Surfacing forum posts in search results

Today, we introduced a new search feature that makes it easier for you to find forum posts or discussions related to what you're searching for. This new addition to Google search results applies to sites that tend to have a large number of posts on a specific topic. When several different discussions on a site are relevant to your query, we indent them under the primary result and include the date of each post.

So for instance, if you search for [getting from rome to florence] you will see, below the third result, a list of relevant discussions on various ways to get between these cities.


It's always nice to know what others are saying about the best ways to get around (by boat or train) and how recent those comments are — especially if it's your first time traveling to Italy.

We hope this feature gives you a deeper view into the relevant content available on sites throughout the web — even when that content spans multiple pages or discussions.
At the same time, the main search results are diverse as always — so if you can't pinpoint a useful comment there's a list of relevant sites there to help.

Posted by Johanna Wright, Director of Product Management and Devin Mullins, Software Engineer

Translate your website with Google: Expand your audience globally

How long would it take to translate all the world's web content into 50 languages? Even if all of the translators in the world worked around the clock, with the current growth rate of content being created online and the sheer amount of data on the web, it would take hundreds of years to make even a small dent.

Today, we're happy to announce a new website translator gadget powered by Google Translate that enables you to make your site's content available in 51 languages. Now, when people visit your page, if their language (as determined by their browser settings) is different than the language of your page, they'll be prompted to automatically translate the page into their own language. If the visitor's language is the same as the language of your page, no translation banner will appear.


After clicking the Translate button, the automatic translations are shown directly on your page.


It's easy to install — all you have to do is cut and paste a short snippet into your webpage to increase the global reach of your blog or website.


Automatic translation is convenient and helps people get a quick gist of the page. However, it's not a perfect substitute for the art of professional translation. Today happens to be International Translation Day, and we'd like to take the opportunity to celebrate the contributions of translators all over the world. These translators play an essential role in enabling global communication, and with the rapid growth and ease of access to digital content, the need for them is greater than ever. We hope that professional translators, along with translation tools such as Google Translator Toolkit and this Translate gadget, will continue to help make the world's content more accessible to everyone.

Posted by Jeff Chin, Product Manager

Surf's up Wednesday: Google Wave update

Starting Wednesday, September 30 we'll be sending out more than 100,000 invitations to preview Google Wave to:

• Developers who have been active in the developer preview we started back in June
• The first users who signed up and offered to give feedback on wave.google.com
• Select business and university customers of Google Apps

We'll ask some of these early users to nominate people they know also to receive early invitations — Google Wave is a lot more useful if your friends, family and colleagues have it too. This, of course, will just be the beginning. If all goes well we will soon be inviting many more to try out Google Wave.

Some of you have asked what we mean by preview. This just means that Google Wave isn't quite ready for prime time. Not yet, anyway. Since first unveiling the project back in May, we've focused almost exclusively on scalability, stability, speed and usability. Yet, you will still experience the occasional downtime, a crash every now and then, part of the system being a bit sluggish and some of the user interface being, well, quirky.

There are also still key features of Google Wave that we have yet to fully implement. For example, you can't yet remove a participant from a wave or define groups of users, draft mode is still missing and you can't configure the permissions of users on a wave. We'll be rolling out these and other features as soon as they are ready — over the next few months.

Despite all this, we believe you will find that Google Wave has the potential for making you more productive when communicating and collaborating. Even when you're just having fun! We use it ourselves everyday for everything from planning pub crawls to sharing photos, managing release processes and debating features to writing design documents. In fact, we collaborated on this very blog post with several colleagues in Google Wave.

Speaking of ways you could potentially use Google Wave, we're intrigued by the many detailed ones people have taken the time to describe. To mention just a few: journalist Andy Ihnatko on producing his Chicago Sun-Times column, filmmaker Jonathan Poritsky on streamlining the movie-making process, scientist Cameron Neylon on academic papers and lab work, Alexander Dreiling and his SAP research team on collaborative business process modelling, and ZDNet's Dion Hincliffe on a host of enterprise use cases.

The Wave team's most fun day since May? We invited a group of students to come spend a day with us at Google's Sydney office. Among other things, we asked them to collaboratively write stories in Google Wave about an imaginary trip around the world. They had a ball! As did we... 



Finally, a big shoutout to the thousands of developers who have patiently taken part in our ongoing developer preview. It has been great fun to see the cool extensions already built or being planned and incredibly instructive to get their help planning the future of our APIs. To get a taste for what some of these creative developers have been working on, and to learn more about the ways we hope to make it even easier for developers to build new extensions, check out this post on our developer blog.

Happy waving!

Posted by Lars Rasmussen, Engineering Manager & Stephanie Hannon, Group Product Manager

Keep up with the latest trends using Google Search

Today, we're launching a new web search feature that will help you stay in touch with the latest trends on the web.

You might already be familiar with Hot Trends, which lists the fastest rising searches on the web at any given hour. Now, when you search Google.com and your query matches one of the top 100 fastest-rising search terms, we'll show you a graph at the bottom of page, with more information — like how popular the query is, how fast it's rising over time, and other useful data.

Below is a picture of what you'd find today if you searched for [reina capodici], who just wed American Idol star Justin Guarini. Or try another example: [gotthard base tunnel], which is set to become the longest tunnel in the world. (But make sure you search for these examples today — nothing stays hot for long.)

To coincide with this change, we've also reduced the number of trends listed on the Google Hot Trends homepage to 40 from 100. This feature, however, will show up for any query that matches the top 100. We hope this change will make for a simpler user experience, and help you focus better on the top, most interesting content.

This new feature is available in the U.S. and Japan. We hope it will help you keep up with everything there's to know about the latest trends online. No more being out of the loop at your office watercooler!

Posted by Aaron Wise, Associate Product Manager and Hiroshi Kuraoka, Product Manager

Back to school with Google Docs

As interns on the Google Docs team this past summer, we were excited to be able to work on making Google Docs that much more useful for students like us. We've now added a bunch of back to school features which should help our fellow students make the transition from summer to school that much easier — and we hope they'll be useful to you non-students as well!

We created an equation editor so you can easily complete problem sets online or write papers that include equations. If you're taking math, you can now take notes in class or answer questions using Google Docs.

In the same vein, we also added superscripts and subscripts — perfect for expressing chemical compounds or algebraic expressions:



For language enthusiasts, we integrated translation features into Google Docs. You can translate either a single word or an entire document — handy for making sure you're on the right track when writing those foreign language essays.

For those of you conducting surveys, we added a "Go to page based on answer" option in Google forms, making it easy to show participants only those questions that are relevant to them.

We also came up with a few features for humanities buffs. To make outlining term papers more customizable, we made it easy to select different bulleting styles for lists by adding an option to the format menu. And when that paper is written and ready to turn in, you now have the option to print footnotes as endnotes for a cleaner-looking paper.

We hope these new features make collaboration in Google Docs even more convenient, whether you're editing group presentations from across campus or collecting survey data from friends. In fact, we've created this video to show how collaboration can even help you out with your "extracurricular" activities:



Posted by Rita Chen and Stephanie Vezich, Google Docs Summer Interns

More insight into claimed content on YouTube

(Cross-posted from the YouTube Biz Blog)

We announced last week that we now have over 1,000 partners using our content identification and management tools to control how and where their videos are distributed on YouTube. Every major U.S. network broadcaster, movie studio and music label is using Content ID to identify user-uploaded versions of their videos, and decide whether they to want block, track or make money from them. As Content ID is proving to be an effective way for media companies to control, promote and monetize their content on our site, we're always thinking about how we can make these tools even more valuable for content owners of all kinds.

Today, we're excited to integrate Content ID with YouTube Insight. Previously, when you claimed a video with Content ID, we were only able to show you basic information (like view counts and tags) associated with the video you claimed. But now, all the statistics and data we share directly with uploaders in YouTube Insight is available to Content ID partners too, making our content management tools more useful than ever — especially for partners whose claimed user videos generate lots of views for them. For example, using Insight with claimed content, Sony Music learned that the JK Wedding Entrance Dance video is currently the music label's 8th most popular video on YouTube.

In addition to rankings, you can also learn about demographics, discovery sources and other metrics for videos that you've claimed, and then compare them to your own uploads. Do the audience demographics of a claimed video differ from those of the official version? What websites or search terms drive the most traffic to user uploaded versions of your content? We think integrating Content ID and Insight can help answer questions like these and will be very helpful as you think about distributing, marketing and making money from your content online.

If you're a Content ID partner, you can find this new information in the Reporting section of your CMS (Content Management System) account.

Posted by Martin Landers, Insight Software Engineer and Walter Lee, Content ID Product Manager

News: Still Alive

This was a triumph....

no, this is not the credits song for Valve's Portal. It is my TRIUMPHANT CRY OF RETURN!

I can hear "oh noes" ring out in the crowd, but yes folks, I am back. You see, for the last couple of months that I have been on hiatus, I have had the chance to catch up with university, and focus on things like studies (urk) and other such things. But all the whilst, I have been playing games as usual, and I've still had the itch to talk about it.

I even started a Twitter page to see if I could cure that itch with bite-size comments, but seriously, trying to talk about Batman: Arkham Asylum in 140 characters is no easy feat. Sigh.

So yes, I am back. Indefinitely with posts irregularly updated, but still nonetheless, better than nothing.

---
So what have I been up to of late?

Since my disappearance off the face of this earth, I have played a lot of games, from Fuel, Call of Juarez, LEGO Batman, Wolfenstein, Secret of Monkey Island, Section 8, Resident Evil 5 and most recently Batman Arkham Asylum, Sacred 2, and also Tropico 3.

All I can say is that Batman: Arkham Asylum is a sweet, sweet game, and it is finally great to see a faithful comic-to-game adaptation that doesn't half-suck. In fact, it is probably the greatest superhero game I've ever played... ever.


Wolfenstein is all shooty, and a lot less brainy that I'd expected a next-gen Wolfenstein to be, but it was entertaining. Kinda' like G.I. Joe the movie, unexpectedly fun but still the sort you'd leave your brain at the door for.


As much of Tropico 3 I've played so far, it's pretty entertaining, but I noticed that the game's limitations start to show after 3 hours or so. Campaign mode is fine with all the objectives giving you a direction, but the sandbox mode is over once you've built everything and can manage your population pretty simply. Oh well, let's see how it goes.


Finally, let me just say Resident Evil 5 sucks. So bad it hurts. Capcom just shot itself in the face with this 'un.

I am also working on a research paper for university which is based on looking at what factors make Left 4 Dead a significantly successful game in this day and age. I'll be arguing about things like its cooperative component, the familiarity to the B-horror genre, amongst other things. I'll be updating you folks on my findings later on.

---

Finally, a reason to get back into Left 4 Dead! The DLC Crash Course will be released tomorrow. A multiplayer-focused map, although it can be played through cooperative, which I shall be doing so with friends soon!

I have to say, it's great to be back.

Open source 3D RPG updates

There has been some activity in the most prominent free (as in freedom) software 3D role-playing games DungeonHack, jClassicRPG and Radakan.

DungeonHack

Green, water and village in DungeonHack [more]

DungeonHack (DH) 0.10 has been released in form of win&lin 32bit biaries and a few commits later I was able to compile the game on my 64bit Arch Linux machine. It is the first release of DH that does not rely on non-free libraries.

I played the game for the first time and I was positively surprised. Not only can I move around in the nice-looking (endless) landscape but also fight, cast magic, pick up items, enter houses and dungeons as well as talk to npcs. Physics also work (see barrels video below). On the downside: the current code is crash-happy and there is little content: In toto three houses, two dungeons, two enemy types, two items, one non-player character, one spell).

Zombie roasting á la DH

The next DH aim is to create a typical RPG village, add some inventory and status GUI and to write a dialog system (the current one runs on boxes). Maybe you feel like giving them a programmer's or artist's hand at achieving one of these or other goals? Then enter the DH chatroom and/or forum (which I find one of the most entertaining floss game forums to read).

Q's first gameplay - DungeonHack svn rev 520

Fun with barrels!

When test-playing DH, it appears weird to me that enemies' bodies disappear when eliminated and wish they would drop and also drop loot, which I could then collect into the (also not yet accessible) inventory. When playing the latest release or watching the videos, is there something you feel is missing?

jClassicRPG

Shrine and road in jClassicRPG

There has been much activity lately in jClassicRPG's Subversion repository. There are texture-roads now, the map not only shows terrain type any more but also infrastructure (roads and settlements). Shrines and Igloo buildings appear in the game world and a yeti creature has been added to the game's repertoire.

Usability has increased a lot through mouse menu integration and addition of buttons for map, character status etc. Though the drop-down menus don't act as the ones most of us are probably used to, the GUI-usage learning curve has dropped a lot. I especially like the tool-tip system, which shows usage instructions for the different controls or details about fields in the map. If only the font was better readable...

If you would like to help jClassicRPG grow, I can think of at least one Blender-modelling task: give attack animations to this gorilla. Apart from that you can find ways to help on this page and in this thread. And if you're hardcore, also read the TODO! (Search for "[ ]") :D

New game & character creation jClassicRPG r1849

Travel and battle

What I would like to see in jClassicRPG are cloth/armor items and a menu for equipping my party members with them. (EDIT: already there - left click character portraits.) Also the shiny flowers scream to me "pick me" and I hope that will be a gameplay option some day. Can you think of content or features that would enrich the game?

Radakan

Panda3D integration in Radakan

Radakan's developer announced a while ago, that the 3D view of the game will be postponed and a text/GUI interface would be developed first. Now Panda3D, a fun, BSD-licensed, python-powered game engine is being integrated.

What Radakan's developers could use help with now is exporting their already available media [.7z archive] and some media from OpenGameArt to the Panda3d .egg format. Instructions here (press "next" multiple times to see instructions for various 3D applications).

Radakan's 'behavior' editor

I do not care too much for the 3D part of the game (at least not yet). I would prefer the engine to be more stable, so I could try out the quest and add some detail to it using the behavior editor. What do you think? Is implementing 3D worth the time or would you rather prefer the gui/text-based framework to get developed further?

Off-topic

A little hint if you ever feel like making a gameplay video yourself: I prepared the videos for this post (and other posts) using glc to record and mencoder to encode. Sometimes (for non-OpenGL games) I use recordmydesktop to record. Feel free to ask in the comments or forum if I can help you with making videos.

Another little hint: If you are unable to use YouTube but curious about the videos and can play back mp4 files (vlc and mplayer can handle them), use youtube-dl to download videos for off-line playback.

Computer Tips - Quick Folder Options

  Quick Folder Options

We've talked about hidden files before, right? Browse to the Control Panel, click folder options, blah, blah, blah. Practically drilled into our head by this point eh? Well, let's put the Windows Vista Search Bar to work then, shall we?

If you're switching back and forth between showing hidden files and re-hiding them, then taking a step out of the process should be welcome. So, instead of slogging through menus to get to the Folder Options, why not just type in “folder” in the Search Bar?

The very top selection that pops up will be “Folder Options”.

Why go through the hassle when you can be there now?

http://www.worldstart.com/tips/tips.php/quick-folder-options

---

Mouse Browse!

If you have a mouse with a scroll wheel on it, here's a cool trick. Try Holding the Shift Key on your keybaord and then spin the mouse wheel. In both Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox you'll go forward or back a page depending on which way you spun the wheel! How cool is that?

Give it a try. Open up your browser, follow a few links, and then hold the Shift key and spin the wheel!

                                                                                                                                                                     Be Sure to Leave Your Comments! Also be sure to subscribe to my feeds http://feeds.feedburner.com/dotblogger and Follow Me on Googles Friends connection Recommend @lilruth to @MrTweet on Twitter....VOTE FOR ME at http://bloginterviewer.com/animals/dogcents-ruth

Jump to the information you want right from the search snippets

For most search results, Google shows you a few lines of text to give you an idea of what the page is about — we call this a "search snippet." Recently, we've enhanced the search snippet with two new features that make it easier to find information buried deep within a page.

Normally, a search snippet shows how a page, as a whole, relates to a your query by excerpting content that appears near and around where your query terms show on the page. But what if only one section of the page is relevant to your search?

That's where these new features can help, by providing links within the snippet to relevant sections of the page, making it faster and easier to find what you're looking for. Imagine, for example, that we're researching trans fats and cholesterol, and their effects on the body. If we start with a generic query like [trans fats], Google returns several results with lots of information about trans fats in general, including this result from Wikipedia:

Now, included with the snippet are links to specific sections within the page, covering different subtopics of trans fats. Since we're particularly interested in what's healthy and what's not, "Nutritional guidelines" is probably where the most relevant information is. Clicking this link will take you directly to that section, midway down the page.

Now imagine we're particularly interested in learning about good cholesterol and what levels of it are healthy, so we try a more specific query, [good cholesterol level]. The top result is from the American Heart Association and has tons of information about cholesterol levels. The specific information about good (HDL) cholesterol, however, is contained in one section titled "Your HDL (good) cholesterol level"‎. Since the query was more specific, the snippet for this result now provides the option to "jump to" just this section of the website.


Clicking on "Jump to Your HDL (good) cholesterol level‎" takes you directly to the most relevant information on the page:


Clicking on the title of the snippet ("What Your Cholesterol Levels Mean") still takes you to the top of the page, as always.

If you're a webmaster and would like to have these links appear for your webpages, take a look at the Google Webmaster Central Blog for info on some of the things you can do. And in the meantime, we hope these enhancements help you find the information you're looking for faster.

Posted by Chris Kern, Snippets Team

Place Pages for Google Maps: There are places we remember!

Google Maps is a great tool for exploring places — you can pan around the map, zoom in and see nearby places, look around in Street View and search for whatever you want. But what I always wanted to do is be able to get a clear understanding of what a place is all about. Instead of doing the research all over the web, wouldn’t it be great to see all the information about one place in...one place?

Starting today, you can do that on Place Pages for Google Maps. A Place Page is a webpage for every place in the world, organizing all the relevant information about it. By every place, we really mean *every* place — there are Place Pages for businesses, points of interest, transit stations, neighborhoods, landmarks and cities all over the world.

You can get to a Place Page by clicking on "more info" in search results, or by clicking "more info" in the mini-bubble. Now, instead of just getting a slightly bigger bubble, you'll get an entire page of rich details, like photos, videos, a Street View preview, nearby transit, reviews and related websites.


Here are some of my favorite places, and what you can discover about them using Place Pages:

Tartine Bakery: My favorite bakery in the world. The "Place Summary" section compiles voices from all over the web praising the desserts but warning you about the lines. The "Details" section aggregates material from over 500 authoritative sources; for example, you can find the menu from Zagat.com. The "Related Maps" sections shows user-created maps that include this bakery, such as this delicious California dessert map.



Yoda statue: One of my childhood heroes in real size! The "User Content" section shows excerpts from all over the web describing this hidden little gem; "Nearby Transit" helps you find the best way to get there by public transport; and there’s even some useful local ads in case you want to get one of these at home.

Tokyo: I've spent a lot of time here lately as it's home to part of the Place Page team. On the city's Place Page, you can find out the most popular hotels, parks and major landmarks in Tokyo, browse local photos and videos, see what other people are searching for and access maps about the city from all over the web.

Zurich Hauptbahnhof: I’ve traveled through the central train station in Zurich several times over the last year, visiting the local team that made Place Pages possible. Place pages for transit stations are particularly useful because they'll show you a list of all the lines serving that station, as well as provide a timetable of upcoming departures. 



As the Beatles' song in this post's title suggests, we want to make it easy to remember places: pages will come with a friendly URL that is easy to remember and link to under google.com/places. For example, the San Francisco Place Page will be found at google.com/places/us/california/san-francisco-city. Right now we include cities and most businesses, but we're working hard on bringing this to all Place Pages.

We want there to be a Place Page for every place in the world, but we might be missing a few places here and there. If you're a business owner, you can add or update your business details through the Local Business Center. This allows you to make sure your Place Page reflects the most accurate, authoritative and recent information about your business. And if you don’t have a business, but you discover a place that doesn’t have a Place Page, you can add it through community edits or Google Map Maker, depending on the country you’re in.

Whether you're searching for a great local florist or planning a trip across the globe, we hope Place Page for Google Maps makes your explorations easier and happier.

Posted by Lior Ron, Senior Product Manager, Place Page team

Announcing Project 10^100 idea themes

Late last year we announced Project 10^100, a call for ideas to help as many people as possible, and a program to bring the best of those ideas to life with a total of $10 million. We hoped to capture the imagination of people around the world and offer a way to bring their best ideas to fruition. We were overwhelmed by the response — you sent us more than 150,000 ideas (approximately 10^5.2) in more than 25 languages and it took more than 3,000 Googlers in offices around the world to review the submissions. (The review process took us much longer than we expected and we appreciate your patience!)

Some ideas we received suggested broad areas of investment, others were very specific technology or implementation proposals, and many of the ideas shared overlapping elements. So rather than posting individual idea submissions, we've decided to do something a little different. We've pooled similar ideas into a set of 16 top idea themes aimed at addressing some important common goals, from making government more transparent to driving innovation in public transport. Every theme has different possible implementations and we intend to consider all reasonable possibilities. But we need your help.

Over the next two weeks we'll be gathering your votes to help inform an advisory board that will then choose up to five winning ideas that will receive funding. After that, we'll present the finalists and ask for proposals from individuals or organizations that can implement these ideas.

It has been a long road for those of us who have worked on this from the beginning. Although it took a lot longer than we first planned, we're pleased with the outcome. In the end, we followed the tried-and-true Google method of "launch and iterate." We enjoyed going through so many interesting proposals and adapted to the massive volume of ideas. We are incredibly proud to be able to put these 16 ideas in front of you to see what you think. Let the voting begin!

Posted by the Project 10^100 Team

Definations of Domain Names and how you use them

                    
How do you choose a domain name? And what happens in regards to domain registration? Are two of the main questions that people hold when it comes to creating their own website. Choosing your domain name is something that should involve a lot of thought as it is vital to the success of your website, which is why it is important that you are well informed of how to go about this process, this is where Article Alley steps in to help with this section. Our Domain Names section aims to help inform you of anything and everything you could need to know about choosing the right name, checking the availability and then registering said name. Also not only do our articles inform of various aspects of Domain Names but they are also available for you to use for free within your own website etc. So make the most of Article Alley's Domain Name section today.
Basics of Domain name registration
Things look amazing when we talk about making money online, well it requires building up credibility among your customers. So with your web presence registration of own domain name is the first step to ensure things are going towards desired direction. ...


Domain Name Registrations – Do This Before Designing!

The major chunk of time, money and resources are spend towards website design and development. And many people compromise on the domain in the process. The domain name is just as important for online success as is a professional web design.
Prosper with Domain names choose the best
Some domain names bring prosperity and there is no myth in this it is the truth. There are many ways and strategies that can implemented. It all depends on your business and size of the company and nature of services.
Dot Eco TLD

Top level domains, or TLDs, are the recognizable suffixes found in internet addresses, such as .com, .org, or .edu. The astonishing growth of the internet over the past decade alone has given rise to a corresponding need for more specific TLDs

Who Owns a Domain Name

Owning a domain name is similar to owning a house in real life – everything must be registered under your name, especially if you’re the one paying for it and maintaining it. Some people might think that any domain can be owned in just a snap of a finger....

Author: Elijah James

Who Registered The Domain Name
The internet promises a lot of money-making opportunities. There are a lot of markets being created by the virtual community. As more and more websites are made, more and more people also become curious how to own or register a specific domain name. Th...

How Do I Purchase A Domain Name

So you have finally decided to land on the virtual community and have your own site – before thinking of a name and all the work needed in order to create a site, one thing you need to consider first is purchasing a domain name. But, how do you purchase...Well, the first thing you need to think of would be the name itself. How would you want your site to be named? Think of a name that will best suit the contents of your site and something that would be easy to recall. Example, if your line of business is about selling recycled papers, you may want to choose www.gorecycled.com. This would be easy to recall and easy to type as well.




Think of maybe ten domain names. Why ten? Because the next step you need to do is to try and search if there already is a site like that. Try googling the name you have in mind and see if it has a direct match over something else. If it does, then go to the next until you have all available options left.



After choosing the name, look for a merchant that sells domain names. A lot of them can be found online. Search for them using search engines and you would be presented with a lot of options. These entities are oftentimes called “registrars” as they verify if such a domain name already exists before they guarantee a sale for you.



Try to research for the name of the domain registrar you will be entering an agreement with. Research if there are feedbacks available for this registrar. See if the customer service, rates, products and other services will fit your needs best. Do not be in a rush to enter into an agreement as most of the domain name services actually last for months if not a year of contract. So if you do not want to be tied onto some entity you’re not really sure if would do a great business with, do not even try and risk it. Do your homework first before selecting the registrar of your choice.

Example of Domain Name


A domain name, to put it simple, is your address on the World Wide Web. This is where you put up your website and it is what internet users will type in their address bar in order to locate your site while online. Your domain name should be short, simple and describe what your site is about...



Internet Domain Name Confusion - A Simple Explanation

Nowadays, it is no surprise that you will find someone or something that has the same name. With so many people going online, our creativity is challenged when making a new idea out of nothing.

                                                                                                                                        Be Sure to Leave Your Comments! Also be sure to subscribe to my feeds http://feeds.feedburner.com/dotblogger and Follow Me on Googles Friends connection Recommend @lilruth to @MrTweet on Twitter....VOTE FOR ME at http://bloginterviewer.com/animals/dogcents-ruth

Fast.Forward. Connecting marketers with innovative ideas (and other marketers)

In this ever-changing digital environment, it can often be tough for businesses and marketers to keep up and maintain relevance to consumers. To help out, we've partnered with The Wharton School to launch Fast.Forward. This site is full of helpful content, including more than 100 videos from leading industry experts — like our own CEO, Eric Schmidt — and academics like Jerry Wind, Lauder Professor at The Wharton School, offering their perspectives on the changing world of marketing.

You can read all about it on our YouTube Biz Blog.

Posted by Cindy Goodrich, Google Business Marketing

Help and learn from others as you browse the web: Google Sidewiki

As you browse the web, it's easy to forget how many people visit the same pages and look for the same information. Whether you're researching advice on heart disease prevention or looking for museums to visit in New York City, many others have done the same and could have added their knowledge along the way.

What if everyone, from a local expert to a renowned doctor, had an easy way of sharing their insights with you about any page on the web? What if you could add your own insights for others who are passing through?

Now you can. Today, we're launching Google Sidewiki, which allows you to contribute helpful information next to any webpage. Google Sidewiki appears as a browser sidebar, where you can read and write entries along the side of the page.



In developing Sidewiki, we wanted to make sure that you'll see the most relevant entries first. We worked hard from the beginning to figure out which ones should appear on top and how to best order them. So instead of displaying the most recent entries first, we rank Sidewiki entries using an algorithm that promotes the most useful, high-quality entries. It takes into account feedback from you and other users, previous entries made by the same author and many other signals we developed. If you're curious, you can read more on our Google Research Blog about the infrastructure we use for ranking all entries in real-time.

Under the hood, we have even more technology that will take your entry about the current page and show it next to webpages that contain the same snippet of text. For example, an entry on a speech by President Obama will appear on all webpages that include the same quote. We also bring in relevant posts from blogs and other sources that talk about the current page so that you can discover their insights more easily, right next to the page they refer to.

We're releasing Google Sidewiki as a feature of Google Toolbar (for Firefox and Internet Explorer) and we're working on making it available in Google Chrome and elsewhere too. We also have the first version of our API available today to let anyone work freely with the content that's created in Sidewiki.

We've been testing Sidewiki with several experts and news organizations for a while and are happy to hear their positive responses. We hope you'll try it for yourself, follow our Twitter feed, and let us know what you think!

If you're ready to start exploring the web with Google Sidewiki, visit google.com/sidewiki to download Google Toolbar with Sidewiki and contribute your own entries alongside pages on the web.

Posted by Sundar Pichai, VP Product Management and Michal Cierniak, Engineering Lead for Google Sidewiki

Picasa 3.5, now with name tags and more

Today, I'm happy to announce that we're releasing Picasa 3.5, a new version of our free photo editing software. This version gives you the ability to add name tags to your photos, using the same facial recognition technology that powers name tags on Picasa Web Albums. Name tags are designed to help you organize your photos by what matters most: the people in them. Picasa identifies similar faces and puts these into an "Unnamed People" album. From there, you can easily add a name tag by clicking "Add a name" and typing the person's name. After you've added name tags to some photos, you can use your tags to do creative things, like quickly find all the photos with the same two people in them, make a face collage with just one click or upload and share people albums with friends.

In addition to name tags, Picasa 3.5 has integrated Google Maps, so you can easily geotag your photos or view the locations of already-tagged photos on a map. And using our totally redesigned import process, you can now import photos from your camera and upload the photos to Picasa Web Albums in one easy step.



Picasa 3.5 is available for both PC and Mac, in English for now. You can download and try it today at picasa.google.com.

Posted by Todd Bogdan, Software Engineer

Google climate change tools for COP15

In December of this year, representatives from nations around the globe will gather in Copenhagen to discuss a global agreement on climate change. The objective is to reduce global warming emissions sufficiently in order to avoid the most severe impacts of climate change and to support the global community in adapting to the unavoidable changes ahead. Denmark will act as host for this fifteenth Conference of the Parties under the United Nations’ Climate Change Convention, known as COP15.

In collaboration with the Danish government and others, we are launching a series of Google Earth layers and tours to allow you to explore the potential impacts of climate change on our planet and the solutions for managing it. Working with data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), we show on Google Earth the range of expected temperature and precipitation changes under different global emissions scenarios that could occur throughout the century. Today we are unveiling our first climate tour on Google Earth: "Confronting Climate Change," with narration by Al Gore. Stay tuned for more tours in the coming weeks!

Together with the Danish government, we're also launching our YouTube COP15 channel. On the channel, you can submit your thoughts and questions on climate change to decision-makers and the world through an initiative called "Raise Your Voice." These videos will be broadcast on screens around the conference in December and rated by viewers of the channel. The top-rated contributions will be aired globally during the COP15 CNN/YouTube debate on December 15th, and the top two submissions will win a trip to Copenhagen. We look forward to seeing your videos!

Posted by Benjamin Kott, Green Business Operations and Jonas Vang, Industry Analyst

A mysterious series for H.G. Wells

You might have noticed an unexplained set of doodles on the Google homepage and a couple tweets from our official Twitter stream, @google, over the last two weeks. On September 5th, we posted a doodle with the abduction of our second 'o' and a coded tweet from its alien captors: 1.12.12 25.15.21.18 15 1.18.5 2.5.12.15.14.7 20.15 21.19, which translates into "All your O are belong to us" (a nod to the Japanese video game, Zero Wing).

We were delighted that people around the world played along with us and shared their theories for why we would have posted this "unexplained phenomenon."

Ten days later, the UFO returned. This time, it was to leave its mysterious mark on the fields.

While the link from the doodle to a search for "crop circles" didn't provide any more clues, we also tweeted the lat/long coordinates of Horsell Commons, the location of the first alien landing in H.G. Wells 1898 classic, The War of the Worlds. Some of you figured out what we were doing, but we weren't ready to reveal it all just yet.

Now, we're finally acknowledging the reason for the doodles with an official nod to Herbert George, who would be 143 years old today. 

Inspiration for innovation in technology and design can come from lots of places; we wanted to celebrate H.G. Wells as an author who encouraged fantastical thinking about what is possible, on this planet and beyond. And maybe have some fun while we were doing it.

The invasion of the logo by alien crafts and pods makes our series complete, but you'll have to read the book to find out how Wells' story really ends.

Posted by Micheal Lopez, Web Design Lead

NAEV 0.4.0 review

NAEV Items [more shots]

NAEV 0.4.0 is out, a game of the space trading and combat simulator genre, inspired by the non-free Escape Velocity. Win32/lin32/lin64/mac binaries are available here.

The new version has parts of the user interface changed and is better accessible, for example through in-game gui keybind editing. Three aspects of NAEV show that usability is a priority: 1) the tutorial is informative without overwhelming too much 2) most combats can be evaded through the run away-tactic (this might be unintended, but definitely liked by me). 3) The automatic jump system, that allows consecutive jumps to systems without having to manually repeat standard maneuvers gives much relief to the player.

The changelog also lists better-looking visuals as well as new sounds and music tracks. As a bonus, all the art in the game is licensed under Debian-friendly licenses. [license.txt: audio, visuals]

Gameplay

Wingmen fighters in action

In NAEV the player starts with a small trading ship and needs to earn money to buy new vessels and equipment. Trading or patrolling missions are the key to income. Though I'm no fan of playing lots of similar missions in a row, I did feel satisfaction, when discovering the most effective way to earn money with them: play patrolling missions and a lot of them at the same time.

Along with the repetitive, generated tasks, there are some original missions of different difficulties that allow the plot to progress and/or provide alternative methods of earning credits. They alone are reason enough to give NAEV a spin. The developers want to include more and more story missions, so contact them via IRC or mailing list if you're up to some sci-fi 'quest' writing! :)

A third (or is it fourth?) method of increasing wealth is observing prices and buying where prices are low and selling where products are expensive. However, there is not much of an economical simulation implemented in NAEV yet, so I wouldn't recommend this path for now.

Yet another battle

Scout ships, fighters and battle-cruisers are available in the shipyards of NAEV, different kinds of energy and missile weapons can be bought, various upgrades can be installed. The brainless method of costlier=better didn't work for me, I had to balance the effects and firepower against speed an maneuverability. Running away is more enjoyable to me than fighting and waiting ten seconds for my ship to turn.

The coolest item in the game is the fighter bay. It allows to host small allied ships in your cruiser. After 'shooting' them into space, they will attack enemies and can be controlled with a few simple commands. Place two is occupied by the afterburners, which will give a temporary speed boost at the price of having the view shaken.

Interviews

Next, two questions for the current top 5 NAEV contributors (and two extra ones for the lead dev):

Q1: What is your role in NAEV development?

bobbens: I am the lead developer of naev.

Deiz: I do a bit of everything, as required.

Done graphics, sound, missions, etc., but most of my time has been spent on making the sprites look nice and getting the game to a fairly balanced state.

For sound I mostly hunted things down and vocoded a few sounds to get the results I wanted. For graphics, most of the ship models are sourced from Vega Strike, many of the outfit graphics are based on models by Joss that I've heavily hacked up.

brtzsnr: I coded a couple of features that NEAV lacked (one of them is the faction disks), now I'm working on 3d-models and sometimes I fix bugs. I wish I had the time to implement more complex features.

stephank: I wrote some code to save configuration. It was unable to at the time.

BTAxis: I've provided some game content (two missions and half a dozen systems so far). That is the extent of my active role in NAEV's development. However, I also occasionally put forward proposals for new or improved game mechanics on the project mailing list, and if I can make them convincing enough and/or talk bobbens into seeing things my way, they may one day find their way into the actual game. I enjoy doing that. Thinking up game mechanics, making them work in my head and fitting them into a bigger picture is fun for me.

Q2: What do you want the game to become in the future?

bobbens: I want the game to be as good as the memories of my childhood playing original EV made it to be.

Deiz: Ultimately I'd like to see NAEV be appealing to a broader audience. At present if you're not somewhat familiar with the Escape Velocity/Elite/Freelancer/etc genre there's not too much to grab your attention.

brtzsnr: I hope NAEV to become more RPG-like (have a crew with different skills tree, say one engineer, one pilot, one commander, etc). Also I want more non-linear/intricate stories.

stephank: I played a lot of Escape Velocity, so that's why I got interested in NAEV. It looks and feels a lot like EV right now, but it looks like the (active) developers are mixing in interesting features from other games in the same genre, and even innovating. I would like them to surprise me, more so than me influencing them. :)

BTAxis: I already mentioned the proposals I wrote up. They're essentially the answer to this question, or at least they're the story so far. But if I'd have to explain it in two words, I'd say that I want naev to be a space exploration game that offers a high degree of interactivity while at the same time providing and engrossing and believable world for the player. That is not an easy goal to meet. Most space games that I know of sacrifice one aspect to pursue another, and in the end NAEV may have to as well. But at this point in time, I believe it's doable, and I hope to be part of making it happen. [For more information check out the proposals on NAEV's mailing list]

Q3: What made you start the project?

bobbens: I started the project about 6 years ago by myself when I realized that there was no game like EV (which I had played extremely intensively as a kid) on linux. EV also had major gameplay flaws that should have been worked around.

Since I had no projects at the time I started out with the ambitious NAEV, which over the years has slowly been taking shape and was released recently (one year ago) to the general public.

As of 0.4.0 I'm starting to be pretty impressed by the results.

Q4: What do you think of Star Control II (The Ur-Quan Masters) as an example of a EV-like GNU/Linux game?

bobbens: I only played Star Control II after someone mentioned it to me about 6 months ago. It does seem to have a lot of EV features, but it seems to lose a bit the fast paced-ness of EV and customizeability of the ships. However it does have other great features that EV lacks like the zooming in systems and the dialog use.

It's good to find good features in other games and use them for inspiration in NAEV, it's evolved enough that it no longer is an EV clone. It also takes from all over while trying to keep itself unique.

Latest NAEV gameplay video

NAEV 0.4.0 beta gameplay

The DoubleClick Ad Exchange: growing the display advertising pie for everyone

Hundreds of thousands of advertisers use search advertising — short, highly relevant text ads alongside search results on Google and other search engines — to grow their businesses. Thanks to a decade of innovation, search advertising is an open platform that allows businesses to easily connect with customers.

As you browse the web today, you'll also see "display advertising," such as videos, images and interactive ads. Like search ads, these connect users with products, services and ideas that interest them. For advertisers, display ads are vital in boosting awareness and sales. For websites and online publishers, they help fund investments in online content and the web services that we all use.

But with a multitude of display ad formats, and thousands of websites, it often takes thousands of hours for advertisers to plan and manage their display ad campaigns. With this complexity, lots of advertisers today just don't bother, or don't invest as much as they would like.

On the other side of the equation, some publishers are left with up to 80% of their ad space unsold. It’s like airlines flying with their planes mostly empty. And for the ad space that they do sell, publishers also have to deal with the complexity of managing thousands of advertisers and campaigns.

We believe that a better system built on better technology can help grow the display advertising pie and benefit everyone.

Three principles underpin our approach to the display advertising field:

1. Simplify the system for buying and selling display ads: For example, our DoubleClick ad serving products help advertisers and publishers manage campaigns and ad formats across thousands of websites and from thousands of advertisers.

2. Deliver better performance that advertisers and agencies can measure: We're building a host of new features to help advertisers to run display ad campaigns across the Google Content Network (comprising hundreds of thousands of AdSense partner sites) and on YouTube. We're also developing better measurement and reporting technology so they can figure out what's working and what's not.

3. Open up the ecosystem: We want to democratize access to display advertising and make it accessible and open, like search advertising. We recently launched the Display Ad Builder to help businesses easily set up and run display ad campaigns. 80% of advertisers who use that product have never run a display ad campaign before.

We've been working hard to put these principles into practice, and today we're excited to announce the new DoubleClick Ad Exchange, a step towards creating a more open display advertising ecosystem for everyone. The Ad Exchange is a real-time marketplace that helps large online publishers on one side; and ad networks and agency networks on the other, buy and sell display advertising space.

These publishers and ad networks manage and represent large volumes of ads and ad space from lots of advertisers and websites. By bringing them together in an open marketplace in which prices are set in a real-time auction, the Ad Exchange enables display ads and ad space to be allocated much more efficiently. This improves returns for advertisers and enables publishers to get the most value out of their online content.

An explanation of the Ad Exchange is here (PDF). You can read in more detail about the features of the new DoubleClick Ad Exchange on the DoubleClick blog.

AdWords advertisers will be able to run ads on sites in the Ad Exchange, using their existing AdWords interface. This means more high quality sites for AdWords advertisers to run display ads on. Similarly, our AdSense publishers will benefit from more high-quality display advertisers coming through the Ad Exchange. You can read more about these benefits on the AdWords Blog and the AdSense Blog.

To find out more about our overall display advertising vision and the many services and features we've been investing in across the Google Content Network, YouTube and DoubleClick, check out the video below:



We believe that growing the display advertising pie for everyone will greatly enhance the web experience for advertisers, publishers, and ultimately users. The DoubleClick Ad Exchange will help create a more open marketplace and is a major step towards that vision.

Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President, Product Management

Blogging and Posting Schedule To Keep the Readers

     
Not all blogger stay in front of his/her computer for blogging and writing the article. I am one of them who not blogging every day. I write the article more than one in one time, but how to make my article showing or updating regularly for my readers.
In my previous post “……”, I have mentioned that to keep readers in your blog is writing the article regularly, once a day or twice a week, it’s depend to your time and effort. in this case, do you suppose to force yourself to be in front of your computer to blogging, did you make it? I said NO……

I have a trick to maintain the article to be showing at your desire time. FYI, I still do my day job and blogging in the night when I have a time. So, I write two until four article at a time. I write using Microsoft Word first, and then I copy paste to the blog software for posting when I have the internet connection active. But before I click the button “save” or “publish”, I arrange the “timestamp” of the articles one by one.
I arrange to show or post ( arrange timestamp ) five of my article once a day each. It’s mean that my blog will arrange that for 5 days ahead my blog will have a new posting every day. So, I have 5 days to do my other work while my readers have their news every day in 5 days. Its really make me little bit relax and use my time properly. Source: Money Online Business Solutions...                                                                                                                                                                Be Sure to Leave Your Comments! Also be sure to subscribe to my feeds http://feeds.feedburner.com/dotblogger and Follow Me on Googles Friends connection Recommend @lilruth to @MrTweet on Twitter....VOTE FOR ME at http://bloginterviewer.com/animals/dogcents-ruth

New AdWords bidding tutorial

(Cross-posted from the Inside AdWords Blog)

Last month we launched a new feature of AdWords called Bid Simulator. Bid Simulator takes some of the guess work out of cost per click (CPC) bidding by estimating the number of clicks or impressions you could have received if you had used a different maximum CPC bid. Today, I thought I would take the opportunity to help you make the most of this new feature by explaining how to use the data from Bid Simulator to maximize the profit from your marketing investment.

In general, when you increase your maximum CPC bid for keywords on search you are able to generate more clicks to your site. This may be because your new bid qualifies you to appear higher up in the Sponsored Links on the search results page, or because your higher bid qualifies your ad to appear in new, more expensive auctions. The goal for you as an advertiser is to decide whether or not these additional clicks come at a cost that is still profitable for you.

To make this decision, you need to compare your expected value per click to your incremental cost per click. Your value per click is how much a click for a particular keyword is worth to you, on average. Your incremental cost per click is how much extra you are paying, on average, for the extra clicks you are getting from your higher bid. When your value per click is higher than your incremental cost per click it makes sense to increase your bid. On the other hand, if your value per click is lower than your incremental cost per click, you probably want to decrease your bid.

To learn more, you can watch the tutorial video below. In the video, I'll show you how to calculate these values, how to interpret them and how to use the data to maximize the profit from your marketing investment. My team and I are always looking for ways to help make the AdWords auction easier to understand so if you have other topics that you'd like us to address, please leave a comment on the video and we may be able to make it a topic for a future video.



Watch it on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRx7AMb6rZ0

Posted by Hal Varian, Chief Economist