Wow, PubCon was a blast. I can’t even begin to go into a full recap, so I’ll mention a few of my favorite things:

- talking to a ton of people. I saw lots of familiar faces, but I was (happily) surprised at how many people came up just to introduce themselves and chat for a bit. Some people wanted to report spam or discuss why a site might have been penalized and some people just wanted to say hello. I also did 3-4 video interviews that should eventually show up somewhere on the web.

- playing Werewolf Search Spam. Rand and Co did a great job on the party and printing up a custom deck of cards. I answered questions at the “Meet the Google Engineers” event beforehand, so I only had time to play a couple games. In the last game of the evening, I got to be a blackhat/werewolf. I realized that the person to my left was the healer (”Danny Sullivan” in this game), and decided to pretend to be the healer myself. Then I realized that the person to my right was the seer (”Matt Cutts” in this game. I know — my head hurt too.). As the “whitehat healer” I convinced the other villagers to lynch the seer. I got voted out early in the game, but enough people believed I was the healer (hi Jonah!) that the villagers voted out the real healer soon afterwards. With no healer or seer left alive, the two remaining blackhats played like pros and won. Just so you know, if there’s video of me celebrating with a little dance and chanting “Blackhats rule! Blackhats Rule!”, that’s why. I was just celebrating our team’s victory.

- Andy Beal took my new favorite picture of me during my keynote Q&A:

(Image used under a Creative Commons License.)

- Speaking of the keynote, at one point I talked about how Search Engine Roundtable did a nice write-up of how to report AdSense spam. I thought that Barry Schwartz did the post, but in fact Tamar Weinberg had done the post. Thanks to Tamar Weinberg being in the front row, I was quickly able to correct myself.

- I got a kick out of how many Googlers participated this year. Just a few years ago, I was one of the only people representing Google at PubCon. At one conference (2005?), I did five presentations and totally lost my voice. This time around, the numbers were reversed. Four people from our webspam team (plus several other Google colleagues) spoke on panels, and that’s not even counting Aaron D’Souza, who spoke at SES Chicago. This year I’ve been trying to step out of the spotlight a little bit to make room for more Googlers to communicate. It’s really wonderful to see just how many Googlers are talking with webmasters and SEOs these days.

- In the Las Vegas airport on the way out of town, four other people were riding the tram to terminal D. Three of them were SEOs, and we had a nice chat.

Google’s services, like Gmail, have privacy policies, but I think it’s not always clear what is meant with sentences like “Google maintains and processes your Gmail account and its contents” (what does this processing consist of? Under what circumstances is which Google employee involved in reading your emails, for instance?). I asked Google who of their employees gets access to email contents. Also, I asked them whether or not Google Talk chats which were flagged with the “off-the-record” option would really not be permantly recorded. Here is their answer (my emphasis in bold; take their statements with whatever level of trust or doubt you deem appropriate):

<<We take our users’ privacy very seriously. We restrict access to personal information to Google employees who need to know that information in order to operate, develop or improve our services. They must agree in writing to special restrictions designed to protect our users’ privacy, and violation of these restrictions is grounds for immediate termination.

For Gmail, only a very small set of Gmail-team employees interacts with user data and – importantly – only accesses the minimum amount of user data required for their task. The vast majority of tasks involve looking only at details about the message, not the content of the mail itself. For example, a debugging task or an abuse prevention task might require just the message header.

We are continually looking for ways to automate tools or processes to further reduce the need for even this limited set of people to view systems with personal information.

As for your Google Talk question: When a user takes a chat ’off the record,’ anything exchanged from that point forward is not saved in either user’s Gmail account or anywhere by Google.>>

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

On Thursday, Google rolled out the new Google Charts API, which makes putting stunning, dynamic charts into your web pages easier than you’d think. And don’t let the term “API” scare you off with this one. The new Google Charts API is perhaps one of the simplest Google APIs to learn to date, and you don’t have to be a brilliant programmer to figure it out.

The Charts API was original created by Google’s Zurich team for use internally. You may recognize the charts, as they have appeared countless times in Google Video and Google Finance. Now Google has opened up the technology to the masses, and I fully expect to see these charts popping up in a lot more places soon. (more…)

Founded by two engineering students at the beginning of this millennium, PicSearch is a multi-language, image search engine that rivals Google’s and Yahoo’s image search service, with a database of more than 1.7 billion images. The engine also indexes video and audio files.

As always, the firm uses patented technology for measuring relevancy and “family-friendliness” of manages. Family-friendliness implies an automatic filter on nudity, pornography and violence. The engine also deploys its own indexer and crawler (Psbot). (more…)

* Upload to Picasa Web Albums
Use the new "Web Album" button to post your best photos online to share with friends and family.

* Save edits to disk
Save edits, undo saves, and revert to the original file with ease. We've got batch saving too! Picasa will even match the jpeg quality of the original. Right-click on your saved files to try the new "locate original" feature.

* Folder hierarchy views
Browse through folders Explorer-style. Use the button at the top of your Albums List to try them out.

* Improvements to Import
Import into an existing folder. (...) We've made importing photos from your camera faster too.

* Better RAW support
Now you can work with RAW files from the Canon 30D, the Nikon D200, Adobe DNG files, and more.

* Many other enhancements
Larger thumbnails, better caption editing, ability to configure the row of buttons, special "Starred Photos" album, search by ISO and focal length.

Fastest fingers in the West

GWT Conference Just as Microsoft was brushing aside claims that Volta, its latest .NET programming toolkit, is a Google Web Toolkit (GWT) clone, Google has disclosed how it plans to open the gap on rivals with the next release of its popular AJAX toolkit.…

No Google clone

As the mad scientists in Microsoft's Live Labs threw the switch on an experimental developer toolset this week the company was already getting flack for copying somebody else - Google.…

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."

Earlier this week, Google launched the Google Mac Developer Playground, a place where Google Engineers can showcase their Mac-oriented projects. In addition to their regular duties at the Googleplex, many Googlers get something called 20% time where they are allowed to work on projects of interest to them. Many spend their time working on open-source Mac projects, and this new site is a place where these projects can be shared with the world.

Right now, the Mac Developer Playground includes six “Tools & Demos”, the latest headlines from the Google Mac Blog, and a “Recent Changes” section that gives you info on the latest happenings at the Playground. Some of the tools are fully supported, while others are simply demos and still need some work. Tools & demos shown on the site include: Statz, GData, MacFUSE, iPhone Disk, Cover Story, and Quartz Composer Patches. (more…)

How do you deal with links that have tracking parameters in the URL for referrer measurement for analytical reasons or in case of a partner program where the referring site gets some form of compensation for referred traffic and/or customers?

The webmasters fear was regarding the duplicate URLs that are generated for the same page and possible negative consequences in Google or other search engines as a result of it.

This question was asked by an attendee during the panel about SEO design and organic site structure on Wednesday at Webmaster Worlds “PubCon” 2007 in Las Vegas. (more…)

Google AdWords advertisers now have new options for location targeting of their ads. The geo-targeting feature now shows advertisers an interactive map showing the locations selected for each ad. Targeting options have been made more flexible, according to the AdWords blog:

"For example, let's say you run an online store, and you ship to all of the United States except Hawaii and Alaska. With these new targeting options, you can target your campaign to the U.S. and exclude those two states. Or, you might run campaigns that are relevant to markets across the United States and a few cities in Europe -- now you can target all of those locations in one single campaign."

Advertisers can search or browse for countries, regions, and cities; select a preset bundle of locations; choose a point on the map and specify a radius around it where ads will appear; or target a custom shape on the map. In all methods, advertisers can also exclude areas within the selected locations.

Google released a chart generator service they are calling the Google Chart API. Usage is quite straightforward: you link to an image in the form of a parameterized URL, e.g. (line break added)

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=
p3&chd=t:90,49&chs=350x150&chl=Foo|Bar

... and Google returns a PNG graphic containing the chart. For instance, above URL results in the following image:

Splitting up the image URL parameters, you can see what it's made up of:

cht=p3

chd=t:90,49

chs=350x150

chl=Foo|Bar

I'm not linking live to Google but caching this image on my server instead, just in case, as Google limits your requests to this API to 50,000 per day. Even with that limit, you can grab the image and do the caching on your own server automatically (by copying the binary), which would mean 50,000 requests will be good enough for many use cases.

This service is really neat all in all. The last time I wanted to do a dynamic 3D pie chart as above, I used some PHP scripts (accessing the GD image library) which were ugly to configure, and not just because the code was obfuscated to make it hard to remove "created by" messages in the image. Then again I'm not sure the Google Charts API does everything other services can do, and we also don't know how long they will keep up support for it – think of other half-cancelled APIs like the Google SOAP API (and there doesn't seem to be a quick way for Google to make money from the Google Chart API yet... adding ads would be too noisy for users for this purpose, and there's no way to make the ad clickable anyway).

Here are a couple of more examples of what can be done with the Chart API (cached again, but click them to see a live parametrized version):

Also see how you can kidnap Google Page Creator's image generator.

[Via Google Code blog. Thanks Reto!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]

Some of you posted feedback that your Google Account was suddenly disabled. John Welch said when he tried to log-in yesterday, he received the following error:

<<Sorry, your account has been disabled. For more information about Google Accounts, please consult our Help Center at http://www.google.com/support/accounts/.>>

Paul B. says, “Crap! I’ve been using gmail since 04, and I just [convinced] my wife to stop using outlook and start using gmail this weekend. With IMAP suuport I was easily able to get her old email into gmail and last night BOOM, ’Sorry, your account has been disabled.’ What the freak is going on!”

(I’ve contacted Google for comment and will update should they reply.)

[Thanks John Welch!]

[By Philipp Lenssen | Original post | Comments]