YouTube channel.

Google is excited to introduce a new stable release of Google Chrome for Windows, which includes two of the browser's most recurrently requested features: extensions and bookmark sync.

Extensions permit you to add new features and functions to your browser. Some provide one-click access to some of your favorite web applications like eBay and digg, or news and information sources such as NPR and Time.com. Others are useful tweaks for performing common online tasks such as browsing photos, getting instructions or shopping.

Google previously launched extensions on the beta channel, and many latest extensions have since been contributed by developers from all over the world. Now you can browse over 1,500 in google extensions gallery and install them on the stable version of Google Chrome.

Bookmark sync is a handy attribute for those of you who use several computers — say, a laptop at work and a desktop at home. You can enable bookmark sync to synchronize your bookmarks on all of your computers so that when you generate a bookmark on one computer, it's mechanically added across all your computers. This means that you won't need to manually reconstruct the bookmark each time you switch computers.

You can read more about stable release — including performance improvements — on the Google Chrome Blog. Or if you want a look under the hood at what this update means for web developers (including new HTML and Javascript APIs), check out the Chromium blog.

To those using Google Chrome on Linux, extensions are enabled on the beta channel. And for those using Google Chrome for Mac, hang tight — Google is working on bringing extensions, bookmark sync and more to the beta soon. Those currently using the stable version for Windows will be automatically updated within the next week (or you can check for updates manually).

If you're on a PC and haven't tried Google Chrome yet, you can download Google Chrome and give all these latest features a whirl.

Google has launched the second version of its Google Voice extension for Chrome which includes innovative click-to-call functionality and easier access to voicemail messages.

The Google Voice extension, released on Friday, adds a button to the toolbar which displays the number of unread messages in a user’s Google Voice inbox – speeding access to their voicemails, which have been transcribed by Google’s speech recognition engine.

The button will also tell users if they have any latest messages and with a click will allow users to make a call, check messages or send a free text message, according to Google.

However, one of the most practical features for Google Voice users on Chrome will be the click-to-call functionality which allows users to just click on any number viewed in the browser to call that number directly from within the browser, if required

The calls will be made from any phones the user has already set up on Google Voice.

Users can download the latest extension from the Google Chrome Extensions page – the voice icon will appear to the right of the search bar without the need for a restart.

Google said it is working on voicemail playback functionality, which will be coming in the near future. The web giant also celebrated that the extension on Macs is still relatively buggy, while switching between tabs in the extension pop up will cause a few problems, as the popup doesn’t mechanically resize to fit at present. Both issues are being worked on.

Last year at our second Searchology event, Gaoogle announced Google Squared and Rich Snippets, two approaches to improve search by better understanding the web. Now Google is kicking off the new year with two improvements based on those technologies. First, they are applying the research behind Google Squared to add a new "answer-highlighting" feature to search, and second expanding Rich Snippets to include events.

Answer highlighting in search results

Most information on the web is shapeless. For example, blogs put together paragraphs of text, videos and images in ways that don't follow simple rules. Product review sites each have their individual formats, rating scales and categories. Unstructured data is hard for a computer to interpret, which means that we humans still have to do a fair amount of work to combine and understand information on the web.

Google Squared is one of the early efforts to automatically identify and extract structured data from across the Internet. The research behind Google Squared is, for the first time, making search better for everyone with a new feature called "answer highlighting."

Answer highlighting helps you get to information more quickly by seeking out and bolding the probable answer to your question right in search results. The feature is meant for searches with accurate answers. If the pages returned for these queries enclose a simple answer, the search snippet will more often consist of the relevant text and bold it for easy reference.

Consider the example, [empire state height]. The earlier search result used to look like this:

With today's improvements, the answer —1250 ft, or 381 m — is highlighted right in the search result:

This kind of quick answer only makes sense for definite kinds of searches. For example, the respond to [history of france] can't readily fit in a search snippet. Answer highlighting is rolling out during the next couple days on google.com in English.

Rich Snippets for events

Sometimes the easiest way to recognize somebody is by having a conversation. The web is similar. A huge way to understand web pages is to simply ask webmasters to teach us (and other search engines) about their content. To that end, we maintain to make improvements to our search results with Rich Snippets, enabling webmasters to annotate pages with structured data in a standard format.

So far Google has launched improved search result snippets for reviews and people. When your search results enclose web pages with review information, you might see the number of user reviews on the page and the average rating in the search result. When your search contains a public outline page about a person from a social networking site, you may see the person's location and occupation, or a list of her friends.

Google has announced support for a new Rich Snippets format for events. The new format improves search results by counting links to specific event names, dates and locations. Here's an example of a latest event result from livenation.com if you search for [irving plaza]:

The new result format provides a fast and suitable way to identify pages with events and click directly to the ones you find interesting. If you're into Hip Hop Karaoke, you can rapidly find out when and where the next show is in Irving Plaza, and click for more info.Check out blog post on Webmaster Central for more details.