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Yahoo has begun testing Search Assist, a new search refinement that could have an impact on search marketers for its ability to prevent typos and guide searchers toward a specific query.

Search Assist refines queries by providing related topics as searchers type to assist them in finding the right search term that will deliver the most relevant information. A recent Harris Interactive poll of online users commissioned by Yahoo showed that Web search users on average needed between 3 and 4 searches to find what they needed. Search Assist is intended to cut down on that number by presenting users with more refined queries and topics early in the search process.

Most of the major search engines have offered post-search suggestions for related searches for years. Google Suggest was the first to offer this type-ahead, pre-search query refinement in its Labs beginning in December 2004. Ask.com added a pre-search query refinement feature in June with the launch of Ask3D.

Yahoo added the pre-search Search Suggest feature earlier this month, which had been available in the Yahoo Toolbar for Firefox since March.

With Search Assist, Yahoo takes that idea a step further by offering related topics as well as specific suggested queries as searchers type. It’s also designed to stay out of the way when users don’t need it, and will only engage when users pause in the middle of typing a query.

More article : http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=3626550

Get more from your Google Base listings by using Google Checkout
By Stephen Salinas, Google Base Support

As a Base user, you’re probably well aware of the increase in traffic that Base listings can deliver to your online business. Now you can convert more of that traffic into sales with Google Checkout, a fast and convenient checkout process that allows customers to buy from you quickly and easily with a single username and password.

If you currently list individual products on Base-hosted pages, you can now place a Google Checkout “buy” button on each of your listings. Customers who use Checkout can buy from you quickly and securely – and you’ll be able to use Checkout to process their orders and charge their credit or debit cards. Learn how to add Google Checkout to your Base listings.

Checkout can also be integrated into your own website alongside your existing process. Google Base merchants that accept Google Checkout on their sites get their product listings and AdWords ads badged with the Google Checkout logo in Google search results, which set them apart from competitors and lets customers know that buying from those sites will be quick and easy. And until 2008, Checkout merchants pay no transaction processing fees. Learn how to offer Google Checkout on your site.

For more information about using Google Checkout with Google Base, visit the Help Discussion Group for tips from other Google Base users.

Source: http://base.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=25396&topic=8288

The latest company to join Google is on-demand communications security and compliance solutions Postini. The deal was sealed today with Google purchasing Postini for a hefty sum of $625 million according to a Google official press release. Postini is currently serving 35,000 business and 10 million users worldwide. None other than Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt explains the reason for the acquisition of Postini:With this transaction, we’re reinforcing our commitment to delivering compelling hosted applications to businesses of all sizes. With the addition of Postini, our apps are not just simple and appealing to users — they can also streamline the complex information security mandates within these organizations.

On Postini’s side, President and CEO Quentin Gallivan explain that:As the market leader in on-demand secure communications and compliance solutions, Postini complements Google perfectly. We share a commitment to providing enterprise customers with compelling technology alternatives. This is an exciting milestone, one that will certainly lead to the next level of rapid innovation.With the acquisition of Postini, Google is hoping to strengthen its

Enterprise suite Google Apps to effectively serve the needs of its enterprise clients. Especially since, corporate customers are very concern about enterprise network security when utilizing enterprise wide applications on their corporate servers. Postini would certainly enhance the effectivity and integrity of Google Apps as an enterprise solutions for office networking and computing.

Source: Search Engine Journal

When you log in to Google Docs & Spreadsheets today, you might be in for a bit of a surprise: we’ve completed a pretty significant redesign. Since we launched Google Docs & Spreadsheets less than a year ago, we’ve made dozens of updates to enable better collaboration. As more and more documents accumulated, users asked for an even easier way to manage them. With this latest refresh, you’ll see that we have been listening to feedback and spending time thinking about the best ways to stay organized.

Some highlights of the clean new look:

• Sidebar with folders: For those who used tags, all your tags have been converted into folders, and you can now drag and drop your documents into any folder. Just like tags, docs can live in multiple folders.
• Documents sorted by collaborator: Sometimes you can’t think of the title or even the content of a document, but you remember whom you shared it with or who shared it with you. To make sorting easier, we’ve added new “created by me” and “shared with…” folders.
• Better search: With autocomplete, all relevant documents, folders, and collaborators are displayed as soon as you begin typing your search query.

The redesign also includes new icons, chronological sorting, and an easier way to save documents in alternate formats.

These features and other improvements are now available to anybody using Google Docs & Spreadsheets at http://docs.google.com or through Google Apps.

Google is keeping a close eye on a small, suburban Melbourne start-up that claims to be developing a search engine that improves on the world leader.

MyLiveSearch, which plans to go live as a public beta in a few weeks, is the brainchild of self-taught software developer Rob Gabriel.

Mr Gabriel, 35, says his search engine gives better, more relevant results than the search king because it is a truly “live” search.

Google’s search engine works by building a vast index of web pages, via automated “spiders” that crawl through billions of web pages a year. However this represents only a fraction of the enormous, sprawling internet, and the index can never be entirely up to date.

Yahoo! search and (despite its name) Microsoft’s Live search work the same way.

MyLiveSearch is fundamentally different. It works through a small browser plug-in. The search terms are put through Google, or other indexed search databases, but those results are treated as “starting points” alongside the user’s bookmarks and other popular web hubs.

From there, the live search takes over, crawling through hundreds of web pages connected to those starting points in search of more information relevant to the search.

Mr Gabriel says the results come back in seconds, and are almost always richer, more detailed and more useful than a standard, index-based search. His product can also search the so-called “invisible web” of dynamically-generated web pages that search engines have trouble indexing.

“This has the potential to change the way people search the internet,” he said. “Google can’t search every page every day (to build its index). The web is so dynamic and changes so often - MyLiveSearch turns your own computer into a ’super-spider’ to search it in real time.

“This technology could be snapped onto any of the major search engines and improve them.”

A Google business development representative has met with the MyLiveSearch team at least twice - once when the technology was at a very early stage, and again last week after Next made inquiries about Google’s interest in the project.

Google did not want to comment on MyLiveSearch, except in general terms.

“We’re really keen to support Australian developers and IT entrepreneurs,” spokesman Rob Shilkin said. “Google Maps was a small Aussie start-up. And Google itself started as two guys in a garage.”

The company has a history of acquiring technology that might help a competitor. In April last year Google bought the rights to an advanced text-search algorithm invented by University of NSW student Ori Allon. Mr Allon, 26, was given a job at Google’s headquarters at Mountain View California.

Search for any human name on google image search and append &imgtype=face in the url 

Google upped its stalker factor this week by adding face recognition abilities to its image search. While currently unofficial and unannounced, users can now search for images that only contain faces by appending a query string onto the end of a search URL. For example, a general image search for “Ars Technica” produces a variety of image results, but when appending “&imgtype=face” to the end of the URL, all new results contain photos of people.

The hidden feature was discovered by Google Blogoscoped, and there is currently no way to indicate that you only want to search for faces through the image search interface. However, both “&imgtype=face” and “&imgtype=news” trigger different search results than what is presented by default—the latter showing only images that are associated with news stories.

The technology appears to be the fruit of Google’s 2006 acquisition of Neven Vision, a company that had developed techniques for facial recognition in photos. “Neven Vision comes to Google with deep technology and expertise around automatically extracting information from a photo. It could be as simple as detecting whether or not a photo contains a person, or, one day, as complex as recognizing people, places, and objects,” wrote Picasa product manager Adrian Graham on the Official Google Blog last August.

Google is apparently taking that technology to heart by experimenting with facial recognition online. Even cooler (or creepier, as the case may be), one day Google’s image search may be able to find faces of specific people based on image analysis/recognition alone instead of relying on the text associated with that image to identify the person in the photo. We can probably expect more search parameters to be added to the search in the future, too, such as different types of animals, different clothing items, and more. Until then, we’re stuck experimenting with different search terms in hopes of discovering one that the public doesn’t know about yet.

By - Jacqui Cheng

Google is expanding seemingly by the minute, and acquisitions are playing a big role in the search engine leader’s quest to rule the technology world. Wednesday Google said it will buy a photo-sharing Web site called Panoramio and confirmed the acquisition of security software vendor GreenBorder Technologies. There are rumors Google will also purchase a provider of online RSS feeds called Feedburner for US$100 million.

In all, Google has agreed to make at least 11 purchases of companies or technologies in the past year. Google usually doesn’t release financial terms of small deals, but the big ones are substantial: US$1.65 billion for YouTube and US$3.1 billion for DoubleClick (the latter deal is pending a federal investigation). A little bit more than a year ago, Google spent US$1 billion for a 5 percent stake in AOL.

The past year’s purchases, which we describe below, have helped Google shore up gaps in its product line, develop a better office application suite capable of competing with Microsoft Office, and build on its massive success in online advertising. Microsoft has made 13 acquisitions in the same time frame, including a US$6 billion deal during May for aQuantive, a digital marketing and advertising company).

Pending acquisition

April 2007: Google agrees to buy Internet advertising company DoubleClick for US$3.1 billion. Microsoft, which failed in an attempt to buy DoubleClick, urged federal regulators to block the purchase, saying it would hurt competition in Web advertising. The Federal Trade Commission has just launched an antitrust investigation into the Google-DoubleClick deal.

 Completed acquisitions

  May 30, 2007: Google agrees to buy Panoramio, a community photos Web site based in Spain that connects pictures to the exact geographical location where they were taken, allowing users to view those photographs in Google Earth. Google and Panoramio had already been working together for several months before the purchase, and the deal is expected to lead to further integration of Panoramio content with Google mapping technology.

May 29, 2007: Google buys GreenBorder Technologies, a maker of browser-based security software. The acquisition should help Google strengthen protection against malware across its line of Web applications. “The idea is that these guys have great expertise in the security domain that can provide obvious benefits to Google, its users and its advertisers,” a Google spokesman told InfoWorld.

April 2007: Google buys Tonic Systems, which makes technology for creating presentations and document conversion. The purchase is part of Google’s strategy to add presentation sharing and collaboration capabilities to Google Docs & Spreadsheets, a competitor of Microsoft Office.

April 2007: Google buys videoconferencing software from Stockholm vendor Marratech. Google plans to use the software for its employees, and has not yet announced any plans to market the videoconferencing technology.

March 2007: Google buys Adscape Media, which makes technology for placing advertisements in video games. The US$23 million deal came less than a year after Microsoft bought video game advertising company Massive for US$200 million, a move that was seen as an attempt by Microsoft to get a leg up on Google in the advertising realm.

March 2007: Google buys Trendalyzer software from a nonprofit called Gapminder. Trendalyzer makes statistics more understandable by converting numbers into interactive animations.

December 2006: For $28 million, Google buys part of Endoxon, an Internet mapping technology company in Switzerland, in a move to bolster European maps in the Google Earth downloadable application and the online Google Maps.

October 2006:Google buys YouTube for US$1.65 billion in a stock transaction. Google subsequently bolstered its video search engine with YouTube content in a move to integrate the two sites. The downside: Google got hit with a US$1 billion lawsuit from Viacom alleging that YouTube enables copyright infringement.

October 2006: Google buys JotSpot, which makes wiki technology for collaborative Web sites. Google’s long-term strategy for JotSpot is unclear. New signups for JotSpot stopped after the purchase, and customers are still waiting to hear what Google’s plans are for the service, which has suffered from some performance and availability problems since being acquired.

August 2006:Google buys Neven Vision, a company that specializes in mobile photo search. The deal was made to improve Picasa, a free download that helps users share and edit photos, and locate and organize photos on their computers. Neven Vision technology obtains information from photos, such as whether they contain images of people.

Source -http://www.linuxworld.com.au/index.php/id;1941637819;fp;4;fpid;3

The ‘Robots.txt Summit’ generated some healthy discussions and support for adding a tag to parts of a page that do not relate to the main content, such as navigation, menus repeated across the entire site, boilerplate text, or even advertising. We heard what people were asking for so we did a little homework and are now happy to introduce the ‘robots-nocontent’ tag.

This tag is really about our crawler focusing on the main content of your page and targeting the right pages on your site for specific search queries. Since a particular source is limited to the number of times it appears in the top ten, it’s important that the proper matching and targeting occur in order to increase both the traffic as well as the conversion on your site. It also improves the abstracts for your pages in results by omitting unrelated text from search result summaries.

To do this, webmasters can now mark parts of a page with a ‘robots-nocontent’ tag which will indicate to our crawler what parts of a page are unrelated to the main content and are only useful for visitors. We won’t use the terms contained in these special tagged sections as information for finding the page or for the abstract in the search results. Note: Using a “nocontent” tag to mark explicit sections of content is not considered “cloaking” because all of the content on the page is available to protect the relevance of the results (unlike “cloaking” where we may be served content that is different from what visitors see).

So for example, the header and boilerplate on Yahoo! Answers might be useful to visitors, but it’s probably not helpful when searching for this particular page. The ‘robots-nocontent’ tag allows you to identify that for our crawler in order to improve the targeting and the abstract for the page.

Applying the “class=robots-nocontent” Attribute:

Here are a few examples of how to apply this attribute for various uses and different syntax options:

<div class=”robots-nocontent”> This is the navigational menu of the site and is common on all pages. It contains many terms and keywords not related to this site.</div>

<span class=”robots-nocontent”> This is the site header that is present on all pages of the site and is not related to any particular page</span>

<p class=”robots-nocontent”> This is a boilerplate legal disclaimer required on each page of the site</p>

<div class=”robots-nocontent”> This is a section where ads are displayed on the page. Words that show up in ads may be entirely unrelated to the page contents</div>

Update: Addressing some comments and questions, with regards to links, the ‘robots-nocontent’ does not in any way affect how links are treated. All links will continue to be used to find targets and will carry attribution to the target if they do not have the ‘rel=nofollow’ tag on them, whether or not they are inside a ‘robots-nocontent’ section.

We deploy various algorithms and mechanisms to understand your website and pages including headers, navigation, footers, etc. However, using this and other markup such as the ‘rel=nofollow’, you can ensure we have more information to understand your site correctly.

On standards, we would be happy to make this into a microformat and are already reaching out to that community. We chose this mechanism because we saw that it was compatible with existing standards and microformats and that makes it easier to gather broader support, including from the other search engines.

http://www.ysearchblog.com

Today at the Emetrics Summit in San Francisco, Brett Crosby and Jeff Veen unveiled the new version of Google Analytics. We will be activating this new version on all current Analytics accounts over the next few weeks, so please be on the lookout for an email from us and keep an eye on your settings page.

After it has been made active, you will still have access to the old version for at least one month.

What’s different?
We’ve redesigned the reporting interface for greater customization and collaboration. This should make it easier for businesses and website owners to find and share the data you need to make informed decisions. The new version presents data more clearly and in context, so you can look at a single report to gain insights rather than having to pull up several reports to understand what action to take.

The admin settings and the actual data collected are not changing except for a few improvements detailed on the FAQ page, of Google support so it shouldn’t take you long to get used to the new interface. We hope that you’ll find Google Analytics more accessible and useful for your business or site. Here are some of the improvements

• Email and export reports: Schedule or send ad-hoc personalized report emails and export reports in PDF format.
• Custom Dashboard: No more digging through reports. Put all the information you need on a custom dashboard that you can email to others.
• Trend and Over-time Graph: Compare time periods and select date ranges without losing sight of long term trends.
• Contextual help tips: Context sensitive Help and
  Conversion
  University tips are available from every report.

Why did we develop this new version?
Since Google Analytics launched in November 2005, the demand for website analytics has increased significantly. Today there are hundreds of thousands of Google Analytics customers, and web analytics has moved from being a niche function to becoming a mainstream aspect of the business for companies of all sizes. You’ve asked that we focus our engineering efforts around maintaining the sophistication and features that experienced users want, while also making it easy for both experts and non-experts to quickly and easily find the answers you want.

For a smooth transition, here are a few helpful resources specific to the new version:

• Take a tour of the new version
• Report Finder Tool: will help you see where data from the previous interface is located within the new version (it is also linked to from within your reports on the left navigation menu)
• FAQs for more details about the new version
• New version features page

And as always, the
Help
Center, the Google Analytics Authorized Consultant program and the Analytics Help Forum are available to help you.

The new version of Google Analytics is easy enough for a layperson to understand, but also offers the sophistication experienced users need.

Internet giants Yahoo has announced that they are upgrading their online mapping service as they would now give driving directions in 34 European countries.

This is a major update aimed to take away users of competing services provided by AOL and Google.

Yahoo aims to make it easier for US based motorists to drive around European countries. They plan to add more landmarks and other visual cues to help people find their way around neighborhoods.

The company added that they are using newer technologies which they believe would provide better services and accurate data to the end user.

AOL’s Mapquest continues to remain at the top spot in this segment of the market though Google is expected to overtake soon with their Google Maps service. Yahoo! has been suffering in this market as they are seeing their market share going down.