Google and Slide: building a more social web

We’re excited to announce we’ve acquired Slide, a social technology company with an extensive history of building new ways for people to connect with others across numerous platforms online.

For Google, the web is about people, and we’re working to develop open, transparent and interesting (and fun!) ways to allow our users to take full advantage of how technology can bring them closer to friends and family and provide useful information just for them.

Slide has already created compelling social experiences for tens of millions of people across many platforms, and we’ve already built strong social elements into products like Gmail, Docs, Blogger, Picasa and YouTube. As the Slide team joins Google, we’ll be investing even more to make Google services socially aware and expand these capabilities for our users across the web.

While we don’t have any detailed product plans to share right now, we’re thrilled to welcome Max and his very talented team to Google, and we can’t wait to work together to give people more and better tools to communicate and connect.

Posted by David Glazer, Engineering Director

Read Full Post »

Google Reveals Google AdSense Revenue Shares

Google Reveals Google AdSense Revenue Shares

Google decided recently to reveal the percentage it pays publishers with its AdSense program. The numbers were similar to what many bloggers suspected. 68% for content ads and 51% for search partners.

AdSense for content publishers, who make up the vast majority of our AdSense publishers, earn a 68% revenue share worldwide. This means we pay 68% of the revenue that we collect from advertisers for AdSense for content ads that appear on your sites. The remaining portion that we keep reflects Google’s costs for our continued investment in AdSense — including the development of new technologies, products and features that help maximize the earnings you generate from these ads. It also reflects the costs we incur in building products and features that enable our AdWords advertisers to serve ads on our AdSense partner sites. Since launching AdSense for content in 2003, this revenue share has never changed.

We pay our AdSense for search partners a 51% revenue share, worldwide, for the search ads that appear through their implementations. As with AdSense for content, the proportion of revenue that we keep reflects our costs, including the significant expense, research and development involved in building and enhancing our core search and AdWords technologies. The AdSense for search revenue share has remained the same since 2005, when we increased it.

Google says they have no plans to change the percentage. Google plans to add the revenue share data to the Google AdSense interface in the future.

Of course, we can’t guarantee that the revenue share will never change (our costs may change significantly, for example), but we don’t have any current plans to do so for any AdSense product. Over the next few months we’ll begin showing the revenue shares for AdSense for content and AdSense for search right in the AdSense interface.

Danny Sullivan says Google is known to pay more to large publishers. Google Operating System compares the AdSense payout percentage to Google’s recent financial results. Paid Content says Google has been under pressure from Italian antitrust authorities to release the data.

Read Full Post »

Integrating virtual keyboards in Google search

Integrating virtual keyboards in Google search

You’ve spilled coffee on your keyboard. The a, e, i, o, u, and r keys have stopped working. Now try to search Google for the nearest computer repair shop. The pain of typing on this broken keyboard is similar to what many people searching in non-English languages feel when trying to type today. Typing searches on keyboards not designed for your languages can be frustrating, even impossible.

Our user research has shown that many people are more comfortable formulating search queries in their own language but have difficulty typing these queries into Google. (Try typing नमस्ते on a keyboard with English letters.) To overcome the difficulty they face in typing in their local language scripts, some people have resorted to copying and pasting from other sites and from online translation tools. But there’s an easier way — a virtual, or “on-screen” keyboard, lets you type directly in your local language script in an easy and consistent manner, no matter where you are or what computer you’re using.

Last year, to make text input easy for people across the globe, we introduced a virtual keyboard API through code.google.com. This allowed developers to enable virtual keyboards on any text field or text area in their webpages. Today, we are taking this effort one step further by integrating virtual keyboards into Google search in 35 languages.

If you use Google search in one of the languages listed below, you’ll see a small keyboard icon show up next to the search field, on both the Google homepage and search results page. Clicking on that keyboard icon brings up a virtual keyboard in your language. You can input text by either clicking on the on-screen keyboard or pressing the corresponding key.

You can find out more information on how to use the virtual keyboard in our help article. If you use Google in a language not listed below and feel that your language will benefit from a virtual keyboard, let us know by voting for your language. We hope virtual keyboards help you find information more easily — especially those of you who speak/type/read in non-Latin scripts.

Virtual keyboards let people type directly in their local language script and don’t require any additional software.

 

A virtual keyboard on http://www.google.am to input Armenian text (the query term is [armenia])

 

Read Full Post »

Google’s U.S. economic impact

Google’s U.S. economic impact 

(Cross-posted to the Google Public Policy Blog)

In 1978, people told Douglas Twiddy he was crazy when he started renting out vacation homes in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. More than 30 years later, his son Ross is using our AdWords advertising program to help attract prospective renters — and grow his small business, Twiddy. Thanks in part to AdWords, in just the past two years the company has added 100 new homes to its listings and hired 16 full-time employees, and it brings on another 50 seasonal employees each year.

This week is National Small Business Week, and Ross will be with me on Capitol Hill in Washington today to share his story and help unveil something that means a tremendous amount to me: a new report detailing, for the first time ever, Google’s economic impact in all 50 states.

People think of Google first and foremost as a search engine, but it’s also an engine of economic growth. In our report, we’re announcing that in 2009 we generated a total of $54 billion of economic activity for American businesses, website publishers and non-profits. Over the years people have asked us whether we could quantify our economic impact on a state level, and we’re pleased to do that for the first time with this report, which you can download at google.com/economicimpact.

In a time of tighter budgets and a slow economic recovery, we’re glad to support so many small businesses and entrepreneurs across the country by helping them find new customers more efficiently and monetize their websites through targeted advertising.

Here’s a video from me and our Chief Economist, Hal Varian, with more background on where we get the numbers:

The report is filled with really wonderful stories about the direct economic impact that AdWords, AdSense, Google Grants and our search engine have across the country. These are the stories of entrepreneurs across the country growing their businesses with Google. And this morning Googlers are hosting events in 10 other cities across the country (Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, New York, Oakland, Portland (OR), Raleigh and Seattle) to help share those stories. Ladies and gentlemen, start your economic engines!

Posted by Claire Hughes Johnson, Vice President, Global Online Sales

Read Full Post »

Google Health: helping you better coordinate your care

Google Health: helping you better coordinate your care

We continue to learn a tremendous amount since launching Google Health in the spring of 2008. We’re listening to feedback from users every day about their needs, and one issue we hear regularly is that people want help coordinating their care and the care of loved ones. They want the ability to share their medical records and personal health information with trusted family members, friends, and doctors in their care network. I can relate to this.

Just a few years ago, my father suffered a minor heart attack and was sent to the ER. I arrived on the scene in a panic, and was asked what medications he was taking. To my surprise, I had no clue. If my father had a Google Health account, and had shared his profile with me, I would have been up-to-date on his current medications.

I’m happy to announce today Google Health has addressed this issue with the release of a new “Share this profile” feature enabling Google Health users to invite others they trust (whether it’s a family member, a trusted care network provider, friends, and/or a doctor) to view their medical records and personal health information.

Log into Google Health, click on “Share this Profile,” and type in the email address of the person with whom you’d like to share your profile. Google Health will send an email to them with a link to view your profile. The link will only work in connection with the email address of that person — your profile can’t be accessed if the link is forwarded on. You can stop sharing at any time, and you can always see who has access to your information. Those who are viewing your profile can only see the profile you share — not any other one in your account. We’ve also built in some extra protections to make sure your health information stays safe, private, and under your control:

• The sharing link in the email expires after 30 days, but the sharing access itself does not expire — it will stay in place until the user decides to stop sharing
• Viewers can only see — not edit — your Google Health profile
• You can review a user activity report to see who has viewed your profile

For doctors and family members who are not yet online, we’ve also made it easier to share a hard copy of your information via our new printing feature. The wallet format prints a wallet-sized card that includes a user’s medications, and allergies; the PDF format prints a letter-sized copy of a user’s profile, including medications, allergies, conditions, and treatments.

Finally, we’ve launched a new graphing feature that helps patients visualize their medical test information. This is great for, say, someone who has high cholesterol. They can use Google Health to enter their lab results on a monthly basis and see the trend over time.

There is still a lot more work to do on Google Health, and we’re excited to keep hearing from you so we can continue to make improvements. For now, we hope this new sharing feature makes coordinating your care, or the care of loved ones, a little easier.

source : googleblog

Read Full Post »

Giving a voice to more languages on Google Translate

Giving a voice to more languages on Google Translate

AM (Cross-posted from the Google Translate Blog)

One of the popular features of Google Translate is the ability to hear translations spoken out loud (”text-to-speech”) by clicking the speaker icon beside some translations, like the one below.

We rolled this feature out for English and Haitian Creole translations a few months ago and added French, Italian, German, Hindi and Spanish a couple of weeks ago. Now we’re bringing text-to-speech to even more languages with the open source speech synthesizer, eSpeak.

By integrating eSpeak we’re adding text-to-speech functionality for Afrikaans, Albanian, Catalan, Chinese (Mandarin), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Latvian, Macedonian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Swahili, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese and Welsh.

You may notice that the audio quality of these languages isn’t at the same level as the previously released languages. Clear and accurate speech technology is difficult to perfect, but we will continue to improve the performance and number of languages that are supported.

So go ahead and give it a try! Click the on the speaker icon for any of these translations: “airport” in Greek, “lightning” in Chinese or “smile” in Swahili.

Posted by Fergus Henderson, Software Engineer – googleblog

Read Full Post »

Google Voice invites for students

Google Voice invites for students

(Cross-posted from the Google Voice Blog)

We’ve found that Google Voice can be useful in many different ways to many different people. But one group of people that it’s especially well-suited for is students. We’ve heard college students in particular really appreciate getting their voicemail sent to their email, sending free text messages and reading voicemail transcriptions rather than listening to messages (especially handy while in class).

But since Google Voice is currently only available by invite, a lot of students are still listening to voicemail and sending text messages the old-fashioned way. As a recent college graduate, I can’t think of anything more painful! So starting today, we’ll be giving priority Google Voice invites to students. To get an invite, just visit google.com/voice/students and enter an email address that that ends in .edu.

So if you’re a student, submit your email address and a Google Voice invite will arrive in your inbox within 24 hours. Keep in mind that only one invite will be be sent per email address and Google Voice is currently only available in the U.S. And if you’re new to Google Voice, check out our introductory videos at youtube.com/googlevoice.

Posted by Jason Toff, Google Voice Team

Read Full Post »

Identifying Keywords and Identifying the Subject in search engine

Identifying Keywords

Keywords! Search engines! If you try to create a Web page, your entire life suddenly revolves around these highly-important search terms. But what is a keyword? What keywords should you use? And how do you know what will work? Keep reading for the answers.

You know you’ve got to use the keywords often to create good keyword density. You know you’ve got to feature these words in your headlines, subtitles and throughout your Web-based content. If you can build links around them, the more the better, and if these words are searched by many then you’re in great shape.

But what are the keywords you’re going to use in your text? If you aren’t identifying keywords for proper use within your content, you aren’t doing yourself any good when it comes to creating Web pages.

Identifying keywords is the first step in Web writing — and it’s something you’ll need to do before you ever start to type. But what makes a keyword a keyword?

Identifying the Subject

If you’re thinking about keywords, you’re probably writing content for the Web (where everything revolves around search terms). What is the piece you’re creating about? If you’re writing on the subject of bank loans for teens, then bank loans and teens will be some of the keywords you’ll want to focus on for your piece.

The subject, topic or main theme of any piece of content is always going to make up some of the keywords, or search terms, as well. It stands to reason that if you’re writing about bank loans for teens, you’ll repeat this four-word phrase several times throughout your piece. You’ll probably even use it in the heading.

The subject of your content is always going to be the main keyword focus. This is what you’ll want to emphasize to make content optimized for search engines. When you know what you’re going to write about, some of the keyword work is already done. Now, you know where to start with your keyword creation.

This makes identifying keywords sound easy, but it can actually be a bit of a pain. When your subject is also your main keyword focus, you have to think very carefully about how you will present that subject. You’re not just writing on a topic you enjoy, have some knowledge of, or think will be great for the Internet. You’re presenting keywords, and this is what makes writing for the Web unique.

source:  search engine

Read Full Post »

How To Get Google Sitelinks

by Daniel Scocco

This post is part of the Friday Q&A section. Just use the contact form if you want to submit a question.

Kang Yudiono asks:

I am very happy because my blog got Google Sitelinks. For your information, the blog is 5 months old and written in Indonesian laguage.

My question: what is the benefits of sitelinks for a blog?

First things first, what are the Google sitelinks? They are those links that appear below the first result when you search for the name of a website or blog. Google implemented the sitelinks to help users find the information or section inside a particular website more easily. That is what the links only appear when you search for the exact name of a website, because those are considered “navigational queries.” Here is a screenshot of the sitelinks for Daily Blog Tips:

One could say that the sitelinks are nothing more than shortcuts in the search results to help users navigate to a website more efficiently.

The next question is how you can get sitelinks for your website or blog. Unfortunately there is no switch that you need to turn on to enable sitelinks for your site. Google handles sitelinks automatically through an algorithm, and usually you get sitelinks when your website is perceived as an authority. Practically speaking, this means that your website needs to have a good amount of backlinks, people searching for its name on Google and so on.

Personally I have never worried too much about sitelinks on my new websites. If you keep publishing quality content and promoting it, eventually you will get the sitelinks.

The last question is: what are the benefits of having Google sitelinks? I believe there are two, one tangible and one intangible. The tangible benefit is an increase in traffic for your website, because the sitelinks will give you more exposure in the search results, increasing the CTR you will get on search queries.

The intangible benefit is the credibility that you get from having sitelinks. Only established and authority sites have sitelinks, so when users come across them after searching for the name of your website or blog they will get a reassurance from Google itself that your content or products must be good.
source: dailyblogtips

Read Full Post »

Apa Itu Search Engine?

Image:  ContactDubai

Web Search engine adalah program yang digunakan untuk mencari informasi di lingkungan (realm) tertentu dan menyimpannya dalam database. Istilah ini seringkali terlalu dikaitkan dengan Internet search engine, yakni search engine yang didisain khusus untuk pencarian informasi di Internet. Sebenarnya search engine bisa juga dimanfaatkan untuk pencarian konten offline seperti misalnya katalog perpustakaan, konten hardisk di komputer pribadi, atau katalog koleksi museum dsb. Search engine membantu kita mengorganisir dan menampilkan informasi sedemikian rupa sehingga informasi tsb mudah diakses.

Ada tiga hal menyangkut search engine: crawling, indexing, dan searching. Sewaktu crawling, search engine mencari konten baru yang tidak ditemukan pada crawl terakhir, termasuk update file dan halaman web. Kemudian ia mengindex informasi yang didapat, mengambil keyword lalu mengelompokkannya. Di Internet misalnya, indexing sangat dipengaruhi oleh keyword dan meta tag yang menyediakan informasi mengenai halaman web.

Jika informasi sudah diindex, informasi mengenai bagaimana cara mengakses informasi tsb kemudian disimpan dalam database. Sebagian search engine juga membuat “cache” agar pengambilan informasi ketika diperlukan menjadi lebih mudah. Ketika kita melakukan pencarian, search engine kemudian menampilkan hasil yang diperluas berdasar relevansinya. Pencarian “apel” misalnya, akan memunculkan hasil mengenai hal-hal yang berkaitan dengan apel, termasuk misalnya, “apa itu apel?” demi kenyamanan pengguna.

Walau semua search engine bekerja dengan cara serupa tetapi kegunaannya bisa cukup bervariasi. Search engine didasarkan pada algoritma kompleks untuk menentukan relevansi hasil pencariannya, terutama hasil pencarian keyword-keyword generik. Pengguna cenderung lebih menyukai search engine yang menampilkan hasil pencarian seperti yang mereka harapkan. Google, Yahoo, Lycos dan Altavista misalnya, berlomba melengkapi fitur masing-masing search engine-nya agar hasil pencarian yang ditampilkan lebih relevan dan lebih disukai penggunanya.

Google menjadi sangat terasosiasi dengan proses web search sehingga pencarian di web kini diistilahkan dengan “googling”. Google sendiri sebenarnya tidak terlalu menyukasi hal ini karena khawatir penggunaan huruf kecil pada penyebutan nama perusahaannya, dan penggunaannya secara generik dapat mengurangi nilai jual.

sumber : djuyadi blog

Read Full Post »