Adam Darowski used Google Transit at the SXSW conference in March, and they sent him this way: Yikes! Took him 90 minutes to figure out how to get around it, and he said then:
Um. Am I Superman? How the hell am I expected to pull that off? I was stumped. Here I am behind some warehouses in the pitch dark, trying to find out how to get over/under that highway. It’s a tangled mess of high speed lanes. I come across train tracks. Of course, I lo

There’s definitely a reason why Google Transit is still in Google Labs. In March, one blogger at SXSW, Adam Darowski, got directions back to his hotel that told him to cross an eight-lane highway. Actually, looking at the map, he had to cross two highways. They recommended that he cross at their intersection. The straightest distance between two points, and all.
Here I am behind some warehouses in the pitch dark, trying to find out how

Fast Search and Transfer has launched FASTMedia, a software offering which allows media companies and publishers another option of delivering in-house managed search and advertising campaigns without dependency on Google AdSense or Yahoo’s YPN.
Reuters reports :
U.S. newspaper companies are looking to offset weakness in traditional classified advertising businesses by signing deals with Internet search companies such as Google or Yahoo, but

Ogilvy’s Neo@Ogilvy, the marketing & advertising giant’s interactive agency arm, has partnered with SEMDirector to form a new search marketing service for Ogilvy clients.
Ogilvy hopes to offer a superb search marketing offering for their A list portfolio which is centered around ROI and performance tracking.
From SEMDirector & Neo@Ogilvy:
The Neo@Ogilvy / SEMDirector alliance: Provides a scalable technology to automate the

Google has posted it here. Thanks Gary!

Google Blogoscoped has some excellent coverage of Google's Personalization Workshop that took place today at the Googleplex. The big news was about the Google Personalized Homepage — which was hit with some serious server trouble last week.  The service will be rebranded as "iGoogle" as of 9:00PM tonight.
 
There were several announcements today — all of [...]

Something I overlooked in all the Google Apps / Google Docs vs. Microsoft Office comparisons, but didn’t go unnoticed by Tony Ruscoe: Microsoft Office Home & Student works on up to three computers. That means that a single copy of Office H&S, which contains Word, Excel, Powerpoint and OneNote, costs $50 a person split three ways, the same as a year of Google Apps, and so cheap that Google Docs has a hard time justifying itself.
G

Remember how Google said recently that it might crack down on listings pages that are simply search results themselves? Reader
Michael Nguyen dropped an email today to point out how, ironically, Google is now listing pages from its own Google Product Search service exactly as it has warned others not to do.
OK, settle down back there, those of you having a chuckle. Embarrassing? Yes! Intentional? Almost certainly not. Let’s take a look. Tr

Google Personalized Homepage (iGoogle) will be having many more feature soon. Read “Google Personalization Workshop: Gadget Maker and More” on Google Blogoscoped for detailed information.
UPDATE: The updates will go live at 12am Eastern time.

Google is selected by USAToday as one of the 25 things that shaped the Internet… YouTube is on the list too. You can find the full list here on USAToday’s website.
Guess who is showing on the YouTube’s description? (hint: a self-claim lonely female celebrity on YouTube)

Google has filed an answer to Viacom’s copyright lawsuit and according to Rob Hof’s summary, the search engine is not taking any chances with its defense.
First up, Google contends Viacom’s suit goes against the principles of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
“By seeking to make carriers and hosting providers liable for Internet communications, Viacom’s complaint threatens the way hundreds of millions of p

Google announced today it has partnered with the governments of California, Arizona, Utah and Virginia to help make it easier for search engines, its own and its competitors, to crawl their websites and get important public info into the major search engines.
“California state government provides tremendous resources online for the public to learn about our great state,” said California Governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger. “Our partnership

I just heard from Google that they’ve re-branded the Google Personalized Homepage to something less of a mouthful. It will now be known as iGoogle.
My first reaction was, what will Apple have to say about them “borrowing” the whole “i” brand. Then, I remembered that Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, sits on the Apple board, so I’m sure it’s all approved.
Along with the new brand comes the launch of Google’s

Starting earlier today, when you search “Google Checkout” on Google, the first result is titled “use google checkout on hibidder com free“. A bit weird, don’t you think? (from the normal “Google Checkout”) Well, this is where Danny Sullivan comes in and explains to you what’s going on…
Also, Ionut spotted some really random suggestion errors on Google Blog Search…
related post: Google&#

Google Blogoscoped live blogged Google’s personalization presentations today. Find it here.

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 To Acquire Right Media; Joins Google In Buying, Rather Than Building, Display Ad Network Yahoo has announced it will acquire Right Media, which operates an auction-based display ad exchange called Remix Media. The move is widely seen as Yahoo fighting back against Google’s recent plans t

Bloomberg writes that the stock market is responding favorably to the idea that General Electric should spin off it NBC unit. That’s okay, and makes sense, as companies are trying to unload low performing units to focus on higher performing ones. What’s silly is this:
This is the second time this week analysts have suggested GE take such steps. Nicholas Heymann of Prudential Equity Group Inc. in New York said a company such as Googl

Well, it seems like my initial assertion that getting geotagged Flickr images into Google Earth wasn’t possible is not quite true. It is possible, but until yesterday’s post, it wasn’t really all that well documented:-) That has now been fixed. There are currently three ways in which geotagged Flickr images can be published to Google Earth (that I know of) — and the latter two methods are good for turning any GeoRSS feed into a KML networ

Today is Google Personalization Day at Google, where reporters and bloggers have been invited to learn more about Google’s moves to personalize its services. Our own Greg Sterling is there and will be providing coverage out of the event later. However, some news is already flowing out now. For one, Google steps up personalized Web search push from Reuters covers how Google will be renaming the personalized Google services as “iGoogle.” Click t

Yahoo and Comcast have struck a multi-year deal where Yahoo will provide the online display and video advertising for Comcast.net. In this deal, the advertising sales organization at Yahoo will will market and sell the display and video ads on Comcast.net’s behalf. Comcast hopes to utilize Yahoo’s “ad-serving, targeting and inventory management capabilities to enable the pricing, targeting, delivery and reporting” technologies in this deal.

Is it worth it to crack Technorati’s Top 100 Most Favorited Blogs? While the honor might be flattering, it may not be extremely useful to you or your blog. Amit Agarwal contends that the popular trend of “reciprocal favoriting” schemes have devalued the list: It takes almost 150 votes to get on Technorati Favorites list and that number is easy to achieve once you participate in any these Technorati link exchange programs. Am

As reported by Google Blogoscoped, Google Personalized Homepage will be rebranded as iGoogle and will let you build your own gadgets using wizards. The gadgets are very simple and are more like containers for things that matter to you: photos, videos, events.”Once the gadget is created, you can invite other people to view & use the gadget, and make it publicly available for other people to view & use it.” So whatever you choose to add to a ga

A while ago, Adam Darowski complained about that the Google Transit wanting him to cross an eight-lane highway on foot, which made him missed a lot of fun at this years SXSW.
To show that they are sorry for the _____ service they offered, Google’s Joe Hughes sent Adam a handwritten note and a Superman Hero Gear…
Dear Superman,
Reading your blog post about Google Transit at SXSW made us wonder if you were losing your powers—I mean,

Via Metafilter, I heard about the latest meme to go viral on YouTube. This one uses entirely copyright violating videos, which means most of what I post will disappear eventually, so watch them now:
First, watch this video from the second season finale of the OC: Now, this is the Saturday Night Live Digital Short (sound familiar?) that inspired it all, known as “Dear Sister”: Get it now? Well, heres the same joke, done in:
The

Today, Google is having a group discussion and workshop on Google’s personalization products. Colin Colehour will be reporting from the Googleplex event for us and I’ll be updating the post with new info as it comes in. Speakers will include Marissa Mayer and Sepandar Kamvar. (Note: Colin worked as a contractor for the Google Partner Solutions organization for 1 year; he’s currently working on personal projects from home.) &nbs

A comprehensive phylogenetic visualization of the avian flu virus (phylogenetics = the mapping of genetic mutations over time and space) has just been published (press release) and its centerpiece is a KML file that shows the evolution of the virus as it travels out of East Asia and into Europe and Africa. Here is the KMZ file: We’ve seen these shapes before in Google Earth. In fact, almost exactly a year ago Andrew Hill published a teaser of

Since the news media seems to think this Google Earth border data error is a big deal, I thought I would try to find out where the border is supposed to be. The point of contention is that a town in Chile called “Villa O’Higgins” is shown in Google Earth to be in Argentina. The border in Google Earth is clearly wrong, and the search results also show “Villa O’Higgins, Chile” to be in Argentina. I looked around for a detailed enough map to sh

Something look odd in the search results above for
google checkout? Yes, that’s the official Google Checkout home page listed first, but it’s most definitely NOT the right title for the Google Checkout page. That’s got folks at Digg wondering if Google Checkout has been hijacked, sparked from Jon West’s original post here. No. It’s just Google being lame. Below, more about how HiBidder.com ended up providing the current title for Google

Apparently AIM, AOL’s instant messenger, has an open API allowing developers to develop interesting applications using anonymous chatter information. The AIM host team has developed a couple of interesting Google Earth files showing real-time information from AIM users. The first is a network link which shows you the connections between chatters started during the last minute. NOTE: - the starting point for the chats is based on your curr

The Google Store has added a 3D navigation mouse ideal for use flying around Google Earth, and moving around the interface in Google SketchUp. It looks extremely useful for working in 3D (something regular mice are not great for).
The Google Store is selling it for $73.70. Amazon has two editions of it, the Personal Edition and Standard Edition, one of which is cheaper, one more expensive, and Google isn’t clear which one they are sellin

Normally our posts on the Yahoo! Search blog include new product launches, Yahoo! Search weather reports and feature the occasional guest blogger. But today we wanted to tip our cap to our brand marketing team, who just launched a new Yahoo! advertising campaign, “Be a Better _____.” Over the next few weeks you’ll see some TV spots highlighting how Yahoo! Answers and Yahoo! oneSearch (our new mobile search offering) can help you be a better wha

If you’re company is looking to fill an open marketing position, we’re offering free job listings on the Marketing Pilgrim Job Board from now until the end of May.
Simply use the coupon code “maypilgrim” for free listings!
So whether you need a new link ninja, copy wizard, analytics warrior, email sorcerer, or any other marketing super-hero, now is the time to list your job openings!

Via /.: “I’m an (extremely) small shareholder in Google, and I looked at their proxy statement today. Most of the time, shareholders’ meetings don’t deal with anything other than rubber-stamping the board of directors, but Google’s upcoming meeting has a interesting shareholder proposal dealing with free speech and censorship to be voted on at the May 10 meeting.” The proposal: The Office of the Comptroller of New York City has advised us th

Google’s blog search engine has a bug that shows weird suggestions for your query in the seventh page of results. While you can’t see the weird “did you mean” for every query, I got the message for two different queries.One of the suggestions was:”Elena Dementieva” (naked| scandal| divorce| separated| cancel| lawsuit| police| injured)As you probably know, | is an alternative way of entering the boolean operator OR that triggers all the results wh

What happens to a PayPal rival’s market share, when the owner stops providing $10 and $30 coupons? This… It goes to show, PayPal built its market share by powering e-commerce sites (and eBay sellers) that didn’t have access to a shopping cart and merchant account. Google, on the other hand, tapped big merchants (such as Buy.com) and used coupons to convince consumers to use Google Checkout. When the coupons stopped, the consum

YouTube’s head of advertising, Suzie Rieder, announced last week at AdTech that they will be adding advertising to videos on YouTube. The ads will be of the pre-roll and post-roll variety, that is ads that play before or after a clip.
“We’re looking at executions like a very quick little intro preceding a video, then the video, then a commercial execution on the backside of the content,” Ms. Reider said.
They didn’t say if thes

The info giant has named Gerry Campbell head of a new search unit and bought a text analysis/search company. PaidContent has more… And Google is working with four states to expose govt. data. This is a very, very important issue.

AIM, AOL’s instant messenger, is more open every day. AIM host team (whatever that means) created two kml files that let you visualize interesting real-time information about AIM users in Google Earth.One of visualization displays all the conversations started in the last minute as connections between two or more cities. The other one shows the most popular AIM users. By looking at the map, you’ll notice that Germany is the only European country

Matt has the story here. Andrew Braccia quietly quit as Yahoo’s vice president of consumer web search earlier this month, and begins tomorrow (Monday) with Accel Partners, a well-known Silicon Valley venture capital firm.

The European press is speculating that FAST will launch AdMomentum today (it was announced back in Feb), a kind of OEM Adsense for publishers. I’ve seen a demo and it’s impressive.

In Time For Google To Give Up The Fight Against Paid Links? last week, I wrote about Google’s second major war against paid links that’s now underway. Today, I came across two examples that illustrate why this is such a difficult war for it to fight. How do you spot the paid link hidden among others? And when a major player like Scripps cross-promotes its shopping sites on newspaper sites it owns, is it violating the spirit of no paid links

That’s Chief Culture Officer. Interview at Cnet here.

Yahoo, which late last year made an investment in the ad media exchange company Right Media, last night announced it has bought the rest, and for quite a price: $680 million. Given the Doubleclick news, this is not surprising. FM uses Right Media and we’ve started to see traction with the service. From Terry Semel’s blog post (I know, that sounds a bit funny doesn’t it?): We hope to revolutionize the way ads are bought and sold on the Internet

A site’s he/ she ratio is measured by counting the number of pages on the domain containing the word “he”, then searching for the number containing “she”, and then looking at the two numbers in comparison. For instance, the Google search site:cnn.com he returns about 1,160,000 results, and site:cnn.com she returns 335,000 results, meaning “he” makes up around 78% of the CNN pages containing either “

Adam Darowski blogged about getting some really bad advice from Google Transit, specifically asking him to “cross an eight-lane highway on foot.” So how did Google respond? Joe Hughes of Google Transit sent Adam a Superman cape and a letter apologizing for the inconvenience. Here is the letter:
Click to continue reading…