Many people do not like to have their search information recorded, but lets face it, it’s not just the internet that does this.  Your local supermarket, be it Tescos or Walmart will be recording what you buy and when you buy it so it can send out advertising to you on the right day about the right products.

Personally I could not care any less if a company recorded information abotu what i bought, searched for or similar, I would prefer to have adverts relevant to me rather than an inbox full of, to put it bluntly, bullshit.

I find this move a hysterical response to an ‘internet phenomenon’ and that this is just anotehr example of nanny state behaviour appearing from the EU.  Many internet companies succeed becasue tehy can see that a certain number of people like certain things, if this information is removed or becomes unreliable the tax losses for governments nationwide will be pretty damn big as companies go under and new ones cannot start.

I use google keyword stats regularly so am more than well aware of how advert targetting is imperative to the survival of small business on the internet.

The new site, due to launch by the end of 2007, will combine human-assisted editing with computer-controlled searches. Earlier this year Wales’ commercial startup company, Wikia, purchased the rights to web crawler platform Grub.

Grub users download a program which makes uses of their computer’s processing power while the machine is left idle. If widely adopted, such an arrangement could reduce the need for Wikia to set up a web crawling network of its own.

more

One of my favourite features in Gmail is the ability to read Word document or .pdf file online with the “view file” link at the bottom of attachments and now things got better as there’s a “view slideshow” that supports PowerPoint files.

More Features

Of course, few mail providers will accept a such a big message, so it’s safe to send messages bigger than 10 MB to other Gmail accounts, to Yahoo Mail Plus or to other premium accounts.

source

According to Viacom, Youtube has infringed copyright laws by displaying 160,000 unauthorized clips of Viacom’s programming which has been viewed more than 1.5 billion times.

Check out the full article here.

But according to Time it might just be referring to:

a subtle reference to the 16th century romantic poet Barnabe Googe, famous for the line, “I did but see her passing by, and yet I love her till I die.” Or maybe it was a secret shout out to Debbie Googe, bassist from a group called My Bloody Valentine?

Read More….

The so-called “server farm” will eventually employ 210 people in a region hit hard in recent years by layoffs in the furniture and textile industries

more

iTWire wrote:

At a conference for finance professionals held by Forrester Research in London last month, the dominant question on everyone’s mind appeared to be whether Google’s vast store of information about consumer search habits, email and content might allow it to enter the ultra-competitive consumer finance market, where detailed information on individual customers is widely viewed as essential in order to successfully sell products.

Asked if Google represented a threat to banks, Joseph DiVanna, managing director of consultant Maris Strategies, didn’t offer much in the way of comfort. “If you think about the footprint that Google has, it’s big,” he said. “It’s the same kind of footprint that we had in retail [banking] years ago with branches. I think Google is a force to be reckoned with.”

It may very well be true and not just a rumor, futhermore a possible domain name Gbank.com is already taken and a little WHOIS work showed that the name was created on 17-May-1996.

Paypal beware?

More at iTWire

JotSpot co-founder and CEO Joe Kraus wrote on Google Blog: “We watched them acquire Writely, and launch Google Groups, Google Spreadsheets and Google Apps for Your Domain. It was pretty apparent that Google shared our vision for how groups of people can create, manage and share information online,”

What exactly is JotSpot?

JotSpot’s product is a platform for building wiki-based applications. For example, the company has an online spreadsheet and calendar that multiple people can edit.

The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company has sold its wiki system primarily to business customers as hosted collaboration software. Wikis are catching on within businesses as lightweight alternative to large-scale document management systems.
source

Read more about it at Google Blog

There are people out there who make their money directly from domains by parking their domains with sites such as Sedo, while parking their domain a single page containing text link (ads) will appear on the page and if a visitor clicks on it the owner of the domain will make some $$.

But instead of Sedo you could also choose to use Google’s Adsense for Domains

AdSense® for domains allows domain name registrars and large domain name holders to unlock the value in their parked page inventory. AdSense for domains delivers targeted, conceptually related advertisements to parked domain pages by using Google’s semantic technology to analyze and understand the meaning of the domain names. Our program uses ads from the Google AdWords™ network, which is comprised of thousands of advertisers worldwide and is growing larger everyday. Google AdSense for domains targets web sites in over 25 languages, and has fully localized segmentation technology in over 10 languages.

more at : Google’s Adsense for Domains

Good Forum for Domain Name enthusiast : Namepros

The results, released late Thursday, lifted Google shares by nearly 8 percent — an upturn that translates into about $10 billion in additional stockholder wealth.

The performance surpassed analyst estimates by a whopping 20 cents per share and underscored the Mountain View-based company’s widening advantage over its main Internet rivals.

Yahoo Inc., which runs the Internet’s second largest advertising network behind Google, has been hurt by slowing revenue growth most of this year — a problem that contributed to a 38 percent drop in its third-quarter profit.

“The difference between Google and the second and third place players has become enormous,” Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry said. “This definitely shows that Google is going to own the next generation of the computing environment.”

Source & More: CNN

Have fun finding and downloading music with Google at g2p

g2p is a product of i-hacked

Here it is:

YouTube will continue to work on it’s brand and will retain all 67 employees, including co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.It’s a good thing that YouTube will continue with it’s brand, God forbid we hear names such as Gtube or Googtube thrown in the air!.

According to Google’s Press Release:

“The YouTube team has built an exciting and powerful media platform that complements Google’s mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” said Eric Schmidt, Chief Executive Officer of Google. “Our companies share similar values; we both always put our users first and are committed to innovating to improve their experience. Together, we are natural partners to offer a compelling media entertainment service to users, content owners and advertisers.”

With this purchase Google has catapuled itself to the top of the online video revolution,not to mention this has been Google’s most expensive purchase by far in it’s 8 year history.

Rumors are that Yahoo Inc will be pressured to make a similar move and may well end up purchasing Facebook.com for over a Billion dollars, although persuading the owner to sell is another matter all together.

“Yahoo really needs to step up and do something,” said Roger Aguinaldo, an investment banker who also publishes a dealmaking newsletter called the M&A Advisor. “They are becoming less relevant and looking less innovative with each passing day.”

Selling to Mountain View-based Google will give YouTube more technological muscle and advertising know-how, as well as generate a staggering windfall for a 67-employee company that was running on credit card debt just 20 months ago.

Read More:

Yahoo News

Google Press Release

The big G is reportedly making a move to acquire YouTube for around $1.6 billion in cash and stock, according to published reports.

This may become one of the best purchase ever done by Google although it already has it’s own video sharing service.YouTube is huge and almost everyone and their dog has at least one time viewed a video uploaded at the site and if Google does go ahead and splash the cash on YouTube it would propel them right at the top of the video content mountain as YouTube has an estimated 30 million registered users as compared to Google (9.3 million) and Yahoo (5.3 million).

YouTube’s rise to fame has been phenomenal having made it’s way to the masses via a garage by former employees of eBay Inc.’s PayPal electronic-payment unit in Febuary 2005 to a now 25 employee company.

The other good thing that would come out of this deal is the ‘copyright’ issue that has plaqued YouTube when users upload copyrighted materials on the site, although YouTube has been proactive and has removed any copyrighted material once a complaint has been made.Google however will have more leverage when they approach the likes of Universal Music, NBC, CBS etc.

But Google also could present a solution, Bernoff said, noting that the software innovator could develop automated systems to block attempts to post copyright materials. He also said Google’s size and clout gives the company much more leverage than YouTube to negotiate deals with copyright holders.

source

Rumor is that Apple is set to team up with search engine giants Google Inc who would be the primary provider of video content for the iTv box.It all looks very possible especially since Apple now has Google CEO Eric Schmidt on their board of directors.

“Google and all its competitors are focused on a three-screen approach right now, whether you’re accessing them or their content on a computer screen, on some kind of a handheld product or on your high-definition TV,” explained Ross Rubin, an analyst with the NPD Group.

more from the source

File Transfer

This is something so important, and finally Google has decided to add this feature to Gtalk.
With this feature you can send unlimited files and folders to your friends through Google Talk. There is no restriction on the file type or size and the peer-to-peer transfer is fast and reliable.

Voicemail

I like this particular feature, because you can now leave a voicemail to your contacts, and if they don’t use gtalk all that often they’ll receive an email with the message attached as an audio file.

Cool feature indeed.

Music Status

Last but not least is the “music status” feature that lets your friends see what you’re listening to by selecting “Show current music track” in your status menu. Your status message will change when your song does!

currently Google only support this music player:

* iTunes
* Windows Media Player
* Winamp
* Yahoo Music Engine

The bummer is that it only supports Windows machines…go figure!

via : Google

Hey my fellow Malaysians…are you intrested in working for Google?
Do you have an MBA or equivalent; undergraduate degree in computer science, engineering or other technical field(s)?

Than this might be your lucky day,as Google is looking for a “Malaysia Country Consultant”

According to Google,this will be a temporary job and will be based in Kuala Lumpur.

If you are intrested and want more info please click here.

p.s : Kalau dapat kerja itu,janganlah lupa belanja saya

There’s girls at Google and they are brainy in their respective roles at Google Management.

They help keep the Google running

Here’s some of them in no particular order :

Shona Brown
Senior Vice President, Business Operations

Shona Brown took on responsibilities for Google’s business operations in 2003, following almost a decade consulting with technology clients in Toronto and Los Angeles for McKinsey and Company. As a partner at McKinsey, she was a leader of the Global Strategy Practice and worked with a wide range of firms on strategy development, business model transformation and operational issues. Her experience includes extensive work in consumer software and hardware technology, online consumer services, and Internet media markets.

more

Sukhinder Singh Cassidy
Vice President, Asia-Pacific & Latin America Operations

Sukhinder Singh Cassidy is Google’s Vice President for Asia-Pacific & Latin America Operations. In this role, she is responsible for all of Google’s sales operations in these regions. Sukhinder also oversees the company’s local search and channel initiatives globally.

more

Marissa Mayer
Vice President, Search Products & User Experience

Marissa leads the product management efforts on Google’s search products – web search, images, groups, news, Froogle, the Google Toolbar, Google Desktop, Google Labs, and more. She joined Google in 1999 as Google’s first female engineer and led the user interface and webserver teams at that time. Her efforts have included designing and developing Google’s search interface, internationalizing the site to more than 100 languages, defining Google News, Gmail, and Orkut, and launching more than 100 features and products on Google.com. Several patents have been filed on her work in artificial intelligence and interface design. In her spare time, Marissa also organizes Google Movies – outings a few times a year to see the latest blockbusters – for 6,000+ people (employees plus family members and friends).

more

Miriam Rivera
Vice President & Deputy General Counsel

Miriam leads the legal teams for Google’s corporate, commercial, Asia Pacific/Latin America, employment, real estate and technical operations. Previously, she served as associate general counsel, managing the commercial and strategic alliance practice for the company. Miriam has also closed a number of strategic partnerships for Google, including AOL and AOL Europe, as well as earlier partnerships for Yahoo! and Yahoo Japan, while overseeing the completion of thousands of revenue and strategic alliances.

more

For The Full Google Management Team -both guys and gals – click here

Incoming Links, Outbound Links, Meta-Tags,Titles, Text and Structure etc…

I came upon this article by The SEO Blog with the title:

Grand Slam SEO – Can My Site Rank Well on all Four Major Engines?

I think this is particularly intresting,it a question i have asked myself as well.Is it possible to rank well in Google,Yahoo,MSN and Ask?

Jim,the author of the article took some time to explain it all,and i think you would enjoy the read too.

Here is a thumbnail breakdown the most important factors each search engine considers, roughly laid-out in order of importance.

Google: Incoming Links, On-page SEO, Site Design Spiderability, User analytics, Outgoing links, Inclusion in other Google indexes, Document Histories

Yahoo: On-page SEO, Links and Link Patterns, Site Design, User analytics, Inclusion in other Yahoo indexes, Document Footprints

MSN: On-page SEO, Site Design and Structure and Sipderability

Ask: On-page SEO, Site Design, Site Structure and Spiderability

FULL ARTICLE

The Big G owned 2.6 per cent in Baidu,and even though it’s a minor stake,Google would still make
approximately $60m (£33m).

Google will still profit from the sale, however, as shares in Baidu have risen to $80 since their opening price of $27 last year.

Source

First it was Gbuy,a rival to Paypal (even thought they deny it:P),than now it seems Google is about to launch an Affiliate Network ala Commission Junction.

Unlike Google’s Adsense program,where it’s pay-per-click (PPC), and affiliate network would allow Google to serve Cost-Per-Action [CPA]adverts.

And yet it’s not paticularly strange ot unheard of,as Google already pays referral fees for Google Adwords, Adsense, Picasa downloads and Firefox installs.

Source & More: Mashable

even more…

It appears that the RIAA is quite pissed about the the recent trend of user using copyrighted music in their videos as background music,something similar to those seen at Gidol.

Some YouTube users have reportedly received cease and desist letters from the RIAA, demanding that the posted video be taken down. YouTube, however, is confident in its copyright policy because it warns people about violation, and pulls material upon request of the copyright holder.

Source(s) & More:

PC Pro

Project Opus

“As we’ve previously announced, we offer users the ability to buy items on Google Base and at the Google Store as well as pay for services like Google AdWords, Google Video and Google Earth.

“We have nothing specific to announce at this time,” Google’s spokesperson said.

“The brilliance of Google’s Gbuy merchant-to-consumer payment platform lies in what Google may do with the transactional data it captures from the thousands of merchants that may ultimately offer Gbuy,” Rohan said.

Source & More: ZDNet

Google’s -Google Talk or better known as Gtalk will be added into Nokia handheld Internet browsing device, in a move that could help boost the search company’s reach in mobile communications.

The move will enable users to have voice conversations and exchange instant messages, according to Nokia.

Source & More : ABC

Online Retailer Amazon.com has Google as its search result provider and selected Microsoft’s new Windows Live Search instead.

This will take effect on Amazon’s A9.com and Alexa toolbar.

Rumor has it that eBay is to follow suit…

Source & More: BetaNews

Many have been living well with what they make via Google’s Adsense system.
Google in turn, also profits from it,with 43% of their total revenue coming from adsense.

However, Benjamin Cohen of PinkNews
believes that it’s not totally wise to depend fully on adsense for your income, stating his
experience of being ousted by Google for “click fraud”.

This is quite an intresting article, so sit back and click here to read it.

“We have seen a few cases where users report that their accounts have been deleted, and in each case our investigations have revealed that the accounts were deleted by someone with that account’s password. In these cases, we’re unfortunately unable to restore accounts,”

Source & More: ZD Net UK

It all seems highly unlikely that the owners will be able to sell the site at that price, in comparison
with MySpace.com was sold for way lesser than that.

But it looks like it has caught the attention of Google.

Check it out HERE