Late last night there were discoveries of the login page for Google Notebook, then came the Official Googleblog announcement of Google Notebook and of course news of the launch spread like wildfire (along with a direct link there to the plugin download. Yes, Google Notebook is finally reality. I haven’t had a chance to test yet, but I did log in and download the extension for Firefox (I haven’t had a chance to close out and restart firefox yet, too much going on…)
Category: Google
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Google Calendar revisited
When Google Calendar first rolled out, I took a look and was not overwhelmed. Now, I’ve had a chance to revisit and see a few improvements. First, one of my initial problems was that I couldn’t get to calendar from gmail. The code has now been added in the upper left corner to navigate between the two (or the google homepage, or their “other services”). This was missing when I first looked. I distinctly remember seeing it in one of the testing screenshots. Even immediately after I had started out with the Calendar, the link was still not there. I’m not sure when, but it’s there now. Good.
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The Google Problem, or why I’m starting to use MSN and Yahoo more.
This weekend has been a bit of an introspective for me on why google is still the primary search engine I use. I know, I’ve been a big “fan(?)” of google for quite some time, I’ve obviously incorporated many of their products into my pages and used Google for 99% of my web searching. In recent months though, I’ve certainly had frustrations from the “site owner” side of the Google relationship. My North Carolina Genealogy site had traditionally been hosted as a subdirectory of averyjparker.com and had always enjoyed the lions share of traffic, so when I gave it it’s own domain, I did a 404 page not found for those following outdated links and I added an automatic 5 second redirect to the northcarolinagenealogy.net page. I soon learned that was a mistake, as the site vanished from Google around the first of December.
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Search engines to blame for malware spread?
There are a couple news stories about a McAfee SiteAdvisor report about the search engines responsibility for sites that distribute malware.
McAfee said Friday that the epidemic of spyware and viruses could be linked to search engines. According to research from the company, even seemingly benign search terms could bring up sites loaded with nasty payloads.
The study looked at the five major search engines — Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, and Ask — and covered a period from January through April. Researchers found that in every search engine, popular keywords returned sites that could be potentially dangerous.
What’s worse, in popular keywords such as “free screensavers,” “digital music,” “popular software,” and “singers,” as much as 72 percent of the returned results contained some kind of risky link.
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A couple interesting online Advertising notes
I’ve run across a couple of interesting things. The first was linked to from the second one I’ll mention. I know, some time back, I visited a publicly available Google Adsense tool a few months back and at that time found an interesting tool that gave you keyword suggestions based on a term or keyword that you supplied. Interesting and very likely it gave results that you might not have thought of without the tool. However, I don’t recall being able to get quite as much information as it appears they give now…
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Google Adwords traffic estimator
For a long time, the only way to play around with Google advertising possibilities was to join Adwords and then you could choose different keywords, see search volume information, estimate the ad position, clicks per day, etc…. I’ve been tempted many times to look into Adwords (which is the flip side of AdSense…) Many times. In fact, I still may, but today the Inside Adwords blog has announced the standalone traffic estimator that can be used without logging into your adwords account.
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Google press day announcements…
It looks as though Google has made a bit of a splash with four product announcements today. Nothing being EXACTLY as forecast it is a bit interesting…. First there is Google Coop where it looks as though people in specific fields can help suggest, review and refine results (like a directory), then users subscribe to an individual who has labelled sites. This is the area that Google Health falls under and there are a couple areas that are “Under development”. This gives some interesting possibilities for refining searches in certain areas.
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Google Press Day
It seems that today is Google Press day and speculation is rampant as to what will be unvelied. Google Health/ Google Purchases are among the leading speculations. In fact, Google Health has been a standing rumor as has the Google Purchases, but there are some signs that a launch might be nearing.