InsideGoogle

Pimp My GMail

A new look for the GMail Help Center has gone live. The most remarkable thing is this :

via [SearchEngineWatch]

October 18th, 2005 Posted by Coolz0r | Services, Gmail, General | 8 comments

MS AdCenter Live

Microsoft has begun its paid search pilot program by rolling out its’ beta pay-per-click interface, a product they call AdCenter.

Evan Roberts over at [SearchEngine Lowdown] scoops you up :

“Microsoft has obviously spent time doing market research finding out what users would like in their console and taken it a step further by adding features that are unprecedented in the search space. “

Smooth stuff coming your way :

Geo-Targeting
Demographic targeting (age and gender)
Time-targeting
Bid Matching
No Content Targeting
End Date

Read more & find out [Right here]

October 18th, 2005 Posted by Coolz0r | Advertising, General | no comments

Secret AdSense API

Randy discovered something very very very secret :

There exists a private API in Adsense for retrieving ads via XML. This would allow a customer to completely customize the look of the ads and avoid the Ads by Goooogle appendage entirely. The API is RESTful, extremely lightweight and includes some very interesting options like returning only adult ads. If I try to use the API, it fails (Forbidden) because my host IP address does not have access.

Well, I hope you figure it out, Randy, cuz the ads by gooooogle is like the only thing bothering me with the ads by Google.

from [Besting Adwords]

October 18th, 2005 Posted by Coolz0r | AdSense, Advertising, General | 5 comments

GMail’s Spam Filter On Vacation?

Randy has had a very frustrating day. City workers laying sod cut the cables of his internet connection at least a half dozen times, then when it got fixed, he got spammed all over the place, through GMail.

The solution to the *MXON* and ‘viagara’ spam is to start creating your own filter rules :

“I’ve had to start writing my own Gmail SPAM filters today. I’ve received hundreds of SPAM with the phrase *MXON* in it. They are almost identical, except for the number of *’s. This seems to escape Gmail’s SPAM filter and I’ve setup a rule to forward anything with that string to the Trash (you can’t send it to the SPAM bin with a rule). “

Read on [iBLOGthere4iM]

October 18th, 2005 Posted by Coolz0r | Spam, Gmail, General | one comment

What Is It?

Yeah. The Countdown says we’ll know in 28 hours.

What is it? Do you want it? It can hold 2500 songs, has over 1700 lines of resolution…

It is everything you ever wanted. That’s for sure.

“The highlight however is the 6 funny videos which appear to make fun of many other company’s campaigns […]”

Check out [Whatis-it.com] via [AdLand]

Update : Whatever it is, you can get it on e-Bay ! - ‘it’ was a viral ad for e-Bay marketing rules !

October 18th, 2005 Posted by Coolz0r | General | 6 comments

Yahoo Acquires WhereOnEarth

Yahoo said on Tuesday it has acquired a small UK company called Whereonearth to help improve its local search and mobile phone services and compete more effectively with search leader Google.

“Whereonearth specializes in location-based Internet services, including a sophisticated database of geographical locations that will let users search for local goods and services without entering a zip code or post code.”

[…]

Whereonearth’s database covers more than 90 percent of Europe, Asia and the Americas, Yahoo said, including detailed information about where certain areas are in relation to each other.

“Having that geographic data asset is something that’s becoming critical for us to make the user experience relevant, as well as the advertiser experience more useful,” said Bassel Ojjeh, Yahoo’s vice president for strategic data solutions.

[YahooNews] has more on this.

October 18th, 2005 Posted by Coolz0r | Yahoo, General | no comments

Yo, Google, Pass Me The Milk

If the title was ’search related’ it would read : Yo, Google, Pass Me The Juice

Walid Elias Kai from Sweden, a Ph.D. in search engine marketing, is a big fan of Google. So big, in fact, that he named his son “Oliver Google Kai.” If that wouldn’t be enough, in Lebanese tradition both parents now have a name related to their son; Abou Google and Emm Google (Google’s father, and Google’s mother).

Read more on [GoogleBlogoscoped]

True or false? Cool or nerdish?

I can only imagine where the kid will be looking for a job when he’s out of school, and as for the playground jokes on his way to graduation… well… it’s pretty obvious they’ll take away stuff from him and tell him to search for it.

October 18th, 2005 Posted by Coolz0r | Controversy, Culture, Humor, General | one comment

ProgrammableWeb & Movil

ProgrammableWeb is a web-as-platform reference site and blog delivering news, information and resources for developing applications using the Web 2.0 APIs.

Many (if not most) inventions are created by mixing two older inventions together to create something new and useful. What do you get when you mix “X” and “Y”? And is it useful?

Philipp has a good example set up. See what you can do with it. Combining ideas always has been a good thing

Join [ProgrammableWeb] and do something with the Movil API.

As for Movil, we’re still looking for some folks from the U.S. or Canada who can help us test our mobile community project. We can provide you with the sms tokens etc.
If you’re interested, let us know.

October 18th, 2005 Posted by Coolz0r | General | no comments

Measure Map, Coming Soon To A Blog Near You

Measure Map is a Web application that helps people get to know their blogs. It looks great and has a lot of possibilities.
It’s about to go online (end of this year) and you can already sign up for an invitation.

“Measure Map is a Web application that helps people get to know their blogs. We do this by collecting and analyzing blog-specific traffic statistics and presenting them in a browsable interface that encourages exploration. It is an experience that offers meaningful insight into the effects caused by small changes in how you blog, rather than the overwhelming complexity of most web stats tools with their query/report-style analytic methods. Measure Map provides understanding by refocusing the difficult problem of web statistics and solving it just for blogs.

We do this with a few lines of code in your blog’s template; there’s hardly any configuration to worry about. We collect your traffic data continuously and in real time and display it through some innovative Ajax-based techniques. But even though we’re a hosted service, you own your data. An open API will empower you to do whatever you like with your numbers — we’ve already built an OS X Dashboard widget, for example. Imagine what else you could do with your blog’s stats…“

[MeasureMap] via [Jeffrey Veen]

October 18th, 2005 Posted by Coolz0r | Consumer Products, Blogs, General | no comments

Blogspot Under Fire

Randy has some good points regarding the entire “Google needs to clean up Blogspot” issue that is going on. I agree totally with what he says, but I have some thoughts on this too, which I’ll add after his to-the-point quote :

” […] Many in the blogosphere have pointed the finger at Google and want Blogspot taken down until they can fix the splog program. This is very short-sighted. You see, if Blogspot wasn’t hosting these splogs, then somebody else would be. The reason sploggers have chosen Blogspot, is that it’s a very popular blogging platform that supports an API. If not Blogspot, then sploggers would host on 21publish or Blogspirit or Blogware or Wordpress. […]”

See, it’s true that Google offers a platform that allows abuse in a certain way, but indeed so do other platforms. My question is : then how come nobody else is using the other services for the same purposes they use the Blogspot for? I’m pretty sure some free bloglines accounts are also splogs, but I’ve not yet encountered a series of splogs overthere. Could it be the browsing function in Blogspot (mostly top-right located) actually invites people to start a splogblog, because of the random ‘next’ button? Is it an open invitation? I thought Google put up a ‘Flag this’ button to get rid of the problem. Isn’t that working out? What are they doing with the flagged blogs? If there were three or four employees over at Google who would crawl through Blogspot for a week, I bet a lot of crap would be removed already, no?

What is the exact difference between Blogspot and the others that makes sploggers decide to go host over at Google’s?

Then : Would things change if there was a blogsearch service that was able to filter out the splog-results?

“Beyond the constant easily detected SPAM that escapes them and the finger pointing that follows, none of the blogosphere search engines are all that good at capturing the blogosphere conversation and an HTTP 500 error isn’t exactly out of the ordinary.”

Randy puts up a ’state of the blogosphere’ regarding this topic, which is an interesting analysis of the electronic world today.

Satire : Splogspot.com & Spamgoogle

Definitely to be continued.

October 18th, 2005 Posted by Coolz0r | Spam, Controversy, Culture, Search, Advertising, General | 2 comments