Google Budget Optimizer for Adwords

MediaPost: "GOOGLE THIS WEEK BEGAN OFFERING AdWords users a tool that adjusts their bids automatically, aiming to get the highest number of clicks for a given advertising budget. The feature, called Google Budget Optimizer, is aimed at consumers who want more automation, promising the maximum number of clicks for a given spend. Google cautions, however, that the Optimizer is not intended to gain a particular placement, but to achieve the maximum volume of clicks. --Shankar Gupta "

Why Google is Syndication Shy

Micro Persuasion Steve Rubel ponders his question leading to:

"an "aha" moment. Google views syndication drastically differently than its competitors. On the Web Google is all about driving people away from their sites. Once they've shown them an Adwords ad they had their opportunity to collect a dollar, so why not give the users what they need and send them on their way. However, when it comes to syndicated feeds they use it as a tool to drive users to their services and that’s why they are syndication shy. Remember Autolinking? I rest my case.

Feeds may be Google's greatest enemy. If Google did offer feeds that connected users with the information they are looking for from the Web they would miss the opportunity to advertise to them. What will remedy this? Google will incorporate contextual Adwords ads into these kinds of feeds, much like Overture has done. What’s taking so long? Beats me."

Google Integrates Keyhole Into Maps, Local

MediaPost report by Shankar Gupta...

"The idea, Keyhole General Manager John Hanke wrote on the Google Blog, is to let consumers see photos of what they're searching for--the beach in beachfront when looking for a hotel, or what the freeway exit on the way there looks like. When getting directions from Google Maps, Keyhole can overlay the path to the destination over the satellite photo...." snip

..."Google is not the first major search engine to incorporate images into its local search results. Amazon's A9 Yellow Pages local search incorporates block-by-block photos of businesses and residences. If a user searches for a coffee shop recommended by a friend, they can not only get the address, but also a photo of the storefront. Amazon accomplished this by equipping a truck with a digital camera and driving around thousands of miles of streets in several major American cities, including New York, Los Angeles, Boston, and Chicago. Both AOL and Yahoo! have maps features--the former powered by MapQuest, the latter by a proprietary engine. Neither has incorporated digital mapping into their offering yet."

Webcast: Google: A Behind-the-Scenes Look

UWTV Program: "Google: A Behind-the-Scenes Look

Search is one of the most important applications used on the internet and poses some of the most interesting challenges in computer science. Providing high-quality search requires understanding across a wide range of computer science disciplines. In this program, Jeff Dean of Google describes some of these challenges, discusses applications Google has developed, and highlights systems they've built, including GFS, a large-scale distributed file system, and MapReduce, a library for automatic parallelization and distribution of large-scale computation. He also shares some interesting observations derived from Google's web data. "

Google .com.au site down

CNET News.com: "Google's indexing service dropped all Web sites with a .com.au extension for a few hours on Friday, effectively leaving millions of sites unattainable from the Net's most popular search engine. Australia's major second-level domains, such as .gov.au, .net.au and .edu.au seemed unaffected. However, Google's paid-for advertisements, which appear on the right of regular search results, displayed .com.au domains as normal.

The company confirmed the problem in a statement. 'For a few hours today, Google experienced temporary problems showing .com.au domains. The cause was quickly identified and is now fixed,' it said. "

Google Labs: Ride Finder taxi locator

Google Ride Finder
Google Blog: "If you're like me, you use a mix of recommendations from friends, the phone book, or standing on the corner with your hand in the air (and hoping it isn't raining) when you need to find a taxi, limousine or shuttle service. With Google Ride Finder, you can tell us where you want to find a ride and we'll show you the actual positions of participating vehicles in that area, along with a phone number you can use to contact the fleet operator (e.g., Chicago)."

United States Patent Application: 0050071741

United States Patent Application: 0050071741 New Google : "United States Patent Application20050071741
Kind Code A1 Acharya, Anurag ; et al. March 31, 2005

Information retrieval based on historical data

Abstract
A system identifies a document and obtains one or more types of history data associated with the document. The system may generate a score for the document based, at least in part, on the one or more types of history data.

Inventors:Acharya, Anurag; (Campbell, CA) ; Cutts, Matt; (Mountain View, CA) ; Dean, Jeffrey; (Palo Alto, CA) ; Haahr, Paul; (San Francisco, CA) ; Henzinger, Monika; (Lausanne, CH) ; Hoelzle, Urs; (Palo Alto, CA) ; Lawrence, Steve; (Mountain View, CA) ; Pfleger, Karl; (Mountain View, CA) ; Sercinoglu, Olcan; (Mountain View, CA) ; Tong, Simon; (Mountain View, CA) "

webmasterworld.com Check out the forum for discussion of possible implications...17 pages and growing....