Googling Google

April 4th, 2008

New Version of Google Talk released!

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 5:10 pm

Categories: Google Talk

Tags: Google Inc., Google Talk, Google Talk Labs Edition, E-mail Providers, Internet, Garett Rogers

Google finally released a new version of Google Talk. It’s been a long time coming, but the new application, in some ways, definitely worth the wait. This version includes all the great features of the Google Talk Gadget, but in an application form. It’s called, Google Talk Labs Edition.

Google Talk, Labs Edition is an experimental release of the Google Talk client. It has many of the same great features as the Google Talk Gadget, including instant messaging, emoticons, and group chat. Google Talk, Labs Edition also comes with new desktop notifications from Calendar, Orkut, and Gmail.

One of my favorite features is the new Google Calendar notifications. They remind me more of the ones you can find in Outlook when you have a scheduled appointment. Instead of a simple email sent to your Gmail account, you are shown a dedicated snoozable calendar alert window that makes it a lot harder to forget appointments.

Unfortunately, however, the new version doesn’t come without drawbacks. No voice calls or file transfer. Even though the client itself is much nicer than the original, the absence of those two features is probably why it’s labeled a “labs version”.

April 3rd, 2008

Google to lay off around 25% of Double Click employees

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 9:09 am

Categories: Acquisition

Tags: Google Inc., Search Engine, Search Engine Marketing, DoubleClick Inc., Search, Marketing Research, Marketing, Garett Rogers

It sounds like Google is splitting up DoubleClick into two separate divisions, and selling off Performics. The reason Google is doing this is because Performics deals with search engine marketing (SEM), and that is a direct conflict of interest. SEM is the term used to describe optimizing your webpage to get better ranking on search engines like Google. This is a smart move — it would look really bad if Google owned and operated their own SEM company.

In addition to selling off half of the company, New York Times reports Google is also firing 300 additional employees, or about 25% of the company. It’s unclear what type of employees make up these 300, but it sounds like the lay offs may have to do with overlapping responsibilities.

Since our acquisition of DoubleClick closed on March 11, we have been working to match and align DoubleClick employees in the U.S. with our organizational plan for the business. As with many mergers, this review has resulted in a reduction in headcount at the acquired company.

[via Google Blogoscoped, Search Engine Land]

April 1st, 2008

Oh Noes, April Fools has lost it’s mojo

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 7:54 am

Categories: Google

Tags: Google Inc., YouTube Inc., Google Australia, Social Networking, Channel Management, Internet, Corporate Communications, Online Communications, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion

I remember when April Fools rolled around, things remained in a state of normalcy, with the odd joke you really couldn’t tell if it was real or not. Today, April Fools has taken a turn for the worse. Everybody and their dog at Google has spent the last month preparing jokes instead of working, and that doesn’t even include all the other Google-related pranks being pulled across the web too.

Philipp Lenssen has a massive list of Google-related jokes this year — it’s sad, but it took me about five minutes to read his point form article from top to bottom. Here are a few of the points from Philipp’s post:

• The Google Talk blog reports wants to help lower CO2 emissions and starts reducing the characters you send… by converting them to instant-messenger-speak. For instance, the sentence “As far as I’m concerned, you can give me the twenty dollars you owe me when I see you later.” will be automatically translated to “AFAIC, U can gve me the 20 $$ YOM whn I CUL8R.” before it reaches the other person. You can already see how your texts will translate thanks to the
• YouTube is rickrolling its users big-scale. All the featured videos on the YouTube.com frontpage are currently linking to Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up. Or, as a commenter at YouTube puts it in the comments to the video, “HAHAHAHHHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHA lol nice youtube”.
• Google Australia delivers gDay with MATE technology to “search content on the internet before it’s created,” i.e., from the future. From the page: “Google spiders crawl publicly available web information and our index of historic, cached web content. Using a mashup of numerous factors such as recurrence plots, fuzzy measure analysis, online betting odds and the weather forecast from the iGoogle weather gadget, we can create a sophisticated model of what the internet will look like 24 hours from now.” I saw this yesterday already and tried to search for “Google Blogoscoped” and indeed, found this post and opened its Google Cache version – I was then able to copy the full text of the post, which saved me a lot of writing today.
• Google’s social network site Orkut turned into Yogurt today, according to their logo.

It’s not just me though, Matt Cutts is also taking a break from April Fools this year. Hopefully, even though I highly doubt it, next year there will be more real news, and a lot less trickery.

March 31st, 2008

Google launches Dajare in Japan

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 9:51 am

Categories: Google

Tags: Google Inc., Japan, Google Dajare, Search, Garett Rogers

Google launched a new feature in Japan called Google Dajare. Dajare is similar to an English pun. This new Google service expands Google’s mission to organize the worlds information by also “organizing the world’s laughter”.

To see the new feature in action, check out these search results for “domestic flights” on google.co.jp.

Of course, this is very likely just an April Fools joke, as April 1st has arrived in Japan already.

March 29th, 2008

Google turns the lights out for Earth Hour

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 9:50 am

Categories: Google

Tags: Google Inc., Light, San Francisco, Government, Vertical Industries, Enterprise Software, Software, Garett Rogers

The last time Google switched the lights off was for an initiative called “Lights Out San Francisco” in October. It’s much easier to get people to listen than to actually act — based on the pictures that were taken during Lights Out San Francisco event. This time, Google is supporting the Earth Hour initiative created by the WWF.

Earth Hour was created by WWF in Sydney, Australia in 2007, and in one year has grown from an event in one city to a global movement. In 2008, millions of people, businesses, governments and civic organizations in nearly 200 cities around the globe will turn out for Earth Hour. More than 100 cities across North America will participate, including the US flagships–Atlanta, Chicago, Phoenix and San Francisco and Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver.

Today, at 8:00 your local time, please switch off the lights in an effort to make a statement about climate change.

March 27th, 2008

Google Maps adds street view for 13 cities + 1 national park

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 5:06 pm

Categories: Google Maps

Tags: Google Inc., Google Maps, Team Management, Management, Garett Rogers

Google Maps has a really cool feature if you don’t already know about it. It’s called Street View and puts you at eye level and lets you explore the streets of supported cities. There are only a handful of them still, but it’s great to see they are continuing to add cities at a brisk pace. Today, they announced the addition of these thirteen cities:

• Albuquerque, NM
• Anchorage, AK
• Austin, TX
• Cleveland, OH
• Fairbanks, AK
• Little Rock, AR
• Madison, WI
• Nashville, TN
• Rockford, IL
• Richmond, VA
• Spokane, WA
• St. Petersburg, FL
• Tampa, FL

As an extra bonus, they slipped in Yosemite National Park in California too.

I’ve been pondering how this street view feature is actually going to scale though. Google Maps is one thing — they only have to snap a series of pictures from space to get updated content — but street view requires someone to drive up and down every street in all the supported cities to get fresh content. I wonder what the plan is?

Another announcement made today by the Google Maps team is the inclusion of Street View data in the Google Maps API. Very cool, and surely it won’t be long before we start seeing some interesting mashups like we did with the original Google Maps data.

March 26th, 2008

Google Docs gets a facelift, adds new menu

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 8:45 am

Categories: Google Docs

Tags: Google Inc., Google Docs, Tool, Productivity, Garett Rogers

As part of Google’s suite of tools that will one day be a serious threat to Microsoft Office, Google Docs has been going through many incremental changes over the past while. The latest change is the new Menu structure — and it’s very good. I feel a lot more comfortable creating documents online now that I have the tools I’m familiar with, where I’m familiar with them.

The new toolbar has taken some of the usability concepts from traditional windows applications by adding the familiar file, edit, insert, format, and tools menus. Philipp Lenssen has posted a good article about the new changes, and he also has screenshots of Google Docs that takes you all the way back to when it was still Writely. It has almost come full circle with the new menu structure.

[image from Google Blogoscoped]

March 24th, 2008

Set change notifications in Google Spreadsheets

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 7:17 am

Categories: Google Docs

Tags: Google Inc., Spreadsheet, Productivity, Garett Rogers

Now in Google Spreadsheets, some people are able to set “notification rules” that keep you up-to-speed with changes being made on spreadsheets. This handy feature gives you the ability to be notified on a daily or an as-it-happens basis when these specific events are triggered:

• Anything in your spreadsheet changes
• Anything on a specific sheet changes
• A specific cell or a range of cells changes
• Collaborators are added or removed
• User submits a form

Both collaborators and viewers are able to set up notifications, however only collaborators will be able to see the usernames attached to updates.

[Thanks Dmitriy!]

March 22nd, 2008

New Google Mobile feature lets you search without typing

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 4:41 pm

Categories: Google Mobile

Tags: Google Inc., Mobile, Feature, Advertising & Promotion, Marketing, Garett Rogers

Google added a new entry into their robots.txt file — one way you can keep tabs on what Google doesn’t want to see. The new entry that forbids crawlers from seeing http://www.google.com/m/lcb made me naturally curious.

The new feature, that from what I can tell is new, lets you browse through categories of businesses without you having to type a word on your mobile device. For the life of me, I can’t figure out what “lcb” means, but everything is broken down into categories — there is even one for “Googleplex”. Strange, and pretty useless if you don’t live in Mountain View California.

The feature works pretty well, but it would be even better if it could somehow figure out your exact location rather than simply the city. This way it could browse real businesses that are close to you rather than everything in the entire city. Maybe if you pass in some weird parameters with latitude and longitude it will do exactly that, but I can’t confirm that at the moment.

Since this feature probably isn’t “finished” yet, I’ll leave most judgment out of this article, but it is promising. What do you think?

March 21st, 2008

Demographic bidding now in AdWords for everyone

Posted by Garett Rogers @ 11:55 am

Categories: Google AdWords

Tags: Advertisement, Google AdWords, Gender, Advertiser, Garett Rogers

Google just announced that they are allowing advertisers to target both gender and age in AdWords starting today. This is an important feature that I’m sure advertisers will be very happy to start using.

It makes a lot of sense to consider your target gender and age when paying for clicks — if you are selling will kits or something, you probably don’t want to bother showing your ads to people under 40. Since you are showing your ads to fewer people, you can now theoretically raise your bids to get better placement without paying anything extra.

I’m not sure where Google gets this demographic information for ads appearing on their search engine, but for content network sites (that display AdSense) like MySpace or Friendster, they provide the relevant demographics.