Google announced that landing page load time evaluations or Landing Page Load Time on the Keyword Analysis Page. This factor load times will be part of ‘Quality Scores’ starting mid june.
In preparation for that launch, Google has started showing advertisers their metrics for the landing page load time for each keyword’s landing page.
Yahoo! has launched Glue pages in Yahoo! India. Glue Pages mix search results with visual information from the best sites anywhere on the Web. User can browse images, videos, articles and more all on one page.
Gopal Krishna, Head of Audience, Yahoo! India said:
Searching on Glue Pages Beta will result in an experience that promises more than just web links. Users will receive more relevant, visually appealing search results from across the Web in one topical page. The new Glue Pages Beta feature for Yahoo! India Search supports our strategy to make Yahoo! the starting point on the Internet and demonstrates our commitment to provide a compelling online search experience.
YouTube has launched a localised version of YouTube for India. Localised site (youtube.in and youtube.co.in also works) is focusing on video content relevant to India that reflect what Indians are watching.
Speaking at the launch, Steve Chen, chief technology officer and co-founder of YouTube, said, “We are very excited to bring a local version of YouTube to India considering the passion of users here for music and entertainment. For a culture that is steeped both in video and in storytelling, and where everyone has a voice — YouTube India will not only offer Indian users more relevant content but also provide a platform to share India’s unique and diverse culture and lifestyle with the largest online video community in the world.”
Adding to it, Sakina Arsiwala, international manager of YouTube, said, “YouTube allows anyone with a simple Web camera or even a cell phone to create content, connect, and converse with each other through the medium of video. It provides a powerful way for people to express themselves. From a home video to a magic show to classroom lectures or working professionals connecting with their families in another city, YouTube is about communication and not just entertainment.”
According to IndiaTimes, partners for the launch are, among others, Zoom channel from the Bennet Coleman & Co, UTV and Rajshri Group.
Yesterday, Google AdSense informed that they have integrated Custom Search Engine (CSE) into AdSense for search, so you can take advantage of CSE’s most popular features without having to leave your AdSense account.
This new feature gives you the following benefits: site search, improved indexing of pages, vertical search, Tuning search results and ads with keywords, selecting ad location, and more.
Just visit your AdSense Setup tab and select ‘AdSense for Search’ as your product to get started with above features. Once you’ve set up your search box, you may wish to explore more advanced features such as site exclusion, labels, and collaboration. Please note that these new features will only be available to you if you’ve migrated your account to a Google Account.
Yesterday, Yahoo! search has released new SearchScan feature which will protect users from viruses, spyware and spam websites.
It is influenced by Macfee’s SiteAdvisor technology. This SearchScan is turned on by default for all users in the U.S., Canada, India, UK, France, Italy, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, and Spain.
SearchScan will protect mainly three types of risks: Browser Exploits, Dangerous Downloads and Unsolicited Email. According to Yahoo!:
Browser Exploits — These are sites that can stealthily harm a user’s computer or install malware simply by visiting the site. Beginning today, any such sites or pages included in McAfee’s data will be removed from search results automatically. Dangerous Downloads — SearchScan will display warnings next to search results for sites that offer potentially dangerous software, such as viruses, spyware or adware. Users often may be unaware that these can be passed along with the screensavers, games and other software downloads. Unsolicited Email — SearchScan will alert users to scanned sites that send unsolicited emails or inappropriately share email addresses with third parties.
It is a nice move by Yahoo! to provide safe search to its users.
Google is now supporting Unicode 5.1 and now available in search. Last month, the Unicode Consortium had announced the release of Unicode 5.1. Unicode encoding – which can be used for a variety of languages, not just the smaller set supported by ASCII and others – has become the most popular encoding on the web since December 2007.
Now a days mostly web pages are using vairety of different character coding from ASCII, Latin-1, or Windows 1252, or Unicode and the problem is most encodings represent only few languages, but Unicode will handle anything Chinese to French to Arabic.
According to Google, Unicode is the most popular and frequently used coding on the Internet, even surpassing the likes of both ASCII and Western European encodings.
Recently Google Adwords Blog announced Google TV Ads. Now you can put advertising on television from your computer with your Google account. Since June 2007 this program was in beta test, now this is available to all US based advertisers even offering a $2,000 promotional credit towards creating a professional TV commercial..
With this program advertisers manage TV ad campaigns through Google Adwords campaign. This Google TV Ads program is a flexible, all-digital system for buying more accountable and measurable TV advertising. Using the familiar AdWords interface, you can launch a TV advertising campaign in minutes.
You can through a Demo how actually this could be possible and bring more revolution in Advertising.
Google attempting to index the form to access dynamically generated pages. Google has announced about it on last Friday.
Google will choose select menus, check boxes, and radio buttons on the form values of the HTML forms. After access to content pass the form, Google may or may not index that content. Google only retrieve GET forms and avoid forms that require any kind of user information.
This change also does not affect the crawling, ranking, or selection of other web pages in any significant way. It also doesn’t affect of your page rank. According to Matt Cutts, Googlebot is only looking at high quality sites right now. Read the full explanations at Matt Cutt’s blog.
I will have to wait and see how this turns out but for those who want to prevent indexing from Google their dynamic pages for whatever reasons use noindex and nofollow for web pages. You can block Googlebot from crawling your forms by excluding them in your robots.txt file.
Last week Google has announced demographic bidding feature available for all AdWords advertisers.
It allows Adwords advertisers to target ads to users of a particular age group, gender or a combination of the two. It can be used contextual or placement targeting and with both CPC and CPM bidding. I believe advertisers will be happy to use this feature.
This good move has been expected since Microsoft launched their adCenter PPC service in the US, which hold this option for demographic targeting by using data from Microsoft’s network of online services.
This feature gives you more control over the demographic groups who see your ads. You can also find demographic reports which is available in the AdWords Report Center.
Google has officially launched new Google Analytics feature called Industry Benchmarking. It will helps customer to compare the site data to any available industry vertical and understand how their site is doing.
It will also compare your site against an industry vertical different than your own. For example, you might see that your industry’s traffic dips at certain times of the year while another industry’s traffic increases.
You can get more information at the benchmarking FAQs in the Google Analytics help center.
This features appearing in customer account’s administrator login to the data sharing settings page and select “Share my Google Analytics data… Anonymously with Google products and the benchmarking service”. On this page, customers can choose whether to opt in or opt out of sharing their Analytics data. It may take up to a couple weeks to show data.