Hot Google News Bites

An arbitrator appointed by National Internet Exchange of India made a Chinese national transfer the domain name gmail.co.in to its rightful owner - Google.

Google Inc, which launched its website ‘gmail’ in April 2004 worldwide, applied for the registration of the mark in India in 2005. The company had filed a complaint before NIXI seeking transfer of domain name ‘gmail.co.in’ when it came to know that the address was registered by a Chinese national.

The arbitrator observed that Zhaoyang registered a company “Gmail Ltd” only after the complaint was filed by Google and the domain name “gmail.co.in” was transfered to the company one day later.

Imposing a cost of Rs 50,000 on the Chinese company, the arbitrator said: “The company has failed to furnish any explanation about the adoption of an identical mark. All these indicate that a disputed domain name is got registered and used by respondent in bad faith in respect of the general commercial business activities.”

Full press release.

Hearst-Argyle, a local TV station, was reported to get local videos on YouTube channels with a revenue share deal. According to TVWeek, YouTube channels offering Hearst-Argyle videos include:

www.youtube.com/wcvbtv
www.youtube.com/wmurtv
www.youtube.com/kcratv
www.youtube.com/wtaetv
www.youtube.com/wbal

via Bloggers Blog

Two notable AdSense policy components were announced today at the Official AdSense blog:

1. The Page Quality Requirement which many AdWord users are already accustomed to. This is more about improving the usability of a website and the quality of its content.

2. Three link units are now allowed in stead of the old law of only one unit.

Check out the updated Google AdSense Program Policies.

Tags: AdSense, AdSense policy

If you’re curious as to what other acquisitions Google had in the past, I mean the companies it has turned into either gold or trash, (come on not all Google acquisitions had become better services…) a WebMasterWorld forum member enumerated them. Here are those who have turned into gold in my opinion:

Urchin Software

Pyra Labs

Applied Semantics

Can you guess what Google product or service they’ve become or they’re currently called?

Here are more of the services that are included in the list of Google Acquisitions.

via PinoyTechBlog

Tags: Google acquisitions, WebMasterWorld

The official Google blog has officially announced its acquisition of FeedBurner. There’s even an audio file of Google’s press call with Dick Costolo, FeedBurner’s CEO.

The announcement’s entitle Adding More Flare. Now is that for FeedBurner or for Google’s advantage?

If you have been using the Google products (such as Google News, Checkout, Gmail, AdSense, AdWords, Earth, and Blogger) for quite some time and you have a lot to suggest on how they can be improved for user experience, you might want to apply for this job opening as an Online Operations Strategist.

The responsibilities of this job mainly include customer service support and product development assistance. A BA/BS degree and 2-4 years customer support and related tasks experience are required.

Sounds more of a call center agent job to me.

It’s one of the non-engineering Google jobs I’ve come across, which doesn’t happen too often.

Learn more about the details of this job here.

Offline web apps from Google, anyone? I’m sure lots of web app faves will raise their hands.

The Google engineers have now made things more fun for the geekos who are simply obsessed with Google apps because they’re now offering them as a browser plugin that can be used OFFLINE - Google Gears.

For you to install this plugin, your computer should meet the following system requirements:

• Windows XP/Vista
• Firefox 1.5+ and Internet Explorer 6.0+
Google Gears (BETA) is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux

As a concrete example of what you can do with Google Gears, Google Reader, the RSS reader service from Google, can be used offline if you have Google Gears. Now what could be cooler than that?

Full press release

Tags: Google Gears, Google Reader, Web Apps

Catching up with Windows Street View, Google Maps has also launched its own Street View. The speculations started when Google was spotted getting domain names with “Google Street View” registered.

Street View is a new feature of Google Maps that enables users to view and navigate within 360 degree street level imagery of various cities in the US. Street View provides users with a rich, immersive browsing experience directly in Google Maps, enabling greater understanding of a specific location or area. Street View imagery will initially be available for maps of the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Las Vegas, Denver and Miami, and will soon expand to other metropolitan areas. By clicking on the “Street View” button in Google Maps, users can navigate street level, panoramic imagery. With Street View users can virtually walk the streets of a city, check out a restaurant before arriving, and even zoom in on bus stops and street signs to make travel plans. Press release

According to Mashable, it’s not yet live for many of the locations. But big cities like New York, Denver, Miami, Las Vegas and San Francisco has it already. Please click the image to see a larger view.

See it in action as demonstrated by Barry Schwartz.

More about this from the Lat Long Blog.

Tags: Google Maps, Street View

Gmail’s spam filtering is not the only functionality of the Gmail filter feature. Here are the other uses of Gmail filter compiled by Lifehacker.org:

Archived bookmarks. If you use del.icio.us and other bookmarking services, you can archive them all in a Gmail label (”bookmarks”). Get the feed urls for each of your bookmarking services, enter them in a forwarding service such as rssfwd.com, and then set up a filter to label them all “bookmarks”. Now all your bookmarks are in one place, with Gmail’s great search.

Backups. Create a second Gmail account for storage, and create a filter to automatically forward any emails with attachments (”has:attachments”) to this second address. Now you can delete your old emails without guilt or worry.

No delete. Some emails you don’t want to delete — those precious ones from your kids, for example, or maybe ones from your boss. Set up a label (”nodelete”) and a filter that puts the nodelete label on emails from (or to) the addresses you want. Now, some of the above filters, add the string “-nodelete” so that it doesn’t show these emails. Now you can delete your old sent emails, or your attachment emails, for example, without worry that your kids’ or boss’ emails will be trashed along with the rest of the riffraff.

Check out 17 more useful tips on how to get the most of this cool Gmail feature.

Tags: GMail, Gmail filter, Gmail spam

If you’re a true-blue Google fan, you already know that for $100 million, Google has just acquired FeedBurner, the most popular startup company offering RSS feed service.

Here you can follow what’s mentioned about this acquisition before and after:

The rumor about the Google FeedBurner acquisition was mentioned at Mashable.

The Good Part of the Acquisition:

FeedBurner will enhance the Google Analytics and Google Reader products and its relationship with bloggers?. - SearchEngineJournal

The Bad Part of the Acquisition:

Google ads on RSS feeds. - Vecosys

More on those who are not fine with this acquisition because of reasons like unreliability of Google when it comes to monetizing content using AdSense.

Now for a more in-depth pros and cons of this acquisition, take it away, Andy Beard.

I’m all for the Google Analytics - Feed stats integration because it will definitely help in knowing more how your subscribers behave if Google Analytics will come in the scene. But the AdSense part on feeds? I thought we already know that people who knows how to use feed readers are ad-blind? So what’s next, Eric?

Tags: FeedBurner acquisition, AdSense on RSS, RSS feed monetization