8 Years ago on September 7, 1998, two guys name Sergey Brin and Larry Page incorporated Google in Susan Wojcicki's garage. And it turned out to be the most used search engine in the world. Let's take a look at how Google looks like 8 years ago.

This was one of Google's first logos, created using GIMP, download the original file here. Well, you know the rest, they are history. ;) "Google celebrates their birthday depending on when people feel like having cake." -Hopefully Google will out of beta tomorrow. *Smile*!-

Winners of the Google Desktop Gadget contest!

As the Inside Google Desktop blog promised, they have posted the winners of the Google Desktop Gadget contest today. ;)

First place is diGGGadget by Marius and Yannick Stucki, second place is Multiplayer Reversi Game by Turhan Aydin, and Beatrix Gottanka's Day/Night World Clock as the third place.

Inside Google Desktop also listed eight Honorable Mention gadgets, and they are 10x10 News by Turhan Aydin, Carrier by Petar Petrov, Gate2Home Virtual Keyboard by Ilan Bar-Magen, Hot or Not by Ron Huang, Weather forecasts of Japan by IT Design BitWiz, Memory Smiley by Bijoy Thangaraj & Nirmal Jose, RSS to Speech by Alexey Polkovnikov, and Shortcut Gadget by Teodor Mihai Filimon.

read more | Google Blog | Google Code Blog

Google News Archive Search

Google launched a News Archive Search site to allow you to explore historical archives. So now people can search to confirm something or maybe just to look up something for history class.

Google News Archive

A Pretty Error Page

The Google OS Blog posted this cool new Extension for Firefox which replaces the old HTTP error page with a new cool twist.

An error page page is an error page, but replace it with some pizazz.

Google OS Blog Post | Download ErrorZilla | More FireFox Extensions

More Info On When The GoogleBot Visited Your Page

Vanessa Fox posted some more information about the Google Bot, this time she explained how do you know when the Google Bot successfully crawled your site. Here are some of the highlights.

if Googlebot accesses a page and gets a 304 (Not-Modified) response to a If-Modified-Since qualified request, Googlebot doesn't download the contents of that page. This reduces the bandwidth consumed on your web server.

Which is very good to know because I had a little problem with bandwith in our forums which was the google bot over crawling the forum and taking up all my bandwith.

When you look at Google's cache of a page (for instance, by using the cache: operator or clicking the Cached link under a URL in the search results), you can see the date that Googlebot retrieved that page.

So now you know thta your cache updates every time the Google Bot crawls your site SUCCESSFULLY, because the crawler can come to update a few things but wont deep crawl sometimes.

Vanessa Fox's Entry | Google Sitemaps | Google's Add URL Page | Digg This Article

New AdWords Terms & Conditions

After their small update on Tuesday, August 29, 2006, the Google AdWords team wanted their "account holders or their managers to physically “click to accept” the new Google Advertising Program Terms and Conditions."

Affected AdWords account holders will have until November 27, 2006 to log in to their accounts and either accept or reject the new Google Advertising Program Terms & Conditions. If an account has not accepted these new Google Advertising Program Terms and Conditions by this deadline, API access will be blocked until the user accepts.

We recommend that you speak with your advertisers/clients in order to determine who should review and accept/decline these terms.

Account managers (MCC users) can automatically accept these new Google Advertising Program Terms and Conditions for all affected accounts under their My Client Center by logging into the MCC, navigating to an affected child account, and accepting the Google Advertising Program Terms & Conditions. This action will then instantaneously accept the new Google Advertising Program Terms and Conditions for all other accounts under that MCC. If you maintain a nested/hierarchical MCC structure, please be sure that you login to your top-most MCC when you accept the changes. This will ensure that all of your sub-accounts will automatically accept the Google Advertising Program Terms and Conditions.

Unfortunately, we're unable to interpret the meaning of changes in our legal documents for you. If you have questions or you need legal advice on interpreting the terms, we encourage you to consult counsel to help you understand how these changes may affect you.

Again, please note that in order to ensure uninterrupted access to your accounts, the new Google Advertising Program Terms and Conditions must be accepted before November 27, 2006.

-- Jon Diorio, Sr. Product Marketing Manager

Google AdWords | AdWords API Official Blog Post | New AdWords Terms & Conditions | Digg This Article

Google Eavesdropping On You

In the Register: Google developing eavesdropping software, we see the suggestion that Google is going to hijack the microphone on your computer, listen to what TV show you are watching in the other room, and serve you customised ads.

The idea appeared in Technology Review citing Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, who says these ideas will show up eventually in real Google products - sooner rather than later.

The idea is to use the existing PC microphone to listen to whatever is heard in the background, be it music, your phone going off or the TV turned down. The PC then identifies it, using fingerprinting, and then shows you relevant content, whether that's adverts or search results, or a chat room on the subject.

As a result, we now have a heated discussion at DSL Reports News Forum: Google Using Your Mic to Listen In?

Looks like Google the Good is turning into Google the spy. Can George Orwell's 1984 nightmare world be far off if Google continues to expand their tentacles into the home. LOL, and people worry about the NSA and AT&T. So look at who the real threat may be.

And a really fun subthread

• Personally, I'd start saying really suspicious things, like airliner, bomb, death to America, etc... and see what happens.
  
• The TSA/FBI will be at your door and you can watch what happens on CNN from jail.
  
• This is Google, not NSA. You will start getting ads for fertilizer, fuel oil, detonators, terrorist training, legal services.

LOL.

Google AdWords Big Change

Google surprised many AdWords advertisers by raising the minimum bid of certain keywords from $0.1 to $0.5 a click to as high as $5 -$10 a click. Google used to determine the minimum cost the advertiser needs to pay to have the ad displayed for a particular keyword, is based on Google's assessment of the 'Quality Score' of a keyword. Relevance of your ad text, historical keyword performance on Google, the quality of your ad's landing page, and other relevancy factors."

According to Google, the lower the minimum bid price, the higher the quality score. And in the latest round of changes in their Quality Score algorithm, Google tweaked it to weigh heavily on the "quality of the ad's landing page". The impact of Google's new landing page algorithm can affect an entire AdWords campaign, but for those affected impact is mainly felt at the Ad Group and individual Keyword level.

Google AdWrods | Digg This Article

Google Scholar in Spanish

Google launched Scholar in Spanish now, since they JUST launched it they are inviting editors and librarians to participate, since, if they sell their papers online, this is a damn easy way to drive traffic while sacrificing nothing. So lets see how this does, at least I know ill be using it. I think that collecting the world’s information isn’t enough, if only parts of the world can understand parts of the information. So I think Google will soon be adding more languages to the list

Google Scholar, [Spanish] | Digg This Article

A Note Of Google

While looking for some videos I stumbled upon this Spanish news video about google, which had a few lines that caught my eye, since the video is in Spanish I will translate what the voice says since im from Puerto Rico and know Spanish.


"Its the most used search engine in the world. It indexes about eight thousand million pages all over the planet. If it would exist in other places, im sure it would do it to. The Definition of the word google comes from the mathematic term designed to 1 continued by 100 zeros, its to say, that this company symbolizes the objective to organize the immense information that is available on the web. Google is used by everyone in every corner of the world. With an index of more than 85 thousand million pages of websites this search engine organizes all the information pertinent to everyone in all the parts of the world, and makes them accessible to who is searching for them. In 1998 comes the Google.inc company. Its founders never thought they would make a monster of a search engine on the web. These college students, while locked in their basements, created a machine of information never doubted from their ignorance that they would merdge with one of the best administrators of companies, Eric Schmidt . Like this, these three united to make the idea of these college guys to make one of the biggest companies of our time. Their starting page invites people of ALL languages to search the web without having to comfort to another person's style. Google is one of the most recognized trademarks in the world, this has been made possible by the "word of mouth". But business is business, google makes profits off advertisers that want to appear in google and Sponsoring Links. Without a doubt this has become an indispensable tool for every day life."

I highlighted some of the notes that caught my eye.

The Definition of the word google comes from the mathematic term designed to 1 continued by 100 zeros
Googl comes from that phrase in Latin, they changed the name to Google so it would make more sense and look better.

In 1998 comes the Google.inc company.
This is a big shocker because it is a very big deal for a company to have this much success in 9 years, on a Global scale, they have made a lot of advancements over these 9 years but they also have made some enemies like Microsoft, for more on that read This Article

Google makes profits off advertisers
Which they made a new revolution in advertising because AdWords and the Ads they put in their searches are not really Ads, they are "Sponsored Links" which they fool the user into thinking its not an Ad when it really is. You can read more about that here.

I watched this video and thought it was worth a mention, hope you liked it.

Digg This Article

Click-To-Call in the UK

Google has now implemented Click-To-Call features in the UK. A search on the word jet2 at Google.co.uk brings up this ad.

If you click on the green phone icon, it opens the ad up to enter your phone number. According to Google’s Click-To-Call FAQ “Google foots the bill for all calls, both local and long-distance“

It was only last week that Google and eBay announced plans to integrate and launch a “click-to-call” advertising functionality within eBay’s U.S. & international marketplaces and on Google’s search platform. So this implementation is pretty rapid!

“The click-to-call capability will allow a user to click on a link or icon within a product or service advertisement to initiate an Internet voice call to participating eBay merchants or Google advertisers directly from either company’s respective sites, using Skype or Google Talk.”

Click-To-Call Info | Digg This Article

Gmail Keyboard Shortcuts Printable

Gmail has had Keyboard Shortcuts for a while now, but Evan Williams has made a Printable list of shortcuts so you dont have to change the browser window or tab to look at the shortcuts. All you have to do is print the page and activate your Keyboard Shortcuts in your Gmail settings.


Source | Gmail | Gmail Keyboard Shortcuts [Printable] | Digg This Article