SEO Blog

Google Earth was a revolution by itself. It added a new dimension to Google, which has just added another feather to its legacy. Now, even Google Earth has gone beyond its height as sound is added, which can guide a user where he should head towards. As promised, a layer for Google Earth has been released by Wild Sanctuary. They collected more than 30 sounds from all over the world and added these sounds to the software.

When a user zoom into an area, he will hear a sound which is tagged with that area. A user can hear the sounds of the savannah in Kenya, a sudden rain in the forest, an inexplicable spring chorus of peepers and loons or the bells of Notre dame de Paris. A very favorite picture of mine is a sound clip from Hawaii - an auditory journey, starting at a beach along the Maui coast, and descended below the surface into the depths of the sea before materializing to the shore. The sea throbs are with natural sounds as well.

The level can be depicted in the huge map section of Google Maps, where the sounds are played using an implanted audio player. A lot of people are benefited by this recently developed technology and they are really amazed with the performance boost and effectiveness of Google Earth with sound.

 Google Earth: Download

Regularly, Google is getting new libraries to associate with its Book Search program. The most recent addition to the book scanning frenzy of Google is the “Bayerische Staatsbibliothek”, the Bavarian state library. By that library, according to a German press release, the possibility of this specific project will be 100000s of texts, with a lot of German language content, but also compatible with English, Italian, Spanish, French and Latin.

There is a restriction here which is quite interesting. Unlike lots of other libraries, Google will only scan those books which have approved in the copyright free zone of the unrestricted sphere of influence. A domain is that, which is by and large, offered as a full view form of Google Book search. Google Book Search is now released but only the beta version is currently accessible. It has almost the same options as the interface of Google, with the options being – Web, Images, Video, News, Maps etc. The options by which we can diverge between the two interfaces are: About Google Book Search, Book Search Blog and Information for Publishers.

Despite the fact of the press release of the library, Google declares that these books will be obtainable by the entire world as soon as possible. They are putting it out of their mind that Google China’s book search is censored in a manner that it shows only the books which are published in China.

Google has constantly involved itself in various agreements with different networks, companies or organizations for mutual benefit. Many of us are aware of Google’s alliance with DoubleClick.

DoubleClick, a site for digital advertising enables marketers, agencies and publishers to work together effectively and profit from their digital marketing investments. It provides high-quality graphical banners to its customers. It was expected that Google will be earning millions of dollars through this agreement. But the reality was a bit different. DoubleClick’s advertisements are often found flashy and most importantly irrelevant to the requirements. DoubleClick portrays everything that was considered incorrect with the internet by Page and Brin. This duo is the creator of the search page of Google which enables users to see the page which they visited yesterday but can’t remember it’s address now. According to them, DoubleClick’s works are turning the web site into an online version of ‘Forty- Second Street’.

But it’s a strange world we live in. Time is changing and people are changing too, and Brin would not have believed any of these following incidents in the 1990s for sure but these are happening.

“A framework will be provided to users allowing them to put horoscopes on Google’s own homepage”
“Human rights can be censored by restricting people in some countries from seeing search results.”
“Someone may purchase a video site where he/she had already produced his/her own video site.”
“Users will get the opportunity to download Real Player with the Google software”

If all these can happen, I will not be surprised if DoubleClick’s features will be considered effective and relevant in future. But till then, let’s hope for the best.

One of the methods of Google to enter a regional market is to establish a close relation with the culture of that particular region or nation. And what better way can you suggest to show intimacy with ones’ culture other than using their language? Google is exactly doing that in China. They are trying to gain advantage in the market by providing this opportunity to use a Chinese Google Zeitgeist.
The /rebang directory is recently spotted in the robots.txt file of Google. Ken Wang from a Chinese blog GSeeker has noticed its brief existence and tendency to become a potential Chinese version of Google Zeitgeist.

A translation of rebang was referred in the Googlified blog in a post made by Haochi. It suggests that the word “rebang” can be translated from Chinese to English as a phrase “Hot ranking”. The post also added that this translation should not be considered as a perfect one or not even a very good one, but it surely can give you an idea what this project can lead to.
The address www.google.com/rebang is at present redirecting people to this following address www.google.com/rebang/home. But the result of this redirection is nothing more than just “Not Found” and 404 error.

Although this is a disappointing redirection we can assume that Google is on their way to construct the domain. If all these assumptions, rumors and predictions turn into reality then we can say it is good news for the Google users staying in China.

Google Blog Bar is new in the Google family which was launched few weeks ago. This new service of Google has received with quite enthusiastic reaction and earned quite an amount of feedback, according to Google AJAX Search API Blog. The Blog Bar is a kind of application that lets you add applications and search results for blogs into your web page. This control can be customized. You can also add the Blog Bar to your page easily. There’s a Blog Bar wizard to guide you through the whole process. There’s even a Blog Bar programming guide for those who are interested to tweak some codes. The new feature added is the site restriction feature. So, all these make Google Blog Bar popular from the beginning. And it’s getting popular with time.

The Blog Bar is available in both styles: horizontal and vertical. The same goes with the Video Bar and News Bar.

The feedbacks were carefully read and discussed, as the impact of the feedback is seen in the Google Blog Bar. The ability of selecting only the specified blogs is added to the service. This helps people to limit the postings to a specific subject and particular group of blogs. The SEW blog will be a good example for this.

UPDATE:
The post made here has inspired Matt Cutts to make his little bit of “Google Flair”, and he prefers calling these widgets as “spruce up a page”

Recently, Google added page view information when a user checks personal gadgets from Google Gadget directory. Gadgets are the previous modules that can be consisted in three dissimilar places right now; a user’s Google homepage, user’s personal computer running beyond the Google Desktop, and other websites, such as, blogs. It is puzzling to think that Google did not combine this into a solitary directory up till now. Google says that, these figures are rough calculations which represent how many times each gadget is left across each and every place where Google Gadgets can be observed.

According to Google, some of the weekly page peeps for the mainly prominent gadgets are given below:

• YouTube player - 32,787
• Mini Web - 47,484
• Google Calendar - 74,182
• Maukie - 244,118
• MyWeather - 519,294
• Google Calendar Viewer - 932,224
• Digg - 3,228,599
• Google Maps - 4,861,113
• PacMan v2.0 - 8,114,344
• Date & Time - 130,290,121

Some portion of these statistics look fairly remarkable (Maukie, a cat which follows the mouse pointer of the user, attracts more than 240,000 page views!), though keep in mind that widget numbers have a tendency of being inflated - a gadget heaps with each single page view, repeatedly included in the direction - finding of the page in query, or someplace on the Google customized homepage, and the scrutiny will tally independent of whether the user still appears at the gadgets or not.

Google is the most trusted and popular Search Engine of the world and not surprisingly, it likes the money to remain in the family. Recently there has been wobbly news that it invested money in Sergy’s Wife’s company. According to Ecommerce Times, Anne Wojcicki, the new wife of Sergey Brin, co-founded a company named Biotech Start up, which received a $3.9 million funding from the search giant, Google.

Previously, Anne Wojcicki was a biotech investor herself. Last year, she co-founded 23andMe with a veteran of biopharmaceutical industry named Linda Avey. The startup was located near Google’s Mountain View, Calif, Headquarters. According to Ecommerce Times, Anne Wojcicki said the startup is striving for enabling persons to have unfathomable insights into their origin, inherited traits and genealogy.

This biotech industry, 23andMe officially plans to launch by the end of the year. The name of the company, 23andMe refers to the 23 pairs of chromosomes present in a human body. 23andMe is a private company which tries to develop new and unique ways of helping a person to know his own genetic information. Even though his body contains trillions of his genome, he has probably never read of it. The company’s aim is to link him to the 23 paired volumes of his own genetic blueprint. It brings him the personal insight of his ancestry, genealogy and inherited traits. By connecting him to others, the company can also help to put his genome into the larger circumstance of human diversity and commonality.

Do you know that you could get a lot of traffic from Google Image Search? Yes, a visitor might end up in your site just by searching for a picture. So that’s why today I’ll be sharing few tips to optimize your site for Google Image Search. They are basic tips but not many publishers apply them on their websites.

• Alt text — ALT text or Alternate Text, is the text to describe your image when your mouse moves over an image on your web page. The text should be meaningful but remember to keep it short. You should use search keywords for ALT text. If your browser can’t display the image for some reason, the alt tag is used in place of that particular image. Here is sample image code with ALT text:


• File name — always use meaningful file name to your images, use image file name like “apple-iphone-cover.jpg” instead of meaningless “pic123.jpg”. Keep image file name same or similar to ALT text. Also, try to keep the path to your image theme such as:
/images/phones/apple-iphone-covers.jpg

• Surrounding Text — always place a paragraph of descriptive text directly above and below your image, with the keywords from your ALT text and Image Name.

• Page Title — Include your keywords in your Page Title and Meta Description. It helps Google define the theme for the page which helps in Image Searches and Google Search Index.

• Page Theme — Keep the theme of each page. Do not mix the content with other topics.

• Links — Whenever you want to link to your image, use the image keywords in your link text. Example: use “Picture of Apple iPhone”, instead of “Click here to view picture”. The link text tells Googlebot that it is a link to a picture of Apple iPhone.

The Washington Post reported there have been talks between Google and another party called Salesforce.com, a CRM application vendor. This move could be a challenge for Microsoft which also offers CRM products. Adding an element to Google Analytics is a possibility and a very small number of companies have already done that - To track down offline conversions to online advertising is what we are talking about.

Visual Sciences, known as WebSideStory will be regarded as a competitor who will face impacts of this alliance. Saleforce.com API can be used by an analytic company to pass the advertising info as well as lead information. Thus it can serve two purposes and work as a two edged sword that can improve ROI.

The most beneficial fact will be the ability of improving spends that is used for offline conversions. Secondly, the ability of determining better quality leads’ origin and passing them to the right sales person is also to be considered. This advantage is really attractive to the large-scale sales personnel.
Since when the Google people had this alliance in mind is a wonder. I also wonder about the CEO of Salesforce.com, how he feels about this. Does he think of it as an opportunity to improve market share and strengthen their position against Microsoft? Well, what the two companies thinking can be seen farther from their operation in the future. Whatever they are thinking will be reflected in their actions. Let’s just wait and watch.

At its Searchology event, Google announced several things. Two of the most interesting aspects among those have now been the topic of discussion for some time.

During his presentation, Udi Manber, Google’s VP of engineering, talked about two upcoming query enhancements intended to serve the user interest better. First one is a technique that will add a supplemental and related query that Google’s algorithm determines to return more relevant results. Since people don’t always say what they think they say, Google is hoping to find what they mean, Manber said.

For instance, if a user searches for a catalogue of a certain mobile set to know its features, price, availability etc, Google will perform that query, and later it will also perform a second set of query for elements of the Mobile set. In another example, a search for distance from Zurich Switzerland to Lake Como Italy would lead Google to add a query for train from Milan, Italy to Zurich, Switzerland.

The second interesting enhancement which was discussed by the VP of Engineering was Cross-language Information Retrieval (CLIR). With this system, Google will translate a query into another language, find results, and then translate those results into the original query language which was provided by the user. This service allows users to search documents efficiently in foreign languages as efficiently as they search in their own language. Google is expected to launch this service later in this year.