September 1, 2008 by Brian Ussery
Google has done it again, who says you can’t launch a new product via a commic book? As first reported by Philipp Lenssen Google, recently sent out comic books by Scott McCloud announcing their latest offering. Not so incognito perhaps but, very cool!
According to Google’s “Google Chrome (BETA)” for Windows FAQ (which wont be available until launch), “Google Chrome is a browser that combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the web faster, safer, and easier.” A few of Chrome’s features include thumbnails of favorite pages, shortcuts for applications and “universal” one box functionality. Google Chrome offers webmasters built in “desktop” style features designed to deliver a better experience to end users. In addition to Google tools and APIs built-in, Google’s use of JavaScript engine 8.0 in Chrome should speed up “AJAXy” web applications. Also worth pointing out, Chrome is built on WebKit and uses the WebKit rendering engine. Thanks to WebKit, pages should look the same in Google Chrome as the appear in other WebKit based browsers like Safari. Also worth noting, Google’s new Chrome browser already supports CSS3 features even though the standard hasn’t officially been released. According to Google Chrome’s EULA “If you’ve tested your website with Safari 3.1 then your site should already work well on Google Chrome.”
Google Chrome offers several tools for webmasters including “Web Inspector”, “Task Manager” and “JavaScript Debugger”. When it comes to meta data, Chrome offers shortcuts similar to those found in Google Gears Desktop API meta data (meta tags), application-name, description and application-url for example. When it comes to search results, “By providing an OpenSearch description document (OSDD), you enable Google Chrome to include your site in the list of search engines in the browser.”
In addition to Google Chrome’s tools for webmasters, Google introduces “incognito mode” for users. While in “Incognito mode” Chrome “will not store basic browsing history information such as URLs, cached page text, or IP addresses of pages linked from the websites you visit.”
OTHER NOTES:
- Not including encoding information could prevent CSS parsing.
- User agent string: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.X.Y.Z Safari/525.13
- Google Chrome will percent-encode query parameters within a URL.
THOUGHTS:
While Google Chrome is a great new product, I feel like privacy advocates may not like Google Chrome recording “snapshots of most pages you visit (except for secure pages with “https” web addresses, such as some bank pages)”. Even in incognito mode snapshots “…could still be stored elsewhere on your computer…”.
Tags: Google Chrome
Categories: Beta, Chrome, Google, Innovation, News, Search, seo •
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May 22, 2008 by Brian Ussery
Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and to make it accessible to anyone. As it turns out, making the internet accessible is almost as difficult as organizing the information. For that reason, Google’s Founder Larry Page is in Washington, DC talking with folks at New America. Google wants to make wifi broadband available to everyone not just in the US but, around the world. To do this, Google has proposed using vacant TV channels as well as unused closed cellular networks. Before using either one, Google needs authorization.
Opening these already existing virtual “lines of communication”, is still just one step in providing wifi broadband to the world’s population. The next step involves the placement of hardware as well as infrastructure that is capable of supporting broadband WiFi even in remote locations. That may sound like a daunting task in and of itself in theory but actually it isn’t. In their recent white paper “On Geolocation“, Google concludes that none of the issues involved in creating such a network are “particularly challenging”.
Google already owns vast amounts of bandwidth in the form of unused, ultra high-speed, fiber-optic or “dark cable”. This “dark cable” could easily be used to connect users to “Google ISP” via transmitters broadcasting WiFi. As far as the transmitters are concerned, Google has a number of options ranging from boxes mounted on existing phone poles to vehicles and even airborne transmitters suspended from weather balloons. Under conditions where fiber-optic broadcast range exceeds transmitter capacity, the system switches to communicate via satellite. This type of network could be partially solar powered, easily made redundant and wouldn’t depend on infrastructure. In addition to “normal use”, this type of network could provide immediate and advanced point to point communications anywhere in the world during disasters. All this, assuming Google is allowed to use a few empty TV channels!
Why is this important to search marketers? In addition to making information available, ads will also be available and in some areas of the world that means for the first time. By providing internet access, Google will be able to provide more relevant results based on the users exact geo-location.
- beu
Tags: Google WiFi, Larry Page, New America, TV
Categories: Google, Innovation, News, SEM, WiFi, online marketing •
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April 28, 2008 by Brian Ussery
A few weeks ago Google launched a new feature intended to provide users with whois data in Google’s main SERPs. By entering a query like “whois google.com” users are returned new whois data including creation and expiration dates in Google’s main results. In addition to the new feature, Google provides users the option for more information via “Whois record for google.com” link which resolves to domaintools.com. After linking directly from Google’s main search results to domaintools.com, users are greeted with various details about the domain including website title, description and even an “SEO Score” provided by domaintoools.com.
After linking from Google’s main SERP to domaintools.com you might notice, there are lots of ads provided by Google. If you look closely, right along side those Google ads you’ll find paid links passing PageRank at domaintools.com. Paid links passing PageRank are a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and grounds for being banned from Google. In this case Google is linking to pages with paid links passing PageRank!
Here is an example using the cached text version of the domaintools.com landing page linked to by Google for the query “whois google.com” http://209.85.165.104/search?…. In it you’ll notice http://vpslink.com… is a paid link passing PageRank. As I mentioned at SearchEngineWatch.com the paid link domain ranks #1 for the keyword term used in it’s ALT anchor text at domaintools.com and linked to by the Google Whois feature.
If you would like more information about paid ads at domaintools.com and have $10k per month, click on the “Sponsor us” link to the right of the Google search box. I’ve not seen many banner ad landing pages with a PR of 6!
- beu
UPDATE: – In response to this post being picked up by blogoscoped.com, Matt Cutts (Head of Google Web Spam Team) confirmed earlier today that DomainTools.com is now in compliance with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. DomainTools is now blocking ads with paid links passing PageRank via robots.txt. Sincere and special thanks to Matt, Google and DomainTools.com for swiftly resolving this issue!
- beu
Tags: Google, News, online marketing
Categories: Google, News, SEM, Search, Spam, online marketing, search engine optimization, seo, whois •
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February 13, 2008 by Brian Ussery
In case you missed it, I recently posted that Google’s “Average Number of Words Per Query have Increased!” In response, JohnW raised a very good question about how Google calculated this number and whether or not it’s a rounded number.
Avinash Kaushik, Analytics Evangelist for Google and author of the book “Web Analytics: An Hour A Day” responded to my request for clarification on this topic via email earlier today. I asked Avinash how Google calculated this figure and if Google rounded up, for example if 3.?? was rounded to 4 or if the actual value is equal to or greater than 4?
Here is what Avinash said:
“I believe that the right term is “average number of words in a query” are 4. I did not get enough clarity if it is 3.6 or 4.2. But none the less it was a movement from 3 to 4.”
So in answer to JohnW’s question it does seem likely that this number is round. Either way, the number is officially 4!
Thanks Avinash & JohnW!
Categories: Google, News, SEM, analytics •
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February 1, 2008 by Brian Ussery
Avinash Kaushik, Google’s Analytics Evangelist and author of “Web Analytics: An Hour A Day” hosted an invitation only event at Google’s Atlanta office earlier in the week. The meeting “agenda” was traditional “Google style”, a meet & greet over Ping-Pong followed by (absolutely fantabulous) hors d’oeuvres and multi-colored icy cold adult beverages served in the game room at Google Atlanta. All in all, the group was 50/50 Googler to non-Googler with 15-20 of us total.
After a little “schmoozing” it was time to get down to business and Avinash’s main talk followed by Q&A as well as a short feedback session all topped off with FREE swag from Google. At the end of our meeting, Avinash asked if we would mind “beta testing” a presentation (which included that latest non-published until now perhaps, Google stats) he was working on and had put together during his flight to Atlanta, GA earlier in the day.
Big News:
- The average Google query now consists of 4 words and not 3! That’s up for the first time ever as of Q4 2007, from the long-time 3 word per query Google user average.
Other:
- 14% of Google clicks come from paid search and 86% of clicks are organic. (up slightly)
- 25% of Google’s user queries are unique, meaning no other user has used the same query previously. (unchanged)* [see update below]
The meeting was informative as well as educational! I must say, Avinash is one of the best speakers I’ve seen in addition to having a great sense of humor and being quite personable. Thanks Google and hats off to you Avinash! It was a pleasure…
* UPDATE
Many thanks to Philipp Lenssen for pointing out an important issue concerning Google’s definition of “unique queries”. Here is what Matt Cutts said in response to the issue at Google Blogoscoped a few months ago:
“Philipp, I think that’s a pretty accurate estimate if you look over a time period of a month or so. So if you had queries from the last month or so, 20-25% of queries the next day would be new/unique. It also depends a little bit about whether you’re defining it only as web queries, or all queries to Google (e.g. blog search, book search, patent search, etc.).”
- http://blogoscoped.com/forum/100228.html
Links to this post:
SEOBOOK – What is a #1 Google Ranking Worth?
Search Engine Land – SearchCap: The Day In Search, February 4, 2008
SearchEngineWatch.com – Search Headlines & Links: February 4, 2008
Tags: avinash, Google AdWords, PPC, SEM, seo, Words per query
Categories: Google, News, SEM •
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