Search Engines || Information Architecture
As of today, it seems that ALL the old blogger accounts have been moved to the new version and you cannot access them anymore unless you have a google account. Crossing fingers right now as I am moving a lot of my blogs 
They finally added them but in a crippled way. As I was saying before I was expecting detailed data not overall stats and only queries with a certain number of hits. Perhaps all the small sites will see something like:
No queries were sufficiently popular to be listed.
and the reason for that is:
The most likely explanation is that no query occurred sufficiently often to make it “popular”. Our definition of popular tries to balance your curiosity about your Custom Search Engine traffic, and our requirement that we take reasonable steps to protect your users’ privacy.
Why is this happening? Because of the AOL data scandal, where idiots were searching for their own credit card numbers. The probability for this is very small to occur in Google’s CSE but they wash their hands and protect the morons innocents. Why this is pointless? Just because Google said that CSE is a better alternative to an inhouse search engine. Well dear Google CSE team, an inhouse search engine will provide those queries and no one can protect the users from themselves.
What I wanted?
Today while performing a query I saw attached to one of the results an address and a plus sign:
using the plus sign I got a map (of course from Google Maps and more details about the address):
Now (beside that I don’t know if this is new or not) here is what I find interesting:
Google CSE team, announced on their blog that they made available the top Google CSEs categorized by various criteria.
I am a user of CSE and I think is the best service in custom search engines, allowing the users to do a lot of twaekings and also get some income for their work.
I am curious though, when they will provide advanced statistics about CSEs usage. What I am thinking is:
This could greatly improve user experience and will help a lot webmasters to better understand their communities and their needs, tweaking the CSEs for the best performance
All the SEOs know the regular speech, Google gives when it comes to duplicated content:
Ok. Some care about it some just yawn when they hear it. Today I am officially among those who yawn. I was looking for a freaking press picture of Joseph Barbera and all I got was the same endless press release. Look for “were the futuristic mirror image” to see how many duplicates Google is keeping (and yes I know in time they’ll be buried and only a few will appear…yada yada yada)
After the yesterday announcement that the new blogger is out of beta (quite a surprise to hear that from Google), Google has start pushing it to the SERPS. Do any query with blog included and you’ll get a tip like that on the screenshot (blog, blogs, blogger, blogspot)
Google Adsense Team just announced on their blog that the old trick of placing images near your Adsense units will no longer be tolerated. Yeah, that’s right, not even with a line between them.
Well…that’s it, back to more work on content now
Mihai Paraparita, employed at Google and responsible of Google Reader, has released in his personal blog a Greasemonkey script that blends google’s rss reader into Gmail.
Even though he says:
I can’t really say what, if any, our integration plans are, but enough users have asked for something like this that I thought writing the script was the most expedient way to provide this (unofficial) feature.
suggesting that a final integration might not be done, the fact that the Greader’s list view looks quite exactly like Gmail’s GUI proves that this will be a goal in the near future.
Anyway is nice to see this feature provided like this instead of a private beta or a gradual roll out.
Perhaps this step leads to another where each item will be treated like a Gmail thread, where the responses will be either posts discussing the original one (opens a huge door to trackback spam) or we will have the option to track blogs converstaions like in Cocomment
Perhaps in an unrelated move with yesterday aquisition, Google added a new feature to their own video service: private videos.
If you have a video you’d rather not share with the entire world, you can choose to restrict access to it by marking it as “unlisted”. Similar to an unlisted telephone number that isn’t available in public phone number databases, videos that have been unlisted are not accessible through Google Video search results. This option is especially useful for family videos. Just set your video to “unlisted” and email the link to your family and friends.
This way, more and more users might become attracted to the unlimited file size and storage offered by them, and whi knows maybe next year premium accounts will be available.
Googlified announced that Google Maps and obviously Google Earth got updated.
I can see that Romania got the main roads listed . Perhaps also other “uncharted” areas got updated.
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