Google Reader is undergoing a constant update and its being transformed to compete with major social media websites like Del.icio.us and Twitter.

Add Notes:
Google Reader now helps add Notes on to it.

Item Sharing:
The new feature from Google helps annotate a shared item with your own notes.

Bookmarklet:
The new bookmarklet helps save any web page along with personal notes and share them with friends. The Google Reader bookmarklet helps save webpages which do not have a RSS feed.

Google has added a whole lot of features to the online PowerPoint application, Presentations. Some of its new features include embedding YouTube Videos, Google Gear and Speaker Notes.

Google has mentioned in its Google Docs Blog that seasoned presenters keep their slides simple and use slides to help illustrate their points, not to present all of their information. They jot down their talking points, examples, and supporting evidence in speaker notes. To help you do this in Docs, we’ve added speaker notes. You can print these speaker notes in advance, or pop them up in a separate window when you present. This would be a wonderful add-on to the impressive Google Presentations.

The new option to embed YouTube videos directly into presentations would be extremely useful on the internet while sharing presentations online using Google Docs users.

Internet has been spammed in all possible ways from e-mail boxes to blogs. It looks inevitable to avoid spam. There just seems to be a possibility to reduce spamming.

Matt Cutts, Google Engineer and Head of Web Spam Team has been fighting spam for the last eight years. Speaking to web enthusiasts in the recent Web 2.0 Expo 2008 in San Francisco, he provided ample tips on fighting spam on websites.

He also mentioned that Captcha systems are not secure and that spammers can bypass CAPTCHA systems easier. Matt Cutts also stated how bots are signing up on Blogger accounts and use accounts to advertise their products and services.

Matt Cutts made it clear that search engine optimization is not spam and that Google by no means hates Search Engine Optimization. Cutts also requested web masters to inform Google Webmaster Central sites that use black hat techniques like white texts on white background to bring up search results.

Google has informed that its new image search algorithm would help search images on the internet far simpler.

The new image search tool would rank images in order of importance much like how website results are displayed on Google search results.

The current image results are based on the page content, alternative tags, image captions, image name and assumptions. However, the new search algorithm has the ability to even read images.

The search algorithm would first draw up a link between different images for a particular keyword. If the search is for earth, then the tool would assume the visual image pattern to have a circular visual theme. Based on this visual theme, it would identify other images related to the category.

Shumeet Balujaz, a Google researcher, mentioned in a paper he co-wrote with a colleague from the Georgia Institute of Technology that “By treating images as web documents and their similarities as probabilistic visual hyperlinks, we estimate the likelihood of images [being] visited by a user traversing through these visual-hyperlinks”.

The new tool would be called “Page Rank for Image Product Search”. The new search tool while tested on the most popular 2,000 images reduced 83% of irrelevant images returned in Google Image search.

A private detective from the Bay State Detective Agency has filed a law suit in California Court against Google for advertising in third party websites. If the lawsuit wins, Google would have to end up paying millions of dollars.

Bay State Dectective ageny private investigator David Almedia informed that the company had signed up for Google Adwords. However, he wanted to advertise only on Google search engine and not on websites like MySpace or personal blogs.

He also mentioned that while setting up the budget for advertisement, he had left the text box blank thinking that a blank box means he would not be charged and that his advertisements would not be displayed.

Google has earned $1.7 billion from advertising in the first quarter of 2008. It should also be noted that Kabateck Brown Kellner had filed a suit against Google for Click Fraud and Google ended up paying $90 million in settlement in the year 2006.

However, this sue by the private detective does not seem to have a strong base to fight against Google. It is a well known fact that Google also displays the advertisement in its other websites apart from the search engine like Blogger and also on third party websites.

Looks like Google has been ignoring Blogger security issues lately.  Bots are bypassing the human verification step and creating spam blogs automatically. This would be a serious threat to Googles security and Blogger reliability.

CAPTCHA a type of challenge-response test is a verification process where the subscriber has to type the numbers/text that are displayed on an image. This helps find out if the blog has been created by a human being or created automatically by a bot program. CAPTCHA has been used by almost all online registration steps after it was coined in 2000 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum and Nicholas J. Hopper of Carnegie Mellon University  and John Langford from IBM.

It is reported that Google has not yet allocated resources to work on Blogger. The Blogger team is still fixing bugs and gets away with work. This has lead to users opting for Wordpress and other free blogging services present online.

This result in security ignorance could be due to Google having other top priorities which could yield more income to the company.

Google Scholar released in November 2004 as a beta version is a freely-accessible search engine that indexes scholarly literature from a variety of publishing formats and disciplines.

Google Scholar helps users search for digital or physical copies of related articles either online or in a library. You can virtually search theses, books, articles, peer reviews from various societies, repositories, universities, academic publishers and scholarly organizations around the globe.

Alex Verstak and Anurag Acharya were ones who initially triggered Google Scholar. Acharya announced in 2007 that Google Scholar has started digitizing journals from various publishers to separate Google Book Search from Google Scholar. Google Book Search inturn scans older journals without metadata needed for finding out specific articles.

Google Scholar’s “cited by” feature has had serious competition to ISI Web of Knowledge and Scopus. However, Google by far is relatively larger than these competitors.

Google came up with the idea of GS after Microsoft launched its Windows Live Academic Search way back in 2006.

Google decided to choose the name “Guge” for its Chinese website. However, this name has not been welcomed warmly by Chinese Google users. Rather, Google users are disappointed with the name.

Google chose “Guge” because it incorporates the Chinese language characters for ‘valley’ and ’song,’ which is an allusion to the Chinese traditional songs that celebrate a rich harvest.

However, Chinese internet browsers are not comfortable with the name. A Chinese Google user mentioned that the name Guge makes them feel bad and it disappoints them.

It should be noted that the name Google was derived from the word Googol which refers to the number represented by a 1 followed by 100 zeros. A googol is a very large number. There isn’t a googol of anything in the universe as a Googol exceeds the count of stars,  dust particles and atoms.

Error: Your search - cache:ISf_NXfdkfMJ:www.seo-mind.com/example.aspx site:www.seo-mind - did not match any documents.

Suggestions:
Make sure all words are spelled correctly.
Try different keywords.
Try more general keywords.
Try fewer keywords.

Some of you who are trying to view the Google Cache of a page might end up with a similar error as above. Google has been mentioning this while clicking on the Cache link for recently cached pages. If you analyze closely, you would find that this occurs only to pages indexed a few hours back.

The most probable reason should be that the server is not yet ready to show you the Cache page and you would have to wait for some time, probably a day to view it.

Google Vice President and CIO Douglas Merrill resigned to join as the President of the UK and NY-based music company EMI Group.

Douglas Merrill joined Google in the late 2003 as the Senior Director of Information Systems. He was responsible for multiple strategic efforts and Google’s 2004 IPO and its related regulatory activities. He was directly in control of the entire internal engineering and support activities worldwide.

Before joining Google. Douglas was the Senior Vice President of Charles Schwab and Co., Inc a multinational financial services company.