Google has been working on updates to how it uses sitemaps. Considering research highlighted in this study (pdf), which showed how search engines find new and changed content faster with sitemaps, webmasters should take note.
Google Gives SEO Advice to the World
Google announced today that its SEO Starter Guide is now available in 40 languages. This covers 98% of the global Internet audience according to the company.
"We hope that webmasters around the world can use the guide to improve their sites’ crawlability and indexing in search engines," says Brandon Falls of Google’s Search Quality Team.
Google Street View Meeting EU Privacy Guidelines
Google has announced it is making additional privacy modifications to its Street View project in Europe.
Google says it is continuing to work with the Article 29 Working Party, which brings together representatives from all 27 European Data Protection Authorities. It is complying with European authorities request to provide advance notice to the public about the Street View project before driving in a new country.
The Article 29 Working Party has requested that Google set a time limit on how long it retains unblurred photos of panoramas in Street View.
Does Google Recognize the Name of Your Business?
People misspell their search engine queries all the time. That is why it can be incredibly helpful when Google steps and offers "did you mean suggestions."
Google actually offers a few different spell-check features in its search results. These come with the internal codenames: "Did you mean," "Chameleon" (mid-page suggestions), and "Spellmeleon," where a couple results are shown for the corrected query.
Wikipedia Results Good or Bad for Google News?
Well, the news organizations must love this one. With all of the controversy that has been going on in the online news world, and in particular, the tension between big news organizations and Google, it must have come as a surprise to a lot of people to learn that Google News is now featuring Wikipedia entries in its results.
Google’s New Cloud Table Collaboration Experiment
Google has introduced a new Lab called Google Fusion Tables, which is described as "an experimental system for data management in the cloud." It allows users to upload tables of up to 100MB and share them with collaborators.
Google Lets Mac Users Quickly Search Outside the Browser
Earlier in the year, Google gave developers a preview of a new open-source quick search box for Mac outside of the browser. The company has now made this available to everyone.
Google Puts Human Touch Into Machine Translation
Google has announced the launch of the Google Translator toolkit, an editor designed to give translators an easy means of bringing the "human touch" to machine translation, which everybody knows is often flawed.
Google Apps Takes Swipe At Microsoft
Not everyone likes change, and complaints are especially sure to occur when changes are forced upon people. So a certain Mountain View-based search giant, while still pushing its products as replacements for Redmond’s offerings, is trying to bridge the gap with Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook.
Google Promoting Gmail Voice and Video Chat
Update: Google has mysteriously added a little promotion to its homepage for "new" gmail voice and video chat. This original article is from November, so unless I’m missing something, it’s not exactly a new featue. I guess they just want to give it some attention. I haven’t seen any new Google blog posts about it or anything: