Google’s a perfectly good search engine, but how well would it function as some sort of omniscient life coach? I don’t know – and I’m not sure I want to find out – but we may see it assume that role; Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently said his company might be able to give extremely personalized tips and answers within the next five or so years.
Google Apps Customers Get Over-Billed
Google may be great at finding things, but the company is apparently not so good at counting – some Google Apps Premier Edition customers were recently billed $500 for ten accounts, even though they held just one, two, or three accounts.
Google & Feedburner – The Good & Bad
Rumours have been surfacing for the last few days that Google might be buying FeedBurner for around $100M.
Google Walks Dogs, Wins Fans
Beginning a piece of writing with a quote is bad, and using clichés can be worse, but a lot of intelligent, upright, and otherwise excellent people subscribe to the maxim that the dog is man’s best friend. Google’s devotion to these animals – as recently demonstrated by its participation in the RSPCA Million Paws Walk – has, as a result, won the company a lot of fans.
Google Grows, Others Slow
At this point you start to wonder why bother: Google reins supreme in the realm of search, Yahoo doesn’t, neither does Microsoft, and everybody else might as well hang it up.
MGoogle Grows, Others Slow
Google To Digitize Indian Palm Leaves
Google digitizes books on a fairly regular basis, but it’s not every day that manuscripts made of palm leaves join the “to-do” pile. That’s the case, however, at the University of Mysore in India, where over 800,000 documents are set to be brought into the twenty-first century.
Google Gives FCC Advice On Spectrum Auction
Looks like Google’s out to save the world again; the search engine company, which claims it won’t bid in an upcoming radio spectrum auction, is nonetheless proposing a new way for the FCC to conduct the affair. According to Google, its method would increase competition among telecom companies (and thus benefit consumers).
New Google Ranking Factors Study
Via Axandra Search Engine Facts newsletter, German company SISTRIX (translated link) has conducted a study of 10,000 random keywords and then analyzed the top 100 Google search results for each keyword to determine which page elements offered the most influence on rankings.
Google Trends Now Has Hotness
The experimental Google Trends site has added another measurement for searches, highlighting the hottest trends for site visitors.
Google Widgets Fly The Coop
The Google Co-op offers a handful of nifty little tools that can provide you with all sorts of useful information (from the time, to the traffic, to the weather, and so on). But a recent upgrade allows users to “have live data included in your Google searches.”