With another sort after product under its tag, Google not just is increasing in reach but also in revenue streams. The advertiser-friendly Google Insights helps provide better insight into broad search patterns.

The tool helps web experts, advertisers and publishers understand the search patterns through time in various locations. These geographic search patterns help understand and strategize web marketing.

The Insights tool also displays some very useful information like the rising search keywords, top news related to the keyword and search terms related to SEO.

This is a welcome tool especially for search engine experts and online marketers.

Not much publicity or hype has been on the new Google Knol [A unit of knowledge]. But it looks like Google prefers ranking its Knol articles in SERP better than other websites.

This favoritism has been noted by a number of publishers. Even an article originally posted in a different website with good PR many months back, if when copied and posted in Knol can give higher results than the original article. This has caused a number of concerns as Google who played the Pope all these days is now trying to promote its own website. This is not a fair game by Google which would just result in loss of reputation.

When a duplicate article is posted on Knol, Google warns that it is a duplicate content as it identifies from where the content was extracted. However, when the same duplicate content is posted, it ranks even better than the original content. Google might claim that this is based on the “Query Deserves Freshness” algorithm which it has been promoting during the recent days. But that doesn’t mean that “new duplicate content deserves more” or “we will add PR to our sites the way we want” Google algorithms are valid.

With Google falsely promoting its own new site, SEO experts have identified the potential in linking to these pages and a large number of search engine experts have already started adding articles or linking their websites to Google Knol.

Google has open-sourced its protocol buffers. What exactly is a protocol buffer? What are its advantages? Let’s discuss.

What is a Protocol Buffer

Protocol buffers are an automated mechanism to serialize structured data in an easy, effective and flexible way. This is great to do an update on an old data structure without affecting its functionality.

Protocol buffers also helps pull data from numerous resources using all popular languages. Well you might think, aren’t XML files doing the same? They help read write data, store then sequentially and they are flexible. When you consider storing, retrieving, updating millions of data at a flash of a second, then protocol buffers certainly have a lot of advantages over XML.

Protocol Buffers Vs XML

Protocol buffers are at least 20 to 100 times faster than XML. If you are handling enormous amount of data, protocol buffer is the best option
Protocol buffers are much simpler and hence better understood and easy to program.
Protocol buffers are at least 3 to 100 times smaller in size. While dealing with huge data, it definitely makes a difference.

Protocol buffers were developed by Google using an index server request/response protocol. There are 48,162 different message types defined in 12,183 .proto files in the Google code tree. These are used by Google RPC and in persistent storage of data.

The 171-year-old jewelry company Tiffany & Co lost to eBay on a suit filed by Tiffany on counterfeit auction listing on eBay. This could be a pleasant surprise for auctioneers like Amazon, Yahoo and Google.

Tiffany’s lawyer’s contacted eBay in 2003 stating that any seller who sells five or more pieces of Tiffany jewelry should be automatically deleted. eBay in turn did not consider this demand and stated that, “we are not prepared to do at this time”. This frustrated Tiffany who again approached eBay to ban all silver Tiffany jewelry. eBay again refused the request. eBay was not willing to accept this demand because it felt that considering a listing infringing just because the seller sold multiple items at the same time is not reasonable.

This long argument was finally put to an end by Judge Sullivan on Monday. He mentioned that eBay always removed listings promptly whenever Tiffany notified of any counterfeit goods. He also mentioned that eBay even delayed listings of Tiffany products by 6 to 12 hours just to do a manual check before making the products live. The judge stated, “As a factual matter, there is little support for Tiffany’s allegation that a seller listing five or more pieces of Tiffany jewelry is presumptively trafficking in counterfeit goods.”

It should be noted that eBay provides the service VeRO – Verified Rights Owner were a trademark owner can report or remove infringing listings. There are more than 14,000 companies and individual merchants participating in this program. Tiffany is one of them.

eBay spends $5 million each year on its fraud search engine identifying counterfeit listings. The search engine has 13,000 rules set to find out fraudsters through a keyword search algorithm.

Another feather to be added to Google’s hat of employees. Google announced that Patrick Pichette who recently served as the President of Operations at Bell Canada would join Google as the Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer.

Mr. Patrick Pichette was instrumental in managing and succeful operation of one of the most extensive communication networks in Canada. Having more then 20 years of experience in financial operations and management, Pichette served for 7 years in Bell Canada holding various executive positings. He was the Chief Financial Officer from 2002 to 2003.

Pichette will be joining Google from August 1 and would become the Chief Financial Officer on 12th of August.

Speaking to the press, Dr. Schmidt said, “Patrick brings the expertise and track record of a successful CFO, along with the hands-on business experience of a seasoned operations executive. This strong combination of skills and experience will be an important addition to Google’s executive management team and will support our ongoing efforts to increase value for our users, advertisers and partners.”  Schmidt also mentioned, “On behalf of all my colleagues at Google, we welcome Patrick and, once again, thank George Reyes for all that he’s done for Google.” Pichette would be directly reporting to Dr. Schmidt.

Pichette mentiond that Google is a great company with a phenomenal brand and outstanding management team. He added, “As an avid user of Google products, I’ve admired the company for many years and am excited about working with my new colleagues in Mountain View and around the world.”

Pichette would be replacing George Reyes who announced on 28th August, 2007 that he would retire from his job at Google as CFO in the near future and will also help Google to replace the position that he held.

Sounds like Microsoft would never give up fighting Google. Well not through technology or creative innovation, but through acquisition. Or is it that Microsoft feels loosing out a bid is degrading its name?

Microsoft Corporation, the Redmond based software giant has again renewed its discussions with Yahoo on a deal to overtake Google. This time Microsoft is not on a pursuit for full acquisition of Yahoo. In return, it’s planning on an alternative to search advertising partnership.

It should be noted that Google had a two week test with Yahoo having its ads displayed in Yahoo search results. Looks like MSN is alarmed at the two giants partnering up as Google and Yahoo alone have more than 80% internet search market covered.

Microsoft’s desperate plans to become a leader in internet search and advertising is not proving fruitful though MSN ranks as one of the leaders in internet technology. MSN has been offering bids with Yahoo in February 2008 and as a private bid in February 2007 which was not publicized.

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 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.

Comparing month to month or week to week has never been easier, thanks to Google Analytics new feature to view analytical data daily, weekly or monthly.

Google Analytics has come up with a new beta version of viewing graphs daily (regular view), weekly and monthly. This new beta version has been appearing from the last week.

Clicking on “Week” or “Month” would display the graph Weekly or Monthly showing statistics from one week to another or one month to another. Google Analytics calculates the total number of visits and makes an average for a week or month depending on the option we choose.

Webmasters have mentioned that this option has been really helpful, especially when they have their website analytical data for years.

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.