Google.org - Google Philanthropic Foundation endowed with $90 millionby Google Inc

Google Commits Funds to Philanthropic Arm - Forbes.com: "Google Inc. is financing its promise to make the world a better place with an initial commitment of nearly $1 billion to a philanthropic arm devoted to causes that mesh with the online search engine leader's crusade...

Brin and Page have since decided their company's ambition extended beyond the limitations of a traditional foundation, prompting them to pool all the company's philanthropy under Google.org.

"We hope someday this institution may eclipse Google itself in terms of overall world impact by ambitiously applying innovation and significant resources to the largest of the world's problems," Brin wrote...

the company is endowing the Google Foundation with $90 million and budgeting another $175 million to invest outside the foundation, said Sheryl Sandberg, Google's vice president of global online sales and operations. Google is investing outside the foundation because it plans to put some money into "socially progressive" companies striving to turn a profit...

Google is pegging its total philanthropic commitment to the value of 3 million company shares - slightly more than 1 percent of the stock outstanding at the time of its IPO 14 months ago...

The Google Foundation already has started to give away some of its money. Several million dollars will be donated to the Acumen Fund, a nonprofit venture that also has received money from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Cisco Systems Foundation. The Google Foundation also is backing separate projects working to protect the water supply in rural Africa and to promote business startups in Ghana"

Google Feed Reader

Google Reader: "Reader makes it easier to keep up with your ever-expanding reading list of content from across the web."

Holizz versus the Web Blog Archive Google Reader lets: "you subscribe to a feed when youre already at a website and you cant be bothered to go to Reader and search for the feed?..It finds the author’s preferred feed and takes you to the preview page where you can subscribe. It only has one real bug; it takes you to a blank page with a cryptic message if there are no feeds listed on a Web page."

Google localises online maps search feature

CTV.ca | Google localizes online maps search feature: "Google Inc. is combining its popular online maps with its local search features, continuing a quest to increase its already rapidly rising advertising revenue.
...
The hybrid service blends addresses, phone numbers, maps, driving directions and other details, like user reviews and credit card information, on the same Web page. Google also offers a satellite-mapping option that provides an aerial view.

By combining maps with local search, Google is following its rival Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO - news), which already provides a similar package, said industry analyst Greg Sterling of the Kelsey Group."

Google Local: "Example searches:
Go to a location
kansas city
10 market st, san francisco
Find a business
hotels near lax
pizza
Get directions
jfk to 350 5th ave, new york
seattle to 98109"

The Google Sun Microsystems Deal

Google and Sun are going for open source development as a means to hinder Microsoft in various ways. Together they form a strong challenge to Microsoft. Google rich in cash has no need to charge for software. Open source software is cheaper to develop anyway because of support due for such systems from the wider tech community. Expect a lot more to come from this partnership soon.

More on the Google Sun Microsystems Deal: "Google is gunning for Microsoft, using the Java Sun Microsystems as its muscle, and Google's strategy goes far beyond pushing Microsoft around.

Under the terms of the deal, the Google Toolbar will be bundled into downloads of the Java Runtime Environment. Java will be used to power new software developed and released by Google, effectively endorsing Java and nailing Microsoft's .Net as an emerging development platform. "

Google ETA? 300 years to index the world's info | CNET News.com

Google still on mission to index all the information in the world and money to be made from offering free WiFi.....has to be advertising..

Google ETA? 300 years to index the world's info | CNET News.com: "It could take 300 years to index all the world's information and make it searchable, Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt predicted on Saturday at the Association of National Advertisers annual conference in Phoenix.

Schmidt admitted to the audience of advertisers that when he first arrived at Google four years ago, he viewed ads from a skeptical consumer standpoint. Shown ads on Google, he thought "You've got to be kidding! People actually click on this stuff? And they do."

He said he quickly realized, though, that "ads actually do have value if you can figure out the right ones to show."

Technology and the interactivity it enables, such as the ability to measure an Internet ad's success rate by viewing how many people click on it, is shifting power in the advertising industry from executives at corporations to consumers, he said.

"The power is moving from us to the end user; it's occurring by the power of the personal computer, by the power of the cell phone," he said. "Thirty years ago we would make the decision (about ads). Now, that person, that individual makes that decision

During the question and answer session, audience members turned to social, ethical and legal topics. One question dealt with criticism Google and Yahoo have received for cooperating with Chinese government censorship efforts. "The technology is neutral. It can be applied for good or evil," he said. "Overwhelmingly, the message of technology is a positive one."

Previous Next Asked to explain why Google has submitted a proposal to provide the city of San Francisco with free wireless Internet service, Schmidt said the plan arose out of work several engineers did on a system that would allow companies to make money offering such a service. "It's an interesting experiment," he said. "If it scales and if it is successful, we think it's going to be very good for the world.""

Google & Sunin software distribution pact to challenge Microsoft

Sun, Google in software distribution pact - Yahoo! News: Seems Google will be partnering up with Sun to help promote Sun's OpenOffice and Java software systems. The partnership will intensify the battle between Google and Microsoft as OpenOffice is potentially a serious challenger to MS Office if given the proper backing and marketing.

"Working with Google will make our technologies available more broadly, increase options for users, lower barriers, and expand participation worldwide," Scott McNealy, chief executive of Sun Microsystems said in a statement."

Easier AdSense payments

Google Adsense blog announces electronic funds transfer EFT is out of beta and the service will be available to all users. I like the sound of them putting in a small test deposit for you to keep!

Inside AdSense: "Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT for short) is officially out of beta. So what's changed? Our process for verifying bank account information has improved.

After you submit your bank account information, we will place a small test deposit into your bank account for you to keep. Once you see this test deposit credited to your account, just input the amount of the deposit into your AdSense account to help us verify your bank account information"

New GooglePatent Application: Variable personalization of search results in a search engine

United States Patent Application: 0050216434: "Variable personalization of search results in a search engine

Abstract
A search engine provides personalized rankings of search results. A user interest profile identifies topics of interest to a user. Each topic is associated with one or more sites, and a boost value, which can be used to augment an information retrieval score of any document from the site. Search results from any search are provided to the user, with a variable control of the ranking of the results. The results can be ranked by their unboosted information retrieval score, thus reflecting no personalization, or by their fully or partially boosted information retrieval scores. This allows the user to selectively control how their interests affect the ranking of the documents. "

Cre8: Variable personalization of search results - Google - Cre8asite forums bragadocchio writes: "This invention would enable a searcher to fill out a profile, perform a normal search, and then use a slider button to indicate how much his or her personal information from the profile should be used to modify (rerank) that search based upon the personalization information that they have entered into the profile, by sliding the button partially, or all the way to a full influence on the results. "

He highlights the following "interesting aspects of this invention is the discussion on how certain sites are determined to be related to the specific topics.

Quote:

[0045] where nih.gov, cdc.gov, and med.Stanford.edu are various sites that have been determined (either manually or automatically) to be related to the topic "Health". In other words, for each topic in the directory, there is a set of sites that have been determined to be relevant to the topic, and for each of these sites, a boost value is defined.

[0046] The boost for the sites listed in the topical directory is generally determined as follows:

[0047] a) A "site graph" is generated where nodes of the graph are sites (basically, pages on the same host) and edges between nodes are weighted based on the number of pages from one site that link to pages on another. This same type of graph can be used to compute all topic boost maps.

[0048] b) For each topic in the directory, say "Health", a number of sites are selected as "start sites" S0 whose home page is listed in the Open Directory. For example, for a university like Stanford, start sites may be selected as any site ending in .stanford.edu.

[0049] c) A computation is run in two passes:

[0050] i) first identify a set of sites S1 that are linked-to heavily by those sites in S0, with each site in S1 assigned a weight according to how heavily it's linked-to by sites in S0.

[0051] ii) then identify those sites S2 that are linked-to heavily by those sites in S1, weighted as with S1.

[0052] d) The sites in S2 are boosted with their assigned weights."

What Google Blog Search means for your website search results

Why Google Blog Search Matters to Your Business: "According to Google, Google's Blog Search is 'Google search technology focused on blogs'. It includes search engine results specific to blogs not just in the Blogger.com community, but across the blogosphere at large....

Google...was already paying particular attention to blogs in regular search results, seems to make a subtle statement with the introduction of blog-specific searches.

Blogs are important enough to warrant their own special level of search, and not just as an advanced search option, but in their own search engine.

If search engines are paying attention to blogging that closely, you should be too -- if you want better search engine results. "

Blogs are easy to get listed in the SERPS..."

Google's Blog Search Help Page states:

"If your blog publishes a site feed in any format and automatically pings an updating service (such as Weblogs.com), we should be able to find and list it. Also, we will soon be providing a form that you can use to manually add your blog to our index, in case we haven't picked it up automatically. Stay tuned for more information on this."

So if you're already blogging - and responsibly pinging, you're probably already listed." If you are not already running a blog "get started blogging today. You'll be missing out on targeted traffic from the most dominant search engine, from the most sophisticated surfers today, and sooner than you know it, the mainstream web."

Google Releases Firefox Toolbar

The long awaited google toolbar for firefox browser users has been released....MediaPost Publications - Google Releases Firefox Toolbar - 09/26/2005: "GOOGLE'S FIREFOX TOOLBAR APPLICATION, IN beta testing since early July, was officially released last week with a set of new Firefox-only functions. Among the new features are the ability to rearrange the toolbar interface and move around the search bar, and the incorporation of Google Suggest, which suggests queries based on what the user has already typed"

Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO Remove result

Search Engine Journal: "Google Testing Remove Result and Spam Report Options
Matt Cutts confirms that Google is testing a new Remove Result features that lets users of Google personalized search exclude various sites from their search results. If Google Personalized Search users are sick of spam showing up in their results or irrelevant sites being listed, they can simply remove the pages.
From Cutts : One request we sometimes hear is for the ability to modify Google results, especially to block unwanted sites. A few eagle-eyed people may have noticed a user-interface experiment on Google that adds the ability to remove results. At that point, your options would normally be to 1) ignore that result, or 2) report the url to Google via our spam report form. If youre in this experiment, youll have newfound powers. Click the Remove result link and with one click you can drop that url from your search results."

Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO UI fun: Remove result: "One request we sometimes hear is for the ability to modify Google results, especially to block unwanted sites. A few eagle-eyed people may have noticed a user-interface experiment on Google that adds the ability to remove results. Heres what youd see. Imagine that you did the search [lynx paw clipart], and you notice one particular result that looks spammy:

You check the cached page, and you notice that if you turn off Cascading Style Sheets, theres a bunch of spammy text:"

Google Putting Crowd Wisdom to Work

Slashdot: "daveperry writes 'The Google Blog has a post about their use of prediction markets to forecast certain events that are relevant to their business. From the article: 'Our search engine works well because it aggregates information dispersed across the web, and our internal predictive markets are based on the same principle: Googlers from across the company contribute knowledge and opinions which are aggregated into a forecast by the market. Sometimes, just feeling lucky isn't enough, and these tools can help.' In related news, some software was recently open sourced that enables people to set up their own prediction markets.'"

Official Google Blog: Putting crowd wisdom to work: "Building on the ideas of Friedrich Hayek and the Iowa Electronic Markets, a few Googlers (Doug Banks, Patri Friedman, Ilya Kirnos, Piaw Na and me, with some help from Hal Varian), set up a predictive market system inside the company.

The markets were designed to forecast product launch dates, new office openings, and many other things of strategic importance to Google. So far, more than a thousand Googlers have bid on 146 events in 43 different subject areas (no payment is required to play)."

| Is AOL The Key to Microsoft 'Killing' Google?

Slashdot | Is AOL The Key to Microsoft 'Killing' Google?: "VK writes 'When Steve Ballmer yelled at a departing Microsoft employee that he would 'kill Google' we had no idea just how direct a method he had in mind. Buying all or part of AOL may be the first part of the master plan, as Google relies heavily on the advertising pages that come from Yahoo, since it now syndicates its search to Google.'"

Google dancing and it doesnt look good.

WebProWorld Forum...."There is a TON of movement taking place on these datacenters.

66.102.7.104
66.102.7.105
64.233.189.104
66.102.7.106
66.102.7.147
216.239.63.99
99 66.102.7.99
216.239.63.104

On one of my main keyphrases I have watched my site go to the #1 position in MSN (easy) and #2 and #5 in Yahoo. Today on these datacenters I was pushed from #16 to #70 give or take a few depending on the DC.

Not only was I pushed back, but about 25 scraper sites have moved into the top 40 results. These sites are nothing but reprinted articles and google adsense. Nothing unique. Nothing you cannot find on 100 other sites."

On Cutts Comments On Reinclusion Requests

Cutts Comments On Reinclusion Requests: "one drawback is probably the time factor involved in getting the relisting done. In some cases, it could take 6-8 weeks or it could take as little 2-3 weeks depending on the type of error and its severity.

Dan Thies over at SitePoint mentions in his blog, 'Unfortunately, he doesn't address the collateral damage caused by some of their more aggressive filtering practices, or the possibility that following Google's webmaster guidelines on redirects can do more harm than good.'

Thies did say his students were reporting better results for the reinclusion process as long as they followed Google's rules. This should bode well for worried businesses. As long as they play by the rules, then they are ok. "

The things Google makes you do

Net Sense Bambi Francisco writes : Google "has just begun testing advertisements on its image pages, a property that holds 1.1 billion images and drew 21 million unique visitors in July. Google images was also the place where 3% of all searches were conducted that month, according to comScore Networks.

The ads aren't turned on everywhere. But in some locations, like Manhattan, if a person types in 'Dell' under the images tab, they will see sponsored search listings at the top of the results page....

What does that add to revenue? A lot, I imagine. What does this say? Google's methodically following the script it laid out for Wall Street. That is: It aims to organize the information (text, pictures, clutter, and so on), attract traffic and sell that audience to marketers.

I can't say this logical prioritization of strategy and laserlike focus is being applied elsewhere."

Google Secure Access: Frequently Asked Questions

bloggers are a-buzzing about a possible Google WiFi launch. The buzz was started by the following FAQ that appears at the subdomain wifi.google.com an

Google Secure Access: Frequently Asked Questions:

"What is Google Secure Access?
Google Secure Access is a downloadable client application that allows users to establish a more secure WiFi connection.

Why would I want to download and install Google Secure Access?
Google Secure Access allows you to establish a more secure connection while using Google WiFi. By using Google Secure Access, your internet traffic will be encrypted, preventing others from viewing the information you transmit. "

Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO � Filing a reinclusion request

Google opens up means of communication for webmasters.....will Yahoo follow?
Matt Cutts: Gadgets, Google, and SEO � Filing a reinclusion request: "Everybody wants to hear about SEO-ish stuff instead of gadgets. I’ll still subject you to pure geekery now and then, but let’s tackle how to do a reinclusion request.

First off, what’s a reinclusion request and why would you want to do one? If you’ve been experimenting with SEO, or you employ as SEO company that might be doing things outside Google’s guidelines, and your site has taken a precipitous drop recently, you may have a spam penalty. A reinclusion request asks Google to remove any potential spam penalty.

The first step is to take a long, hard look at your website. Is there hidden text, hidden links, or cloaking on your site, especially on the front page? Are there doorway pages that do a JavaScript or some other redirect to a different page? Were you trying to use some automated program to get links or scrape Google? Whatever you find that you think may have been against Google’s guidelines, correct or remove those pages.

Now where should you send a reinclusion request? This has changed in the last few months from an email address to a web form. The best location to go is http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py . Google: Help Center You can select “I’m a webmaster inquiring about my website” and then select “Why my site disappeared from the search results or dropped in ranking.” Click Continue, and on the page that shows up, make sure to type “Reinclusion Request” in the Subject: line of the resulting form. Upper- or lower-case doesn’t matter, but make sure you use the words “reinclusion request” in the subject line so it gets routed to the right place.

Now we come to the heart of things: what goes into a reinclusion request. Fundamentally, Google wants to know two things: 1) that any spam on the site is gone or fixed, and 2) that it’s not going to happen again. I’d recommend giving a short explanation of what happened from your perspective: what actions may have led to any penalties and any corrective action that you’ve taken to prevent any spam in the future. If you employed an SEO company, it indicates good faith if you tell us specifics about the SEO firm and what they did–it assists us in evaluating reinclusion requests. Note that SEO and mostly-affiliate sites may need to provide more evidence of good faith before a site will be reincluded; such sites should be quite familiar with Google’s quality guidelines.

Okay, so you found the hidden text that your webmaster put on your front page, you removed it, and you sent your reinclusion request off to Google. How long do you have to wait now? That depends on when Google reviews the request and on the type of spam penalty you have. In the days of monthly index updates it could take 6-8 weeks for a site to be reincluded after a site was approved, and the severest spam penalties can take that long to clear out after an approval. For less severe stuff like hidden text, it may only take 2-3 weeks, depending on when someone looks at the request and if the request is approved.

There’s an interesting thread started by stuntdubl here. I’d add the following things to that thread:

Don’t bother mentioning that you spend money on AdWords or you’re an AdSense publisher. The person who will look at your reinclusion request doesn’t care if you have a business relationship with Google.

Remember, we need to know

1) that the spam has been corrected or removed
2) that it isn’t going to happen again.

I would request reinclusion for one domain at a time. It looks bad if you had 20+ sites all thrown out at once, and you send a reinclusion request for 20 domains in one email. "

America Online May Switch to MSN For Web Search, Abandoning Google

America Online May Switch to MSN For Web Search, Abandoning Google - September 16, 2005 - The New York Sun - NY Newspaper: "Microsoft is in talks with Time Warner about taking a stake in America Online, as part of a broader discussion about the two companies working together, according to people familiar with the matter.
The conversations have centered on whether AOL would switch to using Microsoft's search engine, these people say. AOL currently uses Google's search technology and was Google's single largest source of revenue last year."

Google Pilot New Webmaster Communications Initiative

Google Pilot New Webmaster Communications Initiative | Threadwatch.org: "This is real.

Google is trying out a pilot program to alert site owners when we're removing their site for violating our guidelines. JavaScript redirects are the first trial, but we've also sent a few emails about hidden text, I believe. This is not targeted to sites like buy-my-cheap-viagra-here.com, but more for sites that have good content, but may not be as savvy about what their SEO was doing or what that 'Make thousands of doorway pages for $39.95' software was doing. Personally, I think opening up a line of communication to let webmasters know when we're taking action is a really good thing--a site owner doesn't have to guess about what happened. But again, we're starting with a trial program.
I'll blog about it more soon.
Matt
By MattCutts"