Sergey Brin is telling employees to stop making old products and start improving new ones. "For example, said Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, Google plans to combine its spreadsheet, calendar and word-processing programs into one suite of Web-based applications."

I have seen two conversations about random uncoded AdSense ads appearing on people's sites. Webmaster World is discussing new ads that appear to be adding a "more ads link" and some random text link ads to people's AdSense ads.

A thread here at SEW has found ads being randomly added to a travel blog.

I hope to find out from Google what is happening.... will ask tonight or tomorrow when I am at SES San Jose.

Stumbleupon.com launched a new beta interface tonight. I just noticed the change when I stumbled a few pages.

I was playing around with the new interface and I have to say that I like it. It is IMO much more intuitive to use. It also looks much more organized and overall better and more visually appealing. For people who prefer the old look and feel exists the option to switch back to the old interface and back. I doubt that many people will actually do that.

I did it once to be able to take some screen shots that show the same page with the old and the new interface. Once I was done with them, did I return it to the new look and leave it like that.

Good job.

My new Stumbleupon home page (left) versus my old home page (right)

My new “About” page (left) versus my old one (right)

Stubleupon is a good and often underestimated source of traffic to your site. I also use it myself to discover new content on the internet. Virtually everything Stumbleupon selects and redirects me to is content I like. Professionally relevant content as well as personal stuff I just like. Less than a handful of pages from hundreds of stumbled pages did I not like. I use Stumbleupon as much to promote my own content and content I think is good as I do to discover new content, I would probably not come across without it.

The new and improved interface is another good reason to check it out.

Cheers!
Carsten Cumbrowski

Tools, services, articles, podcasts, videos and other resources for marketers at your fingertips for free at the internet marketing resources portal at Cumbrowski.com.

Just in case you missed the latest rumors revolving around the YouTube video “Googley Blues”: The video, apparently created and sung by a Google employee, was showing the Gdrive aka Platypus icon overlaid with the lyrics, “I’ve been ready to launch my product since 2002 ... At least round here 5 years ain’t so long overdue.” Someone claiming to be an ex-Googler – I can’t verify this – now adds in the comments, “Platypus was intended for public release as much as [a] year ago, but then there was the push away from creating new products.” It’s true that in 2006, an internal Google company goal read “Count total number of Google products and reduce by 20%.”

Also at one time, hidden comments accidentally left in a Google PowerPoint were reading (my emphasis), “Store 100% of User Data - With infinite storage, we can house all user files, including: emails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc). We already have efforts in this direction in terms of GDrive, GDS, Lighthouse, but all of them face bandwidth and storage constraints today.” I have Gdrive on this machine, but it’s just a leak of Google’s internal Gdrive product, used to connect to Google storage from everywhere (if you have the password). I don’t know if any of this truly indicates that Gdrive was ever meant for public release, but at least some signs are pointing in the direction. By now, what Google did release was their shared storage program.

The Googley Blues video in the meantime has been made private.

[Thanks everyone!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

If the word “Google” were an acronym, what would its letters stand for?

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

SES San Jose is next week and we’re all looking forward to it. It is a good chance to network, learn some new tips and relax. Here the top 5 sessions you must attend at this years SES San Jose:

1. Universal & Blended Vertical Search Day 1 11:00 to 12:30

“Search isn’t just for web pages anymore.” Let’s face it, search engines are evolving, and its going to affect your rankings. Google now shows local, video, and news in the normal search results. Ask, MSN and Yahoo are also showing different verticals in their search results. This is the biggest change we’ve seen in the search engines in a while. This session will help you better understand the change and could possibly teach you to optimize your online properties for blended search.

2. Web Analytics & Measuring Success Day 2 10:30-12:00

Everyone website has some form of success weather it’s a more sales, lots of traffic, an email or phone inquiry. With web technology constantly improving, web analytics software is a lot more sophisticated then it was even a year or two back. This session discusses better ways to measure your success helps you identify statistics that really matter.

3. Successful Site Architecture Day 2 4:45-6:00

Search Engines are evolving, content is king and more and more people are on the web. Hopefully this means you are growing your website by adding images, videos, and content. This session talks about correct site architecture and proper design for your growing website. The last thing you want is your efforts of growing your websites to go to waste.

4. Link Baiting & Viral Search Success Day 3 1:30-2:45

You want more inbounds links but don’t want to send any more link request emails. Well this session is for you. Learn different link baiting and viral marketing tips and techniques to bring the links to you. Learn what you’ve been missing out on all year.

5. SMO: Social Media Optimization Day 4 9:00-10:15

When I think social media optimization, Neil Patel, Rand Fishkin and Todd Malicot come in mind. Learn the ins and outs of community type sites from these guys. This session will teach you a few tips and tricks so that you too can start leveraging site like Digg, Wikipedia (yes, its still in almost ever search result), Stumbleupon, and other social sites.

'We do not bring this suit lightly'

Yet another trademark owner has gone to war over Google's keyword advertising. But this time it's a name everyone knows: American Airlines.…

I find this really exciting since it wasn’t that long ago that it might take 4-6 weeks for a Web page to get into a search engine. Google has announced that instead of showing a crawl date for search results, search results will show crawls by hours.

At least, it’s supposed to. I ran several searches on Google and GooFresh and did not find any instance where result pages were showing a crawl of x hours ago. Even a search for Official Google Blog didn’t bring me any joy. However, while I was running searches trying to find evidence of what the blog was talking about, I learned something interesting.

I wondered what kind of searches you’d get if you just searched for the date: that is, “August 16 2007″ (at this writing.) So I plugged that in as a search. I got interesting results, but I was looking for fresh, recent content. Instead I was getting Wikipedia’s page for the date, some upcoming events and placeholder pages, and stuff like that.

So, thinking about how many blogs arrange their pages, and how they include dates in the URLs, I added an inurl: syntax to the search so it looked like this:

“August 16 2007″ inurl:2007

And I got a lot of neat blog content, as well as lots of dynamically-generated pages (an unexpected bonus.) Very fresh. (Still didn’t see that new setup Google was mentioning though.)

And just so you don’t accuse me of being an ugly American — I also tried doing a search for “16 August 2007″ inurl:2007 as well. There were fewer results, but they had a definite European/International flavor…

This post came from ResearchBuzz, a site with news and information about online data collections. Visit us at ResearchBuzz.com .

I think Google should be like a Swiss Army knife: clean, simple, the tool you want to take everywhere. When you need a certain tool, you can pull these lovely doodads out of it and get what you want. So on Google, rather than showing you upfront that we can do all these things, we give you tips to encourage you to do things these ways. We get you to put your query in the search field, rather than have all these links up front. That's worked well for us. Like when you see a knife with all 681 functions opened up, you're terrified. That's how other sites are - you're scared to use them. Google has that same level of complexity, but we have a simple and functional interface on it, like the Swiss Army knife closed.

Let’s dissect the parts of a URL (uniform resource locator). I’ll tell you how we typically refer to different parts of a URL at Google. Here’s a valid URL which has lots of components:

http://video.google.co.uk:80/videoplay?docid=-7246927612831078230&hl=en#00h02m30s

Here are some of the components of the url:

• The protocol is http. Other protocols include https, ftp, etc.
• The host or hostname is video.google.co.uk.
• The subdomain is video.
• The domain name is google.co.uk.
• The top-level domain or TLD is uk. The uk domain is also referred to as a country-code top-level domain or ccTLD. For google.com, the TLD would be com.
• The second-level domain (SLD) is co.uk.
• The port is 80, which is the default port for web servers. Other ports are possible; a web server can listen on port 8000, for example. When the port is 80, most people leave out the port.
• The path is /videoplay. Path typically refers to a file or location on the web server, e.g. /directory/file.html
• This URL has parameters. The name of one parameter is docid and the value of that parameter is -7246927612831078230. URLs can have lots parameters. Parameters start with a question mark (?) and are separated with an ampersand (&).
• See the “#00h02m30s”? That’s called a fragment or a named anchor. The Googlers I’ve talked to are split right down the middle on which way to refer it. Disputes on what to call it can be settled with arm wrestling, dance-offs, or drinking contests. Typically the fragment is used to refer to an internal section within a web document. In this case, the named anchor means “skip to 2 minutes and 30 seconds into the video.” I think right now Google standardizes urls by removing any fragments from the url.

What is a static url vs. a dynamic url? Technically, we consider a static url to be a document that can be returned by a webserver without the webserver doing any computation. A dynamic url is a document that requires the webserver to do some computation before returning the web document.

Some people simplify static vs. dynamic urls to an easier question: “Does the url have a question mark?” If the url has a question mark, it’s usually considered dynamic; no question mark in the url often implies a static url. That’s not a hard and fast rule though. For example, urls that look static like http://news.google.com/ may require some computation by the web server. Most people just refer to urls as static or dynamic based on whether it has a question mark though.

Suppose you worked at a search engine and someone dropped a high-accuracy way to detect malware on the web in your lap (see this USENIX paper [PDF] for some of the details)? Is it better to start protecting users immediately, or to wait until your solution is perfectly polished for both users and site owners? Remember that the longer you delay, the more users potentially visit malware-laden web pages and get infected themselves.

Google chose to protect users first and then quickly iterate to improve things for site owners. I think that’s the right choice, but it’s still a tough question. Google started flagging sites where we detected malware in August of last year. This February, the webmaster console team and Google’s anti-malware team took a big step toward closing the loop for webmasters:
- The webmaster console started listing example urls with suspected/detected malware.
- Google began attempting to email site owners when we detected malware.

Today, the two Google teams added even more functionality into the webmaster console:

- New: Request a malware review from Google and we’ll evaluate your site.
- New: Check the status of your review.
* If we feel the site is still harmful, we’ll provide an updated list of remaining dangerous URLs
* If we’ve determined the site to be clean, you can expect removal of malware messages in the near future (usually within 24 hours).

I like that Google will keep updating the list of dangerous URLs for a site, and that they’re working to remove malware warnings even faster when sites clean up malware. That will help site owners diagnose their problems and get them fixed faster. What’s just as exciting to me is that while I have written about malware unofficially in the past, Google has ramped up official posts about malware on Google’s online security blog.

I’m glad that the Google’s anti-malware team has been doing all this stuff to alert site owners if they’re hosting malware. I don’t think it generates any money for Google (if anything, it costs machine resources and engineer cycles to tackle malware), but it does improve the web as malware gets taken down faster. I guess there could be an indirect effect as people trust the web more and maybe surf more, which is good for everybody.

Two million articles on Wikipedia? Yoiks.

Color-coding Wikipedia entries for trustworthiness.

Online database of registered dog minders (Australia).

Amazon’s new payment options.

Grant to develop a digital archive for archaeologists.

National Digital Archive of Nambian Culture.

Site devoted to eye health information.

Upcoming: digital archive of missionary work.

OT: The Bear Stearns Golf Index. Heh.