Archive for the ‘Search Engines News’ Category
Tuesday, September 19th, 2006 |
After almost a year since it’s launch under the Google label, former Urchin traffic analyzer, now Google Analytics runs at full capacity:
- No more invitations needed for an account
- A maximum of 50 websites to monitor
Still, this a too complex tool for the most website owners and I recommend for bloggers to use Performancing Metrics
Bonus Tip:
If you own multiple blogs, install Performancing tracking code and make the RSS feed public. Then go to Netvibes, create a new tab and add all the feeds from the websites tracked. The result will be a nice real time control panel for all of your blogs
Posted in General, Google | No Comments »
Sunday, September 17th, 2006 |
A few months ago, most SEO and webmaster’s forums were full of people claiming that MFA (Made for Adsense) and other simple affiliates junk websites will be banned from the Adwords program.
For a short period of time, that seemed to be true and I saw a slight increase of the Adsense revenue and no more junk websites. Unfortunately, for the past month they seem to be all over the place again.
So…Google Guys those claims of increasing the quality of the Adsense program were just a PR stunt?
If this is not fixed, on the long run it will affect both publishers and Google. Publishers will remove the Adsense from their websites because their users are mislead and by that Google will loose advertising medium leading to less happy advertisers that will move to other networks.
I wonder what will prevail…greed or quality?
Posted in General, Google | 7 Comments »
Thursday, August 10th, 2006 |
In an attempt to gain more market in the video sharing space, Google tested on its video section today a new interface resembling a lot to the popular YouTube.
Among the differences:
- smaller video window (large version still available on doble click)
- comments placed below the video
- using Google Reader like elements for scrolling on related videos and user videos
Today’s test wasn’t the only one, one spotted a few hours before, listed movie titles below the tabs with top 100, music videos etc.
This comes after Google removing Froogle from its main page and replacing it with Google Videos and a new videos TOS launched yesterday
Posted in Google | 10 Comments »
Sunday, July 23rd, 2006 |
Yahoo! Travel and Trip Planner are 2 pretty decent services that in time will get a good market share in their field. Unfortunatelly for me one of their ways to add user created content is simply broken. Both services, allow you to add to your reviews or trip plans, pictures from your Flickr account. At least that’s what they say. In reality, you cannot use pictures that you have already uploaded and only uploading to Flickr starting from the travel websites will allow you to do that.
Come on, I have 2-3 years old pictures already uploaded. I am too lazy to delete them and reupload them. And 99% of the users are as lazy as me. In an era where user created content makes the difference between services, not allowing users to use already uploaded photos is just a dumb mistake.
And since we are there why just Flickr and not also Yahoo! Photos that is larger in size?
Posted in Yahoo | No Comments »
Thursday, June 29th, 2006 |
Following the last week move, Google seems to be determined establish its supremacy in the video sharing space (or at least gaining a significant share). Since of today the following features are available:
- Movie rating (star based)
- Direct posting to: My Space, Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad
- User comments
Considering the fact that Google Video is among the only service allowing quick jump in movies, no size limitations and no stoargae limitations, the only thing they are missing is a large pool of users and the associated created content.
Anyway, this looks like a battle that Google will win while YouTube future is very gloomy
Posted in Google | No Comments »
Friday, June 23rd, 2006 |
….givin free day passes.
On the front page you will see a red sticker saying “Free Today” and the following text:
You can now watch selected videos for free - thanks to our sponsors. These videos usually sell from $0.99 to $14.99.
Apparently this seems to be part of a deal between Google and Netflix becuase when you go to a movie page you will see above the movie an advertising that says:
Free video made possible by www.netflix.com
Netflix DVD Rental Only $5.99/mo - Free Trial! Watch their ad
All in one is a good ideea and a win/win situation. If they can make it permanent this will give them a decent share on the online videos market. I recommend you “Classic Movies” (previously 0.99)
EDIT
More details about how this works from John Battelle:
How it works (from Google):
1. Advertisers select and bid to sponsor individual videos.
2. The winning bidders for each video are promoted in three ways:
- The ability to run a 15-30 second post-roll video ad
- Persistent branding while the video is playing through a text and icon above the video player
- A listing on the sponsored videos page
3. If a user navigates to one of the sponsored videos, we only show the in-stream video ad once the video has finished playing. If the user clicks the text, logo or visible URL above the video window, they will be taken to the advertiser’s site.
4. At the conclusion of the campaign, the advertiser will receive stats on the performance of his/her campaign.
Posted in General, Google | 1 Comment »
Friday, May 26th, 2006 |
Google just realeased in the labs the Linux version of the Picasa. Users outside US will get only a 404 error. This is not a server error but a limitation that tries to prevent users outside US downloading it.
If you want you can do it by using Google Translation as a proxy.
STUPID STUPID move on behalf of Google
Posted in Google | 3 Comments »
Friday, May 12th, 2006 |
Just checkin the Gmail this morning and I saw that Google just rolled out 2 more enhancements:
- Contact Pictures: Gmail pictures allow you to put a face to a name, by showing user-selected pictures when you roll over a name in your inbox, Contacts, or Quick Contacts list. You can choose your own photo for yourself and for your contacts, suggest a photo for a contact to use, or see what your friends have selected for themselves. Gmail pictures can be configured to show to all users who you email or who email you, or they can be limited to only those users who are able see when you’re online. You can see a full list of users who can see your online status from the All Contacts tab of your Contacts page – they’ll be listed with a colored ball next to their name.
- Gtalk Sounds:If you have Flash enabled on your computer, Gmail will play an audio notification for each incoming chat. Audio notifications are enabled by default, but you can always disable them.
In short nothing big but those are cute. I would like to see the pictures in the emails too not only on mouse over.
Resources:
Posted in Google | No Comments »
Wednesday, April 19th, 2006 |
Recent history has thought us that Google’s policy is to buy payed services/applications (Picasa, Earth, Urchin) and than release it to the masses for free. A pointer from the Measuremap forums shows that this is going to change soon:
Multiple blogs: lots of people have asked us for the ability to track multiple blogs per account. We will likely release this in two stages: first, you’ll be able to add as many blogs as you want. Later, we will be offering some tools to help you compare the traffic between your blogs. Both of these will probably be paid features when we launch our “unlimited” version of Measure Map.
Posted in Google | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, April 18th, 2006 |
Yahoo plans for free wifi
Originally uploaded by Antonescu Razvan.
A friend of mine sent me this screen showing Yahoo’s intention to offer global free wifi through partners (limited to Yahoo! IM) and full wifi for a decent fee.
Posted in General, Yahoo | 6 Comments »
