Google Webmaster tools

Vanessa Fox has published the last post from Inside Google Sitemaps...

We're surrounded by moving boxes and construction dust. To better reflect our goal to provide tools and information to keep you, the webmasters, informed and help you increase your crawl coverage and visibility on Google, we're renaming Google Sitemaps to Google webmaster tools. The Sitemaps protocol remains unchanged and Sitemaps submission mechanisms and reporting is still available from the Sitemaps tab. We're also renaming our blog and Google Group to be more broadly focused on webmaster topics.

You can find handy links to all the tools, the new blog, Google Group, help center and more from our newly launched Google webmaster central. Join us at the blog's new location at googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com where you'll learn about all the exciting things we're planning. Oh, and please don't forget to update your bookmarks and feed!

So, what's new ?

• new name
• new design
• new RSS feed that you have to add to your RSS reader
• ... and that's all.

Other features are expected, but for the moment there's nothing new. And http://www.google.com/webmasters/ works only in English at this time. I have discovered a kind of "AOL issue" with a tool from Sitemaps called "site status wizard" : an example with this blog. But there's nothing really disturbing.

EDIT : Sorry, I was too fast, or Sitemaps Webmaster tools team was too slow. There are new features in this update : "preferred domain", downloading query stats, seeing revamped crawl errors, "manage site verification" and more.

Google Maps : Saved Locations

Google Maps shows a new link at the top of the screen called "Saved Location". This feature is available in all Google Maps versions.

You can save your searches, add a label to the locations, choose your location by default. Google Suggest is built-in: in this example (screenshot), if you type "G", Google Maps allows you to select directly Googleplex or Google France.

These features have already been available on Google Maps' competitors for a while...

Find IP Location With Google Maps

SEOmoz has created a tool that allows you to enter an IP and to locate it on Google Maps. The application uses Ajax so it will display the map as you type (it's useful to test Class C IP ranges).

So next time you find a strange IP in your stats, or when you want to find the address of someone and you know only the IP, use this mashup. The results are not extremely accurate as there are many ways to hide the IP and many machines are behind a NAT.


Note: I'll be gone in a short vacation, but that doesn't mean I won't be around. Starting from tomorrow TomHTML from Zorgloob will keep you company. He asked me to tell you he's not fluent in English, but I'm not either.

Tough Questions From Google Job Interviews

There are many stories about job interviews at Google. But the most interesting part of any story is the list of questions:

Zach had a phone interview in October 2005 and he was asked things like:

"Google gets queries from around the world. Write a function that will return a two character string representing a country code given an IP address as its input."

Here is the answer:

"Essentially, you have to create a tree structure with the country codes as the leaves at the very bottom. I chose to split the IP addresses by octets. So the top level would contain all of the starting and ending numbers corresponding to the first octet on the IP address. So this tree structure would be very wide but only 4 levels deep."

---

Pete Abilla was a little luckier and knew how to answer this question:
"You are at a party with a friend and 10 people are present including you and the friend. Your friend makes you a wager that for every person you find that has the same birthday as you, you get $1; for every person he finds that does not have the same birthday as you, he gets $2. Would you accept the wager?"

"The answer has to do with the number of days in the year and the probability the person’s birthday falls on the same day as mine (without replacement). I eventually solved it, but it took time learning how to apply probability with no replacement."

---

An interesting problem from Google's aptitude test:
Given a triangle ABC, how would you use only a compass and straight edge to find a point P such that triangles ABP, ACP, and BCP have equal perimeters? (Assume that ABC is constructed so that a solution does exist.)

---

The moderator of gamedev.net had a phone interview with rather odd questions:

Explain a database in three sentences to your eight-year-old nephew.

How many gas stations would you say there are in the United States?

You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and your mass is proportionally reduced so as to maintain your original density. You are then thrown into an empty glass blender. The blades will start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?

---

Niniane Wang, who works at Google, has some tips for a job interview:

# Practice using the same medium (e.g. paper and pencil) and time limits (e.g. 30 minutes) as the real interview.
# During the interview, don't obsess over little mistakes that happen.
# Don't be rude to your interviewer.
# Don't hijack the interview (if you really want to talk about a project, ask your interviewer).
# When answering questions expecting a specific answer, give a high-level summary first.

So if you want to work at Google, get ready and good luck!

RealPlayer, Spartan Version

Many people dislike RealPlayer, a software with a bad reputation and an intricated interface. While there are many tricks to play Real media files without using RealPlayer, Scott, a read of this blog, found an interesting version of RealPlayer that does its job without displaying ads and without unneeded features: RealPlayer for Enterprise.

"RealPlayer Enterprise gives you the best of RealPlayer you know and use at home, but without advertising, without requiring registration, and without consumer features that don't belong in the workplace."

The software actually does one thing: it plays files. You'll be surprised by the spartan interface and by the small numbers of options in the menu.

You can read more about RealPlayer for Enterprise here. To download the setup, you need to complete a registration form (the email doesn't need to be valid).

This is a version from 2004, so don't expect a slick interface.

Malware Warnings on Google Search Results

Someone sent me a very nice tip: Google started to show malware warnings for some of the search results. If you search for list keygen mirc (which is a bad thing, but mIRC should be free anyway), and click on the first result, Google will display this page:


Of course, you can still go to the page, but Google warned you.

Google and Sun Microsystems fund a non-profit anti-spyware group called StopBadware and this is one of Google's contributions to the project. "StopBadware.org was established in an effort to preserve this positive ability to generate and share information by exploring ways to solve the badware problem. With the advice and input of a panel of internet experts, we isolated seven categories of behaviors that many users reported as unwanted in software they download: deceptive installations, unclearly identification, causing harm to other computers, modifying other software, transmitting user data, interfering with computer use, and being difficult to uninstall completely."

It's interesting to see if the list of results that include malware has been compiled manually or algorithmically. Google usually doesn't like the manual approach.

There are many solutions that provide safety ratings for sites. One of the most popular is SiteAdvisor, a plug-in for Internet Explorer and Firefox. When you search with Google, SiteAdvisor displays different colors (green, yellow, red) next to the search results to show you if they are safe.

{ Thanks for the tip, Anoymous. }

Reverse Phonebook Lookup

Back in 2002 (and later) people were worried about a new feature of Google:

Andrew Cory recently emailed me to say that you can get a person's name, address, and directions to their home by simply typing their phone number into Google.

I tried it with our phone number and it didn't work. However, I tried it with another phone number and it worked immediately. Just try it--go to Google and enter a phone number. Drop the dashes and just enter it without spaces, i.e. "7345551212".

I don't know how many people are affected but this but frankly it strikes me as pretty creepy. It also may not be illegal, but I suspect that it probably should be. There's a presumption of privacy when you give out your phone number, you don't expect people to find out where you live simply based on it--indeed, it's already illegal for phone companies to give out this kind of info.

The reverse phonebook lookup allows you to enter a phone number with area code and find the address of the person or business. People thought it's an invasion of privacy to just enter someone phone number and find such precious details. But Google saw it in another perspective:

The intent of all of our services--from Google Web Search to Google News--is to organize and provide easy access to publicly available information. Due to the vast amount of data that we aggregate, many individuals become aware via a Google search that their personal information is publicly available. For this reason, we make it easy to remove your listing from our PhoneBook.

Google has combined two services already available: reverse phone directory look-ups and mapping/driving directions with MapQuest and people thought it's something new.

This feature, available only for the US, is a part of a bigger project that allows you to find listings for US residences and businesses. You can use one of the following formats for residences:

* first name, last name, city
* first name, last name, state
* first name, last name, area code
* first name, last name, zip code
* phone number, including area code
* last name, city, state
* last name, zip code

... and for businesses:

* business name, city, state
* business name, zip code
* phone number, including area code

For example: John Smith, CA or Google, Mountain View, CA.

What seems to be intriguing is that the reverse phonebook lookup doesn't work anymore. You can't enter a phone number and find the address. Has Google finally decided this is a privacy breach and silently removed the feature? Of course, there's a great to chance to find a business by entering the phone number (they all have contact pages), but what about the persons? The feature is still available in White Pages.

Update: I tried to use this from my non-US location and with a US proxy.

Picasa Web Albums Uploader For Mac

iPhoto is one of the coolest software for Mac, or maybe not. Google heard that many people complained about Mac's photo management tool and started to work on a Mac version of Picasa.

Until Picasa is released for Mac, Google has created a small utility that allows you to upload your albums to Picasa Web Albums (you can upload photos from the web too, but it's not easy if you have many). You can upload the albums from iPhoto or using a standalone utility. You just need to download a small application and have a Picasa Web Albums invitation from Google.

I know some of the visitors of this blog use Mac (around 6%), so I'd be grateful if someone tries the tool and shares his/her impressions. Some screenshots would be nice too.

Related:
Convert Windows XP into a Mac
Google software for Mac: Video Player, Google Earth, Sketchup

Google Earth Helps Science

Google Earth is probably the most appreciated Google software and it's based on Keyhole, a commercial software that's now free. When it was acquired, Google said "with Keyhole, you can fly like a superhero from your computer at home to a street corner somewhere else in the world" and that's true. Google Earth allows you to view the world from your armchair, to discover secret corners and to explore dangerous places. It's like being Phileas Fogg from the famous book by Jules Verne, Around the World in 80 Days. But Google Earth is also valuable from a scientific perspective, as it creates a 3D interface for geographic information. Spiegel explains how Google Earth is changing the science and our life as well:

"Google Earth wasn't really intended for scientists. The Google search engine's extraordinary globe, which is made up of hundreds of thousands of satellite photos and aerial images, was initially meant as a game for virtual hobby pilots. Users discovered that it was fun to fly over their own homes, swing up into space and, within seconds, swoop back down into the depths of the Grand Canyon. But now the scientific community is discovering how useful the software is for their own work.

With a single keystroke, biologist Born superimposes colored maps over the Arctic. The maps show him where the ice sheet is getting thinner and the direction in which the pieces of floating ice on which walruses like to catch a ride are drifting. All of the ice data, which comes from satellites and measuring buoys, is available on the Internet. [...]

Google Earth played an unexpectedly useful role in the wake of last summer's disastrous flooding in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. Within just a short time after the hurricane struck, Google Earth had already added 8,000 post-disaster aerial photographs of flooded areas taken by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA). The images allowed disaster relief workers to scan areas on the computer and search, for example, for passable roads."

Related:
Create running routes with Google Maps
New in Google Earth 4
Google Earth reveals Iran's nuclear sites

XM Radios Will Deliver Google Ads

Google has found a major client for its radio ads platform: XM Satellite Radio, a company that has over 170 pay-for-service radios with more than 6 million subscribers in the US and Canada. "As part of the deal, Google advertisers will now have a simple, automated way to reach XM's millions of subscribers nationwide and XM will have access to Google's large and small advertisers to offer relevant, targeted messages to their subscribers." Google hasn't yet integrated dMarc with Google AdWords, so the platform will be available in about 3 months.

"The dMarc platform, acquired by Google in January 2006, simplifies the sales process, scheduling, delivery and reporting of radio advertising, enabling advertisers to more efficiently purchase and track their campaigns on terrestrial radio, and now on XM Satellite Radio. For XM, Google's technology automatically schedules and inserts advertising across XM's non-music commercial channels, helping to increase revenue with a wealth of new advertisers, while decreasing the costs previously associated with processing advertisements," states the press release.

For Google, this is a very good news, as many people were afraid the new service won't be too appealing to the radios.

You can listen to some of the XM radios in Winamp. Go to Media Library / Online services / AOL radio with XM and choose from more than 20 music radios. However, Google ads will be featured in the non-music channels.

Related:
Advertising for radios
(What if...) GPS Google ads on radio

Real Player Bundles Firefox And Google Software

Forbes reports that RealNetworks, the creators of the (un)popular media player RealPlayer, have signed a two-year agreement with Mozilla to bundle Firefox with its software (RealPlayer, Rhapsody and RealArcade). They've also signed a contract with Google to distribute Google Toolbar and Google Desktop.

Google continues to focus on making distribution deals (see Dell agreement, Adobe deal) as a way of increasing its desktop presence. Google and RealNetworks have a long history: RealPlayer is bundled with Google Toolbar from 2004 and Google Pack includes RealPlayer as an optional download.

RealPlayer has a bad reputation, as it used to bundle spyware software and it has a bloated UI. It was ranked number two on the PC World's Top 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time:

"A frustrating inability to play media files--due in part to constantly changing file formats--was only part of Real's problem. RealPlayer also had a disturbing way of making itself a little too much at home on your PC--installing itself as the default media player, taking liberties with your Windows Registry, popping up annoying "messages" that were really just advertisements, and so on."

Many people have chosen to use Real Alternative to be able to play Real media files. Others install RealPlayer, but play the files with another compatible player.

But for Google, this is just another distribution deal.

Matt Cutts Answers SEO Questions

Google's interface with webmasters, Matt Cutts, answers more questions on Google Video.

Some of the questions:

Google terminology - What's the difference between an index update, an algorithm update, and a data refresh?

Static vs. Dynamic urls: does PageRank flow the same to both?

Does Google Analytics play a part in ranking web pages? [ Short answer: no. ]

Should I worry about results estimates for 1) supplemental results 2) using the site operator 3) with negated terms and 4) special syntax such as intitle? [ Short answer: no. ]

Which is more important: search engine optimization (SEO) or end user optimization? [ Short answer: both should be the same kind of optimization. ]

One of the best pieces of advice to follow is not to design a site with search engines in mind, because search engines are not your visitors (they crawl your site), they change the algorithms often and their main aim is to have great results for the users. So if you design a site with the user in mind, you'll know that even if a search engine penalizes you for a while, it will change its mind soon. So everytime you make a change to your site, ask this question: will it help the visitors?

Update: some partial transcripts are available at Google Blogoscoped (transcript 1, transcript 2).

Embed a Part of a Google Video

You could link to a part of a video, now you can set the starting point of an embedded video.

Just add this to the code generated by Google Video as an attribute of embed:

FlashVars="initialTime=2171"

The starting point is expressed in seconds, so you need to make a little conversion.

Another interesting value of FlashVars is:

FlashVars="autoPlay=true"

This way, the video starts after the page loads. This is not recommended, because a page may have more videos and users shouldn't be forced to watch your annoying video.

You can combine the values like this:

FlashVars="autoPlay=true&initialTime=2171"



{ From Google Video Blog. }

When Will You Run Out Of Gmail Storage Space?

If Gmail storage grows at a rate of about 0.33 MB per day and you use the space the same as before, is there a chance you'll run out of space? Use this simple calculator to find out (type the date in this format: Month/Day/Year).

Update (October 2007): Gmail increased the rate of growth, so if you use Gmail for a long time or you didn't use too much storage, it's likely you'll see the answer "never".

Picasa 2.5 Has Interesting Features

If you have the latest version of Picasa, namely Picasa 2.5 (available at picasa.google.com), you can find an interesting feature: search your photos by their color. You can type color:green, color:red and any other color from this list: blue, gray, yellow, orange, purple, pink, black and white (I know that black and white are not colors). It would be more useful if the photos were sorted by the predominance of the color, but you can sort them by date.

The filtering is applied as you type, so if you enter color:b, you'll see pictures that contain black spots and pictures that contain blue areas.

This type of search may be useful if you want to find a picture of someone wearing a red dress and the filenames aren't very descriptive.

Another new feature is showing duplicate files. Picasa shows only identical files, so you can delete the copies to save some space. As Picasa doesn't show the duplicate files one next to another, you can enter a keyword from their name in the search bar to show only one set of duplicates.



Picasa is integrated with Google Earth, so you can easily geotag photos (add geographical identification). Just navigate to the location depicted in the photo and press "Geotag". The photo will now have GPS latitude and longitude in the metadata. You can geotag more than one photo at a time. You can also export photos to Google Earth .kmz files, to share them with friends. Geotagging can make finding photos from a specific location an easy task.




Picasa also allows you to upload videos to Google Video. You don't have to visit the site or to use Google Video uploader. You can upload one video at a time.

All these features can be found in the Tools menu.

Related:
Picasa Web Albums
Preloard - online image editor
Use mobile phones for OCR

Create Running Routes With Google Maps

Gmap Pedometer is a site that uses Google Maps to let you record distances between two or more places. You can create routes for your running, see how many calories you're going to burn and save the route for further referencing. The author of the site explains: "As a runner training for a marathon for the first time, I found myself wishing I had an easy way to know the exact distance a certain course is, without having to drag a GPS or pedometer around on my runs." It's always a good idea to get some exercise at least once in a while, if not every day. And you can use the new iPod Nike shoes.

Related:
Google Maps with photos
Anthropomorphic Google Maps

The Next Step In Search

In the beginning, there was little content on the web so we could organize it in directories, hierarchically. Then the number of the pages has increased, and we needed search to find our way around. But searching for the text in a page wasn't enough to bring relevant results. So we looked at the links in a page, to understand the authority of a page by looking at the authority of sites that point to a page. Now we have relevancy, but the search is still textual. So the next step would be to grasp the meaning of a page and of its parts, to create a semantic web algorithmically.

Google already knows how to separate navigation of the page from the actual content, it knows how to tell bad links (affiliates, paid links) from good links, it knows the theme of a page and relevant keywords, but it can't yet divide the content into meaningful parts. If you look at product reviews, you'll find them in different places: in sites that are specialized in reviews and have a special format Google can understand (like Amazon, IMDB), in blogs, news sites, forums. Google's next step is to understand that a blog post reviews a product, to gather relevant passages, to understand if the review is positive and negative, what's good/bad about the product. So the next time you type [review iPod nano], you'll see a list of sites that review the product, grouped by positive / negative reviews and a shared vision about the product. You'll know that most people love or hate iPod Nano and their reasons in an aggregate chart.

Google could also find job descriptions, addresses, emails, events, biographies and let you search them using query-dependent parameters. The next step for Google is to structure unstructured information, and to turn the web into a Google Base.

{ Photo by Joao Bambu. }

July Recap: Improving Existing Products

This month Google didn't release too many products and focused on improving existing ones: Google Talk has the most requested features (file transfer and voicemail), Gmail lets you delete all spam and empty the trash, AdWords shows statistics for invalid clicks. Google Video adds new features and redesigns every month hoping to keep up with YouTube's growth. Google wants to attract more developers on its side and created a repository for open-source code. But this features are small compared to what we are about to see: GDrive, Google Office, improved Google Translate, Mobile Marketplace and many others. Is this the quiet before the storm?

Innovation

Google Accessible Search
Open-source project hosting (not yet Sourceforge)

Consolidation

Gmail has new features: select all spam, apply filters to old mail and select every mail from a search
Google Maps improves zoom
Google Video has international versions
Link to a specific part of a Google Video
Updated OneBox for Google Local
Live traffic information on Google Maps Mobile
Google Talk adds voicemail and file transfer

Advertising

Google is more open about click-fraud
AdSense for Radio coming soon


Future

Internal GDrive homepage leaked
More unreleased services
Google design experiments recap (another homepage design)

Words and numbers

Google is officially an English word
Search numbers are OK,
financial results are great,
numbers for the other services are not OK.

Product of the month: Google Video.



Most popular original article: If Google didn't exist.

Find Brief Facts On Google

If you want to find a short description of a company, or a person, or a product, Google can help you be a little more knowledgeable with a simple search:

who is Larry Ellison?
who is Coca-Cola?
who is iPod?
who is Windows 95?

If you type a query that starts with "who is", Google will show the first words from the most relevant Wikipedia entry.

Queries that start with "what is" return more elaborated definitions and are more appropriate for finding the meaning of a word.

If you want to find information about the location of a company, of a country or a sight, type "where is... ?":

where is Google?
where is Romania?
where is Taj-Mahal?

There's also information about events. You can query Google about holidays using "when is...?":

when is mother's day?
when is Easter?

In this type of query, define is the same as what is, while info and about are the same as who is, so you can just type info oracle or about tarantino.

YubNub - Online Command-line

I wrote in Google as a Command-Line that "a single search box can be more powerful than more disparate search boxes". YubNub is an online command-line that have everything a Linux junkie would want: man for each command (manual), ls (a list of all the commands), parameters, the ability to create a new command. "But what's a command?", you'll ask me. A command can be anything: a search with Google, weather information, view source of a web page, go to an entry in the PHP manual, find who owns a domain and a lot more.

YubNub translates a URL like http://whois.domaintools.com/google.com
into a simple command: whois google.com.

It's easier to use a command like this instead of keeping bookmarks or searching using Google. Many browsers include the ability to create shortcuts for search engines, but YubNub brings this approach to a new level. You can invoke a command multiple times by typing one line.

multi gim rose ginger searches Google Images for rose and ginger and shows the results in two frames so it's easy to compare them.

Type guess le vieux caffe to find the language of an expression (in this case French).

There is a big list of commands: here are just a few and everyone has a man entry, so you can find a description, parameters info and other details.

YubNub transforms any useful service into an alias, an easy to remember command, so you can keep your old-fashioned habits on the web. May the command-line force be with you!

Is Blogger Neglected?

I came across a news from last year that explained Blogger's plans for the future:

"Google is also considering the creation of an enterprise Blogger version, as well as letting users limit access to their blogs by creating private groups, said Biz Stone, Blogger senior specialist.

Although Blogger currently allows users to post text and photos to their blogs via any e-mail program, Google is looking into a tighter integration with Gmail, Stone said.

Although users can password protect their Blogger blogs with third-party software or services, Blogger currently doesn't offer native ways for users to limit access to their blogs. However, Google is mulling over the possibility of adding some native privacy features, such as the ability for users to create private groups and that way control who can view their blogs, Stone said."

Blogger's development seems to have slowed down since it was acquired by Google, and many of the features found in other popular blog platforms (like categories, inline comments, plugins) are not available in Blogger. There are also frequent problems with accessing the site. I wonder what was the real reason for acquiring Blogger: the team or the fact that Blogger is a publishing platform well-suited for AdSense?

This is Google's statement from 2003: "Google recently acquired Pyra Labs, developers of Blogger - a self-service weblog publishing tool used by more than one million people. We're thrilled about the many synergies and future opportunities between our two companies. Blogs are a global self-publishing phenomenon that connect Internet users with dynamic, diverse points of view while also enabling comment and participation. In the coming weeks, we will report additional details. Blogger users can expect to see no immediate changes to the service."

How To Create A Good Site (Video)

There's a new trend at Google: let's create videos where we answer questions and upload them on Google Video. While this is a more personal approach, there must be a way to include the transcript along with the video. The text is searchable so you can find it later on and it's easier to reference it.

In this video, Google's Matt Cutts explains how to create a good site that ranks well on Google. To summarize the tips: make sure the site is crawlable and it has interesting content.

Mozy - Free Remote Backup Tool

Mozy is a remote backup tool for Windows that gives you 2GB space to automatically synchronize your folders online. Mozy encrypts data with 448-bit Blowfish encryption, and transfers them using 128-bit SSL, so it's secure. You can schedule daily or weekly backups or you can let the automatic backup happen (Mozy backups your folders only if the computer is idle for a certain number of minutes, by default - 30 minutes).

If you don't have NTFS as a file system, Mozy can't perform backup for opened files, so you might consider closing all the applications while Mozy backups the files.

My only complaint is about restoring files: you can select the files you want to restore online, but the interface is pretty stiff. You're limited to 5 restores a month and you get the restored files by email. It would be nice if you could manage restoring files using the same local client.

On Google News

Google News is Google's way to create an online newspaper by automatically selecting the most important news from news sites all over the world and trying to provide an objective view. You can read the homepage, go to a specific section or search for a topic.

When did it start?
Google News started with one Googler who tried to manage the flood of information after the terrorist attack from September 11th 2001. You can see in the screenshot below a small draft of Google News - Google's homepage after 9/11:



There was a such a big demand of information after the attack, that many news sites were down or very slow. On 9/11, news-related Google searches were 60 times greater than the number of news-related searches conducted the previous day. In 2001, Nostradamus and CNN were the top gaining queries of the year.

Who created Google News?
Krishna Bharat, Google's principal scientist from that time, realized he could create a tool that clusters related stories, so he could find different perspectives on the same subject.

When was Google News released?
After he created the news portal, he shared it with his colleagues and most of them liked it. Google lauched the first beta of Google News in the spring of 2002.

Why is Google News useful?
Krishna Bharat says: "I want this to be a force for a democracy. I want us to be an honest broker, and I want newspapers featured on our site to get traffic from us. [..] One of the things that makes us objective is we show all points of view. Even if you disagree with one, we give you both - the majority and the minority point of view."

Does everyone see the same news?
At first, the news were the same for everyone. Now Google personalizes the news if you are logged in. You'll see a section of personalized news based on what type of news you usually read. You can share this personalized news with you friends by sending a unique URL found at the bottom of the Google News homepage.



How does Google rank the news?
Google shows news from more than 4500 manually-reviewed sources. Google News pages are created algorithmically, by showing only the most important news. For each subject, Google tries to remove duplicate stories and show fresh news. Google also takes into account the traffic of the site, the number of editors, breadth of coverage, average story length, number of citations to the story and other factors.

Google News Report is a tool that tries to approximate these factors and shows the top scoring stories from the last eight hours, from today, from this month, and this year. There's also a top of the sources: Forbes, Reuters and NY Times are the top 3 sources this month, according to this unofficial hierarchy.

Can my site be a source for Google News?
It's not very easy to become a source, but Search Engine Roundtable has some tips. You can ask Google to include you site at this page.

Related:
Top 10 funny Google News
Google News out of beta
Google News includes financial information

WinRAR Free Today

Note: the offer to get a free copy of WinRAR was only available on July 30 2006.

WinRAR's team was so happy that WinRAR has won the "best overall utility" award from Shareware Industry Awards Foundations, that they decided to offer non-upgradeable free licenses for WinRAR 3.51 this Sunday.

The only problem is that many people want to get the free license key, so their server is very slow. If the page doesn't load, try again. You may need to reload the page 10 times or more.


This is the link where you can fill some details about you and get a free license for the best Windows data compression utility. You'll get a mail that starts like this:


Download WinRAR 3.51 from here (1 MB), install it and then open the archive rarkey.rar that you've downloaded by clicking on the link from the mail. Now you have a great software for free.