by bintangkecil on Wednesday, February 10th, 2010 | News, Tech/Gadget | No Comments

Google is currently testing the ultra-fast broadband network and is planning to build it for as many as 500,000 U.S. customers is an ambitious shot across the bow of incumbent Internet service providers. The plan, which the company will roll out as a test in several U.S. cities, is designed to nudge both the federal government and ISPs to ramp up U.S. broadband speeds. The search giant also hopes the scheme will serve as a test for what it calls next-generation Internet services.

Google will offer customers “Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today with 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections.” In a company blog post, Google issued a request for information to identify interested communities. Already, Seattle is looking into the project, according to The Seattle Times.

Google said it will operate the test network consistent with its long-held support of “network neutrality,” the idea that broadband providers should generally treat all Internet content and services equally. In 2008, Google bid $4.6 billion for the coveted C block of wireless spectrum licenses. Google didn’t win — Verizon Wireless did with a $4.7 billion bid — but it triggered FCC approval of “open access” provisions requiring the winner to allow consumers to mix and match handsets and serivces, like Gmail and other Google Web applications.

Three goals of the Google experiment:
1. To see how users and software developers make use of the new high speed network. Will it result in new software applications or will the high speed network be utilized in ways not thought of today.
2. New Deployment Techniques – Google plans to share their experience of launching a fiber network to facilitate the development of more networks in other areas.
3. The network will be run as an “open access” network allowing consumers the opportunity to select between multiple service providers.

Buzz on broadband

The news had open-Internet and broadband proliferation advocates buzzing. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski and Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., both said in statements that they hoped Google’s test would help usher in a new era of ultra-high-speed Internet access to increase America’s global competitiveness.

“Big broadband creates big opportunities,” Genachowski said in a statement. “This significant trial will provide an American test bed for the next generation of innovative, high-speed Internet apps, devices, and services.”

Google put out a request for information to interested communities on Wednesday. Ingersoll said she hopes Google would be able to identify which community will be the test subject, but added that there was no immediate timeline for when the test network would be up and running.

Tags: broadband, google, google broadband, google broadband network test, google fast internet, google fast internet broadband, google fiber, google fiber network, google high-speed internet, google high-speed internet experiment, google internet experiment, google isp, google tisp, Internet, tracy mcgrady trade

by wildcherry on Monday, February 8th, 2010 | News, Tech/Gadget | No Comments

Gmail is set to become Google’s next major push into social media. According to The Wall Street Journal, the popular webmail service will soon launch a new feature for sharing content and status updates with friends. [Update: We think Google might announce these features on Tuesday]

In other words, your Gmail contacts aren’t necessarily the same people you want to share status updates, photos and videos with. This is an issue that shouldn’t be overlooked in evaluating the new features Google is soon to unveil.

As WSJ points out, Gmail users can already update their statuses — sort of — through Gmail’s chat feature. Currently, this feature is more akin to the traditional IM “away message.” However, with this new social push, Gmail will offer a timeline-view of your friends’ status updates, just like on Facebook and Twitter.

Those updates might come from both Gmail and third-party services. According to WSJ, Google-owned YouTube and Picasa will be integrated into the stream. The huge question then is whether or not the new feature will include updates from Twitter and Facebook.

If so, the new features could be thought of more like a TweetDeck or Seesmic, looking to provide an aggregate view of your friends’ social media activities along with the ability to push status updates to the services you use from inside of Gmail. If not, it could be thought of as a major competitor to Twitter and Facebook as Gmail looks to covert its millions of e-mail users into adherents to a whole new breed of social media service.

Full article:Mashable

Tags: Facebook, gmail, gmail social, google, trending, twitter

by wildcherry on Monday, February 8th, 2010 | News, Tech/Gadget | 1 Comment

Google ran their first Super Bowl Commercial entitled “Parisian Love“. If it looks familiar, that’s because it’s one of their “Search Stories” ads which was uploaded to YouTube back in November.

Google has never been one to advertise — although they did release a series of Chrome commercials last year, and put an ad on the Google homepage for the Nexus One — we’ve never seen an ad for their search engine.

The day before the Superbowl, Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, tweeted ”Can’t wait to watch the Superbowl tomorrow. Be sure to watch the ads in the 3rd quarter (someone said “Hell has indeed frozen over.”)”

Tags: eric schmidt, google, google ad, Google Parisian Love, Google Super Bowl, Google Super Bowl Ad, google super bowl ads video, Google Super Bowl Commercial, Google Superbowl Ad, google superbowl ad video, google superbowl ads, Google Superbowl Commercial, parisian love, Parisian Love Super Bowl, Super Bowl, Super Bowl XLIV

by wildcherry on Wednesday, January 20th, 2010 | News, Tech/Gadget | No Comments

Apple is seriously considering replacing Google search as their default search engine on the iPhone with Bing. And why not? Bing has turned out to be a big hit for Microsoft, which is no small feat considering the competition.

According to Businessweek, Apple is in talks with Microsoft to drop Google search as the default on Mobile Safari on the iPhone and iPod Touch. The move would place Bing, Microsoft’s recently rebranded search, at the top of the mobile browser. The reason would be twofold. One: Microsoft would offer more money for users who click on ads from search and two, because Google’s Android is a much bigger threat to Apple’s iPhone than anything Microsoft can muster.

Interestingly, Apple may also add Bing as an option in Desktop Safari as well, according to their sources. The deal, if finalized, may not be a long one however. Businessweek closes by saying that Apple is working on a skunkworks search product of their own and they don’t want to ‘outsource the future’.

Technorati Tags:apple bing,bing iPhone,google,iPhone bing,iPhone default seach engine

Tags: apple, bing, bing iphone, google, iphone bing, iPhone default search engine, Search, search engine

by wildcherry on Wednesday, January 13th, 2010 | News, Tech/Gadget | No Comments

Google is tightening the security of its free e-mail service to combat computer hackers like the ones that recently targeted it in China. With the shift, Gmail accounts will automatically be set in an “https” mode, meaning contents of e-mail will be scrambled so they’re less likely to leak out to unauthorized users. Before, only the log-in data was encrypted.

Google hadn’t been using this more secure format as Gmail’s default setting because it can be slower than the unprotected mode.

6:00 PM ET: A timeline of Google’s biggest China controversies has been posted.

Selected posts on Twitter have been translated from Chinese to English.

Twitter user Wangle translated the following Tweet, which he says has been re-Tweeted by Chinese users:
#GoogleCN employees already forbidden access to code. Interns went home. All full-time staff discuss severence. #GoogleCN ending for sure.

Tags: google, Google China, google china censorship, Google China Hackers, Google China Liveblog, Google China Liveblogging, Google China Updates, Google In China, Google Leave China, Google Leaving China

by wildcherry on Saturday, January 2nd, 2010 | News, Tech/Gadget | No Comments

Google officially challenges Apple in the cell phone market with their debut of the Google Nexus One.

The HTC-built and (soon to be) Google-sold device runs Android 2.1 atop a 1GHz Snapdragon CPU, a 3.7-inch, 480 x 800 display, has 512MB of ROM, 512MB of RAM, and a 4GB microSD card (expandable to 32GB).

Google is expected to ring in the new year by unveiling its own smartphone on Tuesday, the Nexus One, in a bid to expand its powerful Web brand in the booming mobile arena.

The Internet search and advertising giant has already gained a foothold in the market with its Android mobile operating system, featured in a number of phones starting with T-Mobile’s G1 in October 2008 and more recently with the Droid from Motorola.

But the Nexus One, designed by Taiwanese handset maker HTC, represents a significant departure in that Google is expected to sell the Google-branded phone directly to consumers who will not be tied to any one telecom carrier.

Apple’s popular iPhone, for example, is available exclusively in the United States through AT&T, but buyers of the “Google phone” will reportedly have their choice of wireless carriers.

Technology blog Gizmodo, citing leaked documents, said the Nexus One will cost 530 US dollars “unlocked” — meaning it isn’t tied to a specific carrier — or 180 US dollars with a two-year service agreement with T-Mobile, a subsidiary of Germany’s Deutsche Telekom AG.

Source:Fairfax Digital

Tags: Android, android 2.1, Android2.1, breaking news, BreakingNews, exclusive, google, google nexus one, google phone, GoogleNexusOne, hands-on, impression, impressions, nexus one, NexusOne, tmobile nexus one

by wildcherry on Saturday, January 2nd, 2010 | News, Tech/Gadget | No Comments

According to a study by search-advertising network Chitika, visitors who arrive at sites from organic search results on Bing are 55 percent more likely to click on an ad than if they arrived from Google.

Chitika looked at the clickthrough rates from 32 million ad impressions across its network of more than 50,000 sites in a week in July. Visitors from Bing clicked on an ad 1.5 percent of the time on average, versus a 0.97 percent clickthrough rate for Google visitors and a 1.24 percent clickthrough rate for Yahoo.

One reading of this data is might be that Bing users are more susceptible to ads, and in fact may have used Bing in the first place because of the Bing ads Microsoft is plastering all over the place. (Kinda makes you wonder what will happen when that ad budget goes away).

But a more likely explanation is that Google represents the vast bulk of the traffic, 83 percent to be exact. Bing only represents 8 percent. There is a law of large numbers at work here. The more traffic that comes from any one source (i.e., Google), the lower the clickthrough rate is likely to trend. If the market share was reversed, Bing would undoubtedly have a lower clickthrough rate.

But that still leaves the question of just who are those people on Bing?

impressions clicks CTR % more clicks (Bing)
google 26,929,367 260,518 0.97% 55.11%
yahoo 3,157,648 39,008 1.24% 21.47%
bing 2,236,366 33,558 1.50%
total 32,323,381 333,084 1.03%

Source:Techcrunch

Tags: ads click rate, ads clicking, bing users, bing vs google, bing vs google vs yahoo, chitika, chitika premium, google, google ads, google search, search click rate

by wildcherry on Sunday, November 22nd, 2009 | News, Tech/Gadget | No Comments

Google Sitemaps help Google’s search engine spider discover and index pages on your website. In its basic form, a Google Sitemap is a list of all the webpages on your website. When Google’s search engine spider reads this list, it then knows about all those webpages that are specified in the sitemap. Google Sitemaps come in two formats: xml sitemaps and text sitemaps. Both formats contain the addresses of all the webpages on your website. The XML version contains additional information about each webpage such as its last modification date and roughly how often it is updated.

How Does a Google Sitemap Help Me?

If your website does not have a Google Sitemap, Google’s search engine spider downloads a webpage from your website and scans through it looking for any links that it contains to other webpages in your website. Google’s spider then downloads all those newly discovered pages and repeats the process of scanning for links. Such download and scanning takes time. If you have a Google Sitemap, Google’s spider immediately knows about all the webpages on your website. Reading the Google Sitemap is considerably faster than having to download and scan each page. A Google Sitemap also helps if your webpages are not well linked together or not at all. In that case, without a Google Sitemap, it may take a while for some webpages to be discovered or discovered at all. Google Sitemaps eliminate that problem.

Does Google.com Index Everything?

The answer to that question is no. Google.com states, “we can’t guarantee that URLs from your Sitemap will be added to the Google index.” Even though Google.com does not guarantee that it will index everything that you specify in your Google Sitemap, a Google Sitemap should increase the opportunity that your webpages will be indexed sooner since Google will know about them sooner. If Google does not know about your webpages, they definitely will not be indexed.

If I Create a Sitemap Will It Hurt Me?

Google.com states, “In most cases, webmasters will benefit from Sitemap submission, and in no case will you be penalized for it.” Google.com uses the information contained in your Google Sitemap to learn about the structure of your website and to better schedule its search engine spider in the scanning (a.k.a. crawling or spidering) of your website.

How Do I Generate a Google Sitemap?

There are several tools available that you use to create Google Sitemap. Google.com itself even provides a sitemap generator written in the Python programming language. There are also websites where you type in your website address and its spider goes and scans your website to determine all your webpages; however, such scanning is time consuming since every page on your website must be scanned, and the process must be initiated by you. A faster way of generating a Google Sitemap is to use Google Sitemap generator software that runs locally on your website.

How Can I Automate Google Sitemap Generation?

Creating sitemaps can be an automated process. The simplest way is to install and use the sitemap.pl Google Sitemap generator software. Once you install this software in your cgi-bin directory, the software will automatically generate the Google Sitemap each time it is accessed. This software is of the type whereby you can “set it and forget it”. You can go about adding to your website and you do not have to worry about updating your Google Sitemap. The software works by scanning your website’s hard drive looking for files to include in your Google Sitemap. By directly accessing the hard drive rather than downloading webpages, the software very quickly generates the Google Sitemap. On a typical server, the sitemap.pl sitemap generator software finds about 500 webpages per second (that’s 2 ms/page).

How Do I Tell Google.com About My Google Sitemap?

There are two ways that you can use to tell Google.com about your Google Sitemap. The first method is the simplest and the quickest to do. In your robots.txt file, include a line that says “sitemap:” followed by the website address of your Google Sitemap. For example, the Google Sitemap of the bime.com website is located at http://www.bime.com/sitemap.xml thus its robots.txt file contains a line that states, sitemap: http://www.bime.com/sitemap.xml The second method involves logging into Google.com Webmaster Tools
at http://www.google.com/sitemaps and adding your site to the Sites Dashboard, and then submitting your Google Sitemap. Once you add your site, click the “Verify” link and follow the instructions and you will gain access to additional statistics about your website and status information about the processing of your Google Sitemap.

In Summary, What Do I Need to Do?

1. Use a Google Sitemap Generator such as sitemap.pl
2. Add your Google Sitemap to your robots.txt file.
3. Add your site to Google Webmaster Tools
4. Submit your Google Sitemap.

Having an Google Sitemap is a good first step to get your webpages indexed. And with an automated sitemaps generator, improve the possibility of your webpages being indexed and showing up in search engine results.

Tags: Easy Google, google, Google Sitemaps, Hard, Implemented, Index, Indexed, Indexing, Keep, Program, Quick, Site Constantly, Sitemap, Sitemap Generators, Sitemap Tools, Sitemaps, Submit, Way, Ways, Webmaster Can

by bintangkecil on Saturday, November 21st, 2009 | News, Tech/Gadget | No Comments

Type in a search term on Mystery Google, and you get back “what the people before you searched for.”

Mystery Google Website is a fun new site that delivers real mystery Google results every time you attempt to use it.

Mystery Google works on a simple premise: what ever the person before you searched for, you get in your results. The results are delivered through Google proper, so perhaps not smartly the folks behind the site might not be making much off it by using Google custom search.

The Mystery Google website offers a seriously strange riff on the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button: instead of taking you to the number one result for your own query, it takes you to the search results for the user who searched just before you.

If you’re in the mood for discovery or just plain randomness, Mystery Google might just teach you something new.

I just tried entering “mystery google” into the Mystery Google search box and received the following answer: “That is the site you are on.”

If you type in “Google” …

It insists to search for Mystery Google! - LOL

Tags: google, Google Mystery, how do you use mystery google, how does mystery google work, how to use mystery google, I m Feeling Lucky, Im Feeling Lucky, mystery google, Mystery Google Site, Search, what is mystery google

by wildcherry on Thursday, November 19th, 2009 | Life, Tips | No Comments

There are several tricks to advertising on Google Adwords that unless you know them, it becomes almost impossible to turn a profit on your advertising.

Tips #1 - Only bid on exact match keywords

Google Adwords has a few different ‘keyword matching options’ available. When a keyword is placed in brackets like this: [keyword], it is called an ‘exact match.’ This means that only when someone enters that EXACT keyword phrase will your ad appear. It might occur to you that by limiting your keyword(s) to only exact match, you are eliminating all those people that may be searching for the phrase “cheap widgets” or even “widget” singular, since only the keyword “widgets” plural is an exact match. Believe me, this is exactly what you want. Sure, it will take extra time to create an adgroup within the Google Adwords system for each keyword phrase you want to bid on, but you will know with 100% certainty which keyword(s) are converting into sales this way. If you do NOT use the exact match option in Google Adwords, then there is absolutely no way to know which keyword(s) are resulting in sales on your site.

Tips#2 - Bid to be in position #2 or 3

When someone searches on Google for your keyword, the first page of search results are going to reach the most people. What you want to do is position your ad in one of the top 3 spots. You don’t want position #1 necessarily, because that position costs the most and doesn’t give you much more benefit than being in position 2 or 3. You pay less for these spots than position 1 and gain most of the benefit.

By being in one of these top spots, your ad gets a higher ‘click-thru rate’ (CTR). This is good is because the Google Adwords system actually rewards you for having an ad with a high CTR by charging you less per click! Google Adwords exists to make money for Google. If they have two companies advertising for the same keyword, and your ad pulls a 10% CTR and your competitor’s ad for the same keyword pulls a 5% CTR, then Google Adwords makes more money from your ad. Google Adwords rewards you for this higher CTR by charging you less per click than your competitor!

Tips #3 - Negatively qualify your ads

Admittedly, the problem with having an ad that has a great CTR is that it gets a lot of clicks! Unless your traffic converts into sales, it’s hard to turn a profit on your Google Adwords ads. The key is to put words in the ad that DISCOURAGE people from clicking on the ad unless they ‘pre-qualified’ to convert to a sale. For example, if you have site that sells widgets that cost $10.00 each, then put something in one of the lines of text in your ad like ‘Widgets cost only $10.00.’ The only catch is that if your ad isn’t getting a very good CTR in the first place, then a negative qualifier is only going to reduce your CTR.

Tags: 1 Lets, Adwords, Bid Ranked Search Engine, Cannot Convert, face, free, google, Google Adwords, However, Inside, Internet, Of Traffic, Part, Pay Per Click Advertising, Pay-per-click, Ppc Search Engines, Secrets, Source, Traffic