Hot Google News Bites

In response to fervent requests to localize YouTube for non-US countries, nine new domains were launched.

- YouTube Brazil

- YouTube France

- YouTube Italy

- YouTube Japan

- YouTube the Netherlands

- YouTube Poland

- YouTube Spain

- YouTube Ireland

- YouTube UK

More Asian YouTube domains please! Chinese and Filipinos are definitely fans of YouTube, too.

via the Google Blog

Tags: multilingual, YouTube

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.

iGoogle, the personalized home page for those who are quite satisfied with Google can have the advantage of choosing from a wide variety of iGoogle widgets or gadgets to add to their personal Google pages.

And for those who frugal ones trying to make the most out their hard-earned dollars, an iGoogle gadget - Local Gas Price, is set to help iGooglers find best gas price deals.

via Lifehacker

Tags: iGoogle, iGoogle gadget

Aside from You Choose ‘08, YouTube’s program on educating people and connecting them to the presidential candidates via online videos, YouTube launched another initiative to further get politically involved - the CNN/YouTube Debates.

Through this program, YouTube asks its users to create quick online videos of presidential debate questions. Submit your videos here. Then, you can tune in to CNN on July 23 to see if you’re question has been asked.

Here are the guidelines in creating a debate question video for CNN and YouTube’s Debates.

- Keep it quick—your question should be less than 30 seconds.
- Make it look good—we’re looking for high audio and video quality.
- Choose your focus—you can address one or all of the candidates on a single issue.
- Be creative—we’ll appreciate unique settings and approaches.
- Be personal—we want your perspective and general relevance.
- Please note—all videos are subject to the YouTube Terms of Use.

via Google Blog

Tags: 2007 democratic debate, YouTube, CNN

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

Thanks to the requests of search engine optimization or online marketing experts like Andy Beal, Danny Sullivan, publishers with massive traffic on their sites, or just those who are addicted on checking their stats almost every other minute can now enjoy Google Analytics new features:

• AdWords Integration

Advertisers using AdWords can now more easily link this service to Google Analytics. With Placement Performance and Google Analytics, how more detailed can your campaign analysis get?

• Hourly Reporting

Viewing by daily or hourly is now an option. I’m not sure I’m going to be using this feature too much right now but when my sites get to reach thousands of hits per hour, who knows?!

• Clickable URLs

The URLs on the Referring Sites, Top Content, Top Landing Pages and Top Exit Pages can now be clicked and can lead to external pages. This feature’s cool if you’d like to track those single links that are sending you lots of traffic.

• Cross Segmentation by Network Location
• Increased number of data rows per page
• Bounce Rate increase/decrease

Here are the details of other added Google Analytics features.

Tags: Google Analytics, site stats

US Advertisers using AdWords are now given the chance to improve their ad campaigns with the help of the Placement Performance report, which just got out of beta testing. The main goal of this report is to show to advertisers the site-by-site data, which consequently can help in deciding which site to target more aggressively.

Here’s how to create a Placement Performance report.

After the shutting down of Made for AdSense sites, this will be a very handy tool for advertisers since it’s now less stressful to weed out the non-performing sites.

In the next few weeks, this new AdWord feature will also be available in other countries.

Read more of the discussions about AdWords‘ Placement Performance report feature.

Full press release.

Tags: AdWords, Placement Performance, MFA, AdSense

Here’s a fun time-killer way to use Google Street View. Check out the celebrity homes as found from Google Street View.

That’s reportedly Nastassja Kinski’s place.

Check out more of celebrity homes and neighborhoods - Mashable.

Tags: Kinski, Google Street View, celebrity

Aside from the Library Search Project, one of Google’s “do no evil” educational endeavor is widely gaining popularity - its FREE assistance in modernizing the email systems of schools in the form of Google’s Apps for Education.

Google’s Apps for Education allows colleges to dump their often-antiquated e-mail systems and replace them with Gmail, Google’s popular e-mail service. But unlike standard Gmail accounts, schools can maintain their “.edu” addresses, have students log in from school Web sites, brand the system with their own logos and block advertisements that typically appear in standard Gmail accounts.

Among the first few schools to benefit from Google Apps include Hope College in Holland, Aquinas College in Grand Rapids. This education program also includes access to Google docs and spreadsheet, Google calendar, and iGoogle.

Full report here.

Tags: iGoogle, Google Docs and Spreadsheet, Gmail, Google Apps