It seems pretty much like a fact already, that more and more people are relating the term ’search’ with ‘Google’. I bet you’ve heard dialogues in movies that sounds like these, ‘Let’s Google it’, ‘I found this in Google’, etc. No doubt Google has done a terrific job in their search engine, but have you ever wonder, how intelligent will Google’s search engine be in the next few years to come?

Folks at The Vacationeers has a clue. Check out these funny video clips, demonstrating how sophisticated and intelligent Google search engine has evolved.

Google Maps

Google Moon

Google My Maps

Google SMS

I believe the main reason why AdSense Referrals program is shutting down is because it’s not performing as good as the measured and it’s best that the team place their effort on the more successful product. If you are using these referral ads, you should take them down, at least before the end of August 2008 as they’ll be no more ads after then.

Here’s Google’s suggestion for referral ads publishers:

• Google Affliate network
• Google AdSense

Here’s a word from Google

We’re constantly looking for ways to improve AdSense by developing
and supporting features which drive the best monetization results
for our publishers. Sometimes, this requires retiring existing
features so we can focus our efforts on the ones that will be most
effective in the long term. For this reason, we will be retiring
the AdSense Referrals program.

Is Google AdSense testing out new formats again? Folks at Technospot spotted a different AdSense block on the blog and this time, it’s nothing to do with positioning, instead, it’s a different font.

We all know AdSense allows ads customization. Publishers get to change the ad text colors but never the font type. A large rectangular AdSense block with Comic Sans font type was displayed earlier in Technospot today. Comic Sans is amongst standard font type that most platforms will have. Other examples of font type that can be properly displayed cross platforms are Arial, Helvetica, Georgia, Century Gothic, etc.

Is this a sign that Google AdSense will allow font type customization in future? Well, if they do it’d certainly be something really interesting. Imagine a blog using Georgia throughout with AdSense blocks using Georgia font type – a perfect blend. There’s no news yet from folks at Google AdSense, but we’ll be watching.

The Google design team took more than 100 approaches before they came to this simple ‘g’ favicon. However nothing is final yet, and if you think you know how a Google favicon should look like, Google is inviting you to design one.

Requirements

• resolution: 16 pixel x 16 pixel image
• format: .png, .gif, or .ico
• size: 5 KB
• transparency: 32 bit alpha transparency

And here’s where you can submit your favicon.

via Google blog

When I was logging into my Google AdSense account, I noticed the favicon did not look quite the same. Instead of the previous capital ‘G’ in ‘G’oogle, they now used the ‘g’ of Goo’g'le. At first I thought I end up in some kinda phishing site or it’s a web browser cache, but then I soon found out that even Google SERP pages are using the same favicon.

ICQ Chat Logs

I’m not sure if any of us are still using ICQ, but if you are using the online version of ICQ (instead of the ICQ app), you should know that your chat logs will be stored online. Best part of all, it’s searchable. Dangerous?

How to – Search for intitle:”Index of /” ICQ in Google search box.

Other Chat Logs

This one targets something more general, basically if they are chat logs and matches the search keywords, it’ll be exposed too. If you are performing a search with the following keyword, you are so going to find something interesting.

How to – Search for “Index of” / “chat/logs”

in Google search box.

Fast Solution

The quickest way to make sure private files are not crawled by Google bots is to have this following code in your robots.txt

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

or include a <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow”> inside your HTML, before </head>.

As I was running through some old articles, I noticed my AdSense large rectangular unit showing something rather odd. There’s total of 4 ads in grid of 2×2 format. It looks weird at first, but if Google were to confirm this format, I think there’s a lot of potential of blending this style. Notice that the ‘Ads by Google’ on only appears on the bottom right; that makes the 1 column’s ad units look really like content. With good placement, this unit can certainly blend well.

Think of Google Analytics AIR beta as a desktop version of Google Analytics. Thanks to the multiple-platforms supports of Adobe AIR, this cool application is able to run in most operating systems – Mac, Windows, and Linux.

Google Analytics AIR beta allows you to add multiple profiles of multiple Analytics accounts under one roof. If you previously need to logout from one Analytic account to get in another, now with this desktop client you don’t have to. Google Analytics AIR supports most of the functions of the web version. It’s also lighter and greatly enhance the experience in statistics analyzing.

Installing Google Analytics AIR Beta

Google Analytics AIR Beta runs on Adobe AIR, so you might want to make sure you have the platform installed. Click here to download/install Adobe AIR.

Download Google Analytics AIR Beta

Official Google Blog recently announced a new service – Google Ads Manager. In a nutshell, it is a control center for all the ads have in your website, or blog. If you need to edit the HTML, templates or blog widgets to get a new ads reflected on the website, this is definitely what you are looking for. It helps you to manage all ads in one central place. Also with Google AdSense the biggest player in the ad network industry, it’s pretty convincing that publishers will want a Google Ads Manager account.

Google Ads Manager is currently on invitation only, why not request for an invitation? I’ve submitted mine.

Folks at Google announced this cool instant messenging tool for website call the Google Talk chatback. Think of it as a tool to help you communicate better with your website visitors or blog readers. You place a badge or so in your website, and when visitors clicked on them, you will be notified and chat begins.

Your visitors don’t need a Google talk account to use this, but you do. To get started, click on the chatback start page, copy the provided HTML and paste anywhere suitable on your website. Visitors are also able to see your status, whenever you change them on GTalk, it’ll be reflected as well. Sounds simple, isnt it? I’ve be placing this on hongkiat.com for a while, you can chat with me if you want, provided that I’m online :-)

GTalk Blog

Google Gmail Chat has just added invisible mode as one of the statuses. Good news for those who wants to stay online but keep him or herself away from messages. Apparently the invisible mode is one of the most requested function Google Talk Help Center has received. I guess it’ll be just matter of time before GTalk upgraded with this.

via Gmail Blog

Tonight we will be celebrating Chinese New Year – The Year of Rat according to the Chinese lunar calendar. Google, as part of the celebration also have their logo slightly tweaked – a rat flipping the calender from the year of pig to year of rat. By clicking on the logo, you’ll be brought to a result page of the keyword " 鼠年 春节" (Chinese New year, Year of Rat). The first link on the result page will direct you to a Google Service where you can send free SMS to your loves one this festive season. However I don’t think that service works for all users.

Google also added some firecrackers images at left side of Adwords in result page. To see these in action, visit Google China, or now with a shorter url www.g.cn.

Gong Hei Fatt Choi to all who are celebrating this Chinese New Year. For all my friends, please call me up for mahjong session :-)

Google recently launched some translation bots for GTalk. When you type in a particular phrase or paragraph, the bot will translate it to the language you want, real time. To use the Google translation bot, add them to your GTalk, and here’s how you can add them as a contact in your GTalk.

The bot’s email address comes in the following format.

Format:

[from language]2[to language]@bot.talk.google.com

Sample:

en2zh@bot.talk.google.com, will translate english to chinese.

Supporting Language Pairs

Notice that Google uses two-letter language abbreviations here. Here are the supporting pairs of languages, for the moment.

• ar2en (Arabic to English)
• de2en (German to English)
• de2fr (German to French)
• el2en (Greek to English)
• en2ar (English to Arabic)
• en2de (English to German)
• en2el (English to Greek)
• en2es (English to Spanish)
• en2fr (English to French)
• en2it (English to Italian)
• en2ja (English to Japanese)
• en2ko (English to Korean)
• en2nl (English to Dutch)
• en2ru (English to Russian)
• en2zh (English to Chinese)
• es2en (Spanish to English)
• fr2de (French to German)
• fr2en (French to English)
• it2en (Italian to English)
• ja2en (Japanese to English)
• ko2en (Korean to English)
• nl2en (Dutch to English)
• ru2en (Russian to English)
• zh2en (Chinese to English)

Amusez-vous bien! And that means have fun in French.

via GoogleGTalk Blog

Google has recently released some pretty neat API for it’s Google Chart. It allows you to create charts on your browser dynamically, on the fly and free. Here’s all you need to do:

1. Open up a browser
2. Paste in the following URL
   http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chd=t:20,40,80&chs=250&chl=A|B|C
3. Tweak the settings.
4. Hit enter, download your chart.

Customizing your chart

Here’s a general explanation on the parameters of the URL.

• cht=p3 – Type of chart
• chd=t:20,40,80 – Values, separated by commas.
• chs=250×150 – Chart size, width x height
• chl=A|B|C – Labels of each chart sections.

You can create up to 5 different charts (Line charts, Bar charts, Pie charts, Veen diagrams and Scatter plots ) with Google Chart API, as well as tweaking the colors, line styles, markers, etc. All these are well explained on Google Chart API code page.

Google Blogoscoped reported that they are already receiving feedbacks from some GMail users that their accounts are suddenly suspended/disabled. Reason that causes such action – unknown.

Here’s the error message received by GMail user John Welch:

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

According to John Welch in Blogoscoped comments, his account is somehow partially disabled.

What is odd about the situation is that, one of my computers has a cookie so that my Google Personalized homepage is still running on one of my computers and I can click through the multiple tabs, but when I try to log in to check my email it gives me that error again.

I asked other people I know that use Google Accounts and so far one of them said their account also was disabled.

Google has yet to give an explanation on that.

Updates:

Seems like more and more are getting this problem. Over at GMail Help Discussion, there’s like 151 pages of user postings (for the moment) and majority were complaining about their account being disabled.

After all the rumors about Google’s gPhone, the internet giant today announced that they are not coming out with a new phone, but a open source linux based mobile phone platform call Android.

Android, a joined development of Open Handset Alliance will release its Software Development Kit (SDK) on the 12th of November for developers to test and build cool mobile applications. You probably will not see a mobile phone running Android until next year. Wonder which will be the first phone that supports Android.

Now watch the Android introduction video from its developers.

Blogger Play from its first impression, looks like a gallery of photos. It is a real time slide show of images Blogger users uploaded to their blogs. Theses images come from blogs that are public and listed on the web.

If you are a Blogger users, this can be one good chance for you to get some exposure on your blogs. Make sure images are watermarked clearly with your URL. But if don’ want images from your blog to appear in Play.blogger, there is an option to remove it from the listing.

Google Pack, the collection of applications google recommends is now adding another new application to the family – StarOffice by Sun Microsystem. Questions arise after the announcement, mostly wondering why’s the decision of Google to include StarOffice but not OpenOffice which is build with StarOffice as foundation.

Folks at googlesystem says:

It will be interesting to see why Google didn’t choose to include OpenOffice.org, the primary difference between StarOffice and OpenOffice.org being that StarOffice includes some proprietary components like clip-art graphics, fonts, templates and tools for Microsoft Office migration.

However it doesn’t really matter I guess. StarOffice is actually a $70 bucks application, but with Google Pack it’s free. Make sure you are on a fast internet connection because StarOffice itself is more than 140Mb in file size.

AdSense blog mentioned about Referral 2.0 28th June 2007 but it wasn’t really make available for me until yesterday. First impression on Referral 2.0, a lot of referral ads!

Here are the key benefits of Referral 2.0 directly pull from google’s blog.

• Expanded product inventory: While many of you have had success referring one of our Google products, some of you weren’t able to find a product that fit the context of your site. Referrals 2.0 offers products from thousands of AdWords advertisers, so you can find the right ads for your sites.
• Category and keyword targeting: With thousands of products available, it can be difficult to decide which ads will perform best on your site. That’s why we give you the option to refer products by category and keyword. You can narrow down the types of ads you want to display and let AdSense figure out which ones will perform best on your site. Whether you want ads for a specific category, advertiser, or product, referrals 2.0 will give you the control to decide.
• Ad unit optimization: It can be tricky picking the best ads for your site, so we’ve included ad unit optimization for referrals. When you create a new referral ad unit, simply select the Pick best performing ads option. We’ll then compare your selected ads to other relevant ads, and serve the ads we expect to perform best on your site.
• Better targeting for pages with multiple themes: With standard contextual targeting, ads may not match up directly with the text around them if there are a number of themes on the page. With referrals, you can select unique “keywords” for each ad unit to narrow the targeting directly to the theme you want. Better targeting means higher earnings for your site.
• Greater compensation for high-quality traffic: Since referrals are paid on a cost-per-action (CPA) basis, your traffic matters. If the traffic you send to advertisers is more likely to turn into a completed sale or lead, you will earn more with referrals.
• Add your seal of approval: Unlike AdSense for content ads, our program policies allow you to make specific references to referral ads on your site. If you endorse the product that you are referring, feel free to let your users know. By adding your personal review of the products you refer, you can help your users make more informed choices.

Insert Referrals 2.0 into blog/websites

Google made Referral 2.0 navigates like a shopping cart, so it is really easy to understand even for a first timer. There are tones of categories to choose from, it advisable to gran only those that matches your niche and add category to cart.

Click on view product if you would like to see what these products are. Take a look at Performance on Network on the right side. It gives you ideas which amongst are performing good and likely to convert traffic for money. Chances are you will see most as NEW! Since Referral 2.0 is new.

Click on the product itself to see what ads you are getting and how much you are getting paid for each action. You can even make sure only some specific ads shows on your website but it will not always work if you have the Pick best performing ads checkbox clicked.

Click continue until you get the codes and have them inserted inside your website and you are done.

Here’s how a referral ad will look like:

Verdict

Referral 2.0 gives publishers a lot of option; from choosing categories of ads until optimizing to choose which performs best and display them on websites. Its also contextual, therefore from my point of view, its more likely to convert to clicks compare to images.

However Referral 2.0 is still CPA (Cost per Action) ads. It requires actions (which likely to be purchasing) before one can earn from it. Unlike CPC ads, you earn per click but of course not as much as CPA. I’ve scanned through some of the payouts of these different referral products, they pay are not bad. Say if you earn 10cent from CPC, you probably earn 100x more from a successful CPA.

I think I already have enough ads on my page. The tricky part now is how give referral 2.0 a good spot yet don’t kill user experience.