Mobile innovation is fueling Google’s search offerings for the desktop, as the company today announced two new search interfaces — Voice and Image — inspired by mobile Voice Search and Google Goggles, respectively.

With Voice Search for the desktop, which is a feature of the Chrome browser, users click a microphone icon in the search box, and then speak into their computer’s microphone.

For more info - visit searchengineland.com

The Google Webmaster Central Blog has a post about best practices to follow when moving your site from one domain to another without losing your Google rankings. Here are the main points:

• Test your processes by moving only one directory or subdomain first. Check to see whether those pages are appearing in Google’s search results before moving your entire site.
• Don’t just redirect all pages from your old site to the home page of your new site. Try to redirect all pages on your old site to a relevant page on your new site.
• If you’re thinking about changing your domain and redesigning your site at the same time, consider doing these things separately to minimize the risk of error.
• Check both external and internal links to pages on your site (which can be done using Google Webmaster Tools) and try asking webmasters to change any links pointing to your site to use the new domain.
• Don’t allow your old domain to expire until at least 180 days have passed.
• Add your new site to Google Webmaster Tools, verify you own it and submit an XML sitemap containing all the URLs. Keep your old site too so that you can keep an eye out for any errors.

You might also be interested in reading New Design and Move to Blogoscoped.com

Google Website Optimizer (which was originally launched as a closed beta test in October 2006) has finally dropped its “Beta” label and been made available as a standalone product, Google announced yesterday.

Previously only available as a feature within Google AdWords, anyone can now use it on its own “to increase the value of your existing websites and traffic without spending a cent.”

The Website Optimizer Blog Team have also launched The Official Google Website Optimizer Blog to accompany the product.

Also announced by the Google Analytics Blog is that Urchin has graduated out of beta too. Urchin is similar to Google Analytics – it allows you to report on your website traffic – except it needs to be hosted on your own servers rather than Google’s.

[Thanks Mbegin!]

Google Calendar Sync is a new Google tool synchronizing your Google Calendar with MS Outlook. You can adjust the synchronization frequency, Google says, as well as the direction of information flow. Only syncing with your primary Google Calendar is supported for now.

Google outlines the following steps to get this thing running on Windows:

• Download & install the executable (663 KB).
• In the settings window that appears after installation, enter your email and password and select from the sync options (like frequency and information flow), and hit Save.
• You will now find an icon in your Windows system tray; when events are syncing, you’ll see two green arrows.

Online Workshop: Google Employees on Wikipedia

Those who started new website and want to earn some money through Google AdSense, this post dedicated for them.. I found these following tips when I search for "How to use adsanse on the site". Here you will find some simple and effective AdSense tips that will increase your revenue. If you haven't already joined AdSense program, you should sign up first.

AdSense Tip #1: Find your keywords

Before serving ads on a web page, check its keyword density. A free and advanced tool for finding the most prominent keywords in a page can be found here: SEO Density Analyzer. Copy the most important keywords to a text file ([web page name]-adsense-keywords.txt).

AdSense Tip #2: Improve your keywords

Get keyword suggestions from Overture Search Inventory and from Google AdWords Sandbox. Get new keywords that can help you improve your ad relevance. Enter the keywords from [web page name]-adsense-keywords.txt and save the suggestions to [web page name]-adsense-suggestions.txt.

AdSense Tip #3: Keep your website focused on a theme

Use the keyword suggestions to enhance your web pages and to build theme-based content. And also try to get your keywords into the anchor text of your incoming links as much as possible. Don't forget that Google AdSense is keyword-targeted advertising: Google AdSense bases its advert topics on your websites content, this means that content-rich websites of a popular topic should attract a large amount of ads.

AdSense Tip #4: Write a new page every day

One of the best tips is to add a new page to your web site every day. The more content you have, the more visitors you will get. Put an Adsense unit on each and every content page of your site. But where? You will find more about that from the next AdSense tips.

AdSense Tip #5: Choose the right AdSense format

Wider formats are successful because the ads are compact, easy to read and are complementary to the content. The top three AdSense formats are:

1. 336x280 large rectangle
2. 300x250 medium rectangle
3. 160x600 wide skyscraper

Another successful format is the 468x15 horizontal ad links, that can be placed under your navigation bar.

AdSense Tip #6: Color tips

When creating your Google AdSense ads it is recommended to use the color scheme and style of your website so that the ads blend in well. Ads without background color and borders perfom better than ads within borders with background color.

Create a custom AdSense palette:

• border color = background color of your web site
• background color = background color of your web site
• link color = blue, color of your links
• url color = black, #999999
• text color = black, #333333, color of your main content

You can also rotate your color palette: select multiple color palettes that blend with your site to create variety.

AdSense Tip #7: Position tips

Visitors tend to look at the big headlines to see if your page is worth reading. If you get them interested, they will read the text and look for your navigation links.

Place the AdSense ads in a prominent place around the top/left part of your page or under your headlines, where your visitors are most likely to look at.

If you have an article page with a long body of text, the bottom of that article is a good place for AdSense ads because your visitors read the text and then they want more resources.

AdSense Tip #8: Increase the number of ads, but not too much

If you have a lot of text on a page, use multiple AdSense units. You can use up to three AdSense units on a page, two AdSense search boxes and one unit of ad links.

Link units allow the user to refine what they're interested in. So if they may not be interested in specific ads on your page, they might be interested in a particular topic, and by clicking on a link unit and a link in the link unit, they'll be able to specify that they're interested in that specific topic and get a lot more options and variety on the ads that might appear.

AdSense for Search allows visitors to search Google.com or your sites (up to 3 domains). You earn money whenever they click on the ads that come up on the search results. If you click the Open search results in a new browser window checkbox in the AdSense for Search settings, you won't lose your visitors.

AdSense Tip #9: Preview Google ads

You can find out what ads will be served by Google AdSense if you install Google AdSense Preview Tool, a very simple tool available only for Internet Explorer 6.0. Click to advertiser sites without generating invalid clicks, and easily add their URLs to your URL filter list. Because AdSense uses geo-targeting, Google serves different ads for other countries. Instead of faking your IP or travelling abroad to test your ads, use this AdSense tool to see what ads see your visitors from France, Germany or other countries.

There may be no Google AdSense ads available for your webpage, so Googlw will display Public Service Ads. You can hide them using alternate colors or images. Make sure you include the image in a simple html file as a link (use target="_top"). The image size should be the same as the dimension of AdSense units. In the alternate url box, enter the absolute url of the html file.

Read more about alternate ads.

AdSense Tip #10: What not to do

• Don't click on your own ads
• Don't ask others to click on your Google ads
• Don't manually change AdSense code
• Don't place Google ads on sites that include prohibited content (e.g.: adult sites)
• Don't employ cloaking, hidden text or farm links
• Don't use AdSense ads on the same page with similar ads (e.g.: Yahoo Publisher Network)

AdSense Tip #11: Show images above or next to your ads

Placing images above AdSense ads is not necessarily prohibited by program policies. However, depending on the method of implementation this could be considered encouraging users to click on ads. So you should include a border line between the ads and the images. Don't show specific products in your images, in order not to mislead the visitors. Just use generic images that will increase the visibility of your ads.

AdSense Tip #12: Use section targeting

Use section targeting to emphasize some content in your page. On your site, place this code where you want to emphasize.

Content you want to emphasize.


If you want some content to be ignored, use

AdSense Tip #13: Alternate the colors of your ads

AdSense allows you to have up to 4 color variations for each variable for which you can specify color. You should do that if you put AdSense ads on pages that receive many impressions from the same visitors (for example forums) to reduce ad blindness. For example:

google_color_border = ["628098","628098","000000","000000"];
google_color_link = ["000000","BBB90C","BBB90C","628098"];
google_color_url = ["000000","628098","000000","000000"];
google_color_text = ["628098","628098","000000","000000"];

AdSense Tip #14: Your Google ads should be visible

Make sure your text ads are visible to the surfers in all screen formats. If you put the ads in a table, give sufficient breathing room, i.e. proper cell padding and cell spacing to make the ads stand out from the rest of your content.

AdSense Tip #15: Use AdSense channels

You can categorize the content of your website into channels and then track your performance. This way you can experiment with different types of ads and see which is performing the best.

If you know any other tips regarding Google Adsanse then please let me know. I am waiting for your valuable suggestions.

Source : http://deadline.3x.ro/adsense/adsensetips.html

Orkut Group has finally launched a much needed forum for stolen communities.




This is what they had to say :

Hello to everyone in orkut land :)

I know it's frustrating that some people on orkut don't play nice and
try to steal other people's communities :( When this happens, please
write into the Help Center for individual help.

It takes a lot of time to investigate these cases and attempt to
restore communities, so it's not very efficient to post them here,
with only one Guide here to help out!

We're working on a new contact form specifically for these reports,
which I'll share with you once it's done! In the meantime, you can use
this form:
http://help.orkut.com/bin/request.py?contact=contact_us_troubleshoot

Other tips:

* We won't respond to requests from anyone other than the previous
community owner or original creator of the community.

* We won't transfer someone else's community to you unless they ask us
to. We won't add moderators or delete owners/communities for
inactivity.
Stay beautiful,
orkut Guide

Conclusion :

* Whenever you need to report a stolen community use this form
* You Need to be the owner of the community, i mean the original owner :P
* Hopefully, this will help you getting back your community.
* In case Google takes a while, i am always there to help you out :o)

Hat Tip : Inside Orkut

At the beginning of the year, Google announced the “Build Your Campus” competition that’s opened for college students in North America to build their own campus. Google’s LatLong Blog today announced the winners of this contest.

• University of Minnesota - Department of Architecture
  
• Purdue University - Departments of Computer Graphics Technology and Education
  
• Concordia University, Loyola Campus - Department of Civil Engineering
  
• Stanford University - Department of Architectural Design
  
• Indiana University Purdue University Fort Wayne (IPFW) - Departments of Engineering and Computer Science
  
• Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering - Department of Engineering
  
• Dartmouth College - Departments of Computer Science and Digital Art

The winning prize is a free 3-day visit to Googleplex. :)