Friday, October 10, 2008
CBS Series On YouTube USA
YouTube is adding full-length content from the CBS network, Advertising Age reports. For instance, MacGyver and episodes from the original Star Trek are supposed to be part of the mix. Visiting the CBS YouTube channel and clicking through to a video here in Germany, all I get is the increasingly more frequent message “This video is not available in your country.”
CBS content on a Google property is not new, in fact, this is a bit like a move of the content. Now-mostly-meta-search-engine Google Video already had a store with CBS shows like MacGyver in 2006.
[Via Ionut.]
Thursday, October 9, 2008
Google Employee Visions
Google put out a promotional video interviewing a couple of Google employees, like Marissa Mayer and Craig Silverstein. In the first part of the video, people are looking back (mostly at fun things, perhaps the message is that the giant Google dog “just wants to play”). In the second part, they’re contemplating the future. Here are two quotes (edited for clarity where necessary):
The grand vision, you know, to think way out there, is ... wouldn’t it be nice to have all the information stored in one place. Whether where you place your house key, to where is your socks to wear in the morning, to where is your, you know, blouse, and what are you going to do on the weekend. All those things that you can find from Google, so that you don’t need to remember them.
– Dora Hsu, Google Director of Partner Solutions Organization
My colleagues and I at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory this year will be testing an interplanetary protocol to extend the internet to operate in the neighborhood of Mars. ... So by the end of this year we’ll have some confirmation that we’ve got protocols that will really work over interplanetary distances. And 10, 20, 50 years from now, when we have lots of robots out there exploring the solar system – and maybe even people out there – the internet will be serving them... and so will Google. [smirks]
– Vint Cerf, Google Chief Internet Evangelist
[Thanks Hebbet!]
Update: The video has now been removed by Google (I don’t know why). [Thanks Lmjabreu!]
Associate Email Links With Gmail in Firefox (Natively)
The Google toolbar already provided a feature for this, but you can also do it right in the latest version of Firefox*: associate “mailto” links in web pages with Gmail, so that when you click on e.g. info@blogoscoped.com you’ll be instantly forwarded to create a new message in Google’s email client. Open Tools -> Options -> Applications, and look for the entry titled “mailto”. In the dropdown box, pick Gmail. Note this didn’t work here, but it worked for some of you.
[Thanks Adrian L.!]
*I’m not sure when this was added to Firefox and whether it’s completely new.
YouTube Comments Audio Preview
YouTube’s comment box now has an Audio Preview button – like on this video – which reads the comment back to you using text-to-speech technology. YouTube’s comments are known for being spontaneous/ flaming/ low-quality, so perhaps the YouTube people read the Xkcd cartoon, as Mrrix32 in the comments points out:
On the other hand, YouTube restricts comments to 500 characters. But let’s see if too much parental care might scare some kids away from using the site. Or, as a real live comment by magneto518 on YouTube put it 51 seconds ago, “wtf.. audio preview?”
[Thanks Mrrix32! Comic by Randall Munroe, CC-licensed.]
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Google Says Their Results Will Be RSS-Enabled
Search Engine Land writes that Google confirmed to them that “they’ll soon start offering RSS feeds for web search results. When it happens, the RSS feeds will be an extension of Google Alerts, which currently only allow notification by email.”
Screen-scraping Google results was already easily possible but once live, RSS feeds should be a nice addition nevertheless, especially for all the tools out there which only work on RSS. There’s no specific launch date set for this, Google says.
[Thanks WebSonic.nl!]
PageRank Checker Bookmarklet
ChromeFans has a nice PageRank checker bookmarklet. A bookmarklet is a bookmark containing JavaScript, and it might make a nice alternative in case you don't want to install the Google Toolbar (like because it's broken or crashes). This is the JavaScript bit you'll need to add as the bookmark's location in browsers like Firefox or Chrome:
In Firefox, you can additionally add a bookmark keyword. I picked the word "pr", for instance; now when I visit a given site I can enter "pr" in the address bar, hit return, and a new window pops up showing the PageRank of the URL.
[Thanks Andrew!]
Update: Some of us (me too) are sometimes seeing a PageRank of 0 displayed now. Not sure if this bookmarklet is flaky, about to be blocked, or...[Thanks Dan Russell!]
YouTube "In Super HD"
This experiments puts 4 YouTube players next to each to other to increase the quality of the video. [Via Andy Baio.]
German NPD Party in Google News
Google News is moderated by editors to decide which news sources to accept. How well do they do in figuring out relevant sources? Well, in Germany, they happened to accept a source with the official sounding name “News from Lower Silesian and Upper Lausitz” (“Nachrichten aus Niederschlesien und der Oberlausitz”). A glance at the domain “npd-loebau-zittau.de” and a further look at the site’s imprint however will reveal that these are releases issued by the NPD, a German right-wing (or, depending on your view, neo-nazi) party. A search for site:npd-loebau-zittau.de in Google News lists 54 items so far.
I would think diversity is good in a news aggregator (as opposed to showing mostly duplicates, or removing sources based on government pressure, as Google did in China), but I’m not sure Google wants to have news releases issued by a specific party in there, nevermind which party. I could be wrong; if you know of other examples of party releases in Google News, please comment.
[Thanks Mathias Schindler!]
Update: Hebbet in the comments points to other parties who are part of Google News as well (like the FDP), so I suppose this might be normal in Google News. It would be interesting to know though if it’s also common for the source to be undisclosed if you just look at the title of the site. [Thanks Hebbet and Mathias!]
Two Alleged SEO Spam Tricks
Recently at the Barcamp Stuttgart, Stephan Siegloch told of an alleged way to optimize business listings in Google Maps: get a post box (i.e. a business home address, though perhaps not your real one) close to the city center or main station. Then submit that address to Google Maps. This way, your listings would appear closer to the top in local results with Google. Does anyone else have experiences with this?
Another tactic reached me via email a while ago, but I was not able to find other sources or identifiable information on this, so I’ll pass it on as a rumor. To quote from the source, who wants to stay anonymous (line breaks adjusted):
I know of a company who figured out how to use cheap chinese workers to reach #1 on google for a [particular] search (...)
I don’t know the details but they pay couriers on bikes to
a) bike to various internet cafes
b) search for their terms (ie nigritude ultarmarine)
c) click on the desired listing
Over time the listing will go up. In some cases google actually wraps each result to monitor where the
user is going. And it’s working, shockingly some of the pages are now number one with
absolutely no backlinks. (...)
Previously they were selling their items through ads, now they have reached #1
and have moved their money to the chinese labour.
Admittedly, even if this report is true, it’s hard to tell exactly what made the company’s listing go up in Google. Also, the company did other things to try improve their Google rankings: they bought backlinks, so that might well skew things too. But I did once hear a Google employee after a Hamburg conference tell a group of us that Google was indeed looking at result click-throughs to adjust listings (and we do know they implemented a click tracker in results). As usual, it’s hard to tell what really happens with Google’s rankings, so again, I’ll put the “rumor” stamp on all of this.
Google AdSense for Games
Google released AdSense for Games aka Google In-Game Advertising. This is a way for AdSense ads in text, image or video format to be integrated into web-based Flash games. Currently participating game publishers include Konami, Playfish, Zynga, and Demand Media, Google says. Smaller web game creators need not apply, this is a short tail thing for the moment: applying is restricted to those receiving a minimum of “500,000 game plays” per day where the traffic source must be “80% US & UK Traffic”.
[Thanks DPic! Also see Google’s blog post on this. Image from a video by Google.]
Gmail Aims to Stop Sending Mail You Might Regret
A new peculiar Gmail labs feature – opt in via Settings -> Labs -> Mail Goggles -> Enable – lets you solve some math problems at certain times of the day and week before a mail gets send out. Gmail developer Jon Perlow writes:
Sometimes I send messages I shouldn’t send. Like the time I told that girl I had a crush on her over text message. Or the time I sent that late night email to my ex-girlfriend that we should get back together. (...)
When you enable Mail Goggles, it will check that you’re really sure you want to send that late night Friday email. And what better way to check than by making you solve a few simple math problems after you click send to verify you’re in the right state of mind?
Have you ever mailed/ blogged/ IM’ed drunk or depressed, and later regretted what you wrote?
[Thanks Hebbet!]
Google Russia Classifieds Search
Google released a classified ads search site for Russia a while ago. Ionut in the forum points to an auto-translated Google blog post from August:
We launched a new beta product – search ads. Users of the service can search for private ads, collected from the top sites Runet. Google search ads ... finds anything – from budgerigar [?] to factories, from tractors to refrigerators, from programmers to tutors – all this with a simple and user-friendly interface. To date, it does not include ads on cars and real estate. We have half a million ads, and their number will increase as you add new sites to our index.
If you speak Russian and can help shed more light on this, please post a comment. Yakov of competing search engine Quintura, who covered this last month, tells me “G is yet to establish itself as a brand in Russia before common web users will use its either classifieds search or any other ’vertical’ search from G”.
[Thanks Yakov and Ionut!]
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