Google's Toolbar gets on-the-fly translation powers, Usenet file traders get a bit of warning, and a whole morning gets compressed into five crazy minutes.

• How to get up, eat breakfast and get ready for work in 5 mins!
  You could, theoretically, pick up a few tips, like the collar button safety pin pull, from this clip of a crazy Japanese variety show (are there any other kinds?). Really, though, we just enjoy items that help us define the outer limits of efficiency. (Thanks for the tip, Jackson!) [YouTube via Doobybrain.com]
• RIAA triumphs in Usenet copyright case | Digital Media
  Judge finds that Usenet.com, which provides access to the greater Usenet network, definitely isn't a Betamax-type copyright exception, and that the site destroyed evidence and interfered with the case. That's not exactly great news for other Usenet/newsgroup providers. [CNET]
• VirtualBox 3.0
  The final version of the beta we checked out solidifies the support for Direct3D and OpenGL in virtual systems (that means games and graphics-heavy apps), along with a whole host of bug fixes and code tweaks. [VirtualBox]
• Do 0.8.2 Released
  The best is yet to come for this smart little Linux app launcher/dock, as support for "docklets" indicates future Gmail checkers, weather indicators, and other tiny apps for GNOME-Do's "Docky" mode. [Peng.u.i.n]
• Google Toolbar's Improved Web Page Translation
  The newest Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer detects non-native languages on whatever page you're looking at and offers to translate it, on the fly. That's really useful for webapps, search results, or other pages you couldn't paste into a web translation tool. [Google Operating System]

Google Books announced today that it’s added a “Common Terms and Phrases” cloud on the overview page for some of its books. We can’t call it a tag cloud, because these aren’t tags, so I’ll call it a term cloud. For an example let’s look at Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp By John [...]

Cisco Systems is close to integrating its Jabber instant messaging and collaboration tool into its WebEx Connect SAAS suite. The networking giant is also considering adding a Twitter-like status update tool to the cloud computing suite. Cisco aims to better compete with Microsoft, IBM and Google in the collaboration software space.
- Cisco Systems is putting the finishing touches on integrating its Jabber instant messaging assets into its WebEx Connect suite and will likely add a Twitter-like status update tool to that suite, a company official told eWEEK June 30. Cisco WebEx Connect is a SAAS (software as a service) collabo...

Bing grabs a percentage point in the search wars, stealing a sliver of the search market from Google. Is it the beginning of a long march or just the product of an ad campaign?

CNETNate writes "The tests prove it: It's the third-fastest browser in the world, and over twice as fast as Firefox 3. In terms of Javascript performance, Firefox 3.5's new rendering engine places it squarely above Opera 10's beta and Internet Explorers 7 and 8 (based on previous benchmarks), plus it's getting on for being almost as quick as the original version of Google Chrome. Also, the new location-awareness feature was testing in central London, and pinpointed yours truly to within a few hundred meters — easily enough for, say, a Starbucks Web site to tell you where your nearest Starbucks is."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

StatCounter made news fast and furious in Bing's first week when they offered up data showing Bing had surpassed Yahoo! in search. And now they're making a splash again by quickly releasing data for the whole month of June.

Overall, things are relatively steady, but there's an ever-so-slight increase in Microsoft search share.

The data shows Bing gaining .5% search share in June compared to May. But Live Search had gained about .5% in May over April.

One percent growth over the last two months may not seem significant, but it could be the beginning of momentum.

"At first sight, a 1% increase in market share does not appear to be a huge return on the investment Microsoft has made in Bing but the underlying trend appears positive," commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter. "Steady if not spectacular might be the best way to describe performance to date."

Plus, the 1% growth has come at the expense of Google. The search mammoth saw its search engine share according to StatCounter decline by 79.07% in April to 78.48% in June.

By the way, despite that first week of traffic for Bing, Yahoo! still retained its second place status for the entire month of June. Yahoo!'s traffic has remained fairly steady over the past three months in StatCounter data.

One of the things people who don’t use Gmail have complained about since the beginning of the service was the fact that you can’t drag and drop messages. Gmail just added a new feature that lets you do that! Now you can use your labels just like you would use folders — dragging messages onto [...]

You already know that if you want to lock down your Wi-Fi network, you should opt for WPA encryption because WEP is easy to crack. But did you know how easy? Take a look.

Today we're going to run down, step-by-step, how to crack a Wi-Fi network with WEP security turned on. But first, a word: Knowledge is power, but power doesn't mean you should be a jerk, or do anything illegal. Knowing how to pick a lock doesn't make you a thief. Consider this post educational, or a proof-of-concept intellectual exercise.

Dozens of tutorials on how to crack WEP are already all over the internet using this method. Seriously—Google it. This ain't what you'd call "news." But what is surprising is that someone like me, with minimal networking experience, can get this done with free software and a cheap Wi-Fi adapter. Here's how it goes.

What You'll Need

Unless you're a computer security and networking ninja, chances are you don't have all the tools on hand to get this job done. Here's what you'll need:

• A compatible wireless adapter—This is the biggest requirement. You'll need a wireless adapter that's capable of packet injection, and chances are the one in your computer is not. After consulting with my friendly neighborhood security expert, I purchased an Alfa AWUS050NH USB adapter, pictured here, and it set me back about $50 on Amazon. The guy in this video below is using a $12 model he bought on Ebay (and is even selling his router of choice). You won't go wrong with the Alfa, but do your research. There are plenty of resources on getting aircrack-compatible adapters out there.
• A BackTrack 3 Live CD. We already took you on a full screenshot tour of how to install and use BackTrack 3, the Linux Live CD that lets you do all sorts of security testing and tasks. Download yourself a copy of the CD and burn it, or load it up in VMware to get started. (I tried the BackTrack 4 pre-release, and it didn't work as well as BT3. Do yourself a favor and stick with BackTrack 3 for now.)
• A nearby WEP-enabled Wi-Fi network. The signal should be strong and ideally people are using it, connecting and disconnecting their devices from it. The more use it gets while you collect the data you need to run your crack, the better your chances of success.
• Patience with the command line. This is an ten-step process that requires typing in long, arcane commands and waiting around for your Wi-Fi card to collect data in order to crack the password. Like the doctor said to the short person, be a little patient.

Crack That WEP

To crack WEP, you'll need to launch Konsole, BackTrack's built-in command line. It's right there on the taskbar in the lower left corner, second button to the right. Now, the commands.

First run the following to get a list of your network interfaces:

airmon-ng

The only one I've got there is labeled ra0. Yours may be different; take note of the label and write it down. From here on in, substitute it in everywhere a command includes (interface).

Now, run the following four commands. See the output that I got for them in the screenshot below.


airmon-ng stop (interface)
ifconfig (interface) down
macchanger --mac 00:11:22:33:44:55 (interface)
airmon-ng start (interface)

If you don't get the same results from these commands as pictured here, most likely your network adapter won't work with this particular crack. If you do, you've successfully "faked" a new MAC address on your network interface, 00:11:22:33:44:55.

Now it's time to pick your network. Run:

airodump-ng (interface)

To see a list of wireless networks around you. When you see the one you want, hit Ctrl+C to stop the list. Highlight the row pertaining to the network of interest, and take note of two things: its BSSID and its channel (in the column labeled CH), as pictured below. Obviously the network you want to crack should have WEP encryption (in the ENC) column, not WPA or anything else.

Like I said, hit Ctrl+C to stop this listing. (I had to do this once or twice to find the network I was looking for.) Once you've got it, highlight the BSSID and copy it to your clipboard for reuse in the upcoming commands.

Now we're going to watch what's going on with that network you chose and capture that information to a file. Run:

airodump-ng -c (channel) -w (file name) --bssid (bssid) (interface)

Where (channel) is your network's channel, and (bssid) is the BSSID you just copied to clipboard. You can use the Shift+Insert key combination to paste it into the command. Enter anything descriptive for (file name). I chose "yoyo," which is the network's name I'm cracking.

You'll get output like what's in the window in the background pictured below. Leave that one be. Open a new Konsole window in the foreground, and enter this command:

aireplay-ng -1 0 -a (bssid) -h 00:11:22:33:44:55 -e (essid) (interface)

Here the ESSID is the access point's SSID name, which in my case is yoyo. What you want to get after this command is the reassuring "Association successful" message with that smiley face.

You're almost there. Now it's time for:

aireplay-ng -3 -b (bssid) -h 00:11:22:33:44:55 (interface)

Here we're creating router traffic to capture more throughput faster to speed up our crack. After a few minutes, that front window will start going crazy with read/write packets. (Also, I was unable to surf the web with the yoyo network on a separate computer while this was going on.) Here's the part where you might have to grab yourself a cup of coffee or take a walk. Basically you want to wait until enough data has been collected to run your crack. Watch the number in the "#Data" column—you want it to go above 10,000. (Pictured below it's only at 854.)

Depending on the power of your network (mine is inexplicably low at -32 in that screenshot, even though the yoyo AP was in the same room as my adapter), this process could take some time. Wait until that #Data goes over 10k, though—because the crack won't work if it doesn't. In fact, you may need more than 10k, though that seems to be a working threshold for many.

Once you've collected enough data, it's the moment of truth. Launch a third Konsole window and run the following to crack that data you've collected:

aircrack-ng -b (bssid) (file name-01.cap)

Here the filename should be whatever you entered above for (file name). You can browse to your Home directory to see it; it's the one with .cap as the extension.

If you didn't get enough data, aircrack will fail and tell you to try again with more. If it succeeds, it will look like this:

The WEP key appears next to "KEY FOUND." Drop the colons and enter it to log onto the network.

Problems Along the Way

With this article I set out to prove that cracking WEP is a relatively "easy" process for someone determined and willing to get the hardware and software going. I still think that's true, but unlike the guy in the video below, I had several difficulties along the way. In fact, you'll notice that the last screenshot up there doesn't look like the others—it's because it's not mine. Even though the AP which I was cracking was my own and in the same room as my Alfa, the power reading on the signal was always around -30, and so the data collection was very slow, and BackTrack would consistently crash before it was complete. After about half a dozen attempts (and trying BackTrack on both my Mac and PC, as a live CD and a virtual machine), I still haven't captured enough data for aircrack to decrypt the key.

So while this process is easy in theory, your mileage may vary depending on your hardware, proximity to the AP point, and the way the planets are aligned. Oh yeah, and if you're on deadline—Murphy's Law almost guarantees it won't work if you're on deadline.

---

To see the video version of these exact instructions, check out this dude's YouTube video.

Got any experience with the WEP cracking courtesy of BackTrack? What do you have to say about it? Give it up in the comments.

Gina Trapani, Lifehacker's founding editor, is tired of typing commands that start with "air." Her weekly feature, Smarterware, appears every Wednesday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Smarterware tag feed to get new installments in your newsreader.

Google's data-crunching ways found that the majority of Gmail users aren't actually using the webmail service's labels. Starting today, those label names get higher placement, and drag-and-drop labeling aims to make Gmail's labels more like familiar email folders.

By placing users' own labels higher up on the left-hand sidebar, right below the main Inbox/Starred/Sent/Drafts/All Mail destinations, Gmail admits that keeping them in their own box, stuck underneath the chat widget, implied they weren't that important before. Fixes like those contained in Gina's Better Gmail 2 Firefox extension and the "Go to label" keyboard shortcut in Gmail's Labs section helped, but now labels are easier to reach, and kept more at the front of your email-clearing mind.

The three labels you use most are automatically shown below your main links, with the rest accessible from an "X more" drop-down. You can add more labels to your shown list, however, by clicking the downward-facing arrow next to a label and choosing "Show label."

Those higher-up labels are also a boon to frequent mouse users, as you can now click and drag single email messages, or multiple selected messages, onto a label to "move" it into that label (kind of like a folder, no?), or drag the label onto the messages to, uh, label them.

All these features and functionality will be "rolling out gradually" to Gmail users.

StatCounter says Microsoft's Bing search engine grabbed more than 8 percent share of U.S. Web searches in June. The news could be an anomaly or a sign that Bing is luring users from Google, Yahoo and other search engines. Microsoft has bet big on Bing as it seeks to grab a piece of Google's massive Web services user base.
- Buoyed by strong word of mouth and intensive marketing, Microsoft's Bing search engine gained 8.23 percent of U.S. Web searches in June, Web data researcher StatCounter said July 1. That's up from 7.86 percent in May and 7.21 percent in April, when Microsoft's search engine was kno...

Google has updated their Toolbar for the Internet Explorer browser to make language translation easier. Instead of manually copying and pasting text into Google Translate, the Toolbar now automatically detects if a language is different from the one set as your default.

Google will then serve up a message saying it has detected a language foreign to your own and asking if you would like it translated. Simply click the "Tranlate" button in order to receive the translation.

The new feature is available for all languages of the Toolbar (but again, just for Internet Explorer). The languages include: English, and the translation service supports 41 different languages: Albanian, Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.

The overwhelming winner in my 30 day poll was “Bike to work” so that’s what I’m doing during the month of July. In the third week of July I’ll be out in Boston to speak at SIGIR, but any time I’m heading into the Googleplex during July, I’m planning to bike there.

Is there something good for yourself that you’ve been meaning to do? Why not try it for 30 days this month? The month will end whether you try something new or not, so why not tackle something new?

A Google Webmaster Help thread has a searcher asking Google how they can remove a Facebook page from Google. The page has been deleted from Facebook, but it still shows up in the Google Cache. Googler, Wysz, gave the searcher...

On Monday we reported that Google spanked the adult porn industry by penalizing many of the sites. There were many theories as to why those sites were penalized. It wasn't all the adult sites that were penalized but a nice...

We have covered time and time again about Google having issues paying publishers in this country or that country. This time, Australians are suffering from now being paid on time. There are at least two threads with reports of the...

We rarely cover forum news about the forums themselves, so I figured I pull out one significant thing that happened in the forums over the past 24 hours that is really bothering some forum members. As you know, Google has...

Yesterday Google announced the latest version of the AdWords API, version v2009. This is an upgrade from AdWords API 13 which was released in October 2008. There are major changes between v2009 and version 13 and Google wants you to...

Google Apps Sync, an Outlook plug-in that connects Google Apps accounts released earlier this month, has updated with a version that doesn't block Windows Desktop Search from indexing Outlook data, along with offering more control over auto-archiving and making it "more clear where data in other Outlook accounts is located." Existing Apps Sync installations should get an automatic update notice, while the IT curious can grab the fixed version now. [Google Enterprise Blog]

A DigitalPoint Forum thread has a copy of a email sent to a webmaster for violating Google's webmaster guidelines. The email specifically shows the webmaster which guidelines they are breaking, in this case, hiding text. Here is a copy of...

New smartphones and mobile operating systems have drawn another sizable wave of consumers to intelligent smartphones. These platforms provide more productivity potential than ever before, but there are still gaps in the kind of security and management capabilities necessary for enterprise use. eWEEK Labs examines how to make the right choices now to meet future needs.
- The release of the Palm WebOS mobile operating system on the new Pre, along with recent upgrades to both Apples iPhone OS and Googles Android operating system, has drawn another sizable wave of new consumers to intelligent smartphones. Given the obvious computing potential of these platforms, t...

SEOquake addon developers continue to impress us with always new awesome tools. This time they are launching a new one called SEOpivot.

This tool finds your site most promising keywords by looking at your site current Google rankings and identifying most powerful words that your site already ranks high enough. In a way, the tool works the way I described in a previous article on doing keyword research for an established site.

Our report will show you all keywords, for which any URL of your domain ranks high enough to get into TOP100 Google Search results, as well as how much traffic you’ll get if you improve the position of the URL we found on interesting keyword.

Each report looks exactly like this:

where:

• Potential stands for the amount of traffic you are going to get after reaching the top position (potential = traffic the first position brings - traffic you are getting now);
• Position stands for your current Google ranking;
• Average search volume (monthly traffic).

The index is limited but it is large enough to give you very useful data:

We studied TOP100 Google Search results for 500 thousands of most high-frequent keywords and received information on more than 3 400 000 domains.

The tool was reviewed under SEJ policy.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

SEOpivot: Find Your Site Most Promising Keywords

When the news about Michael Jackson’s death broke out, it was TMZ who scooped it beating other news outlets and was quoted as a source throughout Twitter, Facebook, traditional media and various online properties.

As a result, Hitwise numbers are showing that TMZ’s site traffic on that day was able to achieve a 3 year all-time high. The news created a spike and brought a 5x increase in volume as compared to the previous day’s site traffic.The incident even surpassed the 18% market share of TMZ site visits when it featured photos of controversial singer Rihanna badly beaten and bruised. Overall, TMZ became the 60th most visited site on the day of Michael Jackson’s death. A day before that event, TMZ’s site visit was ranked 305th in terms of market share.

But perhaps the best result that came out from this incident was the fact that it gave TMZ around 61% new unique visitors.

From an SEO perspective, the blog post that broke the news has over 12,000 incoming links. I wonder how TMZ will be taking advantage of that link equity?

Right after other “established” news sources beat TMZ in page visits. Yahoo! News, CNN, MSNBC, and Google all received some good spike in terms of site visits from fans and onlookers wanting to find the latest development in the cause of death of MJ. Both MSNBC and CNN got the highest page visits on Thursday, registering 67% and 64% increase respectively.

And that goes to show our dear readers the importance of being the first to report any controversial item on the Internet - be it in the form of news or blog posts.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Michael Jackson Death : TMZ Traffic Surge Numbers

Expect more of these kinds of post in the next couple of days as search analysts will be on the lookout for statistics on Bing’s first month of operation. The latest of these data is coming from StatCounter which is reporting that Microsoft’s search market share went up to 8.5% one month after Bing’s launch.

Although Bing’s  market share is still miles away from Google’s , Microsoft would be glad to know that part of  the increase from previous month’s 7.81% to this month’s 8.5% seemed to have been taken from Google’s market share.

Google’s market share drop a few notch from 78.72% to 78.48. While Yahoo’s market share increased from 10.99% to 11.04%.

Interestingly, during its first month of operation, Bing’s market share was not steadily increasing. It had its peak during the first week after launch before dropping during the middle two weeks of June and then finally rising again during the last week.

While this may seem good news for Microsoft, it’s still too early to tell whether Bing could sustain its momentum and continue to get some more market share.  Let’s wait until other Internet analytics reports come out in the coming days and compare this report to see whether Bing is really registering positive numbers.

In the meantime, let us allow Microsoft and the whole Bing team to rejoice for the fruits of their hard labor.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Bing Gets a Slight Increase in Market Share

Seen in my feedreader just now. I dunno, it just struck me, Google can't do a helluva lot to help you, Newspaper Industry.... (Go to Searchblog Main)

Google worked with Microsoft to patch up some serious issues with the first version of the Outlook plugin for Google Apps. Among other things, the first version of this plugin disabled windows desktop search, which probably made Microsoft as angry as most users. The new version finally plays nice with things like Windows Desktop Search, [...]

With Google Chrome threatening its dominance in the browser arena, Firefox certainly has got many things to consider to prevent Google’s browser from inching in closer in terms of popularity and user base. At the rate things, it seems like the Firefox folks have done their job as they are releasing Firefox 3.5.

But you’ve probably downloaded Firefox 3.5 and have used it since its first RC… So, while we await for the next stable release of Firefox 3.5, like the Firefox team, we might as well ponder on what could be in store for Firefox 3.6. aka Firefox.net, codenamed Namoroka.

Mashable’s Josh Catone enumerated some of the top priority changes that we might see in Firefox 3.6 which is scheduled for release sometime in 2010.

• Better Performance
• More Personalization and Customization Feature
• New Navigation feature
• Improved Web App Support
• Taskfox
• Enhanced Session Management
• Customizable Browser
• Better Identity Management
• New Tab Page

The Firefox Team must no rest on their laurels. There are certainly many work that needs to be done. The browser war is getting hotter now as rival browsers are gearing up to outsmart each other in features, performance and speed.

Hopefully Firefox 3.6 will answer these issue and put a mark on Firefox dominance in the browser market.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Firefox 3.6 in 2010? Namoroka!

An anonymous reader sends news from The Washington Post's Security Fix blog of a new Trojan horse program that takes click fraud to the next level. The Trojan, dubbed FFsearcher by SecureWorks, was among the pieces of malware installed by sites hacked with the Nine-Ball mass compromise, which attacked some 40,000 Web sites this month. The Trojan takes advantage of Google's "AdSense for Search" API, which allows Web sites to embed Google search results alongside the usual Google AdSense ads. (SecureWorks' writeup indicates that Yahoo search is targeted too, but the researchers saw no evidence if the malware redirecting Yahoo searches.) While most search hijackers give themselves away on the victim's machine by redirecting the browser through some no-name search engine, FFsearcher "...converts every search a victim makes through Google.com, so that each query is invisibly redirected through the attackers' own Web sites, via Google's Custom Search API. Meanwhile, the Trojan manipulates the victim's PC and browser so that the victim never actually sees the attacker-controlled Web site that is hijacking the search, but instead sees the search results as though they were returned directly from Google.com (and with Google.com in the victim browser's address bar, not the address of the attacker controlled site). Adding to the stealth is the fact that search results themselves aren't altered by the attackers, who are merely going after the referral payments should victims click on any of the displayed ads. What's more, the attackers aren't diverting clicks or ad revenue away from advertisers or publishers, as in traditional click fraud: They are simply forcing Google to pay commissions that it wouldn't otherwise have to pay." If FFSearcher were the only piece of malware on the machine, it would have a better chance of staying under the radar.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

No chillers? No problem

Structure 09 Google is developing some sort of back-end technology that automatically - and nearly instantly - redistributes live compute loads when a data center is in danger of overheating. Or maybe this is just talk. Google prefers to at least maintain the illusion of data-center nirvana.…

What is your recession sales strategy?

Chris Crum at WebProNews.com has pieced together some very interesting pieces of information regarding Facebook, a former Googler and a new payment system.

Facebook in May announced that it was testing a new payments system that would deal in real money, rather than virtual currencies that it had been using for any number of applications. This might work fine for Mafia Wars and other light games that Facebook has increasingly added, but if you were to want to move into, say, storefronts or product comparisons, you'd clearly want to be able to deal in real currency.

Enter announcement two: Facebook has hired an ex-Google Checkout director to develop these payment systems. Given Facebook's immense and growing popularity, its standing as place for sharing opinions and favorites, its open platform and an army of marketers desperate to monetize work on Facebook, it could wind up being an absolute perfect storm.

Imagine classified ads or, bigger yet, entire storefronts integrated directly into a social networking site a la A Small World - except instead of a half million very exclusive members considering five and six-digit purchases in between their social networking activities, it's 200 million+ people worldwide who could have their friends' opinions of a product just a click away from being able to purchase it.

Chris has screenshots and more details - worth checking out.

What do you think? Would you purchase or shop on Facebook? Would your customers?

Real-time search is one of the hottest mini Web trend out there right now, promising new ways to help users tease out current information they want from the digital information glut. The ability to seek out what everyone is discussing or looking for in the moment captures the imagination. Twitter's search capability does this for its tweets, but some find it insufficient. While Facebook is just beginning to help users surface the latest information and Google is thinking about this area, several startups have come to the fore to help Web searchers tease out bits on specific topics. Here is a beginner's list of newcomers intent on helping you ferret information out of the noise.
- ...

Mozilla adds new privacy features to the latest version of its Firefox browser in response to features in Internet Explorer 8, Apple Safari and Google Chrome. In addition to a Private Browsing mode, Firefox 3.5 has Forget This Site and Clear Recent History capabilities.
- Mozilla has responded to enhanced privacy settings in rival browsers from Microsoft, Apple and Google with new privacy features of its own. In Firefox 3.5, released June 30, Mozilla has added its own version of private browsing to match a feature offered by Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 8 and...

Google reports it has fixed its broken Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook plug-in, a messaging and collaboration software module geared to let Microsoft users access their Gmail e-mail, contacts and calendar content through Outlook. The move is a bid to get customers of enterprise applications off of their Exchange servers and stored in Google's cloud computing environment.
- Microsoft Windows Desktop Search and Windows Live Hotmail users can rejoice. The search tool and Webmail client are no longer broken when used with the Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook plug-in, which Google released June 9 to help Microsoft Outlook users access their Google Apps e-mail, c...

The New York Times' Gadgetwise blog asked its readers to call a Google Voice number and leave voicemails to test and stretch the service's transcription prowess. They responded with glee, reading parts of the Declaration of Independence (translation: "We hope you straight to be self evident ..."), Monty Python skits ("this carriages no more in tennessee seems to be hey it's expired"), and more. We gave Google Voice transcriptions a "not bad," and it holds. It's fast and search-able, but don't rely on it—just yet, at least—for legal briefings or turn-by-turn instructions. [Gadgetwise]

Dell may be working on an ARM-based mobile Internet device that uses ARM-based chips, The Wall Street Journal is reporting. Or, it may just ditch the whole thing.
- Dell may or may not be working on a Mobile Internet Device (MID) that may or may not use ARM-based chips, according to The Wall Street Journal. People who saw early prototypes said it would run Googles Android operating system, while another witnesses said Dell may begin selling the device late...

You only have a couple of weeks left to submit an entry to this year's Search Engine Watch Awards. The deadline is July 17, 2009.

The objective of the SEW Awards is to recognize excellence, as well as inspire innovation and encourage new ideas in search marketing. The SEW Awards will honor 14 outstanding search marketers, search engines and technology providers, as judged by a panel of industry experts and the Search Engine Watch editorial staff.

The categories are:
* Search Engine with Most Relevant Results
* Most Innovative New Search Engine
* Best Search Engine Ad Platform
* Technology Platform Search Marketers Can't Live Without
* Best SEM Technology Platform for SMBs
* Best Social Media Platform for Marketers
* Best Web Analytics Platform
* Most Innovative Use of Search Engine Optimization
* Most Innovative Paid Search Campaign
* Best Social Media Marketing Campaign
* Best Business-to-Business Search Marketing Campaign
* Best Use of Local Search
* Best Integration of Search with Other Media
* Most Effective Use of Web Analytics

And who are the judges? They are:
* Chris Boggs, Director, SEO, Rosetta
* Jessica Bowman, SEO Strategist and in-house SEO Expert, SEMinhouse.com
* Eric Enge, President, Stone Temple Consulting
* PJ Fusco, Natural Search Director, Netconcepts
* Bill Hunt, President, Back Azimuth Consulting
* Mark Jackson, SEW Expert & President/CEO, VIZION Interactive
* Ron Jones, President/CEO, Symetri Internet Marketing
* Cindy Krum, Chief Executive Officer, Rank-Mobile, LLC
* Sage Lewis, President, SageRock.com
* Melissa Mackey, Online Marketing Manager, Fluency Media
* John Marshall, SES Advisory Board & CTO, Market Motive
* Lee Odden, SES Advisory Board & CEO, TopRank Online Marketing
* David Szetela, CEO, Clix Marketing
* Brian Ussery, Director of SEO, Search Discovery
* Matt Van Wagner, President, Find Me Faster

By the way, in case you think I'm sucking up to the judges by listing their names, my firm can't enter because SES is one of our clients. This wasn't in the rules a year ago, but now that it has, I am free to comment on the process and the outcome.

Entrants may submit nominations for multiple categories, but each submission must focus on the four key areas of consideration:

1. Overall approach and category relevance
2. Innovation in methodology and execution
3. Excellence in tactical execution
4. Achieving success goals

Submissions will be accepted through July 17, 2009. There is an application fee of $145 per entry. Up to four award finalists will be determined for each category. Finalists will be notified by July 27, 2009, and will receive 1-day passes (limit 3) to the SES San Jose sessions and Orion panels on the day the winner in their category is announced. Winners will be announced during Search Engine Strategies San Jose, August 10-14, 2009.

Submitting companies will be recognized at the event, as well as in the SES Magazine and on Search Engine Watch. I also plan to interview as many winners as possible for SESConferenceExpo's Channel on YouTube.

Oh, there is one other thing you should know about the Search Engine Watch Awards. The winner of the 2000 SEW Award in the "Outstanding Search Service" category was a little known start-up named Google. And Google was also the winner in the "Most Webmaster Friendly" category, as well.

Not bad for a company that had just announced a $25 million round from Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins a year earlier. Where are they now, I wonder?

Sharing stories on social voting and bookmarking sites both grows your social media profile power and enables you to reach your audience. Surprisingly enough, being one of the most important element of the story success, proper tagging is very often overlooked.

Let me first make it clear why you should do at least some research on relevant tagging before sharing the story:

• Relevant tags ensure your story is seen (found) by people interested in the topic;
• Proper targeting ensures your story is voted for, hence you have more chances to get it hot;
• Relevant tags make it less probable you will be attacked by social community trolls (yes, most popular communities do have them).

StumbleUpon has one of the most intricate network of tags and categories - so let me share how to use correct ones: make sure to use tags popular within the community (using relevant keywords isn’t enough).

1. Identify a few main keywords associated with the story;

2. Run Google search for [site:stumbleupon.com keyword];

3. Find SU submissions of the stories on similar topic:

4. Open a couple of them and check if they were popular (StumbleUpon stars are good indicators of popularity):

5. See what tags it was shared in:

You are done! Use these (add yours too!) tags when submitting the story.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

StumbleUpon Tip: Use Google to Choose the Best Category and Tags

About two weeks ago, we asked AdSense publishers what do you want to be called. Well, after almost 150 responses, I figured I share the results with you. :: Web Marketer said 30 respondents or 21% :: Web Publisher said...

Since early February, Firefox users may have tripped on a Google AdSense security error. The error reads: Security Error: Content at http://googleads.g.doubleclick.net/ may not load data from example.com It happens on some configurations of Firefox, where the security prompt seems...

The Google News Blog is asking Google News publications to sign up for the YouTube Partner Program in order to get your videos more exposure. If you use Google News, you would have noticed that they are playing up YouTube...

Toodledo, a web-based task manager that's friendly to Getting Things Done adherents or anyone looking for a serious but customizable reminder setup, adds a Gmail gadget to its arsenal of tools that let you track your to-dos anywhere you're looking.

We've been impressed in the past by Toodledo's exportability and convenience, along with a clever paper booklet option. Toodledo was already available on iGoogle start pages and Google Calendar, so a Gmail gadget closes the loop for Google app fans.

The gadget can't, unfortunately, directly create new tasks out of the emails you're running through—that remains a unique feature of Google's own Gmail Labs task manager. But if you're used to Toodledo's creation system, or Google's tasks tool is a bit too simplistic for your needs, this new gadget should fit right into your work flow. Free to use, requires a free Toodledo account to use in the sidebar. Hit the link below for installation instructions.

Your reputation, online or offline is vital extremely important. Recently, a friend of mine owned a travel business. After hiring an employee with a light criminal background and having thousands of dollars embezzled from him, he started to pursue legal action against this individual. This person decided to get revenge by badmouthing the owner and business through Rip Off Report and other online platforms. Now, anytime you Google his name or business some very offensive things are displayed as a #1 result. Consequently, his business has suffered tremendously.

This situation is the perfect example of the need for reputation management.  One of the most powerful (and easiest) methods to begin to control your reputation in the search engine result pages (SERPs) is to create social profiles on major social media websites. Since domains like Twitter or MySpace have such high authority it takes a lot less effort to rank, than creating your own site, by creating a profile that will outrank and push down undesired search results. Also, these search results gives you the added benefit of having control over your brand and being accessible and available on multiple platforms strengthens your overall branding efforts.

Which social profiles should I have?

Once you understand that you should be monitoring and repairing your reputation, you will need to figure out how to do it.  As a rule of thumb the Big 4 social media sites are a great place to start. Generally your goal would be to obtain user profiles that are an exact match as the keyword you are trying to manage. In most cases this is a branded term such as your company name. Additioanly branded usernames are generally available on social media websites. Many sites, particularly niche sites, can be useful to your company and your specific ORM situation. But the 4 you must have are:
•    Twitter
•    LinkedIn
•    Facebook
•    MySpace

If you want to check across 120 different social sites to see which keywords or names are taken you can do so very easily with KnowEm.com. Just type the desired username and click “Check Username”. Additionally, they offer a service that will register you on all those different social media sites as well for .50 cents per social media site.

Steps to Take

Once you have your accounts setup, you will need to do a few things before your campaign can be effective.

1. Create a complete profile
Simply obtaining the name twitter.com/companyname, isn’t enough.  You need a complete and full profile to have a legitimate working account, this includes bios, avatars etc. As much information that you can fill in and feed to search engine spiders, the better.

2. Engage and Interact
Participating in the community strengthens your profile and gives your account credibility. An account that has your name but nothing else looks like a spam account.

Also, you gain the added benefit of internal links from these social sites. If you just create a profile and let it sit then it doesn’t gain internal link equity it needs, for high SERP rankings, from other profile pages, group pages, etc.
Interacting (e.g. returning messages, commenting, voting) is vital to the strength of your profile.  For an example, check out the hat tip to Steve Espinosa for showing how to get DoFollowed links on YouTube here.

3. Monitor
When a company engages in social media they are opening themselves up for a lot of commentary regarding their brand. Be prepared to monitor the sentiment to measure if it’s positive or negative. Have a contingency plan for when you come across negative sentiment. I’ll spare the lesson on monitoring and handling sentiment and direct you to The Online Reputation Management Guide by Outspoken Media. Another good resource on ORM is The M&Ms of Online Reputation Management by @DaveSnyder.

Summary

Remember that social media profiles are only one small part of online reputation management but a critical step indeed. Even if you don’t have any negative sentiment in the SERPs, pre-empt now by registering and building out your profiles today to prevent it from happening in the future.

Jordan Kasteler (aka. Utah SEO Pro) is a co-founder of Search & Social, the parent company of Search Engine Journal. Search & Social integrates social media marketing into the Online Reputation Management, SEO, link building & search marketing mix.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Social Media Profiles for Online Reputation Management

We have way too many resources to track today: thousands of blogs, social media networks, forums - somewhere someone may be talking about you and you may be unaware.

Here’s a cool solution to keep an eye on everything: create your own united, customized RSS feed and add it to your preferred feed reader.

Feed Killer is one of the tools for that too consider. It is very basic, yet offers all necessary features and, what is also great, requires no registration. Two features you are going to love:

1. Add and mixx as many feeds as you need;
2. Customize the number of stories you want to see from each feed.

Now, let’s say I want to track my name in Twitter and throughout the blogosphere; what I need to do is:

• Search Twitter search for [Ann Smarty] and grab the RSS feed link;
• Search Google Blog Search for [Ann Smarty] and grab the RSS feed link;
• Go to RSS-mixer, add both links and click "Build it!"
• You are done:

Feedstitch is another similar tool with some added options (It supports RSS, Twitter, Twitter search, Delicious, Tumblr, GitHub and Flickr data feeds.):

• Login using your open ID;
• Add as many feeds as you want;
• Sort feeds into groups for easier management;
• Customize each feed URL.

More tracking tips:

• Track Hot Trends With Twitter Tools
• Track Google SERPs for Reputation Management and Rankings Monitoring
• Track SERPs, Blogs, Social Media and More with Trackle

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

How to Track Your Reputation or a Keyword in Multiple Resources via One Unifed Feed

Google has invites news outlets to put up their videos on YouTube and split the ad revenue through YouTube Partner Program. In a blog post, Google said other perks included premium placement on the YouTube page and viewership analysis.

Windows: Free Office 2003 & 2007 plug-in OffiSync lets desktop users open documents from, and save to, Google Docs' online servers, but that's nothing amazingly new. A newer Google Search option does, however, integrate powerful image and web searches.

That means that, rather than relying on Microsoft's Clip Art repository, or switching away from Office to search for a usable picture, you can hit the Google Search button on your Office toolbar. Hit that button, click the drop-down box to choose the license you want or need, set parameters for sizes and faces, and then find, click, and quickly insert that picture into your document or presentation. That feature, and OffiSync's basic functionality, are pretty well explained in the video introduction below.

OffiSync is a free download for Windows systems with Microsoft Office 2003 or 2007 installed. What's your favorite Office/web syncing solution? Tell us in the comments.

It’s amazing to see all the search engine development that’s been taking place in the last couple of months. It’s like 1999 all over again, in a good way. Google Labs is humming with all kinds of neat stuff. When Google Squared came out earlier this month, I was pretty excited, but I think right [...]

Thanks to Thomas Bindl at Refined Labs for pointing out the launch of a new Adwords API - v2009. Seems they have created an entirely new API that offers some interesting new services.

* We've created new web services for managing campaign targeting options and campaign-level criteria.
* All web services share a consistent, data-centric interface with two operations: get and mutate.
* A secure authentication token replaces the login credentials required in v13 request headers.

The information about the new Google Adwords API can be found here.

Google may be a verb that means search, but if you aren't seeing other search boxes, you are missing out. Wired.com takes a look at the rest of the search services on the net and finds some beauties.

Are you in need of some video inspiration? Need some fresh air? Let’s have a look at a few video search engines that can help you refresh ideas for your upcoming creation (note: I didn’t mention here most popular engines, like Youtube and Google as I am sure you are well aware of those):

Video Search Engine	Video Sources	Search Goodies
Truveo	Fox news, Howcast, blip.tv,etc	Boolean operators support
VideoSurf	Youtube, Metacafe, Revver, Dailymotion, 5min, Vimeo, blip.tv, Spike, Hulu, Crackle, MSN video, etc	Refine search based on the “face” search; exclude/include any video channel, category or content type
TagBulb	Youtube, Blip.tv, DailyMotion, Metacafe, Google, Grouper and Revver	Tag search
CastTV	YouTube, iTunes, CNN, CBS, hulu, ESPN, 5min, blip.tv, Dailymotion, etc	Multiple sorting and filtering options
Tagoo	N/A	Filter by: Music / Video / Soft

Truveo

Truveo is a video search engine with multi-lingual support. It supports boolean operators (OR, AND and -) and exact match search (”your search phrase here“). Another fun thing about the platform is that it has cool Twitter integration allowing to see most “Twittered videos.”

TagBulb

TagBulb is a tag search for images and videos aggregating several popular platforms. Its search results page is no more than a list of video thumbnails:

VideoSurf

VideoSurf aggregates results from popular video sharing sites like Youtube and links them together using combination of facial recognition and text search (based on video description and tags).

It also offers handy search suggestion feature. It also lets you refine your results by excluding any search channel, category or content type (e.g. Slide shows, full episodes, web series, clips).

CastTV

CastTV is an excellent search engine for tv shows, movies, news, sports, celebrity, and viral online videos. The site is divided into categories and also offers a handy search option.

Each search result includes a source link, description and a video thumbnail. Besides, you are able to sort and filter search results in multiple ways: by source, genre, type, etc:

Tagoo

Tagoo is a search platform that lets you search for all types of media-content: mp3 audios, music albums, audiobooks, music videos and podcasts. The site contains a huge database of sites to crawl but the overall result quality leaves much to be desired:

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

5 Lesser Known Video Search Engines

Google is extending its services to mobile phone users in Africa via Google SMS. Google SMS is a suite of mobile apps that provide access to information covering various topics such as health and agriculture tips, news, local weather sports and more. This is Google’s way of extending its services and reaching out to African mobile users who rely so much on SMS in carrying out their day to day activities.

Google SMS features Google Trader, a mobile app which African users can use to sell or buy any any type of products or services. It’s like an SMS-based eBay where you can find used cars, mobile phone, crops, livestock, jobs and other consumer goods which are up for sale.

Aside from this, Google SMS also features SMS Tips which is SMS-based query-and-answer service which works like a mobile search interface. Of course the answer is delivered through SMS.

Google Trader and SMS Tips are the products of collaboration among Google, the Grameen Foundation, MTN Uganda and other African local organizations.

The African region has the world’s highest mobile growth rate. Compared with the Internet, mobile phones has a higher penetration rate on the African population. It’s no wonder that Google focusing on this avenue especially since one third of the African population own a mobile phone.

Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.

Google Launches SMS Mobile App in Africa

Philip Lenssen over at Google Blogoscoped noticed a variance in the size of Google logos in the search results from browser to browser.

I did a little experimenting and noticed the same thing. On Firefox and Safari, the Google logo is proportionately smaller than on IE and Chrome for me. Check out the images below.

Anyone else seeing the same thing?

Firefox

Safari

Internet Explorer

Chrome

The top of page one SERP's have become polluted with ads, images, videos, news, and other junk results that Google is currently pushing under the premise of "universal results". Some members are seeing high click through counts from Page 2 SERPs. Some are seeing more clicks from Position 11 than positions 5-10.

I’m currently seeing a slightly changed layout for Google results. The Google logo has gotten smaller, and there’s more padding to the left. In Firefox, the file holding the logo for the new layout is called nav_logo6.png (when I open the old layout in Chrome, it’s nav_logo4.png).

This redesign could well be just an experimental prototype, and nothing that’s rolled out for everyone, I don’t know... who else is seeing the changed layout?

(Recently, the Google homepage also presented itself with less padding below the search box, but that may have been a temporary bug... it doesn’t show anymore to me.)

[Hat tip to WebSonic.nl and Tony!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: A Changed Google Results Layout, Perhaps Expe ... | Comments]

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