Sagrada Família (Imgs..) in Barcelona, Spain is now visible..The Google Earth Blog has confirmed updated satellite imagery for Google Maps and has just verified the same imagery is now available on Google Earth. Major world cities such as Cape Town South Africa, Barcelona Spain and ski hotspot Whistler, BC in Canada are all now visible with high res views! Here is an update of specific areas which have enhanced viewing (From this post on the G

This month, Google added personalized search for every logged-in user, so now it’s even more likely that your search results are different than your friend’s Dan. You’ll also see plus boxes that extended the snippets with useful information from different Google services.Google Maps was upgraded. This month, Google included “building footprints for the urban cores of 38 U.S

Finally, we have a click fraud rate from Google itself: less than 0.02
percent of all clicks slip past its filters and are caught after advertisers
request reviews. That low figure is sure to bring out the critics who will
disagree. Below, more about how Google comes up with the figure plus some click
fraud fighting initiatives it plans to implement later this year.
Why release this figure now, when many have wanted it for literally years?
"We’ve been working to be more transparent and informative on the issues
related to click fraud

Paul Christ as KnowThis.com Marketing Blog lists search engine marketing as the #2 concept that modern marketers need to know. It’s a pretty strong endorsement. From the post:

But I will say that if you are not thoroughly familiar with each of these topics then you owe it to yourself to learn

People in big media companies sometimes ask me about YouTube and the content conundrum. In short: Should they post their stuff up there, or not? My answer comes back as sort of a koan - yes, of course, do both.

Mark Cuban, who is a consistent and very vocal YouTube critic, points out a few issues as to why

Want a snapshot of the day’s search marketing news? Here we’ve collected today’s top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:

MyRide.com, set to debut during the second quarter of 2007, will offer consumers a comprehensive array of information related to “the automotive purchase and ownership lifecycle.” Is the company that invented the automotive Internet now reinventing it? Greg Jarboe takes a look at what MyRide.com has to offer in today’s SearchDay.

GEarthBlog reports that the’s a satellite imagery update in Google Earth. Here are some of the key updates:

Entire country of Switzerland at 50cm and many Swiss cities at 25cm
Entire country of Switzerland terrain at 10m, the Swiss Alps are now high-res!
Entire country of Denmark at 50cm
Australia day flyover
Cities of France: Lyon; LeMans; Lourdes; Riems; Nancy; Limoges; Lille; Arles
Potsdam and Magdeburg, Germany
Barcelona, Belem, CapeTown, Galapagos (Isabella Island), Manaus, Mt Saint

Google held an in company conference this week, gathering techies from their various departments. They assembled “engineers from Testing, Development, User Experience, and other groups to submit conference sessions: tool presentations, tutorials, workshops, panels, and experience reports”, the Google testing blog reported.

Testapalooza was a big sucess, they reported in the blog.

Google Searches For Government Work - Washington Post
The search engine giant showed off its ambition yesterday to expand its business with the federal government, kicking off a two-day sales meeting that attracted nearly 200 federal contractors, engineers and uniformed military members eager to learn more about its technology offerings.
Academy threatens YouTube - Variety
Web surfers will no longer be reliving the magic moments of the 2007 Oscarcast via YouTube

A brand new feature on Google Maps lets you see a visual representations of traffic in some major US cities.  Green is ideal traffic conditions, yellow means there may be some delays, and red means you should probably expect stop and go traffic.
 
Imagine this feature available in a GPS navigation unit with wifi or 3G [...]

Google Maps has added the ability to view real time traffic data for 30 major US cities, highlighting traffic jams and slow moving traffic.

Traffic conditions are displayed over the highway as color coded lines. Each color represents how fast the traffic is moving:

Green: more than 50 miles per hour
Yellow: 25 - 50 miles per hour
Red: less than 25 miles per hour
Gray: no data currently available

iHaochi of Googlified adds “Google Maps for Mobile has had this feature for a really long time.”

John Marshall, the highly respected CEO of Clicktracks, and I had chance to talk about analytics recently. Clicktracks is well known for it’s analytics software solution.

While many people are familiar with Google Analytics, fewer people are aware that Clicktracks offers a free analytics solution as well, known as Clicktracks Appetizer

Googler Bill Kee talks about using Google Talk and Twitter to publish your up to the minute status on the Google Talkabout Blog.
Twitter is a site that makes it easy to let the world know what you’re doing, and see what other people are up to in a fun, social environment. You can think of it as low-effort mini-blogging

Although I can't get it to work, Bill Knee announces on the Google Talkabout blog that Twitter can now be used through GTalk.  Simply send your "twitter contact" the message you would like to post.  I am getting stuck at the "add the twitter@twitter.com to your contact list" step — my invitation doesn't get accepted.
This [...]

[UPDATE 2010: some edits were made to the list and are highlighted in blue.]

The update of imagery mentioned over the last few days for Google Maps is now available in Google Earth. Swiss Alps terrain is in high resolution (10 meter)! This is awesome to behold! .

Here’s the scoop from Google on what is new:

The key hightlights are:

Entire country of Switzerland at 50cm and many Swiss cities at 25cm (thank you, Endoxon)
Entire country of Switzerland

Last week’s Small is Beautiful column asked, “What’s So Different About Being Small?”

The answer? Time. Money. Knowledge.

Those are the three biggest challenges a small business must overcome to achieve search marketing success, and the three things that make small business search marketing unique. Many small businesses have one or two of those, but not the third. And some small businesses don’t have any of the three, making their road to search success even harder to travel.

Here’s a quick look at each challenge in more detail:
Click to continue reading…

Yahoo is rolling out a global search index update which will reindex content on the web, result in ranking changes and the “shuffling” of pages according to the Yahoo Search Blog.
Along with the global update comes the new support by Yahoo for the NOYDIR tag, which will stop Yahoo from listing Yahoo Directory titles and descriptions in the search results.
Yahoo now supports ‘NOYDIR’ which will recognize the following Meta Tags on web pages:

<META NAME=”ROBOT”

Google is losing a senior ad guy, and a real nice fellow to boot, to CBS. SEL has the news.

Here’s the release, as well.

Remember the /rebang directory that was spotted in Google’s robots.txt file yesterday? Ken Wang from GSeeker (a Chinese blog) noticed it was briefly live and showed signs that it is probably going to be a Chinese version of the Google Zeitgeist.
Haochi posts more over at the Googlified blog, suggesting that “ReBang” can be translated from Chinese as “Hot Ranking” – adding that this is “not a good translation, but you get the idea.”
The address www.google.com/rebang is currently redirecting me to www.google.com/rebang/home, although all I get is a “Not Found” 404 error.
[Thanks Ken Wong, xujie, KEViN恺, Philipp and Haochi!] [By Tony Ruscoe | Original post | Comments][Advertisement] Bloggers, increase your ad revenue: make contextual ad networks compete (for free)

Back from skiing, I’m still in one piece, tomorrow Cairo, but first:

Convergence example #1: Mura Aktihanoglu writes:I thought you might be interested in hearing about my project that turns Google Earth into a multi-user environment:www.unype.comIt lets you connect to and follow another user in Google Earth

Over the past year, we’ve been working hard to share more information about how we protect you against click fraud. Last July, the invalid clicks report was released to provide you with the number of invalid clicks we detect (and don’t charge for) in each individual account. A few weeks ago, our Click Quality team provided a list of common concerns and tips related to their click fraud investigations and let you know how to request an investi

TonyB makes some observations about Google Notebook in the forum:
<<
1. [Google Notebook]’s much faster for me now. I had quit using it mostly because it was so slow. It is very usable now.
2. The Actions drop down has a new option- Export to Google Docs and Spreadsheets. It apparently will only send your entire selected Notebook

New York, Boston, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Chicago, Atlanta and more… Google Maps now displays live traffic data for about 60 US cities. This functionality has been available on Google Maps for Mobile since July, but it’s now available in many languages on the standard version.
The official Google Blog explains what the colors mean, although the Google Operating System blog seems to be more accurate:

Green: more than 50 miles per hour
Yellow: 25 - 50 miles per hour
Red: less than 25 miles per hour
Gray: no data available

When you’re viewing an area on Google Maps where traffic information is available, a traffic light is displayed

This is probably one of the most requested feature for Google Maps, and it is now live - real-time traffic data. There are comprehensive data for 30 major cities in the U.S., including Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and others. Many more has partial coverage. If the area where the traffic data is available, you should be able to see a “Traffic” button at the top right corner.
This is what the colors represents on the traffic data:

Green: more than 50 miles per hour
Yellow: 25 - 50 miles per hour
Red: less than 25 miles per hour
Gray: no data currently available

Oh wow, Manhattan, busy town

Today I made plans to go out tomorrow evening to a Thai restaurant in Tampa, my new hometown. I’ve only been here 3 weeks and have been driving by many different Thai places around town, but am not really sure which one to go to.
I could always just pick one out of the phone book, but why do that when you have the Internet

GOSwards are Google Operating System’s awards for all Google-related things. Here are my awards for 2006:The most expected Google product - GDrive, an online storage service that could integrate with many existing Google products.The biggest change in Google’s philosophy - tie between more features, less products and censoring search results in China.The best document leaked from Google - the Analyst Day presentation plus some confidential information.Best new product in 2006 - Google Docs & Spreadsheets

I’ve been working from home, mostly telecommuting, since my son was born a year ago. If, like me, you’re one of those SEMs who works from home, Read/WriteWeb has compiled a list of programs to create a complete virtual office, including giving presentations and collaborating with team members (presumably also working from their homes)

CBS has named Patrick Keane their new Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer. Mr. Keane was previous Google’s Head Of Advertising Sales Strategy. He worked at Google for four years, his bio tells us he was “responsible for developing and managing the strategic plans and relationships critical to growing Google’s advertising customer base.”

At CBS, Keane will help “implement systems to market and sell its content on a growing variety of emerging media platforms and expand the

What are you doing right now? It’s a pretty simple question. Me? I’m writing this post. Maybe you’re “eating a magnolia cupcake,” or “at work, but shopping online.” Or maybe you’re “thinking of how to use the word of the day in a sentence: polypropolene.” Twitter is a site that makes it easy to let the world know what you’re doing, and see what other people are up to in a fun, social environment. You can think of it as low-effort mini-blogging.

The first round in the legal battles over using trademarked terms in AdWords ads went to Google. The decision in Rescuecom v. Google was, bottom line, that Google could accept bids on trademarked terms.
Naturally, Rescuecom, the plaintiff, is appealing the decision. The case is waiting its turn in the US 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals

Jeff Bonforte, senior director of real-time communications at Yahoo, said that Google “definitely are lacking in usablity” while trying to explain that “when it comes to consumer applications, no-one is more successful than Yahoo hands down“. Really? He also said “They don’t have this intimate connection in usability with consumers that Yahoo has had for 10 years.”
He reportedly turned down a position at Google some time ago because (he says that) the company is ruled by engineers and refuses to pay attention to usability.
So, talking about usability, which Google takes very seriously: they pay people money to improve their products’ usability and mention on their blog numerous times how much they care about it

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on
Search Engine Land and from other
places across the web:

From Search Engine Land:

Yahoo Provides
NOYDIR Opt-Out Of Yahoo Directory Titles & Descriptions
Yahoo! Search Support for ‘NOYDIR’ Meta Tags and Weather Update from the Yahoo
Search Blog covers how at long last, you can now tell Yahoo to not use Yahoo
Directory information to make a title and/or description for your web page
listings

O’Reilly Japan and CMO Technology announced its plan for “Web 2.0 Expo Tokyo”. It’s currently scheduled for November 15 and 16 at Izumi Garden in Roppongi, Tokyo, Japan.

Tim O’Reilly is scheduled to attend the expo as a keynote, …

After a long wait, Yahoo / Overture has finally shifted the pay-per-click ads platform to “Panama” in Japan. According to comScore Networks’ study, the advertising campaign on new platform is bringing a higher click-through-rate (5-9% up) since its opening …

That’s a tricky question. But Google decided to reveal a part of the mystery by showing the number of page views per week for the universal gadgets - those gadgets that work in the personalized homepage, in Google Desktop or syndicated in other sites. Fortunately, it’s very easy to see the numbers for almost any gadget (but not for feeds), so here’s a list of some of the most popular gadgets:* Date & Time - 130,290,121 page views per week* Google Calendar - 91,491,639 page views per week* Driving

MSNBC is launching a site for citizen journalists to contribute to their news. As a separate site, FirstPerson has a social media twist to it:

In the coming months, you will see the FirstPerson logo show up throughout the site, seeking your input and contributions on stories both serious and light-hearted

Yes, indeed. Google’s code blog has hard numbers on the number of calls to Google’s Gadgets. It’s clear Google is looking to promote these tools, as allowing numbers like these to get out is not common. In fact, I’d say it’s a totally unnatural act for Google. The numbers are not aggregated in one place, but Radar has done some of it for us

Yahoo! Search
Support for ‘NOYDIR’ Meta Tags and Weather Update from the Yahoo Search Blog
covers how at long last, you can now tell Yahoo to not use Yahoo Directory
information to make a title and/or description for your web page listings. It
also cover how Yahoo’s currently doing a reindexing change that might impact
rankings

Yahoo has come through with it’s promise to release a no Yahoo directory meta tag much like the no ODP meta tag.
Many webmasters complained that the title and description given to organic search listings when a site was listed in the Yahoo directory affected click through ratios and rankings. Now they can opt out of Yahoo using the directory information.
The format for the meta tag is:

<META NAME=”ROBOT” CONTENT=”NOYDIR”>

or

<META NAME=”Slurp” CONTENT=”NOYDIR”>

Yahoo noted that to make these changes effective there would be an index update

In the spring of 1907 Kenneth Grahame sent his seven-year old son, Alastair (nicknamed ‘Mouse’), the first of a series of letters telling the story of a group of animals and their various adventures along the river, in the woods and on the road. These letters, centering on the swaggering Mr. Toad, formed the first whisperings of what would become one of the best-loved children’s stories of all time: The Wind in the Willows. (http://www.ouls.ox.ac

Been waiting for this, Yahoo has had it for some time.

Google released today a very useful new overlay for cities in the US showing real-time traffic information for major roads and highways (via GoogleMapsMania). When traffic is available you will see a “Traffic” choice in the upper right next to “Map | Satellite | Hybrid“

I’m generally suspicious of surveys that say things you’d expect them to say
by the company that commissioned them. In this case,
ClipBlast — a video search site —
sends word of a survey covering frustration with video search. Still, I’ll pass
along some stats and the press release, for what they’re worth

By Steven De La O, Google Base SupportBack in December 2005, Clint published a post about the label attribute and its usefulness in helping searchers find your items. A little more than a year later, we’ve had the opportunity to evaluate the information included for this attribute, and we’d like to announce changes that affect its use. Moving forward, we will no longer support the label attribute. We’ve found that label values can easily be submi

We�re adding support for the Meta tag called �NOYDIR� that will complement the �NOODP� Meta tag, which we already support. If you�re unfamiliar, the �NOODP� Meta tag is basically a way for webmasters to indicate that Open Directory Project (ODP) titles and abstracts will not be used in search results for their pages

We�re adding support for the Meta tag called �NOYDIR� that will complement the �NOODP� Meta tag, which we already support. If you�re unfamiliar, the �NOODP� Meta tag is basically a way for webmasters to indicate that Open Directory Project (ODP) titles and abstracts will not be used in search results for their pages

We�re adding support for the Meta tag called �NOYDIR� that will complement the �NOODP� Meta tag, which we already support. If you�re unfamiliar, the �NOODP� Meta tag is basically a way for webmasters to indicate that Open Directory Project (ODP) titles and abstracts will not be used in search results for their pages

Yesterday Philipp Lenssen found that Google has added “/rebang” to their robots.txt file. Usually when Google is going to launch a new service or channel, they add that site to this file.
Philipp asks “Does anyone know what Rebang is?”
Possible scenarios:
Rebang.com is a 3d design company, is Google planning on acquiring this company for its second life style 3D interface?
No, the owner of Rebang.com comments on Philipp’s blog and shot down that notion.
Instead, Rebang

Google Maps has caught up with Yahoo
and Microsoft in adding live traffic reporting for the United States to their
online mapping service.
Google Operating System

spotted the change today (and Google now has the official word up here). To see the traffic yourself, just go to Google
Maps and click on the new "Traffic" button that you’ll see in the upper
right-hand corner of the map page, right before the "Map" and "Satellite" and
"Hybrid" buttons.
Pushing