Have you ever checked out Google’s Insights for Search? Basically it’s a set of tools launched last summer that let you look at trends in search to help you apply them to your own marketing campaigns. "See what the world is search for," as the product’s slogan goes.
Google TV Ads Moves Forward With MSNBC
Google TV Ads is on a roll. About 15 days ago, the division struck a breakthrough deal with CNBC, and there was official talk of partnerships between it and MSNBC, Oxygen, and SciFi moving forward "in the coming months." Now the MSNBC arrangement’s been made, and advertisers have gained access to an enormous audience.
A post on the goofily named Let’s Take It Offline blog explains, "[A]s a result of our partnership with NBC Universal Google TV Ads advertisers can reach over 91 million households who watch MSNBC."
Google Reaches Ad Deal With European News Agencies
Google and the European Pressphoto Agency (epa) have struck a deal under which the search engine will host epa content on Google News.
Under the agreement Google News users will be able to find original text stories and photos from the online services of a number of epa’s eleven agencies.
Google Adds Ads to Hosted News Articles
Google is now showing ads on Google News pages that show full-text articles. These are the articles which Google itself hosts.
In case you’re unfamiliar with these Google-hosted articles, back in 2007, Google News started offering original source content from a variety of publishers like the AP, Agence France-Presse, UK Press Association, the Canadian Press, etc. This was to give special treatment to "original sources."
Google Test Shows 300 Percent ROI
Kelly Wall of Google’s Retail Team was spare on data in a report about an experiment to see how online advertising affected offline, in-store sales, probably because it took some convincing to get the participants to share their sales data to begin with. So we’ll have to take Kelly’s word for it that one retail client saw a 300 percent return on investment.
Google Adds AdWords to Picasa
Google is now showing AdWords ads above search results in its photo sharing service Picasa. It’s hard to imagine people being shocked by this.
Google has been getting more aggressive with adding ads to its products. Only a few weeks ago, Google started adding them to Google News search results after years of not having them.
Create Trust, Reduce Spam with Google Friend Connect API
Yesterday, at PubCon South, Matt Cutts talked about Google Launching the Google Friend Connect API. Shortly after Murdok broke this story, Cutts sat down with our own Abby Johnson for an exclusive interview in which he discussed the API launch in a litle more detail.
Google Reader Now Offers Comments For Entries
Google is not not not building a social network. Really. They’re not. They’re just adding features to every product ever made to enable you to communicate and otherwise share information among your peer group and store all your information in a centralized place. That’s soooo not a social network, so I don’t need anybody telling me about how Google Reader’s new comment feature shows that they’re a social network.
Searching for Answers Google Doesn’t Have
A new way of searching is on the way, and will come under the label Wolfram Alpha. This is a "knowledge engine" built by Stephen Wolfram, which allows users to ask questions and receive a single definitive answer rather than a page of results pointing to pages that may or may not have the answers they are looking for.
Google Maps Blends UGC Into Search Results
The search results traditionally provided by Google Maps might best be described as "straightforward." They were fine so long as users already had a good idea of what they were looking for; they were rather less useful for browsing. But the blending of user-generated content into the results should change all that.