In many ways, Google is the company that AdSense built. It makes sense for Google to extend the advertising solution into new markets, then, and the company’s doing exactly that with its fresh AdSense for Mobile Applications beta.
Google Wants the Web to Function Like a Magazine
Google has begun an initiative to help webmasters all over the web make their sites faster, and in turn make the entire web faster for everybody. This would reflect Google Co-founder Larry Page’s vision of people being about to surf the web as quickly as if they were flipping through the pages of a magazine.
Bing vs. Google – Side by Side
I have been making a conscious decision to use Bing as my default search for about 2 weeks now. We made a Bing video at this year’s SMX Advanced (where Bing was almost as buzzy as no-follow) so I was interested in the changes and wanted to take some time to see how Bing performed in the ‘real world’.
Google Analyzes Rich Media Ad Effectiveness
Google’s DoubleClick is presenting findings from a new study it commissioned with Dynamic Logic, this afternoon at the ARF Conference. The study, titled, "The Brand Value of Rich Media and Video Ads (pdf)," analyzes image (gif/jpg), simple Flash, and rich media (with and without video) ad formats.
Google Launches All For Good
Google, Craigslist Foundation, YouTube, FanFeedr and UCLA have partnered to launch a new site called All for Good, which is designed to connect volunteers in their local communities with charitable organizations.
All for Good helps people find ways to get involved in their community, from being a mentor to helping design a website for a nonprofit. The platform allows people to sign in to Facebook or Google to share volunteer activities with others across social networking services.
Google Apps, Microsoft Live@edu Do Battle
Here’s a simple fact: no matter what the industry, there are few things quite as nice as a lifelong customer. Here’s another: while attending college, students often establish patterns that they’ll follow for the rest of their days. Now, Microsoft and Google seem to be acknowledging both issues as they promote school-oriented software suites.
Google Makes Progress in Image Recognition
Today at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) conference in Miami, Google released a new research paper that looks at building a web-scale landmark-recognition engine. This could lay the groundwork for some interesting advancements in image search.
"To be clear up front, this is a research paper, not a new Google product, but we still think it’s cool," says Jay Yagnik, Head of Computer Vision Research.
Google Improves Flash Indexing Capabilities
Last year, Google began crawling and indexing Flash content, but now Google has announced that it can also index external resource loading. In other words, Google can index external content that loads within an SWF file, and associate it with that file, so that it will appear in search results.
For example, a site that loads something like this in Flash:
..might appear in a Google SERP like this:
Google/Facebook Go Persian in Response to Iran Discussion
Google announced that Google Translate now offers translation between the English and Persian (Farsi) languages. With all of the news discussion from within and all over the world surrounding Iran, the company presumably felt that having this available would be beneficial for those trying to stay informed.
Google Changes to No-Follow on the Horizon?
We made a video at SMX Advanced with Stephen Spencer recently where we discussed (among other things) some changes expected(?) to be coming to Google in terms of the no-follow attribute. These no-follow changes have some pretty significant implications for lots of things, first and foremost though it seems these changes are specifically geared to mitigate, to some degree, the effectiveness of PR sculpting.