Entries Tagged 'Google Miscellany' ↓

Gobala Krishnan has an interesting post about Google as the decision-maker on who to praise and who to condemn amongst the Internet marketing companies.

Here’s how Gobala finds Google, the billions of dollars worth gorilla:

Job Title: The almighty god of the Internet

Job Scope: Decides which website goes to Internet marketing heaven and which ones go to hell.

Biblical Reference: Came out of nowhere in 1997/98 and crushed all other search gods and goddesses, rules from the kingdom of heaven (Mountain View, California). A few centuries ago, Nostradamus predicted the rise of Big G. It was foretold that Big G will crush the Devil (Microsoft) and that the people will love him. But in time, Big G will assume the role of the devil as well. Spiritual leaders are still analyzing the data on their Windows Vista. It may take some time.

Why you should cover in fear: Big G can crush your life in an instant. Therefore, you should log into Internet marketing forums everyday and see what message Big G’s carrier pigeons (so called SEO experts) bring. You may also find some fake prophets that claim to carry the mandate of Big G. They will tell you they know how to get past the system, and get a free ticket to heaven.

You gotta check out the rest of Gobala’s thoughts about Google’s own casino and charity project.

Google, IMHO, is business as usual, a stroke of genius, a greedy monster, and a fun tool rolled in one.

How about you? How do you find the Google?

Tags: AdWords, Google hater, internet marketing

To further contribute to the developers’ community, Google’s inviting all Google Gadget developers to create more useful Gadgets or to enrich their creations with their latest initiative - Gadget Ventures.

Google Gadget Ventures will offer third-party gadget development and gadget-related businesses two types of funding:

Grants of $5,000 to developers who’ve built gadgets in our directory that already receive at least 250,000 weekly page views. To apply, qualified Gadget developers will be asked to submit a one-page proposal.

Seed investments of $100,000 to previous Google Gadget Ventures grant recipients who’d like to build a business around the Google Gadgets platform. Qualified developers will be asked to submit a business plan.

Burnt by Google products’ volatility, an Internet marketing membership site from Cuzcom Internet Publishing bans any Google-related products. The site aptly named Internet Power Without Google, with Paul G. Curran as its webmaster, offers email marketing and Internet marketing courses (isn’t it email marketing a part of Internet marketing?)

According to Paul G. Curran…

“There comes a point in one’s life when you have to take a stand. I’ve read that a few good sites always seem to get caught up in the crossfire when Google changes its rules. One of my niche sites (gardening) was doing OK when, wham — no pages indexed, no adsense income, no sales. Several other sites followed. Although some folks believe that Google could be suffering from megalomania, I’ve just removed them from my business model; hence my site, Internet Power Without Google.”

Anyone excited to join Paul?

Full press release here.

Tags: banned, Google banned, internet marketing, email marketing

Another notable service that Google has launched last year is the custom search engine. With the ability of people to create their own search engines, lots of niche sites were able to further improve their collection of resources for the benefit of their users.

To augment this effort further, the CSE team has provided a page where the best among the best of these custom search engines can be searched. It’s more of like the search engine for the best DIY search engines. The only CSEs that were included were chosen in terms of quality, recency, traffic and other metrics.

If you want to get your custom search engine included, the Google Base is the place where you can do that.

The featured CSE page can be used for those who would want to improve other’s search engines by contributing.

via Google Blog

Tags: Google base, Google CSE, custom search engine, search engine

Google announced its new green project addressing climate change - RechargeIT. In an effort to decrease the effects of climate change through reducing the effects of oil such as CO2 emmissions, improving energy efficiency and supporting clean energy sources, RechargeIT will attempt to increase the world’s adoption of plug-in hybrid cars and vehicle to grid applications. Google chose plug-in hybrid cars because..

Transportation related greenhouse gas emissions are responsible for roughly one third of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States and at least 20% globally. In the US, over 60% of the transportation emissions result from gasoline consumption for personal vehicle use. We believe that plug-in hybrids capable of running on biofuels are the best near term option for significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector.

Plug-in hybrid vehicles can achieve 70 -100 miles per gallon, quadrupling the fuel economy of the average car on the road today (~20 mpg), and doubling the fuel economy of a regular hybrid car such as a Prius (~45 MPG). A plug-in hybrid is different from today’s hybrid because it has a higher capacity battery and the car can be plugged into a regular 120-volt outlet for charging. Because it is operating primarily on electricity for the first 20-40 miles, the car operates much more efficiently and uses dramatically less gasoline. Manufacturers are now designing plug-in hybrids that may not use any gasoline at all for those first 20-40 miles, and since more than 70% of Americans drive less than 33 miles per day, many will not use any gasoline in their daily commutes — but they retain the flexibility of using the hybrid gas engine for longer trips. In addition, plug-in hybrids will often recharge at night using excess power from base-load power plants that are already running, so they won’t generally add to peak electricity demand. During daytime peak power usage, plug-in hybrids may be able to sell power back to electric utilities, potentially earning drivers as much as $2,000-$3,000 per year

This Google.org project will include the demonstration of the technology to show to the public how these plug-in hybrids fare compared with non-plug-in cars in terms of environment-friendliness. To further support this cause, Google will also be doing public engagements, providing grants and investing on others that are doing similar green projects.

Now why would you want to do that in the first place? If you are running a search engine optimization campaign but would rather do it in an organic way, meaning you don’t buy links or any of those easier ways to game search engines, you might outperform competitors without having to pay anyone - report those paid links!

Google’s policy in ranking websites or its Pagerank calculations is not for this method of advertising. Google does not prioritize paid links.

And for your convenience, Google has just further facilitated the method of doing this job. Google provided a paid links reporting form which can be found within the Webmaster Tools. Just log in and report sites that are buying and selling links.

But if you are selling links for advertising purposes, there are many ways you can designate this, including:

- Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the href tag
- Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

But seriously, do many people use such measures in for the benefit of the reliability of the search engine results?

Tags: paid links, SEO

Intel together with Google, Dell, EDS, EPA, HP, IBM, Lenovo, Microsoft, PG&E, WWF, and other organizations are joining forces to save energy and decrease greenhouse gas emissions in an initiative called Climate Savers Computing Initiative.

This will be accomplished with the use of computers and computer parts, which are energy-efficient, and promoting the use of these environment-friendly computers.

Full press release

Tags: going green, environment friendly Google, Climate Savers

Customer relationship management company SalesForce has been recently reported to start partnering with Google.

The results maybe the integration of Google’s online collaboration services such as Gmail and Gtalk.

This partnership is rumored to be for the purpose of preparing to outperform Microsoft.

More sources discussing this partnership here and here.

Maybe you have read or heard from someone that working for Google, which is one of the best companies to work for, is simply one goal that’s becoming a part of the American dream or even the entire world’s dream for that matter, especially, the geekies’.

Why not? Aside from this reason,

Work and play are not mutually exclusive. It is possible to code and pass the puck at the same time.

Learn more about what motivates many to work for billion-dollar company.

If you’d like to enjoy the Googler life in the Googleplex

in MountainView, California and you just happen to be a web programming guru, you’ve just lucked out! Google is looking for visual designers, interaction designer and other professionals with programming skills.

Don’t want to work in California but would still like to work for Google? Browse job openings according to US locations.

via BlogHerald

[image from Time]

Simply Google an oh-so simple page where all of the Google products and services can all be accessed. All the accounts, the innumerable blogs for the wide variety of services Google provides, and downloads are all in one page! No more googling this time.

According to its creator, Chris McEvoy, it was my attempt to expose the hidden google information architecture. Since then I have been keeping the page up to date and have just added a co.uk version, so it seems like a good time to review the past year for Simply Google.

One Read/Write Web (where I’ve learned about Simply Google) reader, it’s ugly but damn useful. So give it a try.

And if you agree with the useful part, yeah, don’t forget to bookmark it.