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The Dutch Google Maps mashup scene is picking up speed so I’m back with my second Dutch post to round-up all of the recent examples..Dutch Crime Mashup (Dutch language) - This Google Maps mashup uses a database of police records and lawbreaks and plots them on a map. The motto on the banner of the site indicates that there are “Already more than 62637 crimes” on this mashup
Last Friday afternoon, I was able to catch the end of the Blog Business Summit in Seattle. At the session called “Blogging and SEO Strategies,” John Battelle brought up a good point. He said that as a writer, he doesn’t want to have to think about all of this search engine optimization stuff. Dave Taylor had just been talking about order of words in title tags and keyword density and using hyphens rather than underscores in URLs.We agree, which is why you’ll find that the main point in our webmaster guidelines is to make sites for visitors, not for search engines
So, now that you’ve (a) provisioned a Live Search Box for your site, and (b) updated it with a cool look and feel, you are finally ready to build the search query of your dreams.
Back in the old days, search boxes generally gave you two options: (1) search the whole Web or (2) search only your site
Per an announcement today at Zend Conference 2006, GData support is now available in the Zend Framework:The Google Data APIs provide a simple standard protocol for reading and writing data on the web. With the Google data APIs, developers can mash up services like Google Base, Calendar, Blogger, and CodeSearch.Zend Google Data Client Library provides a PHP 5 component to execute queries and commands against Google Data APIs from your PHP applications.Check it out and let us know what you think!
We’ve just posted an article on dev.live.com that looks at a few simple hacks you can do with the Live Search Box, to change its look and feel. You can use these hacks to make the search box fit better into the design of your site. List of hacks:
Applying the Windows Live styling to the basic search box
Adding default text to the search box
Auto-selecting the search box when the page loads
Ensuring compatibility with ActiveX and other smart objects
But this is really only the beginning of what you can do
Whether you’re walking door-to-door with a small ghost in tow or handing out treats tonight, you’re sure to hear the phrase “Trick-or-Treat” screamed more than once by excited youngsters. As that phrase lingers in your head for the next couple of days, here’s a way that you can constructively apply it to your AdWords campaigns to improve the experience of your potential customers and your bottom line.
Every advertiser has an end goal in mind when they decide to advertise online
Last week we told you that Bharat Mediratta would be speaking at Zend Conference 2006. Now we can tell you why: PHP leader Zend has added support for Google data APIs to their Zend Framework. They’ve written a flexible library that makes it easy to use Google data APIs as part of your PHP applications. Check out the package and let us know what you think.Leslie Yeh, Product Manager
(And, yes, it supports Firefox too!)
Today, we’re proud to announce the launch of the Live Search Box, to bring the power of search to your Web site or blog through a cool widget. Check it out:
When the user enters a query, the search box dynamically builds a floating <DIV> on your page to display the search results
Happy Halloween! Today we’re highlighting the finalists in the Google Video Horror Show. Not sure which will scare you most, but we hope one of these videos will put you in the Halloween mood. The following videos were hand-picked by you and rated as the scariest videos on Google Video.Thank you for participating in the Google Video Horror Show and have a safe Halloween!Click here to watch “How to..
Posted by Kevin Gough, Product Marketing Manager
Interested in getting a sneak peak at the latest Google Enterprise products? Want to verify that Google is run by humans and not just really smart robots? Join us in November for a breakfast seminar during our Google Enterprise world tour, where our Enterprise execs will share their thoughts on IT trends and you can learn about Google’s enterprise search, geospatial and collaboration offerings first hand from product experts.
We’ll be stopping by the following U.S
Mark Cuban has posted a long bit on the intimate details of the YouTube buyout and copyright infringement issues. Take a read.
Posted by Dave Girouard, Vice President and General Manager, Google EnterpriseWe think Jotspot is a hotspot for enterprise.In the last couple years, JotSpot made a name for itself, as well as for do-it-yourself application publishing — used by individuals and businesses. JotSpot makes it easy for companies of all sizes to use wikis to collaborate online.We’re excited about what that could mean for our enterprise customers. So, welcome Joe and team.We look forward to putting those wikis to work.
They should probably make this part of the official Gmail interface, but for now we’ll have to use this greasemonkey script to add the ability to have multiple signatures in Gmail.
Google and JotSpot have announced an acquisition by Google. JotSpot makes a collaborative product similar to a wiki that allows groups of people to work together and share ideas. As with most new Google acquisitions, registration is closed for new customers, but there is a waiting list if you want to sign up. Also in Google form, JotSpot’s services are now free.
More about JotSpot’s product.
Today’s the thirty-first of October and Google’s got lots of scary stories for you.
Read Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or Frankenstein, or search for your favorite book.
The official Google blog announced yesterday that it would pass on most of the advertising revenue generated by the new “exploding diet coke” video to Coke and Mentos. If you haven’t seen these videos by the guys in white lab coats from Eepybird, you’re in for a treat. They create a whole show revolving around mixing Diet Coke and Mentos and making it shoot high in the sky. But perhaps the most interesting part is that Google has agreed to share the advertising revenue with the makers of the film. If you think you’ve got a video worthy of this revenue sharing program, just get in touch with Google.
Another airline has discovered Google Maps and has integrated it into their website. Air New Zealand makes Google Maps available to prospective kiwi customers planning their flight from New Zealand to destinations around the world (I haven’t confirmed if other global Air NZ websites have this functionality yet)
We’re happy to announce our first release candidate for Google Web Toolkit 1.2, which has a number of highly requested features and bug fixes: Full support for OS X development Develop with GWT on OS X as easily as on Linux and Windows Much faster hosted mode Debug your GWT apps much more quickly. Hosted mode startup time has improved significantly — and even better, refreshes are now lightning-fast — even when your source code changes. New
USA Today has reported on a new list put out by Morgan Quitno Press which ranks crime rates in US cities titled: “Ranking of least, most dangerous cities”. Virender Ajmani decided to focus on the safest cities in that city crime rankings list and has created a Google Maps Mashup showing the top 25 called:
America’s Safest Cities
Posted by: Dave MacLachlan, Member of Technical Staff, Mac Team(Editor’s note: today’s post is a bit different from our usual fare — it’s aimed at the Mac programmers out there. And if you’re not a programmer, you might want to find one to guide you through this peek behind the scenes of how we make our applications fast and reliable.)At Google, software performance is extremely important
Posted by Mendel Chuang, Product Marketing Manager
When we were designing Google Desktop, we knew that people would use it in different ways. It’s been interesting to see just what you’re doing with it. Legal Andrew points out that one way to improve your experience is to simply have the right set of gadgets in your Sidebar, so that, for example, the email gadget keeps you from having to switch constantly between Outlook and your other programs
By Anita Yuen, Webmaster Tools Team
A few months ago, my sister started a small online business, Bumblebee Linens, to sell handkerchiefs and linens. Once she finished her website, the first things she focused on were advertising and getting her site and products on Google search results
First, thank you to those who are using Yahoo! Site Explorer to keep tabs on how your site is indexed by us, and especially to the folks who are using the forum to ask questions and suggest new features. Your feedback helps us prioritize features as well as come up with new features to add to the roadmap
Nate Anderson of ARS Technica attempts to answer this question. Apparently there isn’t any hard evidence, but the claims are provocative. Read the stories.
Former Intelligence Agent Says Google In Bed With CIA
A former clandestine services officer for the CIA who also maintains close relationships with top Google representatives says that the company is “in bed with” the intelligence agency and the U.S. government. He has also gone public on his deep suspicions about the official explanation behind 9/11.
Google actively aiding intelligence agencies?
Former intelligence officer Robert David Steele recently appeared on the Alex Jones show to make the provocative claim that Google is currently cooperating with secret elements in the US government, including the CIA.
Steele, who now runs OSS.net and is a proponent of open source intelligence, said that “Google has made a very important strategic mistake in dealing with the secret elements of the U.S. government—that is a huge mistake and I’m hoping they’ll work their way out of it and basically cut that relationship off.” In his view, Google’s attempt earlier this year to avoid turning over information to the Department of Justice was little more than a hypocritical charade.
Google Admits Terror Storm Blackout But claims “error” and not censorship for second successive time as 9/11 film enters top 100.
Following our attempts to get an answer as to why Google was seemingly artificially stifling the viewership numbers for Terror Storm, ensuring the film didn’t enter Google Video’s popular categories, the online giant has admitted the figures were pegged but claims again that the change was due to a technical glitch.
Interesting stories.
Last weekend, Google hosted the third FLOSS Usability Sprint, an event designed to bring together User Experience professionals and open source developers to collaborate and improve OS projects. The two facilitators, Allen “Gunner” Gunn and Eugene Eric Kim, quickly made all the participants feel welcomed and engaged. Allen and Eugene then paired developers with the UX practitioners in attendance and we were off and running, pausing only for reports back to the group on our progress and, of course, lunch! The team from SocialtextOpen found that their new, simplified interface left their more advanced users feeling information withdrawl. They spent their weekend concentrating on building a user interface for their immersive wiki users while simultaneously putting the finishing touches on their next product release. Another team worked on enhancing the usability of HyperScope, a project laying the groundwork for Douglas Engelbart’s vision of an Open Hyperdocument System. The Social Source Commons group focused on removing extraneous elements from their website to make the site more navigable and useful for those doing IT support for non-profits. The Sustainable Civil Society project, a wiki-like project to create a map of organizations devoted to sustainability, wowed us with an excercise in creating affinity diagrams and left the sprint under a new moniker, Wiser Earth. I was fortunate enough to spend the weekend with four developers from the Drupal project, reviewing the results of their user survey and creating the framework for a report on improving usability in Drupal. The report will be published to the entire Drupal community, and in the interim Kieran Lal of CivicSpace has posted a write up of our activities this weekend. Thanks to Kieran, Neil Drumm, Matt Cheney and Zack Rosen for the deeper introduction to the wonderful world of Drupal
Someone’s got some imagination.
Haven’t used Google Checkout yet? Take a quick tour and see if you’re hooked.
Let’s take a look at Google’s Privacy policy:
- Google collects personal information when you register for a Google service or otherwise voluntarily provide such information. We may combine personal information collected from you with information from other Google services or third parties to provide a better user experience, including customizing content for you.
- Google uses cookies and other technologies to enhance your online experience and to learn about how you use Google services in order to improve the quality of our services.
- Google’s servers automatically record information when you visit our website or use some of our products, including the URL, IP address, browser type and language, and the date and time of your request.
Now what does Google do with this information?
- We may use personal information to provide the services you’ve requested, including services that display customized content and advertising.
- We may also use personal information for auditing, research and analysis to operate and improve Google technologies and services.
- We may also share information with third parties in limited circumstances, including when complying with legal process, preventing fraud or imminent harm, and ensuring the security of our network and services.
- Google processes personal information on our servers in the United States of America and in other countries. In some cases, we process personal information on a server outside your own country.
Now let’s move over to another topic. Google Analytics. Over the last ten months or so since Google aquired Urchin and renamed it Google analytics, *a lot* of websites have started using this free, organized, intuitive web statistics program. Google Analytics sets a couple of cookies for tracking and to keep it short, Google is pulling a lot of data about how all of us move about on the internet. Let me explain.
Let’s talk about Joe Blow. He visits wakes up in the morning and starts surfing. He visits 30 sites before he needs to shower and get off to work. I have not stats on how many sites us Google analytics, but if half those sites, do, then Google is collecting and storing a pretty good picture of Joe’s overall surfing habits.
This is fine, right? Google is the good guy, and they’re only going to use the information to serve up the most relevant ads to Joe. Joe’s fine with this, because although Google makes a killing, the ads are less intrusive because they’re things that Joe is interested in.
Now remember, Joe never saw or agreed to Google privacy policy, but Google has the info.
There’s also another factor. The US government could subpoena information that Google has. So even though Google has the best of intentions, they may not have the last word.
It might be a good idea for sites to start looking for alternative statistics programs.
Back in August, the AdSense team landed at the Google booth at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose, CA. We had a blast meeting all of you in person, providing optimization advice on the spot, and listening to what you had to say about AdSense. Whether or not you were able to attend, I’m excited to share with you a video recap of the conference
Here’s a quick question (and answer) that we spotted on the
AdWords Help
user-to-user support forum. We thought it’d be worth posting here (lightly paraphrased for clarity) to more fully explain one important aspect of monitoring your account performance.
When will I see activity? My ads have been live for hours now.
To which, a short while later, a helpful community member replied:
Give it a bit more time
Posted by Jeff Ragusa, Google EnterpriseWe will be hosting a joint webinar with Persistent Systems this Thursday 11/2 at 11:00am PST where they will be demonstrating some of the ways in which they extend the reach of the Google Search Appliance through their Suite of Enterprise Content Connectors. As a Google Enterprise Professional partner, Persistent has spent the past year providing value to our customers by extending the Google Search Appliance deep into enterprise content repositories.This webinar, jointly hosted by our Google Search Appliance Product Manager Nitin Mangtani, will provide demonstration of end-to-end search scenarios on hidden secure content residing within Lotus Notes and Documentum eRoom
At the first Internet Governance Forum in Athens, Google is expected to defend it’s presence in China saying that it does more good than harm since it gets more information to more people. Delegates from China, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, …
Sun Zhongpeng, a member of the China Anti-Hooligan Software Alliance, is suing Zhongsou.com which claims to be the world’s largest Chinese language search engine. The law suit was heard in the People’s Court in Beijing’s Haidian District on October …
Renaud Euvrard and other French Google Maps Mania contributors are back to help us learn what’s new, mapped and mashed-up in France:Peuplade creates mass social exchange in Paris (French language) - Renaud explains Peuplade.fr: “..Peuplade (translation :Tribe). The purpose is to improve communication between neighbors, to create a true social exchange between them in Paris.” The new version of this site (born in 2003 and limited to a district of
Phillip Lenssen writes about Google’s goals for this year in his blog. Here are some of the items:
Read the entire article here.
Posted by Todd Jackson, Product Manager
Since launching Google Checkout earlier this year, we’ve received a lot of feedback on the features you’d like to see. Coupons and discounts have been a big hit so far with buyers, but until now, it’s been hard to create coupons without being an API wizard
By Maya Capur, Google Base Operations ManagerWe are delighted to introduce a new way to submit AdWords ads for multiple items in Google Base! Previously, you could only do this for individually posted items but now you can do this through your bulk upload file. We think this is a significant improvement for content providers with multiple items who would like an integrated advertising solution.Here’s How:You should first set your daily budget and other AdWords campaign settings
Being an engineer isn’t always about working on fun new features — sometimes there are bugs that need to be fixed before anything else can happen. This is especially important in an application like Reader; if you use something every day, even small bugs can start to get very annoying. Here’s what’s been keeping the team busy this past week: The shared items clip that you can embed on your site will not interfere with other JavaScript that ma
Not too long ago, we posted about a new series of AdWords Seminars being offered by search marketing professionals who are also Qualified Invididuals in the Google Advertising Professionals program. Due to the overwhelming response, we’ve worked with the seminar leaders to add four more sessions of AdWords Seminars in November 2006
Do you use both Google Analytics and Google AdSense? If so, we’d like to get your feedback on two questions: Which Google Analytics reports do you use most often in conjunction with your AdSense account? And which reports or metrics would you most like to see added to Google Analytics to help you succeed with AdSense?
Tell us your opinions in the Google Group “Analytics Help” which is a forum for Google Analytics users
Last winter, we released a beta of Open Shortcuts, a way to create your own custom keywords that take you directly to a site, a search, or start a task right from the search box. As Open Shortcuts increases in popularity, we’re increasing the number of Open Shortcuts per user to 60.
To catch up, Open Shortcuts fans have been creating and using lots of shortcuts
Bharat Mediratta from Google will be giving a talk about GData at the Zend/PHP Conference in San Jose this coming week. GData team members will be available after the talk, so stick around afterwards to chat and ask questions. Bharat will be speaking at 5PM on Tuesday, October 31. Title and abstract for the talk are below.Google Data APIsThe Google Data API is a mix of simple query language, based on OpenSearch, using Atom and RSS to represent
eMarketer reports on Internet access via mobile devices.
The study was conducted in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, UK, and the US. while 29% of European Internet users regularly access the Internet from their mobile phones, only 19% of US …
On Tuesday we announced our support for Custom Search Engines. We asked you for your input and many of you suggested that we add support for Custom Search Engine Refinements. This evening we launched support for Custom Search Engine Refinements in a way that complements what many of you are trying to build. We extended .setSiteRestriction() so that in addition to passing the Custom Search Engine Id, you can also pass a Custom Search Engine Refinement label. See the code snippet below:
var cseId = "017576662512468239146:omuauf_lfve"; searcher = new GwebSearch(); searcher.setSiteRestriction(cseId, "Lectures");
To demonstrate this new capability, we have produce a new sample. The AJAX Search API based Curriculum Search Sample performs parallel searches over a Curriculum Search Engine as well as the engine with a “Lectures”, “Assignments”, and “Reference” refinements. This sample is based on the full blown Curriculum Search Engine hosted on code.google.com/edu.
As always, please continue to provide feedback.
If you’re looking for work, look no further than the Googlunaplex which will house “35 engineers, 27,000 low cost web servers, 2 massage therapists and a sushi chef formerly employed by the pop group Hanson”.
The Google Copernicus Hosting Environment and Experiment in Search Engineering (G.C.H.E.E.S.E.) is a fully integrated research, development and technology facility at which Google will be conducting experiments in entropized information filtering, high-density high-delivery hosting (HiDeHiDeHo) and de-oxygenated cubicle dwelling. This center will provide a unique platform from which Google will leapfrog current terrestrial-based technologies and bring information access to new heights of utility.
Giant lava lamps filled with biomass suspended in seawater generate oxygen for the complex
I’m not making this up, read it for yourself. 
Google has promised to take a hard stance against copyright violations when the $1.65 billion takeover is complete.
Copyrighted videos or TV shows, movies and other material have been one factor in YouTube’s impressive growth. Now that Google along with its billions in cash is at the driver’s wheel, many are predicting a long string of lawsuits against Google.
Via BBC.
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