According to Larry Page, co-founder Larry Page your brain’s algorithms are not all that complicated (speak for yourself Mr Page) and could be replicated. Google are, of course, working on it right now.
Google has ended it’s ‘invite only’ sign up for Google Mail (or Gmail as it’s known outside the UK), making the beta email system available to anyone wishing to use the web based mail service.
While the service has been available since 2004 it has previously been on an invite only basis, now anyone can visit www.googlemail.com and open an account.
Google has also launched an application which gives UK users access to their inbox from their mobiles, running on any Java based phone.
Of course it would be too much to expect Google to give us the actual data (they still need to protect their index from manipulation) but while the new links data shows only a fraction of the links they can track, it provides much more information than the link: operator.
Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land has given a great overview of just how different the links data is with the new webmaster tool and what can be done with it, including exporting the backlinks in a CSV file.
Google has updated its image search to give you more information on an image as you mouse over it.
Not exactly an earth shattering change, and not as good as MSN’s Live Search images which display images a little more clearly and allow you to place images in a scratchpad. Still they say a change is as good as a rest…
Do those brainy people at Google ever take a break? Every day there seems to be another rumour or press release confirming that they are up to something new. Well today it’s Google Earth’s turn.
According to an employee from Second Life investor company Benchmark Capital, “Google is working on turning Google Earth into a virtual world a la Second Life.”
This isn’t the first time this rumour has surfaced, last month at CNN Money Business 2.0 magazine discussed the launch of SketchUp, a 3-D modelling program which Google is encouraging developers to use to build layers on Google Earth.
At the moment avatars aren’t available, but it seems that it’s only a matter of time before they are, allowing you to populate a virtual planet Earth.
Google may be working with other major publishers to make e-books available on mobile phones and other handheld devices in a bid to give readers full access to books online according to Dominic Rushe of The Sunday Times.
Reinventing Google Book Search to bring books out of the library and into readers’ pockets, Jens Redmer, director of Google Book Search in Europe, told The Sunday Times that making books available online didn’t spell the end of the printed word, but would give readers.
“Ultimately, it will be the readers who decide how books are read,” he said.
A new innovation in the UK and US, Japanese consumers have been reading e-books on mobile gadgets for several years. Google’s project is likely to be realised sooner rather than later according to the media giant.
But the project is not without its difficulties; the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers is suing Google over its deal with major libraries to scan their collections, with publishers claiming that the scheme infringes copyright and that Google should be required to seek permission from before scanning published works.
Google has a great range of feeds offering support to a number of it’s services, such as Google News Search Feed and Google Groups Feeds which make it easier to stay on top of what is happening. Search Engine Land has pulled a list of ten of the best together which is well worth adding to your feed reader to help you keep up to date with all the latest news and developments.
The deal may eventually be expanded to include releasing content on YouTube, the video sharing site now owned by Google.
Several large broadcasters already have deals with Google, including CBS and Robert Redford’s Sundance Festival. The BBC deal would increase the profile of the channel out with the UK, which may be seen as vital in light of recent cash concerns.
The Guardian reports that BBC executives are looking at the commercial opportunities of the agreement, such as a share on contextual advertising that will run alongside BBC content.
The deal, which involves BBC Worldwide and the BBC, follows reports in the last week highlighting the BBC’s moves to sell advertising on its website as the broadcaster seeks to recover from a disappointing licence fee increase.
Digital Inspiration has posted on Googlebot ignoring the robots META tag or robots.txt instructions, the two methods used to prevent Google crawling webpages. Taking two case studies – one from del.icio.us and another from Google Finance, it seems that Googlebot has even cached pages form one of it’s own sites which were disallowed.
The responses generated by the posting are interesting, have you noticed this happening?
Matt Cutts has announced that Google’s quarterly PageRank export is underway, where scores shown in the Google Toolbar and elsewhere are being updated. According to Matt this won’t make a difference to your site’s ranking or traffic to visibly change as these PR scores are already in use in Google’s scoring.
ambergreen are always telling people not to focus too much on PageRank, something which Danny Sullivan comments on in his review of Matt’s post. This is summed up by the discovery that while Google sends plenty of traffic to Search engine Land, the site has a PR of zero.
Matt also discuss supplemental results, and while ha has already admitted that pages in the supplemental index are those deemed to be less important from a PageRank perspective than ‘normal’ results, he does say that supplemental results will continue to become fresher results, enabling more traffic to be gained from supplemental pages.
Also on the agenda are the ‘filetype:’ operator (which allows you to see the results of certain filetypes - i.e. filetype:doc – for a certain keyword)
Be sure to check out Danny Sullivan’s analysis of Matt’s post, as it looks into other recent areas of concern such as CSS indexing and duplicate content.
