Google Maps walking directions had been spotted by some users before, and now they"re being rolled out for everyone, as Search Engine Roundtable reports. Try this directions search in New York, for instance, and you"ll see the "Walking" link on top activated (though this isn"t just restricted to US locations, as a test search in Ge ...

You can emulate selection boxes using HTML layers, but you may also want to provide a traditional HTML form selection box using the <select> element. If you do so, how can you spice up that form element anyway? There"s a couple of things you can do. The <optgroup> element groups together and labels as set of items. A style applied to an <option> can add colors. And then there"s some nice Unicode symbols, like stars (&#9733;) or checkmarks (&#10003;), which can bring a more graphical look to your selection box, too: ★ (worst) ★★ ★★★ ★ ...

Before Google"s 3D chat world Lively was released, the product was called Google Rooms. Here are some left-over screenshots that we discovered on Google"s servers shortly after Lively was launched: The Google Rooms logo used in the rooms directory, showing a palm tree from the island room Selecting an avatar from the directory, which included URL references to Google"s 3D Wareho ...

Pixelisation in the forum and Ionut at the Google Operating System blog mentioned the Google Docs documents editor now has a full-screen mode (not to be confused with the older full-width page view). You"ll find it in the menu View -> Full-screen mode, and hitting escape switches back to the default view. Does anyone know how to bookmark a Google Docs document so that it always opens in full-screen mode though?

Google announced they"re aquiring Russian ads service ZAO Begun from Rambler Media for $140 million. [Thanks Pavel!]

RedWine.com, one of those ads-only websites potentially profiting through Google. Google pays domain parkers by allowing them to run a special AdSense program. Titled "Google AdSense for domains", this program now reportedly triggered a class-action lawsuit which alleges "that Google committed fraud, business code violations, and unjust enrichment by selling ads that were unlikely to generate conversions". As Information Week continues to write: According to the complaint, the "Levitte International" online ad campaign ran from June 1, 2007, through August 18, 2007, a ...

Google released a layout templates directory for Google Docs*, the application suite consisting of Google Documents, Spreadsheets and Presentations (Google"s kind of web-based light-weight Word, Excel and PowerPoint). You can sort templates by target application, like Spreadsheets, or by category, like "Resumes" or "Personal Finance". Then you can look at a preview and if you like a style, hit the "Use this template" button to fill it with your own content. Google Presentations since some time had a limited amount of basic designs available, and Google Documents also offers stylesheet editing, but this new directory ...

Here"s something that made the frontpage of popular social news site Reddit.com yesterday... a submission titled "A 15 year old from South Wales used his new Visa debit card to order cigarettes, alcohol (etc.)", pointing to a page at money.co.uk allegedly from July 15th, 2008, by author Charlotte Cardingham. This sounds oddly familiar to the last "hoax news to attract backlinks" story. However, after that last incident of letting a search engine optimize ...

The Vacationeers released sequel videos to what they call The Googling, dealing with existing Google services gone "different": Part II: Google Moon Part III: Google My Maps Part IV: Google SMS Google Maps is their original older clip, in case you haven"t seen it yet. And as it"s supposed to be a five-part series, there may still be one clip coming. [Via

Google released a well-working iGoogle gadget in which they extract text information from video content. The Elections Video Search gadget -- its standalone page can be accessed as well -- lets you search for keywords across YouTube"s US politician channels, like Barack Obama"s. Clicking on a result item will load the video in question into the player embedded in the widget, with the specific occurrences of the word in the video color-marked on the timeline. For instance, I searched for the word friendship

The Wall Street Journal writes: Google Inc. and Viacom Inc. have agreed to allow Google to anonymize YouTube visitor data before complying with a judge"s order to deliver the data to Viacom as part of a broader copyright lawsuit. Google-owned YouTube announced late Monday night that the parties had agreed to allow it to substitute actual user and visitor IDs and internet protocol addresses with other unique values to help protect user privacy. Obfuscating user IDs in such consistent ways does not guarantee complete anonymity (take a look at what ha ...

The JavaScripted SWFObject is a popular way to include Flash files. Recently, Google announced better support for crawling Flash files, and in an update they added to their original post, they now also say: For our July 1st launch, we didn"t enable Flash indexing for Flash files embedded via SWFObject. We"re now rolling out an update that enables support for common JavaScript techniques for embedding Flash, including SWFObject and SWFObject2. On another note, Google adds: At this time, content loaded dynamically from resource files is not indexed. We’ve noted this feature request from several webmasters -- ...

Radiohead teamed up with Google to show their music video for the song "House of Cards," visualized using 3D data. Google also offers an interactive app to let you see this data (it may take some time to load but once it"s done, you can play the video and pan & zoom at the same time), a Making Of, and a download of the points data as Comma Separated Values file. [Thanks Pixelisation!]

On this page, grab the image to the right and slowy drag it over the other stripes layer below it... [Image by Rufus Butler Seder.]

The graphics in Google"s 3D chat world Lively shine, but behind the scenes the Lively team also seems busy squashing minor and major early-release bugs. And since some days, Lively got its first social phenomenon, too: the almost meme-like creation of cyber sex rooms. Not that there"s anything wrong with that, or is there? To see what Google thinks let"s ask Lively"s community guidelines, which state: We don"t allow nudity, graphic sex acts, or sexually explicit material. This includes making sexual advances toward other users. We also don"t allow content that drives traffic to commercial pornography sites ... However, a typical room overview listing at Lively.com lately revealed ...

[Ad campaign by Newell-Emmett agency, from the Taschen book "A History of Advertisement".]

Odd. Google Trends" "Hot Trends" feature, an aggregated overview of recently popular search queries, shows a swastika today in one of the top spots. A swastika has been used as a symbol for different purposes in the past, like in Hinduism and Buddhism, but it was also used by the Nazi party. Could this possibly be some kind of defacement group-effort (or scripting), trying to sneak a Unicode character into Google trends? After all, Google can be searched for symbols like Yin-Yang, the swastika and so on (though one would figure Google Trends uses a large enough s ...

Ionut of the Google Operating System blog has screenshots of a Google News design experiment, apparently showing to a portion of users (I can"t see it, can you?). On the frontpage (of at least the science/ tech section), there are now a couple of more visual modules, like a "featured photo" section. Ionut argues this marks the first time "when Google News promotes stories just because it has the permission to show associated images" (Google licenses content from some news agencies, and preferring partners over non-partners may be a bit portal style, for better or worse). [Image by Ionut via Santosh with

Here"s a list of questions with tips and tricks for Google"s 3D chat world, Lively. If you have a question that"s not answered here please ask in the comments, and if you have a tip, please post it too (this page will be updated as new information comes in). What"s Google Lively? Lively (apparently code named Fiji and Google Rooms, and previously nicknamed Google Metaverse by some outside Google) is a three-dimensional chat world by Google. You navigate your avatar to talk to others, show your emotions, and, if you want to, build your own rooms for your website. Lively runs inside the browser but needs a Windows installation first to w ...

Gmail rolled out a new feature which you"ll find at the bottom of the application (if you have it already): account activity information. You"ll see an info text like "Last account activity: 0 minutes ago on this computer" with a Details link. This information is supposed to help you find out when fishy things go on with your Gmails... like when your password has been discovered by someone else, who now browses through your private messages. Clicking on the details link pops up a window where you can sign out other sessions that may be running. That window also contains a recent activity history complete with (partial) IP addresses. "With this information, I can quickly verify that all the Gmail activity was indeed mine," a G ...

Google just released Lively, a 3D world where you can create your own rooms. Traces of this program appeared back in 2007 under the name of My World (and TomHTML, Tony and I also lately saw traces of something called Google Rooms, though we aren"t 100% sure it"s related). After installing the desktop setup for Windows -- yes, this is one of the rare Google products which isn"t completely browser-based -- you"ll be forwarded to lively.com again. There, you can pick from a number of available rooms, and sign-in with your Google account. I experienced many problems with this service right now; from failed log-ins (I finally copied and pasted my password from a text editor to make sure), to odd user name restrictions (I ended up re-selecting my Google ...

Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land did an interview with Google"s anti-web spam boss Matt Cutts at the SMX conference on June 3rd. The issues they talked about in the first half of this (the second half likely won"t be live until some days later) include: The dark craft of creating fake stories to get backlinks (the "13 year old steal"s dad"s credit card to buy hookers" incident), and Google"s reaction to it. Matt: "... to have that land in your lap and not take any ...

A lot of people have used Google but few have any idea as to the complexity and computer power necessary to return billions of queries with millions of results all in under a second. This isn"t by accident, an oversight by Google or even due to security concerns, Google believes in not making search seem complicated to users. This notion is perhaps best illustrated in Google"s "Technology Overview", which uses just 5 images and 4 sentences to explain the "Life of a Google Query". Despite Google"s simplistic interface, search is complicated. For example when a user in San Francisco enters a query like google.com/search?q=blogoscoped, the user"s browser first completes a DNS lookup mapping www.google.com to a ...

A guy by the name of Mr. Schofield got some custom wooden window blinds all with logos from different websites -- like Digg, StumbleUpon, Facebook, and yes, also Google and YouTube. According to the story told by the blinds maker Nets2Go, his wife did not approve of the choice though: The sting in the story"s tail? 2 weeks after the blinds were delivered, Mr Schofield regrettably separated from his wife. "It was coming anyway", Mr Schofield told us, "but my design choice for the blinds was pretty much the nail in the coffin. She doesn"t understand the intense geek in me. And anyway, the only one she"d even heard of was Youtube" As parts of this story sound a bit unlikely, I c ...

Larry Johnson writes that a lot of Blogspot blogs opposing US presidential candidate Barack Obama had been falsely marked as spam. As you may know, Google both offers a "report a spam blog" form, and they also have a Flag Blog feature at the top bar. Larry"s theory as to what happened: "It appears that anyone who blogs with Google supported [Blogspot] is vulnerable to being shutdown unilaterally if they are targeted by a group of bloggers who claim the site is responsible for spam." Larry adds that all you need to do is fill out the spam complaint form, suggesting that "a ...

Together with Yinxue I"ve been working on a new site lately and it goes live today: Watch to Learn Chinese. Originally the idea was spawned when I saw Totlol, a YouTube API powered site aimed at parents who watch videos with their kids. Using the YouTube API in such custom ways looked extremely interesting. At Watch to Learn Chinese, we"ve used it to compile a help site for language learning. Here are some of the things the YouTube "Chromeless Player" JavaScript API enables you to do: completely customize the player layout... well, except the actual movie rectangle and its YouTube logo. Other than that, you can add your own time bar, your own play buttons, volume control a ...

The New York Times has a piece critical of Google"s handling of their day care management facilities for parents. Besides the core issues surrounding a 75% raise of the in-house day care costs, there"s several peppered quotes. For instance, the author Joe Nocera refers to people who heard Google co-founder Sergey Brin saying he has no sympathy for the parents and that he was tired of "Googlers" who felt entitled to perks like "bottled water and M&Ms". Google denies Sergey made this statement, the NYT says. Over at Friendfeed, so ...

Google already frequently shows text-based AdSense ads with a slideshow feature... two arrows where you can click through to more ads if you like. Now Bilal Hameed spotted an image ad with a slideshow feature, as shown above. I wonder... is this new, or is it perhaps one of those gadget ads? [Thanks Bilal! Screenshot by Bilal.] Update: Ionut in the comments says it"s a gadget ad indeed. [Thanks Ionut!]

Google has a couple of "success stories" on their AdWords promo page... like "Five Star Alliance used Google AdWords to increase sales by 75% in just one month" or "Twiddy used Google AdWords and Google Analytics to transform the way it does business". I wonder what the success story to the following ad might look like: Perhaps "we fooled Google searchers into clicking on the ad using a semi-official looking URL and then got them to register on our site for something they"d better be downloading at the official source"? [Thanks Russell O.!]

The Google homepage saw a little change: instead of "©2008 Google" the footer now reads "©2008 - Privacy", with the word "privacy" being linked to Google"s privacy policy help center (which contains videos, legal texts, explanations and so on). Perhaps there may have been legal considerations to do so, too. Google"s Marissa Mayer at the official Google blog says, "Larry and Sergey told me we could only add this to the homepage if we took a w ...

ZDNet today writes: Google has confirmed that personal data of US employees hired prior to 2006 has been stolen in a recent burglary. Records kept at Colt Express Outsourcing Services, an external company used by Google and other companies to handle human-resources functions, were stolen in a burglary on 26 May. An undisclosed number of employees" details and those of dependents, such as names, addresses, and social security numbers, were on the stolen computers. Credit card numbers were reportedly not among the stolen data. ZDnet"s Brendon Chase adds that it is understood "that Colt did not employ encryption to protect the information." According to ZDnet, Google has offered employees to pay for a one-ye ...

Google is closing its office in Denver and Dallas, as someone at Friendfeed posted today. "Employees have to choose relocation or severance," a former Google employee (according to her blog"s about page) wrote, adding that the reason was consolidation; "Someone decided the ROI wasn"t there." I asked Google for a statement and they say: Following an operational review, we are consolidating our offices in Dallas and Denver, as we currently have at least two offices in each of these markets. This reorganization is designed to ensure we are serving the needs of our customers, stakeholders and Googlers [Google employees] efficiently. These are the only two cities affected by this review, and all affected Dallas and Denver Googlers will be offered opportunities within the company.

Google Talk, Google"s chat program, is now available for the iPhone, Google announced in one of their blogs. Google says it"s enough to just point your iPhone browser to www.google.com/talk and then sign in for this to work. Google says you"ll then be able to chat, view your contacts and search for them, and update your status message. [Thanks Colin! Screenshot by Google, edited to remove minor noise.]

The Wired blog writes that a judge ruled that Google will have to "turn over every record of every video watched by YouTube users, including users" names and IP addresses, to Viacom, which is suing Google for allowing clips of its copyright videos to appear on YouTube." Viacom allegedly likes to have that data to prove "that infringing material is more popular than user-created videos." Seems like a clear user privacy violation. Besides, Viacom don"t need actual IPs [edit: ... or login names ...] to validate their claims -- it would be enough to get a made-up but consistent user ID for that (if they would need some way to count users in the first place). I wonder if Google can go into some rev ...

Google Street View -- those panorama photos part of Google Maps -- has now been released for France, as second country in the world after the US. However, the pics taken are just from the Tour de France route, as Luka from the French Zorgloob blog explains. The faces of people are blurred as they are in other Street View locations nowadays, Luka explains. In the meantime, Google"s cars continue to drive around other places in Europe -- like in Germany -- so we have reason to expect more Street View countri ...

In February this year, the Wall Street Journal reported that Google wants to "crack" the Chinese market with a music-related offering. "The U.S. search giant is in the late planning stages of a joint venture with a Chinese online music company that would permit it to provide free -- licensed -- music downloads in China," the WSJ wrote. (Please note the logo above is just for illustrative purposes with no relation to the service...) Now, several traces of Google Music started to surface. First of all, there"s a bunch of additions to Google"s robots.txt file, ...

Many of us are noticing an odd black-to-gray ink spot at the top left of Gmail, like in Firefox. Does anyone know what this is? (Tony Ruscoe suspects it"s a zero-width inline frame...) [Thanks Mrrix32 and Jarred!]

Google"s sitelinks are the navigational links displayed below a main result; they"re automatically picked by Google, and just show for some sites/ queries. Now it seems Google also shows other sub-domains among these links.... like uk.ask.com below www.ask.com in a search for ask (oddly enough, the subdomain link seems to use a different font, too). Does anyone know if this is new? [Update: Apparently not new then, except perhaps the font issue... thanks all!] [Thanks Russell!]

This particular YouTube video has a couple of things going for it which might make more people subscribe to the creator"s video channel or view more of their videos: The first part of the video is basically a still telling viewers to click the Subscribe button to "see Tania naked." To not see her naked, you are told you also need to click the Subscribe button... The customizable channel banner graphic itself has an arrow pointing to the Subscribe button. The graphic is animated, too -- I might be wrong, but it seems this is a hack as they"ve uploaded an animated GIF but using a JPG extension (letting the browser figure out it"s indeed a G ...

Google announced they improved their handing of Flash files in search results; they say they now have a better ability "to index textual content in SWF files of all kinds," including buttons, gadgets and so on. Google were already able to find and read Flash files to some extent, but now, to quote them (my emphasis): We"ve developed an algorithm that explores Flash files in the same way that a person would, by clicking buttons, entering input, and so on. Our algorithm remembers all of the text that it encounters along the way, and that content is then available to be indexed. We can"t tell you all of the proprietary details, but we can tell you that the algorithm"s e ...

Google just announced they are ending their AdSense referrals program. In the past -- and until August 2008 when this will officially stop -- AdSense referrals allowed you as a webmaster to include links from different kinds of products; health, real estate, shopping, computers, travel, Google-suggested products like Firefox or the Google Pack download, and many more. When a user to your site bought something via that link, you"d get a commission of the sale. But now the AdSense page shows a red warning with a link to the help center covering the subject. Also, the following mail was sent to publishers:

Seero.com allows users to mash and sync videos with a Google map. One user mapped a car chase scene from the movie Bullitt with Steve McQueen: to the left you"ll see the video, and to the right the related San Francisco locations. (If you"re wondering why there"s no jet fighters or transforming robots in this car chase, note the movie"s from 1968.) [Via Boing Boing.]

This video has over 2.7 million views on YouTube. And over 23.000 comments. It"s by YouTube sensation Fred, 14-year old Lucas Cruikshank"s fictional 6-year old with "anger management issues", as his channel explains -- and this is by far not his most popular video. Some of his other videos, done in a high-pitched voice, fast cuts, and about lots of teen problems, are titled "Fred Gets Bullied", "Fred Loses His Meds", "Fred Goes to the Dentist", and "Fred on Christmas". Adding up ...

The New York Times reports Google will be teaming up with the creator of the US cartoon series "Family Guy" to distribute short original episodes of a show called "Seth MacFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy."* The first news of this came in last year already. Instead of creating a new microsite where people can view these episodes, in this model the new cartoons will be shown in AdSense spots, those automated Google ads third-party webmasters include on their sites. From the NYT: Advertising will be incorporated into the clips in varying ways. In some cases, there will be "preroll" ads, which ...

The Chinese Google Rebang site -- a listing of hot searches as well as a general info directory -- provides a new research tool for prospective university students in China. The tool is called Gaokao Zhuanti, which can be roughly translated to "Special Subject: College Entrance Examinations." I asked native speaker Aaron Liang from Canada to provide more background info about this, and he says: When the high school students in China graduate, they need to take a national exam (GaoKao) in June in order to go to college or university. After the ...

Tonight, Spain will be playing against Germany in the European foot(as-in-soccer)ball championships final. For this special event -- people in Europe are often found partying on the streets when their team wins -- Google launched a logo doodle contest a while ago, and today presents the winner on the homepage of Google homepages of Switzerland, Austria and Germany. The logo was selected from 3,800 competitors and received over 300,000 votes, Google says, and is drawn by 17-year old Mai Dao Ngoc from Germany. Additionally to having her logo showcased on the homepage, Mai Dao Ngoc was given a computer by Google employee and original logo artist Dennis Hwang during

In much the same way that Google launched the Russian-only Knowledge Search almost exactly a year ago, a new Google Help site has now been launched by Google Poland. The site"s FAQ page (available in English) explains: Google Help is a place where you can ask questions about Google services and give answers to questions posted by other users looking for help.Google Help is an unmoderated forum for users wanting to discuss Google Products. We encourage you to ask questions, answer que ...

Embedded comments, and star ratings Google"s Blogger has a couple of new features available at the special Blogger Draft site. Among these changes are: Star ratings: Let your visitors vote from one to five stars. You will then be able to see the average rating for a particular post. You can find this feature at your Layouts page; click Edit at your Blog Posts element, and check the Show Star Ratings box. The ability to put the comments form embedded below the post. Blogger"s old comments functionality had very low usability for a couple of reasons; one of them was that it ...

A couple of minutes ago an interesting attempt to phish for Google account credentials made it to my inbox. It had me blink my eyes because while I suspected phishing there were some things with this one that had me check twice to see how it"s done, as things looked quite official on the surface. As you may know, phishing emails are sent out by abusers to make the recipient in some way reply with their password or click through to enter their password, but the more official looking they are, the more easily they"re believed. This particular mail, shown in the screenshot, had the following attributes: It was sent by "customer care". OK, could be a lie. It got my name right... might be just luck, as my name is included in my mail address. I ...

Google used to pride themselves about how word-of-mouth spread popularity of their search engine, and to this day they"re doing remarkably little traditional advertising. However, after their ad campaign in Russia now another ad campaign in China has been spotted. Xujie in the forum posted photos from a DWGoogle.cn article, with one pic shown above which includes Google"s super-short "g.cn" domain. From an automated translation: "Google China in Guangzhou Subway advertising is to promote Google"s mobile search services." At the moment, purely relying on word-of-mouth in China would be a tough challenge, too, as the business environment isn"t completely fair. For ins ...

Drake Bennett at The Boston Globe has a long article about how Google managed to remain "fundamentally likable", as he says, while today being "a behemoth, with more than 15,000 employees and a market value as big as Coca-Cola and Boeing combined". He mentions concerns that even provided Google sticks to its privacy policy and handles the sensitive information we feed it sensibly indeed, "government might compel it to turn over search information." Drake argues "Google has so outpaced its rivals that it has begun to look like a monopoly" and goes through various different sugge ...

The New York Times says that Google News, Google"s semi-automated mainstream and blog news indexing service, is experiencing slow growth: ... traffic growth is sluggish. With 11.4 million users in May, Google News ranked No. 8 among news sites, far behind Yahoo News, which was No. 1 with 35.8 million visitors, according to Nielsen Online. Its growth rate of 10 percent over the last two years is far slower than those of most other large news Web sites. In the last two years, second-ranked MSNBC.com grew by 42 percent, adding 10.4 million users. Traffic at CNN.com and nytimes.com grew even faster. If being among the top 10 news sites in the world is consi ...

Reuters today writes: Google Inc was named on Monday in a trade secrets lawsuit alleging that the company"s business software unit copied a tiny start-up"s tool for moving customers off of Microsoft software onto Google"s. LimitNone LLC filed a complaint in an Illinois circuit court alleging that Google at first began promoting the smaller firm"s tool for migrating Microsoft Outlook customers to Gmail, then copied the idea and went into competition with it. [Via Google Watch Blog.]

Google just went live with Map Maker, a program that makes certain regions around the world -- like Jamaica, Iceland, Bahamas, Grenada and more -- editable by everyone (everyone with a Google account, that is). "Map Maker allows you and your peers to add, edit and moderate most features you see on maps including roads, lakes, parks, points of interest, businesses, cities and localities," Google writes in their blog post. I find the interface for this tool somewhat non-intuitive in parts (for instance, a button in the explanatory legend looks just as clickable as an actually clickable button ...

Google "Universal" includes results from Google Maps as well as other verticals. In addition to relevancy, Google Maps includes geographic factors in determining ranking order in search engine results pages. Google Universal search engine results page including Google Maps results. By creating their own business listing, business owners are helping drive traffic to their site as well as customers through their front door. Millions use Google Maps each day and business listings are free through

Brian Jepson is the editor who worked with me on the book Google Apps Hacks, and I asked him to describe the technical process of what it took to convert the book from Google Documents -- in which the book was written -- to the InDesign format. Here"s his explanation. One of the tricky parts for us was getting the chapters into InDesign, the book layout program we use for our books and magazines. I know where we were coming from -- Google Docs" HTML format -- and where we were going to -- InDesign"s tagged text format. For example, here"s what one of the Google Docs do ...

Google Japan* launched a microsite titled One Green Project to help prevent global warming, and promote some ways of using Google"s tools like iGoogle. The page seems to contain tips for reducing CO2 emissions. Can anyone who speaks Japanese explain more? [Via the Google Japan blog. The screenshot shows a bug I"m seeing on Google Maps.] *I"m not sure if this is also rolled out for other countries?

Worth1000 started a little photoshopping contest to show what things would look like if Google ruled the world (arguably, they already rule quite a bit of it, at least online). I like the One Google dollar bill... [Via Google Watch Blog. Image by Hbales.] Update: Oops, this contest is old... it"s from 2006, F.O.R. in the comments says. [Thanks F.O.R.!]

You can now enter a domain into Google Trends and switch to the Websites tab to get traffic information. Use a comma between domains to see comparative stats, as in mashable.com, techcrunch.com. Note Google"s guess of the daily unique visitors only works for some websites, and you also won"t get absolute numbers. Google on their help page explains: Trends for Websites combines information from a variety of sources, such as aggregated Google ...

This is the story of Russell, whose AdWords campaigns fell prey to a phishing scam. Russell advertises one of his websites (WorldLabel.com) using AdWords, Google"s program that will launch advertisements on search results and third-party websites using AdSense. Russell is not a large-scale advertiser, so he only had a single campaign has six campaigns set up, he tells me. Seemingly out of the blue, Russell one day noticed how a lot of odd, likely spammy campaigns had been set up in his account though. Take a look at the screenshot: The keywords targeted for this campaign are all variations on "loans", "fast cash" and so on. The maximum cost per click was set to $6.25. Now apparently, Russell suggests that Google m ...

When you search Google for gay, you will see special rainbow colors next to the AdWords ads to the right side. Rainbow colors are a globally recognized gay symbol and there"s Pride Week coming up. On a related note, Google also sometimes dresses up AdWords for holidays, and they"ve also had their own wagons at gay parades before. Within Google, gay employees call themselves "gayglers." [Thanks Michelle L.!]

Google provides a daily Google tips gadget for iGoogle. Here"s a sample tip of the day: If you use Gmail, you may have noticed the headlines that appear at the top of your inbox. These web clips show news, blog posts and other information available from web feeds. You can customize what web clips are shown by clicking Settings, then the "Web Clips" tab. Choose from a directory of sources, or provide your own feed. Note you can"t just click "Next" on this gadget to get a new tip, as is common with other program"s tips windows -- this is literally just an archive of tips, so the Prev and Next buttons are used to navigate th ...

Vittorio sent in this Google translator finding: If you type "simpaticone" (very funny person) in Google Translate and choose Ita-Eng, the result is "Barack Obama". The ways of the Google are long and complicated... [Thanks Vittorio!]

The designers at TurboMilk didn"t like the new Google favicon -- the icon displayed in the address bar and elsewhere on Google"s sites -- so they decided to take the design job in their own hands. Four designers each had a try at a redesign, and came up with different reasoning and different end results. Here"s one of their results: As the official Google blog told a while ago, Google"s new favicon too was the result of different explorations of the Google design team, as Google"s image shows....

Totlol is a community-moderated video site for "those between the ages of 6 months and 6 years." Its video embeddings -- like the Googleheads song -- are based on the YouTube API, making for a customized, integrated look*. Totlol"s About page explains, "Online video is a great new experience, and new parents discovered that showing their tots videos on the computer screen is a great way to spend time together. So they head to the leading video websites." Totlol steps in, the explanation reads, because some of the bigger video sites "provide no way to filter anything that may be inappropriate and they provide very limited tools ...

When preparing a new text message to someone on the mobile phone I use, you"re offered to pick from ready-made text templates like "I am late. I will be there at ___" or "I"m busy right now. I"ll call you later." Another template Nokia decided to include reads: I love you too Thank you Nokia developers of the world for making our busy lives a bit simpler!

Googolopoly by Box.net is a game of Monopoly where the goal is to "organize all of the world"s information." To achieve this, you can buy or build internet properties. The board includes fields like "Go" ("collect 200 shares of VC funding as you pass") or a "deadpool" jail ("404 error file not found"), and properties you can buy range from Jotspot, YouTube, SketchUp, over to PayPal, eBay, Yahoo and Microsoft... [Via Spreeblick. Thanks Ionut!]

Brian Ussery is director of SEO at Search Discovery in Atlanta, Georgia, and develops using Google"s tools and APIs. The Google Maps team has been hard at work launching a number of new features in recent months. In case you"ve missed them, here are a few of the features available in Google Maps these days. "Get directions" with Google Maps Street View Google"s Street View was released a year ago and includes imagery for 37 major metropolitan areas in the US. In addition to the stand-alone version, Street View is now included in Google Maps directions. Street View directions make it possible for users to virtually tour new destinations before their arrival. ...

Now when you look for bits and pieces at Google Code Search, you can switch to an Outline view additional to the existing Files view. In the (presumably) new Outline view, you will see a linked list of functions and their parameters. This does not work with all kinds of programming languages yet (like Visual Basic), but it worked in some when I tried (like JavaScript). ...

Surprise... I usually enter "gmail.com" to jump to my email inbox, but today I"m greeted with the following message after doing so (the message sits at mail.google.com/gmail/): We can"t provide service under the Gmail name in Germany; we"re called Google Mail here instead. If you"re traveling in Germany, you can access your mail at http://mail.google.com. Oh, and we"d like to link the URL above, but we"re not allowed to do that either. Bummer. For general information about Google, please visit www.google.com or www.google.de. Why does this happen? The reason is likely Google"s lost trademark

Geoquake released a bird"s view driving simulator... based on the Google Maps Flash API. Well, perhaps "simulation" is a bit far-fetched, as you can pass through any object, like houses. (Ironically, this works better for me than maps.google.com, where I mostly see gray tiles.) [Via Waxy.]

TinEye is an impressively fast, and well-working image comparison search engine -- you provide either an image URL or an image on your hard disk, and then they will show similar images. While they don"t yet have enough images indexed to show a lot of results -- and often, there won"t be any result at all even when you know the image exists online -- this is still a very interesting engine, and already useful for certain types research. (It"s also the kind of product where you wonder, "Why doesn"t Google release this?") Searching for the Google logo... I"ve asked Idée Inc, the company behind this, what people might wan ...

Google announced they about doubled the scope of their Google Maps Street View imagery, bringing it to many new locations including Springfield, Atlanta, Knoxville, Reno and others. Also, some old imagery has been expanded or updated, and Google also says they"ve rolled out their face blurring technology to all pics*. You can also now look upwards in all of their images, Google says, and looking down also won"t result in you seeing their Street View car or other obstacles. At the moment, the Google Maps panorama photos are still only available for the US, but Street View cars were spotted in several other locations -- like in Italy ...

Oh, sweet. You know when you look for some company homepage to get their support email address or something, and then the page will start with a super great 3D animation that will take a minute to load... before you can actually find the info you wanted? Well, that"s why many Flash apps have the infamous "Skip Intro" button included, and now*, Google does too. In a search for e.g. yuasa france, the top result -- yuasa.fr -- is listed as normal. But to the right side of the title, there"s a link reading "Skip Intro", which will take you straight to yuasa.fr/index.htm. (On the other hand, perhaps for some sites it would also make sense to directl ...

In the post The Google Browser from earlier this year, someone going by the name "the Lizard" says that Google is developing its own, WebKit-based browser. Lizard argues that it is strategically dangerous to bet too much on just Firefox, which sends a lot of paid search traffic to Google, and that this made Google start an internal project in mid-2006 titled "GBrowser." According to the Lizard, GBrowser is built on top of the open source WebKit browser framework, which was also used by Apple to create Safari, and is also used for the browser of Google-initiated mobile platform A ...

up up down down left right left right b a :) Tags: google reader, konami code, ninja [Thanks anonymous!]

In 2004, David McCandless produced a "good news"-only Google News (see image). Now there"s a new "personal version of good news"-only fiction of Google News around. [Via Reddit.]

Yakov at the Quintura blog reports of a Googe outdoor advertisement campaign in Russa. The tag line of the campaign -- reportedly titled "Moscow 2.0" -- is "Know more on Google.ru", and according to Yakov, it includes "information messages about the city of Moscow on 5.5 thousand ad places in Moscow, including on 24 billboards, 58 benches and 4.5 thousand stickers in the city underground." As part of the campaign, Yakov writes, "users are invited to embed their own city images and videos onto a virtual map of Moscow on Google Maps." Google often relies on word of mouth rath ...

Google went live with Gmail Labs, experimental features for web mail client Gmail which you can choose to enable one by one. Note this may still be rolled out for you; if you have it, you can log-in to Gmail, click Settings, and switch to the right-most tab, titled Labs. You will then see an explanation that this is an experimental testing ground where Google engineers can try out new ideas, with a warning that any feature may "change, break or disappear" in the future (but that you can temporarily disable the Labs via a special URL). Here are some of the features currently available -- note whenever you pick one, you are not only required to hit ...

Frank Taylor of the Google Earth Blog has news that Disney World of Orlando, Florida, is now available in 3D in Google Earth. To view this, enter disney world in the Google Earth search box -- you might want to download the latest version, but note when I tried it always crashes Firefox 3 -- and tick the "3D Buildings" box in the bottom left. Here are some screenshots, and Frank also put up a video:

Google has always been a friend of open source. First, when they were "only" a search engine as a user with their Linux based servers or their GIMP drawn Google logo, but later also as a contributor. Nowadays, the involvement is too broad to be fully covered here, but to mention a few they submitted countless fixes to WINE, have the Google Summer of Code program, an open source project hosting page and last not least full projects that were or are yet to be open sourced like Google Web Toolkit or Android. Recently, Google took another step towards open source: Google Gadgets for Linux. Google Gadgets come in two ...

... is a new site. Unfortunately, Firefox-only (plus perhaps Safari)... I did this with Canvas. Feedback welcome. [Thanks to all who gave early feedback, including Tony, Jess and Dominik! Hat tip to Pixelwit. My friend Dominik contemplates a Flash port to make this IE-ready, please contact me if you want to help.]

YouTube now offers video annotations, text bubbles created by the video owner which are overlaid on the video at specific times. To add an annotation to one of your own videos, check your videos listing and hit the "Edit Annotations" button next to one. You will be able to insert three types of annotations; "speech bubbles," "notes," and "spotlights." Also, you can add a link with each annotation. Those URLs may only point to YouTube though (I wonder if that"s greedy or if there"s a good reason for this). This feature also allows you to create interactive videos -- like a video ending with a multiple choice question, leadi ...

.imageBox { background-color: #eee; font-size: 85%; padding: 10px; -moz-border-radius: 10px 10px 10px; border: 1px solid black; font-style: italic; margin-top: 40px; margin-bottom: 40px; } h4 { background-color: #eee; padding: 4px; -moz-border-radius: 4px 4px 4px 4px; color: #555; text-align: center; } From 2003 to January 2008, Kevin Fox worked as a user experience designer at Google, designing such products as Gmail, Google Calendar, and the second version of Google Reader. He"s curre ...

Following Philipp"s announcement last month about the release of Google Apps Hacks, written by him and published by O"Reilly, I"m pleased to say that another O"Reilly book recently hit the shelves. Over the last couple of months, I"ve been the technical reviewer for Google Apps: The Missing Manual, a book aimed at users who are either new to Google"s online applications, such as Google Docs, Gmail, Google Talk, Calendar, iGoogle, Page Creator, Google Apps and Google Sites, or who simply want to learn more about all the available features which can sometimes be difficult to fin ...

Goosh.org hosts an unofficial Google interface which "behaves similar to a unix-shell," as the author Stefan Grothkopp explains. For instance, entering n disney will result in a Google News search for the keyword "disney". Type help to see some of the other available commands, like lucky (an "I"m feeling lucky" search), wiki (a Wikipedia search), blogs, or video. Note this project is not the first try at a Google command line utility, though one previous such site I know of seems to be down now. [Thanks Stefan!]

"We have asked you here to appear before the robotic tribunal to defend your case, human." "I was ..." "Quiet! You will speak when you"re asked to. R27161, please read the accusation." [human bows his head, momentary silence] "R27161 speaking. The human #281738 is accused of having climbed upon an early Googlebot model around 20 years ago. Human?" "It was 2008, those were just cars, not robots! I was actually..." "No need to shout, human. Continue." "I was ...

TomHTML of the French Google watch blog Zorgloob conducted an interesting experiment, and the results are in now. What Tom did was to put up a couple of fake definitions in order to fool Google"s "define" operator. To explain, when you enter something like define hula-hoop into Google web search, you may get an instant result on top... in this case, the explanation that Hula-Hoop is a "plaything consisting of a tubular plastic hoop for swinging around the hips." (You can also bring up these definitions when you enter e.g. what is hula-hoop, and the query define:hula-hoop yields a page with nothing but definitions, if available.)

Google Maps is showing a redesign here, though I don"t know in what occasions it shows and whether it"s experimental or meant to go live for everyone. At the moment in Firefox (but not Internet Explorer, and also not in Firefox on another computer) I"m seeing the orange tabs gone; instead, there"s now a light blue bar on top with plain blue links reading "Get Directions" and "My Maps". The search examples are now printed in gray inside the input box itself, as opposed to above it. A slight shadow effect makes the map area look embedded in the page, and it"s now spanning towards the right and bottom browser limits without padding. I think the new design looks a bit lighter and ...

This is one of the smaller changes to Google -- at least if measured in pixels! Google changed their "Favicon.ico", the 16x16 image file that usually shows in the browser address bar or in bookmarks. The old icon used a square with red, green and blue edges, wrapping an upper-case "G". The new logo is a bit more open, showing just the lower-case blue "g" from the Google logo, without borders, and a bit of shadow. To see this, visit Google.com (or images.google.com, Google Product Search and so on), empty your browser cache and reload the page. Tony Ruscoe in the forum wonders, "Is Google undergoing a rebranding exercise...?" and adds, "Maybe they"re going to be known as "the little g" rather than "The Big G" ...

Brian Ussery is director of SEO at Search Discovery in Atlanta, Georgia, and develops using Google"s tools and APIs. He"s visiting the Google I/O work shop and brings us photos and more. Google Developers from all around have converged on the Moscone Center here in San Francisco, CA for 48 hours to discuss their latest projects, new products and web applications. Google"s largest developer event, Google I/O 2008 is under way. This year"s Keynote presentation by Vic Gundotra, Google vice president of engineering (formerly at Microsoft) along with special guests from Google Web Toolkit, Android as well as other teams, focused on building web applications to adva ...

Google in a press release announced they are now allowing open sign-ups to their Google App Engine, which according to Google saw 150,000 developers register so far. The App Engine allows developers to create Python programs running on Google"s scalable, distributed server infrastructure. Plus, two new APIs will come to the App Engine, Google says: a server-side image manipulation API to crop, scale, rotate pics, as well as a caching layer to render pages faster. Google also announced an expected pricing plan which they say will become effective later this year. To quote the numbers from their press release, which are additional to the free s ...

A screenshot of the live plug-in Google released a Google Earth plug-in and API. This means you can now view Google Earth-based applications -- with functionality defined by the developer of a site -- in your (Windows) browser. It"s a bit of a bridge between the Google Maps browser-only application and the existing Google Earth desktop-only installation. I"ve tried this with Firefox and it works nice, though the download, as well as subsequent loading of applications once the plug-in is installed, were rather slow. Naturally, creating sites that require an ...

It seems a bunch of new functionality might be coming to the Google Docs spreadsheets application. By accessing one of Google"s experimental sites (like the one where I found offline access would be coming to Google Docs) I was able to get a sneaky look at some of this functionality, including the ability to record, edit and run macros, edit a shared spreadsheet in something called "List mode" and a few new functions for use in spreadsheet formulas. Macros For those unfamiliar with advanced features offered by desktop office applications, a macro is a set of instructions that can be used to automate a series of actions in a program. Yo ...

Google boss Dr. Eric Schmidt talked to German FAZ. Here are some of the items Eric talked about (my emphasis; note from what it looked like, FAZ might have back-translated the interview from German, though I"m not sure): The mobile web, in a discussion that circled around ads: "Yes, mobile will be a larger business than the [PC web]. But it will take a few years." Advertising in social networks: "MySpace did not monetize as well as we thought. We have a lot of traffic, a lot of page views, but it ...

German Welt Online reports (translated): The Californian search engine operator went to Hamburg in 2001. This was followed by offices in Düsseldorf, Frankfurt/ Main, and Munich with altogether 300 employees. Now Berlin will be the smallest branch at 150 square meters. Mainly, the new location will be housing Google"s new chief lobbyist Annette Kroeber-Riel. Internal title: European Policy Counsel. Kroeber-Riel represents Google in industry associations like the Bitkom, and promotes Google positions to consumer protection workers and politicians. Welt.de adds that Kroeber-Riel "will have a lot to do" as "since months" the criticism against Google grows, in particular in relations to "privac ...

According to the descriptions on YouTube, the first video is a Google Street View car in Seville, Spain, and the second is one around Palm Springs, California, US. These cars from the Google fleet have a camera mounted on top to photograph the panorama views that are later added to Google Maps ...

We are faced with a harmonized collectivity of consciousnesses to a sort of superconciousness. The earth not only becoming covered by myriads of grains of thought, but becoming enclosed in a single thinking envelope, a single unanimous reflection. -- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) «[French Jesuit scientist and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin] believes that because human beings are self-reflective ... they constitute a new sphere of existence on earth; the sphere of thought, or the noosphere

"Reflow is the process by which the geometry of the layout engine’s formatting objects are computed," Doug T. explains. Above Mozilla reflow visualization shows how the browser calculates the geometry of the Google Japan homepage, and Doug has more visualizations at his blog. [Via Reddit.]

Haochi Chen stumbled upon what looks like it may be a prototype of an optimized Google result snippet for discussion threads. In a search for e.g. router vs modem, the top result from Computing.net was showing the text "Discussion forum: 3 posts - 2 authors - Dec 8, 2001" below the title link. In this case I can see 4 posts on the Computing.net page, but in other cases the count is correct. While Google makes this experiment -- which they may currently only show to a small portion of users -- work for different types of discussion boards, it does not work for each and every forum (it does not work for the forum here, for instance). To join this ...