Imagine a day without any news headline. Well, that’s what’s happening to Google News today... it’s showing empty fields for all the topics, across various country versions (including the US one at news.google.com). Some test searches I tried didn’t yield any results either. People had been reporting problems since some days already, but this scope seems to be new.

[Thanks Mathias Schindler, Sohil, TomHTML, Ido Kenan & Reto Meier!]

Update: I can see some entries back already, it almost looks like Google News is being refilled at the moment.

Update 2: And it’s back.

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

Google users who accessed the search engine from the San Francisco area yesterday were served an all black version of the Google Homepage. No, Google is not caving in to the ‘Blackle‘ energy saving movement, which insists that by switching over to a black homepage Google will contribute to energy conservation around the world; instead Google is working with the city of San Francisco to raise awareness of the Lights Out San Francisco energy conservation project.

Google users in the San Francisco Bay Area will notice today that we “turned the lights out” on the Google.com homepage as a gesture to raise awareness of a citywide energy conservation event called Lights Out San Francisco.

On Saturday, October 20, 2007, Lights Out San Francisco invites the entire city of San Francisco to install one compact fluorescent light bulb (CFL) and turn off all lights for one hour, from 8:00 pm to 9:00 pm PDT. According to estimates, turning the lights out in San Francisco for even one hour could save as much as 15 percent of the energy consumed on an average Saturday night.

Given our company’s commitment to environmental awareness and energy efficiency, we strongly support the Lights Out campaign, and have darkened our homepage today to help spread awareness of what we hope will be a highly successful citywide event.

If Google switched to a permanent black homepage design would it save energy in the long run? Google says not really:

We’re committed to reducing the effects of climate change by promoting energy efficiency, but current evidence doesn’t suggest that a permanent change to a black background would be beneficial to either the environment or our users.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[Craig] Silverstein, now director of technology, explains that, from the earliest days, Brin and Page envisaged a super-connected computer. "The vision of search has always been broader than has been portrayed in the press," he says. (...) He recalls one example that shows that Brin and Page imagined that one day even the smallest "stuff" would be online. "When we were doing the first research, we used to eat in Whole Foods [an organic supermarket chain]. We talked about using search to find out what aisle the salt is on. Instead of having to look at the big signs at the top of each aisle, you could use a search engine to tell you where in the store everything is, and maybe graph it out for you."

Brin and Page were obsessed with recording, categorising and indexing anything and everything, and then making it available to anyone with internet access because they genuinely believed - and still do - that it is a morally good thing to do. It may sound hopelessly hippie-ish and wildly hypocritical coming from a couple of guys worth £10 billion each, but Brin and Page insist they are not, and never have been, in it for the money. They see themselves as latter-day explorers, mapping human knowledge so that others can find trade routes in the new information economy.

Instead of worrying that they are going too far, Google's top team talk, with poker faces, about a "300-year mission" that will eventually see almost everything - including, perhaps, one day you and me - linked to the web and searchable online. (...) Google's techno-dream comes in three bytes. The first is loosely referred to as "universal search". Scribbling frantically on a whiteboard, Mayer, Google's head of search products and user experience, says the web is currently "very limited and primitive". It consists mainly of words, images and some music, mostly created in the last few years. There is much, much more that could - and should - be online. At its simplest level, this includes every film, TV show, video or radio broadcast ever made; every book, academic paper, pamphlet, government document, map, chart and blog ever published in any language anywhere; and any piece of music ever recorded. Google is currently developing new software that will scan millions of new sources of information to give richer search results. (...) Mayer and co argue that to be true to its mission statement of "organising all the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful", Google should be about more than searching for words, images and music; it should be about finding objects and, eventually, people. Any item that can be fitted with a radio-frequency identifier - an electronic tag called an RFID - can be linked to the internet over local or national WiFi networks.

The second part of Google's techno-dream is "personalised search". (...) Google wants us to sign up for iGoogle on our PC, and also to install it, along with Gmail, Google Maps and Google Earth software, on our mobile phone, so that it knows not just who we are but where we are in the world, 24 hours a day, thanks to the satellite-positioning chips starting to be included in mobile phones. "Our goal is that you can, if you want, search for anything, anywhere, any time," says Douglas Merrill, 37, Google's chief information officer.

The final piece of the Google future is called "cloud computing". Instead of using the internet to search for information that we then copy and use to work on documents stored on the hard drives of our computers, using the software on those computers, Google wants us to create all our documents online, to work on them online using Google's web-based software, and to store them online on Google's vast global network of servers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If you’re visiting Google.com from San Francisco today, you might see it showing a black background color with the text “We’ve turned the lights out. Now it’s your turn.” Google in an explanatory page say they’re doing this as “a gesture to raise awareness of a citywide energy conservation event called Lights Out San Francisco.” More info on the event is available at LightsOutSF.org. And if you want a permanently dark search homepage, you can boomark Blackle.com, though Google says a black background color doesn’t actually save energy...

[Via Google OS. Screenshot taken by Mr. G.K..]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

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."

Lifehacker information overload making you want to just hit "Mark all as read"? Turn down the volume with our daily, trimmed-down top stories feed or once-weekly highlights feed. This week's best posts include:

• Get Organized with Remember the Milk
  "Remember the Milk's got all the best features modern webapps have to offer: email/SMS/IM integration, tagging, advanced search, keyboard shortcuts and even offline access with Google Gears."
• Easy Ways to Live Greener
  "Last Monday, we put out a call for your best ways to live greener, and as usual, Lifehacker readers did not disappoint."
• A Look at Ubuntu 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon" RC1
  "Gutsy Gibbon's not a major Long Term Support release, it's not a radical re-thinking of the system, but it is another step toward a Linux system that just works."
• The Power Traveler's Checklist, Part One: Pre-Flight
  "If you're planning to fly the friendly skies this Thanksgiving or Chrismukkah, you've either already bought your tickets or you're about to."
• Top 10 Distraction Stoppers
  "Most desktop software and web sites are built to grab your attention in one way or another, and the constant temptations are tough to resist."
• Is Mint Ready for Your Money?
  "After just four weeks of their public beta, financial management web site Mint is already boasting over 50,000 members and managing over $2 billion of their money."
• Windows Tip: Hibernate vs. Standby
  "Quick: What's the difference between putting your PC in Hibernate or Standby mode? Yeah, we weren't sure either."
• Google Releases Gmail Mobile 1.5
  "Version 1.5 adds the ability to search your mail, easy access to your contacts list, more efficient data usage that reduces bandwidth consumption (and load time), and more configurable settings."
• What's New in the Other 'Buntus
  "A new version release for Ubuntu can feel like a Linux version of a dysfunctional family reunion for some users--they watch the oldest, most popular sibling get all the attention, wondering when their own unique qualities will get noticed."
• First Look at Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac
  "Mac users have been waiting since 2004 for an update to Microsoft's ubiquitous office suite, and especially eagerly since Apple switched to Intel processors."

Brian McAndrews, senior vice president of Microsoft's Advertiser Publisher Solutions Group stated during a panel discussion at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco Thursday that Google is getting too much credit for conversions when they are the last place someone visits before making a purchase etc. - when the person usually visits numerous places before the final search is made.

McAndrews was talking about Microsoft's plan to launch conversion attribution tracking - where the user's previous ad exposure etc. is attached to longer tailed tracking.

Click to read the rest of this post...

This week Microsoft launched their voice activated local search service, Live Search 411, which harnesses the technology behind Microsoft acquisition Tellme to deliver local, maps, directions and web results to mobile phone users after the ease of a telephone call.

Phones are made to speak into, not typing, so voice activated search makes total sense. Microsoft and Google now have their respected offerings, with Google’s 1-800-GOOG-411 and Microsoft’s 1-800-CALL-411.

Yahoo is still working on voice search, as they’ve mastered their Yahoo OneSearch mobile search offering, but have not gone public with a voice input option.

Live Search 411 features include (from the LiveSearch blog):

• Connect to any business listing you find-for free
• Receive SMS links to maps, driving directions and traffic conditions (just say “text me the info”)
• Get movie showtimes and even buy tickets over the phone (via our partnership with Fandango)
• Share text messages of business details with friends so they can easily meet you there
• Hear the current weather conditions and the forecast
• Quickly access travel resources like airlines, hotels, and rental cars
• Remember your personalized locations for movie theaters, weather and traffic, and your preferences for receiving text messages.

Google’s Webmaster Tools’ top search queries just got better with the expansion of its time  coverage, top query percentage and search data upload via CSV format.

From the previous 7 days historical data reporting of search queries, the webmasters tools now reports historical search data as far back as six months ago. This means you’ll get a pretty view of which keywords gives significant amount of hits and page visits to your sites. You can see snapshots of top search queries on a monthly, bimonthly or quarterly basis. Unfortunately, the system might be having some bug though as top search queries for my personal blog is not showing any statistics yet.

Another improvement of the top search queries is the inclusion of top query percentages. Each query is ranked in relation to the other top ranking queries. Previously, webmaster tools just ranks query results and click and did not analyze each query in relation to the other top queries.

And lastly, you can now download this top query data in to CSV format just like the other useful webmaster data.

These three enhancements of the Google webmaster tools’ reporting system would indeed be very useful for SEO work, as it gives valuable information regarding relevance of keywords used in your blogs or websites and whether those keywords are actually driving traffic to your sites/blogs.

Google sitelinks are the navigational links displayed in search results, below a site (this typically happens for your site if you search for the site’s title, but note it only happens for some sites out there). Google determines these sitelinks automatically so you usually don’t have a say in that, but now you can disable specific sitelinks. Just go to the Google Webmaster Tools, verify your site in question, and switch to the Links -> Sitelinks menu entry.

I can see the menu entry but don’t see the option to disable sitelinks yet for one of my sites which has sitelinks, but as I only verified that site just now, maybe it simply takes a bit of time. The official Google Webmaster Blog though posted a screenshot of what it should look like.

In related news, Search Engine Land reports that sometimes, up to 8 sitelinks will be displayed now instead of the usual 4. Can anyone find an example for that?

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

Google Trends measures the frequency of certain keywords searched in Google. Nic Pfost sends in the following question:

<<I thought you might be interested in this trend I stumbled upon while tooling around with Google Trends:

google.com/trends?q=flowers%2C+sex%2C+m...

Apparently, people search for the word “Google” on Google more than they do for “music”, “movies”, “flowers”, even “sex”. And it’s happened in the last couple months.

Any idea why people are searching for “Google” on Google itself??>>

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

Blogsearch being redirected to Baidu in China, new reports have surfaced that would indicate that China has unilaterally blocked all three major search engines in China and is redirecting all requests to Baidu. More on Google Blogoscoped.