Search Engine Optimization News Blog

Google has updated some of the functions of the Apps in order to make them more sophisticated and useful. This would make it easy for the employees within an enterprise to communicate easily without any trouble or hassle. This would make every possible communication within the enterprise very simple and easy. They would even be able to share templates and other documents required.

There are already much feasibility offered by Google to share templates but the current system is more sophisticated. Google Docs is a template gallery that is already available in usage and people here will be able to share templates and other presentation documents, files and spreadsheets. However, this new App called as Premier and Education Edition App will allow users to share templates with only those they require the file to be transferred. Private sharing of templates would be possible but only with those members who are there in their domain. Colleagues who share the templates will be bale to use the files and would be able to sort and rate them.

The Gmail users Apps have also been updated for better usability. The contacts list search information has also been updated to perform even better. Now when Gmail users make a search to find some contact id, they would bee provided with results from the whole contact address list of the company. They would even be able to find results from the contact ids of those he or she might have contacted earlier. This upgrade would certainly be of great help to the marketing professionals as this would enable them to contact their old clients and would be of great help in keeping in track with the old contacts.

Google has also released a new user profile Application Programming Interface or API. This new API would be of great help to the administrators, as this API would help in retrieving any particular profile information from the database of all employees and other members in the company. They would also be able to make any update to the files this way. This API has been developed and released with an intention to make it easy for administrators in maintaining a global address list of all the users in Google Apps. This API would be able only for users of Google Apps Premier Edition users.

Many other updates have also been made and one among those is its update to the Gmail for business users. This includes a new way of organizing labels that can be used by users as a tag to be placed over messages. The labels that are rarely used can be hidden from the main list and pushed into the ‘More’ list and can be retrieved from there when required rather than having it all the time. This can be done by the user by just dragging and dropping it in the ‘More’ folder. Now, it would even be possible for users to drag and drop messages into labels and vice versa. The updates that are made to the labels are available for all users.

YouTube has today announced the launch of Reporters’ Center through which daily news and updates related to the news industry. This would be a service in which information on various journalists and experts of the industry and reports in the video form on how news reports are gathered, sorted and reported. Reporter’s Center would be the best place for journalism students to train themselves and can get trained the right way. It also covers a wide range of other related topics that would be of great help to the journalism students as it would discuss about facts on how one should attend and handle interviews and all other journalism ethics.

Talking about their latest specialty, Mr. Steve Grove, YouTube’s head of news and politics said, “For the first time on YouTube, veteran journalists are making themselves openly available to aspiring reporters around the world who want to report on the news and events happening around them,”. He added saying, “As current events demonstrate on a daily basis, citizen-reporting on YouTube is a critical part of today’s media landscape — and the YouTube Reporters’ Center will help foster an even more productive relationship between professionals and these aspiring reporters.”

It has been specified that the visitors who visit Reporter’s Center can browse through more than two dozen how-to videos and improve their skills about journalism and more. They have also mentioned that the visitors would also be able to create their own how-to videos based on the lessons they he or she has learnt and upload it.

As a part of the process, Google has invited all its (more than 25,000) news sources that are currently providing news for Google News to become official partners of YouTube at the occasion of the launch of Reporter’s Center.

In a blog post, the news manager of YouTube Ms. Olivia Ma has said, “The offering will help news sources more easily share your news videos on both YouTube and Google News”

They have mentioned that the visitors who join YouTube now would receive a ‘featured placement’. Another important aspect that has been announced is that the participants who post lessons and share their knowledge would be able to appear on Google News. However, the benefits that an official partner would get is really great. An official YouTube partner would be able to share the revenue shared through advertising programs in Google.

YouTube’s Reporter Center will also feature many other useful things like tips and advice in the form of instructional videos. Investigative reporting and conducting interviews are presented in videos from the tips of Bob Woodward and Katie Couric. It is expected to grow  faster and bigger very soon. Once it is completely done, the network would be huge and updated often.

After of two and a half yearsof dedicated research, project CHORUS concluded its work and presented at a conference in Brussels. The conference looked at the status and challenges of multi media search engine technology. The different challenges, gaps, commonalities, difficulties, targeted/expected impacts and success criteria related to search initiatives were also examined, and a summary givven of the Initiatives productivity.

CHORUS was a European Coordination Action with the goal of creating conditions of mutual information and cross fertilisation between the European projects. The focus was on dealing with Multimedia Content Search Engines. National and international initiatives were gradually included, and the initiative grew to encompass a diverse range of projects.

The conference was enhanced by the accompaniment of an animated stand exhibition of 11 research projects, which all participated in the CHORUS cluster, and an additional two external research projects. All projects were in the domain of multi media search engines.

This conference was attended by more than 120 people. They came from a wide range of professional backgrounds; both private and public research institutes were represented (including various universities, INRIA, IFAAR, IDIAP, CERTH, Fraunhofer),  as well as industry leasders in the field such as Nokia, Yahoo, Exalead, and Thomson. Major public bodies (The European Commission, German Ministry of Economy) and national initiatives such as THESEUS and QUAERO were also well represented.

The news about the sudden demise of Michael Jackson came out yesterday. Michael Jackson seems to have suffered a cardiac arrest that resulted in his death or at least that is what we are told by the media. It is also reported that the actual reason for the death of this legend is unclear and the world is waiting for the autopsy reports for the final word on his death. The sudden and unexpected death of this celebrity has thrown the world of music in to grief. It has also elicited a lot of suspicion.

All these have resulted in a heavy surge of traffic in search engines and in other content sites including Wikipedia. People have started searching for available information online frantically hoping to know the mystery behind their favorite pop star’s death. All the search engines including Google, Yahoo and MSN experienced a huge volume of traffic.

Other major content sites and social networking sites too faced heavy volume of traffic. No other event in recent history has experienced this high level of traffic including the latest American election.

Around 30% of tweets in Twitter.com yesterday were about Michael Jackson. There are number of reports that the sudden rise of traffic slowed down the search engines and the content sites. The latest Michael Jackson story was the most shared story yesterday in Facebook. The same applies to the other social media sites. Yahoo News recorded 16.4 million unique visitors. For the latest American election yahoo received only 15.1 million unique visitors. This may also be due to the fact that American election was mostly a topic of interest for the Americans whereas Michael Jackson is a global celebrity and his story received greatest global attention. We do not have any numbers from Google. However, Google just reported that its service had a great impact in the past 24 hours because of the traffic that was searching for Michael Jackson story.

The next report comes from Wikipedia. Normally Wikipedia’s page on Michael Jackson gets around 20000 visitors but yesterday Michael Jackson’s pages recorded 1.8 million unique visitors. There were also 650 edits on its pages where the articles were updated with the latest news about Michael Jackson.
We can find the same phenomenon in the other sites such as Digg as well whereby the internet community was sharing and discussing about the latest story on their favorite pop star. Some of them just wanting to know what happened to him while others searching for clues to his sudden suspicious death.
This shows that if we have stories that are powerful enough, we can indeed drive loads of traffic to our sites. However, it is doubtful whether we will be able to create stories that are as powerful as the demise of this legendary pop star.

The Chinese government seems come down heavily on Google again. On Wednesday this week, Google’s websites were not available in major portions of China. Google’s email Gmail too was not available temporarily. However now the service has been restored. According to China’s internet watchdog, Google’s search engine promotes pornographic content in China and the Chinese government cannot allow this. The state owned television network CCTV also reported the same on June 18.

Though there is an agreement already between the Chinese government and Google on censoring of internet content, what can be viewed by the visitors and what cannot be viewed or accessed by them, the problem seems to crop up again. If you try to access censored content we will see the message, “According to the local laws and policy, part of the search results are not shown.” Still today, we can see this message while using Google in China. We can’t make searches on names like Hu Jintao and Wen Jiaobao, these are names of some of the Chinese leaders. If you look at the situation in China, it is not just Google that is serving search results on pornographic content but there are many Chinese search engines that freely serve results on pornographic content. We are not sure of the sanctions on those Chinese search engines. This has made many eyes turn towards Baidu with suspicion, as this is number 1 search engine in China. It may not like to be rivaled by Google so many internet users feel that Baidu may have a hand in this latest episode against Google.

From July 1 all the computers that connected to the internet should have Green Dam Youth Escort which is a software that will filter pornographic content and political sites. However, the question is whether such an enforcement of law in China is against the trade rules. We can see resistance against this move even within China. People also fear that the usage of Green Dam software can subject the internet users in China to high level of risk as this is not a sound software.

Though there are many restrictions people in China always have a way to go about it and escape government firewalls. While having so many problems within, coming down on Google alone makes things look little fishy.

Google is working with the Chinese officials to handle the situation in an amicable way. Google cannot risk the Chinese market because it is one of the largest markets and still has a great potential for growth. Google will take every step possible to be in the good books of the Chinese government. The company has invested a considerable amount of money for its Chinese sites so backing now from the Chinese market would mean severe loss for Google.