S'pose had better flag up Googles April fool...many thought the gmail was it but iit appears not....see wired comment beneath...Google Job Opportunities: Google Copernicus Center is hiring: "Life in the Googlunaplex
The Googlunaplex is a working environment that will be unique both because of its location and its design. Based on a working model constructed by Google co-founder Larry Page from Lego� Mindstorms�, the facility features compact living quarters and a state of the art server farm that are co-mingled to maintain a delicate bio-technical balance. In traditional Google style, space will be used with extreme efficiency, with Googlunars sharing quarters with machines that generate search results as well as enough heat to warm the entire Googlunaplex and several hot tubs."
Wired News: A Fine Year for April Foolery: "Among search engines, Google led the pack in April Fool's Day promotions. Visitors who clicked on a link offering jobs that are 'out of this world' on the search engine's home page were told that 'Google is interviewing candidates for engineering positions at our lunar hosting and research center.' Google went on to say that the facility, set to open in late in the spring of 2007, will house 35 engineers, 27,000 low cost Web servers, two massage therapists and a sushi chef.
On a more serious note, Google's much-lauded announcement of a soon-to-be-launched free e-mail service called Gmail generated widespread speculation online as to whether the offering is a hoax. While the announcement received voluminous media attention, skeptics looked to the wording of Google's press release, which says the service provides a gigabyte of free storage, 'quickly recalls any message an account owner has ever sent or received' and 'can already be used to read and send e-mail in most languages (even Klingon.)'
A Google spokesman confirmed that the free e-mail offering is not a hoax. Boese, of the Museum of Hoaxes, said the e-mail offering didn't sound like a prank.
'If they say they're going to give a gig of space, it wouldn't be that clever or funny a joke because it's too believable,' Boese said. 'But they might get people talking about if this is too good to be true by announcing it on April Fool's.' "
Friday, April 02, 2004
Gmail
Welcome to Gmail: "A Google approach to email.
Gmail is an experiment in a new kind of webmail, built on the idea that you should never have to delete mail and you should always be able to find the message you want.
The key features are:
Search, don't sort.
Use Google search to find the exact message you want, no matter when it was sent or received.
Don't throw anything away.
1000 megabytes of free storage so you'll never need to delete another message.
Keep it all in context.
Each message is grouped with all its replies and displayed as a conversation.
No pop-up ads. No banners.
You see only relevant text ads and links to related web pages of interest"
FT.com / Business / US: "Millions of M&Ms later, Gmail was born,' said the company in a quirkily worded press release put out yesterday with an April 1 dateline that had many journalists (including this one) wondering whether this was another April Fool's spoof. Gmail, however, turns out to be real...
Gmail, which will go live with a few invited trial users today and has its own website (www.gmail.com) will automatically organise e-mail according to topic and allow users to search their e-mail - including sender, text and subject lines - in the same way they search the internet, Wayne Rosing, Google's vice president of engineering, said...
Gmail will be supported by 'contextually relevant' text adverts that will appear in the margins of individual e-mails - rather like the advertisements that appear down the right-hand margins of Google search results pages.
Google emphasises that users' e-mails will only be machine read and that no human eyes will be involved."
Gmail is an experiment in a new kind of webmail, built on the idea that you should never have to delete mail and you should always be able to find the message you want.
The key features are:
Search, don't sort.
Use Google search to find the exact message you want, no matter when it was sent or received.
Don't throw anything away.
1000 megabytes of free storage so you'll never need to delete another message.
Keep it all in context.
Each message is grouped with all its replies and displayed as a conversation.
No pop-up ads. No banners.
You see only relevant text ads and links to related web pages of interest"
FT.com / Business / US: "Millions of M&Ms later, Gmail was born,' said the company in a quirkily worded press release put out yesterday with an April 1 dateline that had many journalists (including this one) wondering whether this was another April Fool's spoof. Gmail, however, turns out to be real...
Gmail, which will go live with a few invited trial users today and has its own website (www.gmail.com) will automatically organise e-mail according to topic and allow users to search their e-mail - including sender, text and subject lines - in the same way they search the internet, Wayne Rosing, Google's vice president of engineering, said...
Gmail will be supported by 'contextually relevant' text adverts that will appear in the margins of individual e-mails - rather like the advertisements that appear down the right-hand margins of Google search results pages.
Google emphasises that users' e-mails will only be machine read and that no human eyes will be involved."
Silicon Valley Biz Ink :: The voice of the valley economy
Silicon Valley Biz Ink :: The voice of the valley economy: "WebSideStory (http://www.websidestory.com), the leader in on-demand Web analytics, today announced that the Google.com domain continues to distance itself from the competition and has reached an all-time high in U.S. search referral market share. As of March 23, 2004, Google.com posted a U.S. search referral percentage of nearly 41 percent, up from 35.99 percent on the same day last year,"
Google Extends Lead as Search Referrer � MarketingVOX|SEARCH: "
WebSideStory's recent press release fills in a few gaps in reality.
recap:
Google: 41.0
Yahoo: 27.4
MSN : '.6
No wonder webmasters recoil when Google hiccups. It's that central to so many livelihoods. Yahoo's overrated, especially since it short-shrifted its flagship directory....I'd love to drill down on the stats a bit more to determine how many of the "referrals" from MSN and Yahoo are based on paid inclusion (all? most?) ... or whether *any* of the referrals coming from Google in this survey are paid for. (One assumes not.)
Google Extends Lead as Search Referrer � MarketingVOX|SEARCH: "
WebSideStory's recent press release fills in a few gaps in reality.
recap:
Google: 41.0
Yahoo: 27.4
MSN : '.6
No wonder webmasters recoil when Google hiccups. It's that central to so many livelihoods. Yahoo's overrated, especially since it short-shrifted its flagship directory....I'd love to drill down on the stats a bit more to determine how many of the "referrals" from MSN and Yahoo are based on paid inclusion (all? most?) ... or whether *any* of the referrals coming from Google in this survey are paid for. (One assumes not.)
Wednesday, March 31, 2004
News - Hoover's Online
News - Hoover's Online: "A Georgia company is suing Google over technology that the search giant uses to target advertising at Web surfers based on their location"
Tuesday, March 30, 2004
Traffick | Minding the Search Engines' Business
Traffick | Minding the Search Engines' Business: "The Case for Infospace + Google
Infospace's seemingly innocuous acquisition of a local online search provider called Switchboard for $160 million in cash may be a harbinger of an impending domino sequence in the local search market and the search engine industry in general."
Intriguing theory...
Consider Metacrawler and Dogpile. Currently, these metasearch properties are significant sources of revenue for several of Google's competitors, including LookSmart, FindWhat, and Overture. By acquiring these, Google could reduce the number of paid links in Metacrawler results, especially those emanating from competitors' keyword ad networks, while taking out a bigger share of that ad revenue pie for itself. This was the same strategy used when Google acquired Applied Semantics, whose DomainSense keyword listings were a major source of revenue for Overture and FindWhat.
If ballpark valuations of Google in the range of $14 billion are accurate, then Google is worth about a dozen times more than Infospace, at least on paper. Sure, Google could raise some IPO cash and then offer Infospace a cash-plus-stock deal they couldn't refuse. But I like the idea of Google and Infospace throwing us a curveball and cooking up a reverse-takeover scheme, leaving Infospace shareholders with a fair but relatively small proportion of shares in a new public company called Google. I'm not sure a reverse takeover on that scale is even legal. But Google taking the back-door route to going public would certainly confound and infuriate the bankers, the press, and the public, who have already speculated to the nth degree about a traditional IPO for Google. Some have even dreamt up bizarro scenarios such as a "Dutch auction."
Infospace's seemingly innocuous acquisition of a local online search provider called Switchboard for $160 million in cash may be a harbinger of an impending domino sequence in the local search market and the search engine industry in general."
Intriguing theory...
Consider Metacrawler and Dogpile. Currently, these metasearch properties are significant sources of revenue for several of Google's competitors, including LookSmart, FindWhat, and Overture. By acquiring these, Google could reduce the number of paid links in Metacrawler results, especially those emanating from competitors' keyword ad networks, while taking out a bigger share of that ad revenue pie for itself. This was the same strategy used when Google acquired Applied Semantics, whose DomainSense keyword listings were a major source of revenue for Overture and FindWhat.
If ballpark valuations of Google in the range of $14 billion are accurate, then Google is worth about a dozen times more than Infospace, at least on paper. Sure, Google could raise some IPO cash and then offer Infospace a cash-plus-stock deal they couldn't refuse. But I like the idea of Google and Infospace throwing us a curveball and cooking up a reverse-takeover scheme, leaving Infospace shareholders with a fair but relatively small proportion of shares in a new public company called Google. I'm not sure a reverse takeover on that scale is even legal. But Google taking the back-door route to going public would certainly confound and infuriate the bankers, the press, and the public, who have already speculated to the nth degree about a traditional IPO for Google. Some have even dreamt up bizarro scenarios such as a "Dutch auction."
Google Loses Tabs In New Look, Gains Web Alerts & Personalized Search Results
The first newsletter comments re changed layout & results...
Google Loses Tabs In New Look, Gains Web Alerts & Personalized Search Results: "Google has unveiled a new look that involves dropping its famed search tabs, along with debuting a web alerts service and a personalized search results option."
Google Local Search, rolled out earlier this month, does not appear as a search link on the home page - froogle does...
"Previously found via its own tab, the Google Directory has been demoted to the More Searches page.
'We analyzed what people were using, and that had become less popular over time. As the web grows, directory structures get harder to use,' Norvig said. 'It didn't seem to be worth the real estate on the home page.'
Demoting the directory may also be a way for Google to eventually distance itself from from the Open Directory Project, which powers it."
Changes To Ad Format
On Google's search results page, the sidebar boxes that contained sponsored links are now gone. Instead, a vertical line separates sponsored links from paid results. These all come under a "Sponsored Links" heading and remain on the right-hand side of the page, as before. Other sponsored listings that appeared at the top of unpaid results in boxes appear to have been retained.
"We wanted a page that looked cleaner," Norvig said, about losing the boxes. "People are still very much clear on what's an ad and what's not."
Invisible Tabs / One Box Results
To see one box results in action, here are some specifics:
News headlines: search for iraq, and these appear alongside a newspaper icon.
Shopping search: search for canon powershot, and these appear alongside a shopping bag icon. These were added in added in December
Local search: search for san francisco dentist, and these appear alongside a compass icon. These were added earlier this month
Web Alert Service Introduced
Site owners and others have long wanted the ability to be alerted to changes in Google's web search results. In fact, the third-party Google Alert service has grown popular because of this.
A new Google Web Alerts service now allows monitoring of a number of terms on a daily or weekly basis. The first 20 results are monitored and emailed to you. A similar Google News Alerts service was introduced last August.
Neither Google Alert or the new Google Web Alerts service provide enough functionality for those interested in rank checking purposes, however. Tools like WebPosition have long been used to do this and still continue to be popular despite Google's warnings against automated rank checking.
Google has banned some users of these tools from being able to access Google's results, though it has never actually banned pages themselves from being listed that Search Engine Watch knows of, just because someone used a rank checking tool.
Personalized Search Debuts
All the major search engines have said recently that they see personalized search results as a key way to advance relevancy. Now Google is the first among them to provide a real personalized service for users to play with for web page search refinement.Google Personalized Web Search is a beta service that allows users to refine results based on their interests. You can set up a profile of your interests, then use a "slider" bar that appears above web results to see the results reshaped toward what you may like.
For example, use the profile page to tell Google that you like video games, then do a search for cars. Push the slider to "Max," and the results change so that sites generally about cars, such as Cars.com and Jaguar, get pushed below personalized selections such as pages from computer game sites GameSpy.com or GameSpot.com. Small Google "colored balls" appear next to any personalized results.
How does Google know what to deliver as personalized content. The company is categorizing pages across the web, understanding what's relevant to topics such as "video games" or "movies," Norvig said. When someone does a search, Google looks through pages associated with their interest to find matches...What's happening is that Google's system can't tell exactly which (of my) interests to target. It sees pages that are relevant to cars with various different topic areas, but it doesn't know which topic I'm most interested in.
"That's part of the reason it's on Labs," Norvig said, referring to personalized search's status as a Google Labs project. "You're right, that's one of the issues. You can certainly go back and forth and change your profile, but that's a little clunky.
Personalization Technology
Google says it does not record a personal data on its end. Instead, it remembers your general personal preferences and records these in your Google cookie. The use of cookie data by any company often raises privacy concerns...Google also is not using any type of clickthrough measurements or user feedback to associate personal preferences with pages
Google is using a blend of technology acquired during its purchase of Applied Semantics last year and its own native technology to classify pages, which is has long used to deliver AdSense contextual ads.
Not using Kaltix, Outride or Orkut
Google Loses Tabs In New Look, Gains Web Alerts & Personalized Search Results: "Google has unveiled a new look that involves dropping its famed search tabs, along with debuting a web alerts service and a personalized search results option."
Google Local Search, rolled out earlier this month, does not appear as a search link on the home page - froogle does...
"Previously found via its own tab, the Google Directory has been demoted to the More Searches page.
'We analyzed what people were using, and that had become less popular over time. As the web grows, directory structures get harder to use,' Norvig said. 'It didn't seem to be worth the real estate on the home page.'
Demoting the directory may also be a way for Google to eventually distance itself from from the Open Directory Project, which powers it."
Changes To Ad Format
On Google's search results page, the sidebar boxes that contained sponsored links are now gone. Instead, a vertical line separates sponsored links from paid results. These all come under a "Sponsored Links" heading and remain on the right-hand side of the page, as before. Other sponsored listings that appeared at the top of unpaid results in boxes appear to have been retained.
"We wanted a page that looked cleaner," Norvig said, about losing the boxes. "People are still very much clear on what's an ad and what's not."
Invisible Tabs / One Box Results
To see one box results in action, here are some specifics:
News headlines: search for iraq, and these appear alongside a newspaper icon.
Shopping search: search for canon powershot, and these appear alongside a shopping bag icon. These were added in added in December
Local search: search for san francisco dentist, and these appear alongside a compass icon. These were added earlier this month
Web Alert Service Introduced
Site owners and others have long wanted the ability to be alerted to changes in Google's web search results. In fact, the third-party Google Alert service has grown popular because of this.
A new Google Web Alerts service now allows monitoring of a number of terms on a daily or weekly basis. The first 20 results are monitored and emailed to you. A similar Google News Alerts service was introduced last August.
Neither Google Alert or the new Google Web Alerts service provide enough functionality for those interested in rank checking purposes, however. Tools like WebPosition have long been used to do this and still continue to be popular despite Google's warnings against automated rank checking.
Google has banned some users of these tools from being able to access Google's results, though it has never actually banned pages themselves from being listed that Search Engine Watch knows of, just because someone used a rank checking tool.
Personalized Search Debuts
All the major search engines have said recently that they see personalized search results as a key way to advance relevancy. Now Google is the first among them to provide a real personalized service for users to play with for web page search refinement.Google Personalized Web Search is a beta service that allows users to refine results based on their interests. You can set up a profile of your interests, then use a "slider" bar that appears above web results to see the results reshaped toward what you may like.
For example, use the profile page to tell Google that you like video games, then do a search for cars. Push the slider to "Max," and the results change so that sites generally about cars, such as Cars.com and Jaguar, get pushed below personalized selections such as pages from computer game sites GameSpy.com or GameSpot.com. Small Google "colored balls" appear next to any personalized results.
How does Google know what to deliver as personalized content. The company is categorizing pages across the web, understanding what's relevant to topics such as "video games" or "movies," Norvig said. When someone does a search, Google looks through pages associated with their interest to find matches...What's happening is that Google's system can't tell exactly which (of my) interests to target. It sees pages that are relevant to cars with various different topic areas, but it doesn't know which topic I'm most interested in.
"That's part of the reason it's on Labs," Norvig said, referring to personalized search's status as a Google Labs project. "You're right, that's one of the issues. You can certainly go back and forth and change your profile, but that's a little clunky.
Personalization Technology
Google says it does not record a personal data on its end. Instead, it remembers your general personal preferences and records these in your Google cookie. The use of cookie data by any company often raises privacy concerns...Google also is not using any type of clickthrough measurements or user feedback to associate personal preferences with pages
Google is using a blend of technology acquired during its purchase of Applied Semantics last year and its own native technology to classify pages, which is has long used to deliver AdSense contextual ads.
Not using Kaltix, Outride or Orkut
Monday, March 29, 2004
Google Introduces Personalized Search Services; Site Enhancements Emphasize Efficiency
Google Introduces Personalized Search Services; Site Enhancements Emphasize Efficiency: "MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. - March 29, 2004 - Google Inc. today released three new innovative features that demonstrate the company's ongoing commitment to improving the search experience for users. The new offerings include a revolutionary search engine that uses user preferences to match search results to their interests, a service that delivers search results via email, and an enhanced interface for Google web sites worldwide.
Google Personalized Web Search and Google Web Alerts, both debuting on Google Labs, enable searchers to specify what interests them and to receive customized results based on those interests. Changes to the Google interface improve the speed and accessibility of Google's search offerings, further demonstrating the company's focus on providing the best search experience for users.
'Today, Google takes the first step in providing personal search results based on users' preferences,' said Larry Page, co-founder and president, Products. 'We can deliver search results tailored to your interests or promptly email you new information on any topic. In addition, Google has a cleaner new interface and easy access to the comprehensive Froogle product search.'"
Google Personalized Web Search and Google Web Alerts, both debuting on Google Labs, enable searchers to specify what interests them and to receive customized results based on those interests. Changes to the Google interface improve the speed and accessibility of Google's search offerings, further demonstrating the company's focus on providing the best search experience for users.
'Today, Google takes the first step in providing personal search results based on users' preferences,' said Larry Page, co-founder and president, Products. 'We can deliver search results tailored to your interests or promptly email you new information on any topic. In addition, Google has a cleaner new interface and easy access to the comprehensive Froogle product search.'"
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