Google started to display text ads above the search results from Picasa Web Albums. In the recent months, Google turned to the services that weren't yet monetized to improve its financial performances: Google Image Search, Google News, Google Finance and now Picasa Web Albums.
"We've been testing different advertising formats for years (some have been more successful than others), and over the next few months, you'll see us continuing to experiment with new ads in new places. (...) Whenever we make changes like these, we carefully evaluate users' reactions to ensure we're holding true to our basic principles: that ads by Google should always be relevant and useful. Of course, these experiments benefit Google because they generate revenue from new sources — but by ensuring that we show the right ads at the right time to the right people, we'll add value for users too," explained Google in November.
Now that the revenues from advertising grow much slower than in the past, Google will probably launch more paid services like the App Engine or Google Apps Premier Edition. Even Google Checkout, a service that has been subsidized by Google for years, will use the same processing fees as PayPal from May.
The word processor from Google Docs lacks a sorting feature for tables, but Firefox users can try an extension that adds the missing feature. Install TableTools, the best extension for managing tables, restart the browser and open the document that includes tables.
To use the extension, you need to right-click on the table and select one of the available options: sorting, filtering, copying data as tab-delimited text or as HTML. Google Docs replaces Firefox's contextual menu, so it's necessary to press Shift + Right-click in order to bring back the original menu. Select from the menu "Sort table column as" and choose the appropriate data type.
If you want to copy a table from Google Docs to Google Spreadsheets, select the cells, choose from the contextual menu: "Other table operations < Copy as tab-delimited text", and paste the text in a spreadsheet using Ctrl+V. Unfortunately, the filtering feature from TableTools doesn't work in a rich-text editor, but it's very useful if you visit a web page that includes long tables.
Hitwise reported that Google's market share in the US was 72.11% in February. "Yahoo Search, MSN Search and Ask.com received 17.04%, 5.56% and 3.74%, respectively, and are down year-over-year at -17%, -20%, and -10% respectively." comScore has different numbers and they show that Google's market share in the US is much lower: 63.3%.
A report from the AT Internet Institute shows that Google's market share in France was 91.23% for February 2009. The major search engines that trailed Google were Yahoo (2.43%) and Live Search (2.29%).
Most of the news articles that discuss Google's market share only include the US, but it's interesting to see how popular Google is around the world. That's why I created a Google Spreadsheet where you can enter Google's market share in your country. Make sure to provide a reliable source for your information and to include recent data. The spreadsheet can be edited by anyone and it's not necessary to log in using a Google account.
"Google, la machine à penser" ("Google, the Thinking Machine") is a 50-minute documentary produced in 2007 that tries to explain Google's extraordinary success by analyzing its principles and idiosyncrasies. The documentary shows many of the things that define Google's corporate culture: from the colorful lava lamps, the hiring process to the recreation facilities and the internal debates.
Michael Malone, columnist at Wall Street Journal, describes Google as an "enormous predator" that manages to dominate almost any market it enters. In his opinion, Google is a huge organization that takes pragmatic and sometimes cynical decisions, while trying to portray a friendly image. At some point, a Google engineer says that Google Analytics is the most used analytics service because it's free and it works equally well for personal use and business use.
Unfortunately, the video is in French and I couldn't find an English subtitle, but there are many images from Googleplex that could be interesting even without a translation.
Google Voice is the name of the updated version of GrandCentral that runs on Google's infrastructure. At this time, the service is only available in the US to the existing GrandCentral users, but Google promises to extend its availability soon. The good news is that GrandCentral will continue to be free and you'll only have to pay for international calls.
"Google Voice gives you one number for all your phones -- a phone number that is tied to you, not to a device or a location. Use Google Voice to simplify the way you use phones, make using voicemail as easy as email, customize your callers' experience, and more. Google Voice isn't a phone service, but it lets you manage all of your phones. Google Voice works with mobile phones, desk phones, work phones, and VoIP lines. There's nothing to download, upload, or install, and you don't have to make or take calls using a computer," explains the new help center.
Google Voice Blog mentions that the service added many new features: "voicemail transcription, SMS support, conference calling, GOOG-411 integration, low cost international calling". Voicemails are now searchable, you can embed them in a web page and you can receive email notifications. Text messages sent to your Google number are automatically forwarded to your mobile phone and they are also available in the web account, where you can reply to the incoming messages.
The following videos show how to use Google's new voice service:
To request a notification when Google Voice becomes publicly available, use this form. "We expect to have the service ready for new users in a matter of weeks, and are focused on opening it as soon as possible," promises Google.
* it's not important to get the top rankings, users often click on the next pages of results to find appropriate images. There are many "subjective" queries and users tend to explore instead of trying to find the perfect result.
* use images that are large enough.
* use high-quality images.
* include descriptive text next to the images.
* place the images so that it's not necessary to scroll too much in order to find them.
* Google Image Search clusters (almost) identical images and usually only one of them is displayed. If more than one page embeds the image, Google tries to find the most relevant page for that query.
* there are many new use cases for Image Search: inspiration, visual dictionary for foreign languages, shopping, research.
As part of the integration with DoubleClick, Google announced last year that it would use DoubleClick's DART cookies to improve the way ads are displayed on the Google content network. The list of improvements included in-depths reports for advertisers and preventing ads from being displayed too frequently to the same user. "We are enabling this functionality by implementing a DoubleClick ad-serving cookie across the Google content network," mentioned Google at that time.
The integration will soon expand since Google intends to offer behavioral targeting or interest-based advertising, as Google likes to call it. "We think we can make online advertising even more relevant and useful by using additional information about the websites people visit. Today we are launching interest-based advertising as a beta test on our partner sites and on YouTube. These ads will associate categories of interest — say sports, gardening, cars, pets — with your browser, based on the types of sites you visit and the pages you view. We may then use those interest categories to show you more relevant text and display ads," explains a post from the Official Google Blog.
The DoubleClick cookie contains a unique ID that is associated with all your visited pages that include ads served by DoubleClick. If you're visiting a lot of pages related to music, Google will place you in one of the 600 predefined categories (most likely, music enthusiasts) and will use this information to show more ads about music. For now, Google will use interest-based targeting to show better ads when the content of a web page doesn't include enough information to serve contextual ads.
Google also launched a page where you can enter a list of categories that reflect your interests. If you don't likely the new targeting options, the same page offers two ways to opt-out: either by setting a special opt-out DoubleClick cookie or by installing an add-on that protects your cookie. Another option is to block all the cookies sent from doubleclick.net. Google promises to offer an option for AdSense publishers to disable interest-based targeting, but the publishers still need to change the privacy policy to reflect the new features.
While behavioral targeting is not new and manyothercompanies are using it, Google tried to alleviate the worries about profiling users: it won't create sensitive interest categories like race or religion and it won't cross-correlate the data with other information saved in Google accounts.
Google tries to use the enormous reach of the content network (75% globally) to attract more display ads, but the risk could be too high: Google's ads were perceived as non-intrusive, relevant and complementary to the page where they were placed. Focusing more on display ads, using recently visited pages to target ads to users could change that perception and Google will lose its most important asset: user trust.
Google Noticeboard is an application that helps people access and share information over the Internet using public digital noticeboards. Using Google Noticeboard, communities can access a variety of relevant information. People can create text messages or record voice snippets and post them to one or more noticeboards. Typically each digital noticeboard carries publicly accessible messages. Compared to the notion of personal communication using email accounts, the Noticeboard metaphor allows user to engage in public communication with communities.
Communities with access to shared computers can use the Noticeboard for exchanging messages related to community announcements, social interactions, local buying and selling, and information that is of wider interest to the community. The Noticeboard may also be used for the community to engage in a dialog with benefactors, public servants, and other service providers who are geographically distant. For example, residents of an apartment complex can use the Noticeboard for posting announcements, or NGOs who own and operate computer centers in several villages can use the Noticeboard to enable village residents to communicate amongst themselves
Noticeboard uses a Firefox extension and requires to enable IMAP in Gmail to send messages. The service seems to be aimed at people that don't own computer and don't have an email address, but the interface is very basic and limiting. Google Noticeboard's user guide (PDF) has more information.
Google Video started to diminish the importance of the uploading feature by placing the "upload" link at the bottom of the homepage. What's surprising is that uploading videos to Google Video now requires Google Gears so you can upload huge files simultaneously (up to 1 GB) and see the progress.
In January, Google announced that it will discontinue support for uploads to Google Video in a few months. "We've always maintained that Google Video's strength is in the search technology that makes it possible for people to search videos from across the web, regardless of where they may be hosted. And this move will enable us to focus on developing these technologies further to the benefit of searchers worldwide."
Even though Google owns YouTube, a much more popular video hosting service, Google Video attracts a different audience that watches longer videos and doesn't like the extraneous social features from services like YouTube. Google could use the same back-end for both services and promote Google Video as the place where you can watch Charlie Rose's interviews, interviews from the archive of American Television or public domain movies.
Next time when you can't access Gmail, Google Calendar is down or Google Docs loads very slowly, visit the Google Apps Status Dashboard. Despite its the name, the page shows the latest status data not just for the Google services that are included in Google Apps, but for the corresponding consumer services as well.
"[The] page offers performance information for Google Apps services. Unless otherwise noted, this status information applies to consumer services as well as services for organizations using Google Apps."
Today's status for Gmail informs that "a small subset of users" couldn't access Gmail and that the service has been restored for most of the affected users in about 3 hours. "The rest of the users should be coming back online within the next 24-36 hours."
Looking back at the historical data, it's clear that the Google application which has the most issues is Gmail. Another Google service that shows a detailed status dashboard is Google App Engine and it would be nice to show similar information for other Google services.
Five years after its release, Gmail is still a beta application. Gmail continues to add significant features, but most of the interesting ideas are now in Gmail Labs: tasks, offline Gmail, sending SMS or adding iGoogle gadgets.
It makes sense to add experimental features in the Labs section and remove the "beta" label from Gmail's logo. Felipe Zamorano, a reader of this blog, noticed that the Gmail logos created for some of the themes have two versions: one that includes "beta" and another one without "beta".
Google has recently launched a Labs section for APIs and started to add deprecation policies for the APIs that graduated from Labs. "For these graduates, we're increasing our commitment with published deprecation policies and other critical support services. The Visualization API terms, Contacts Data API terms, and Picasa Web Albums Data API terms include good examples of transparent deprecation policies. They state that we'll support each version for at least 3 years from when it's deprecated or a newer version is introduced."
Maybe it's time to show the same commitment for popular applications like Gmail or Google Calendar and drop the "beta" label.
