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Since announcing the latest Google Chrome beta earlier this month, we've been excited to receive feedback from our beta users on the browser's new translation and privacy features. Today, we're introducing these features in the stable channel, so that they're widely available to everyone who uses Google Chrome on Windows.

Google Chrome’s translation feature is the latest step in the evolution of translation tools across Google. Just a few years ago, Google’s translation tools consisted of a site where you had to copy and paste text into a box — and it only worked for a handful of languages. Today, our translation technology works across 52 languages and can automatically detect and translate entire websites in less than a second. Chrome's translation feature automatically detects if the language of the webpage you're on is different from your preferred language setting, The browser will then display a prompt asking if you'd like the page to be translated using Google Translate. With one click, you can instantly translate the page, and all of its text will appear in your preferred language. Here's a demo of Chrome's translation feature:



Language detection happens only on your computer, so no information is sent to Google Translate until you choose to translate a page. You can read more about how this feature works on the Google Translate Blog.

In addition, we've introduced new privacy features in this stable release to give you even greater control of your privacy while helping to protect the information that you do decide to share online. You can now manage Chrome's privacy settings via the browser's Options dialog. From these settings, you can control how browser cookies, images, pop-ups and even JavaScript and plug-ins are handled on a site-by-site basis. For example, you can set up rules to allow cookies exclusively for sites that you trust, while blocking them from for untrusted sites. For the in-depth scoop, check out google.com/chrome/privacy or watch our video series on privacy and browsers.

For those of you who already use Chrome, go raibh maith agaibh! You'll soon be updated with these new features. And for those of you who haven't yet tried Google Chrome, download it at google.com/chrome.

Posted by Wieland Holfelder, Engineering Director, Google Munich

Over the past year, we've highlighted companies around the world who have switched to Google Apps. And that means more than 25 million people have "gone Google", including those at such globe-trotting organizations as Jaguar Land Rover and National Geographic. (You might have seen their Gone Google messages in print.)

Recently we visited one of our newest customers, Konica Minolta, to learn about why they decided to join us. Here's their story:



For those considering a switch to Google Apps, this updated resources page offers a variety of info such as customer testimonials, white papers, links to webcasts and more. Be sure to visit the Google Enterprise Blog and visit google.com/appsatwork, too.

If your company is already using Apps, join the Gone Google community. Put yourself on the map to share your experience and see who else has, yes, gone Google.


After you add yourself to the map, grab a laptop sticker that you can personalize. We're giving them away free for a limited time*. More details here.

*And our lawyers ask us to tell you that the "giveaway offer is void where prohibited and valid only while supplies last" — so hurry!

Posted by Vivian Leung, Google Enterprise Team

Posted by randfish

Late last week, Eric Enge of Stone Temple (and a co-author of mine on The Art of SEO) published a fascinating interview with Google's head of Webspam, Matt Cutts. I think the whole of the SEO community can agree that Matt taking time for these types of interviews is phenomenal and I can only hope he does more of them in the future. Understanding more about Google's positions, their technology and their goals will benefit website creators and marketers dramatically.

The interview itself is certainly worth a read, but as one mozzer noted to me during the email string on the subject "I'm embarassed to say I couldn't make it all the way through." Fair enough; and that's why I'm presenting Matt's primary points in graphical, cartoon format. I've also included some adlibbing, interpretation and fun into these. Only the bits surrounded by quotes were actually taken directly from Matt's words, so please do keep in mind that this is my opinion of what Matt means (along with the occassional editorial).

#1 - There is No Hard Indexation Cap; But Indexation Has Limits

#2 - Duplicate Content Might Hurt Your Indexation

#3 - Lots of Qualifiers on Whether Affiliate Links Count

#4 - 301 Redirects Pass Some, But Not All of a Page's Link Juice

#5 - Low Quality, Non-Unique Pages Might Drop Your Indexation

#6 - Faceted Navigation and PageRank Sculpting are Thorny Issues

Personally, I liked how much Eric pushed Matt with scenarios that would require some advanced methods of showing faceted navigation to users but not search engines. However, I also understand that Matt needs to take a position that's right for 95% of site owners 95% of the time or risk creating a new "PR sculpting" issue.

One other item that really stood out and got me excited was this response:

Matt Cutts: (with regard to links in ads) Our stance has not changed on that, and in fact we might put out a call for people to report more about link spam in the coming months. We have some new tools and technology coming online with ways to tackle that. We might put out a call for some feedback on different types of link spam sometime down the road.

That sounds really good - a huge frustration for the SEO world has been the fact that so many SEOs perceive their competitors to be outranking them with black/gray hat linking techniques and feel they must engage as well is order to stay competitive. Shutting this down or making SEOs feel that Google is taking consistent action when obvious manipulation is reported would go a long way to quelling this thorny problem.

My last recommendation is that you check out Eric's 29 Tidbits from my Interview with Matt Cutts; a post that summarizes a lot of the critical information and takeaways quite neatly.

To end, I thought I'd add the four questions I wish Eric would have asked Matt (maybe next time!):

1. With Google's new recognition of internal anchor links and listings of those URLs in the search results, is it still safe to link to internal anchors on pages and trust that the link juice will flow to the page as a whole, or are content blocks inside individual pages now being treated as unique entities?
2. With the handling of nofollow changing and Google crawling/executing Javascript, what's the best way to link to a document on the web so human visitors can access it but search engines cannot WITHOUT wasting link juice/PageRank (robots.txt, for example, couldn't do this) or cloaking?
3. Does Google now (or will you in the future) consider the sharing/linking activities happening on Twitter, Facebook, etc. to have any impact on the overall link graph of the web (assuming we're talking only about those links that don't make their way onto standard web documents)?
4. When people ask the question, "why is my competitor ranking so well with low quality/manipulative links?" you often reply that they should be careful in presuming that Google hasn't already discounted the value of spammy links and the competitor is actually ranking on the basis of quality link sources. This creates an environment where marketers are constantly trying to discern which links pass value and which don't - could you give advice for relatively savvy, experienced SEOs to help them make those determinations so they can pursue the right links and stop paying spammers for the wrong ones?

If you've got thoughts to share, questions outstanding from the interview or my amateur drawings or things you wish Eric had asked Matt, feel free to post them below.

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At age five most kids can hop, skip and tie their shoes without help. Google Code turns five this week, and while we’re still working on the shoelaces thing, we’ve grown from a simple site for hosting a couple of APIs into a destination for developers to prototype their ideas in a Code Playground, host all kinds of open source projects and find out about our growing family of APIs and products like App Engine, Google Web Toolkit and Android.

To learn more about how code.google.com has come alive over the past five years, check out our post on the Google Code Blog.

Posted by Chris DiBona, Open Source Programs Manager

Posted by Errioxa

This post was originally in YOUmoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

In the past, I have tried several different ways to skip the first link that Google takes into account for a given URL (nofollowed links, links with 301 redirections, etc). However, all these attempts had little success (301 works but it's very suspect). Recently, I ran a test to see how Google handled the anchor links (links to different sections within the same page, eg: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://example.com/index.php#anything)">example.com/index</a> and was surprised by the results I found. In the setup I tested, Google completely ignored the first standard link and instead credited the second anchor link.

The Test

For my test, I included several links on a page (Page A),

• the first link is a simple link. (<a href="http://example.com/category/product.php">text</a>)
• the second and third link are anchor links. (<a href="http://example.com/category/product.php#anchor-example">other text</a>)

Or in graphic form: 

 

Results for Test 1

If you search for the first linked text we can see that we don't get the results of the destination page (Page B) . This link is not an 'anchor link', this link is a link to a 'simple URL' (that´s how I named it) but it is ignored.

SERP for first link: simple link (no # mark)

Instead, Google takes the next two anchor links (this and this) and shows the page they point to in the results. Although the apparent ignoring of the first link is odd, the way the link is displayed is even weirder. As you can see the URL that shows in the SERPs (See red box in image above) does not take to the anchor link, but to the simple link.

SERP for second link: anchor link (#)

SERP for third link: anchor link (#) 

 

Results for Test 2

SERP for first link: simple link

 

SERP for second link: anchor link (#)

 

I ran two more tests to see if the test could be reproduced. Both of the other tests had the same results!

Conclusion

 

It is interesting to see the impact that link order has on rankings. Keep this in mind going forward and I hope you find this as interesting as I did.

 

Note from Jen: Errioxa had an updated version in the queue that I missed that explains this all a bit better. I have updated this post with the new version. 3/16/10

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(Cross-posted from the Google Public Policy Blog)
Power. Clean water. The Interstate highway system. It’s easy to forget that the advantages of modern American life result from basic infrastructure investments made by earlier generations.

Tomorrow the FCC will release a national broadband strategy. The plan will set goals for expanding broadband to unserved and under-served areas, promote greater speeds, and drive consumer demand. It will harness this communications technology to urgent national priorities, such as jobs, education, health, energy, and security. In short, the plan will lay the groundwork for investing in America’s future.

Yes, the Internet was invented in the United States. Yes, we once led the world in broadband development. But now, networks in many countries, from Western Europe to East Asia, are faster and more advanced than our own. Long after we recover from this recession, this broadband gap will be a dead weight on American businesses and workers, unless we act now.

As with the space race in the 1960s, America needs a national effort by our scientists, engineers, companies, educational institutions and government agencies. Just like that great national adventure, we need near-term and long-term goals.

Broadband is an essential input to expanding business, education, and healthcare opportunities everywhere. As soon as possible, we need to bring Internet access to every community, from rural America to the inner cities.

But we also need even more ambitious objectives — or “stretch goals” — that test the limits of our ingenuity. When President John F. Kennedy summoned the nation to space exploration, the immediate goal was to send an astronaut in orbit around the earth. But JFK called for “putting a man on the moon” because he knew that dream would inspire Americans to literally reach for the stars.

The private sector has a big job to do, and needs to carry much of the investment. For our part, we plan to build and test an ultra-high-speed broadband network in at least one U.S. community. We are excited by the amount of support our proposed testbed has received from local communities and individuals.

But smart, tailored public policies are critical too. Let’s install broadband fiber as part of every federally-funded infrastructure project, from highways to mass transit. And let’s deploy broadband fiber to every library, school, community health center, and public housing facility in the U.S.

I support a national broadband strategy because ubiquitous broadband connectivity can catapult America into the next level of economic competitiveness, worker productivity, and educational opportunity. But as in the past, we will make this breakthrough by choice, not chance.

Posted by Eric Schmidt, CEO

Posted by Sarah Bird, Esquire

May It Please the Mozzers,

I haven't written on the blog in months, but I simply couldn't let today pass by without acknowledging the courage and perserverance shown by Rhea Drysdale in her pursuit of justice. She's my hero and I want to be just like her--A woman of action and humble fortitude.

Rhea announced victory against Jason Gambert in a trademark dispute lasting more than two years. She fought to prevent "SEO" from becoming trademarked for one mysterious man's private use. She fought on behalf of all of us who work in the SEO industry. Like many of you, I feel sad and ashamed I couldn't do more to support Rhea--but we've had other legal trouble to sort out at SEOmoz that consumes our limited legal resources. :( 

Lawsuits are expensive, stressful, and very time consuming. There is nothing glamorous or certain about them. Even when you're in the right, you have to keep worrying about whether justice will prevail, and whether you'll be broke or demoralized before it finally does.

I'm feeling really jazzed and happy today because Rhea has bolstered my belief in people, the SEO industry, and the justice system. As Joanna Lord said earlier, "Its a good industry-day folks, good industry day :)"  It just feels warm-and-fuzzy to work in a community of people like Rhea who sacrifice a lot without hope of any financial gain. And of people like Aaron Wall, Michael VanDeMar, Barry Schwartz and many others who've publically supported and recognized Rhea for her efforts both today and in the past.

I just wanted everyone out there in blogland to know that we have a big crush on Rhea and a big crush on the SEO industry. It's so great to see everyone coming together to support Rhea and recognize what she's done for all of us.

You can show your support by helping Rhea recoup some of her legal fees. She's updating her blog with the best way to donate to her (without inadvertently giving her some tax grief!) on the OutSpokenMedia blog.

Group Hug!

Sarah Bird

Chief Operations officer and Erstwhile Legal Blogger

SEOmoz, Inc.

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It's been two years since we completed our acquisition of DoubleClick, a leading provider of display advertising technology. This is the first in a series of posts over the next few weeks about our vision for online display advertising in the years ahead. Today, Susan Wojcicki previews the series and looks back at how we've brought Google and DoubleClick technologies together over the past two years. -ed.

The first online display advertisement — a simple, clickable image — appeared online over 16 years ago. Fast forward to 2010. You're likely to see display ads — image, text, video and rich-media formats — on most of the websites that you visit. These ads are crucial to the Internet. They provide information about thousands of products, services and businesses. They help to fund the web content and services that we all use. And they enable large and small advertisers to reach new customers, increase sales and grow their businesses.

I've watched display advertising evolve from a series of simple, static images, to the incredible creative units that we see today. The best display ads today are often like mini-websites with complex animations, stunning graphics or videos, interactive and social elements. As technology enables better ways of matching ads, they're becoming more relevant to the audience that views them and the website that hosts them. In addition, they're bought and sold across the web more seamlessly than ever before.

Our belief in the potential of display advertising has spurred our investments in this area. We started investing seriously nearly six years ago, by offering display ad formats on our AdSense partner sites in the Google Content Network (which now comprises over a million online publishers). About three years ago, we acquired YouTube and began to offer various display advertising options.

And two years ago, we acquired DoubleClick, a leading provider of display advertising technology. Since then, we've been busy integrating the DoubleClick and Google technologies, and unveiling new features to improve display advertising for users, advertisers and online publishers alike. I thought this was a good opportunity to look back on what we've done over the past two years by bringing Google and DoubleClick together.

Helping our advertisers get better results

By combining Google and DoubleClick technologies, we've made significant enhancements to advertising on the Google Content Network. For example, we've offered support for third party vendors, enabled ads to be frequency capped so that users don't see the same ad over and over, introduced view-through conversion reporting and opened a beta of interest-based advertising. Through these enhancements, we believe we can deliver more relevant, measurable ads that create more value for everyone — users get more useful ads, and these ads generate better results for advertisers and higher returns for publishers.

We're also working to provide an integrated solution that enables advertisers and agencies to plan, buy, create, serve and measure display ads across the web, in a single interface. For the longest time, getting a display ad campaign up and running has been inefficient and cumbersome. We've made significant upgrades to DoubleClick's ad serving technology, DoubleClick for Advertisers, adding new measurement and planning technologies, including Ad Planner and Google Analytics. These improvements streamline advertisers' and agencies' online advertising campaigns.

New ways of buying display ads: the Ad Exchange

In September 2009, we launched the new DoubleClick Ad Exchange. The Ad Exchange is a real-time marketplace that helps large online publishers, ad networks and agency networks buy and sell display advertising space. The new Ad Exchange is a major step towards creating a more open display advertising ecosystem for everyone. The technologies in the new Ad Exchange — principally "real-time bidding" and "dynamic allocation" — are already delivering great results for participants. AdWords advertisers can run ads on sites in the Ad Exchange, using their existing AdWords interface. This gives AdWords advertisers more high quality sites to run display ads on. Similarly, our AdSense publishers are benefiting from more high-quality display advertisers coming through the Ad Exchange.

Maximizing revenue for online publishers

A few weeks ago, we launched the upgraded DoubleClick for Publishers, to help publishers get the most value out of their online content and improve the process of selecting the ads to appear on their websites. In making this upgrade, we've been focused on combining the best of Google's technology and infrastructure with the best of DoubleClick's ad serving expertise to help generate more advertising revenue for major online publishers. For these publishers, managing, delivering and measuring the performance of ads on their websites can be a hugely complicated process that can have a significant impact on how much money they make from their online content. Ad serving is the core technology that underpins this process.

Unleashing creativity in advertising

There's no shortage of creative marketers with brilliant ideas to engage and reach consumers — from remarkable rollerblading baby videos, to customizable ads featuring interactive Twitter feeds. We launched DoubleClick Studio, a rich media tool that makes it easier for agencies and advertisers to design interactive rich media ads. We've also continued to invest in DoubleClick Rich Media, which enables complex and creative ads to be easily trafficked and served. Ads created with these DoubleClick products are engaging users every day, and frequently appear on the homepage of YouTube, on sites in the Google Content Network and all across the web. To further help marketers run engaging ads across the web, we recently acquired a company called Teracent that developed technology that can tailor literally thousands of creative elements of a display ad, in real-time.

To date, we've put hundreds of thousands of engineering hours into building our display solutions and have partnered closely with advertisers, agencies and online publishers to help them get the best results; and to help users see more engaging and relevant ads. We've also developed controls like the Ads Preferences Manager and a specially-engineered opt-out plugin, so that users have transparency, choice and control over the ads they see.

However, our work in recent years is really only the beginning of what's possible in this area. Across the board, we're building and seeing vast improvements in display advertising technology. These technology improvements will make it far easier to buy ads across the web at scale, create engaging ad formats, measure the impact of ad campaigns in innovative and insightful ways, deliver relevant ads to precisely the right audiences in real-time and maximize the value of publishers' online content. With these advances, we think that display advertising, as a category, can grow dramatically.

Over the next few weeks, we're looking forward to exploring these themes on this blog, and explaining some of the ways that new technologies are helping to move display advertising forward for everyone.

Posted by Susan Wojcicki, Vice President of Product Management

Posted by Nick Gerner

I know, I promised a Linkscape update by last week.  And I missed it.  But there's an update today!  Do you forgive me?  No?  Not enough?  Well how about doubling the volume of data available in our free API?  You might have gotten a totally awesome email last week announcing that the free SEOmoz API is now serving up to 1,000 links.  This email was so awesome I just had to share it (nice work Scott!)

  This is the same free API that's powering tons of internal reporting tools and plenty of tools you might have already seen.  This includes Carter Cole's SEO Site Tools toolbar which went volcanic last month.  And he's not even showing lists of links.  So by some math there's 1000 times more power available!   But seriously, there have been comparisons made between what we're doing and what you can do with Yahoo! Site Explorer.  The Yahoo! Site Explorer API offers up to 1,000 links.  And there's no reason we can't do the same.   What do you get with the free API?  You get a lot:

• Up to 1,000 links to a page, subdomain or root domain (sorted by Page Authority of the linking page)
• Anchor text for those 1,000
• Aggregate anchor text counts across all links in our index
• HTTP status code
• nofollow indicators
• Plenty of metrics for data junkies

We've got a community submissions page on our wiki, and we love to share neat apps.  So if you build something on our API, send it our way and we'll make sure the community hears about it.

 

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Posted by willcritchlow

Rob and Duncan are currently in Seattle, with this week full of interviews of SEO consultants for our US office. Since the announcement in February, we have been working flat out with a bunch of new clients and dealing endlessly with the US immigration service. With people on the ground, I guess we're now officially participating in the American dream, so to celebrate I'm going to spell Visualization with a z throughout this post. I can't guarantee full American spelling for everything I'm afraid - muscle memory is a powerful thing.

Anyone who has heard me speak will know about my love of data. Heck, I've even given talks on Excel ninjas. However, this post isn't so much about the data (and that's the last mention of Excel, I promise). This post is about the visualization.

I expect that everyone in SEO has spent at least some time recently thinking about data visualization techniques. They are great ways for content and data sites to get links and branding benefit and are also loads of fun. Tom's resource for information visualization and infographics is a great place to start if you don't really know what I'm talking about.

Last week, I was approached by the FT to pull together some data for them about the use of the web (and social media in particular) across the UK's political parties as we approach the election. As I started thinking about how I wanted to shape this, I realised that I wanted to produce a visualization for the web as well and that the process I was using might be interesting to you guys. Hence, my top tips for data visualizations with bits and pieces of real world examples:

7 Data Visualization Secrets

1. Gather data (intelligently)

Over the weekend, I had a bit of a think about what kind of data I wanted to be able to visualize. Thinking about Twitter, for example, I wanted to know things like the most influential (and least influential) Twitterers in each party, who was doing things really well and who was making a pig's ear of it, who could I compare unfavourably to some comedy joke accounts and how did the best of them compare to the Prime Minister's wife's pretty impressive performance.

In order to answer any of these questions, I needed data, and lots of it. Obviously, had I been working on this on a weekday, I'd have looked around for the newest recruit in the Distilled office and asked for the data on my desk by the end of the day. Without that option at the weekend, I fired up Mozenda to grab Twittering MPS, their grader ranks, retweetranks, and tweetranks along with follower counts, number of tweets and profile information. It took me about half an hour to gather all this information!

Tip #1: use tools like Mozenda to mash up your own data with multiple sources of public data to get unique insights.

If you haven't played with Mozenda yet, I highly recommend it - with a simple user interface for creating robust crawlers, it's a superb tool for any SEO.

2. Delegate additional research

There are some things that even the best scraping engine in the world can't gather for you. For example, I wanted to cross-reference the data I'd gathered against the cabinet and shadow cabinet. Only a human can do this reliably. For this, I recommend using a virtual assistant service for cheap data gathering (I use timesvr - in the US, you could use mechanical turk for this kind of thing).

I discovered an awesome service the other day - Smartsheet integrates with Google Apps and has an integration with Mechanical Turk that enables you to easily populate tabular spreadsheet data using cheap human resource. Unbelievably useful and powerful.

3. Use great design

I'm not a designer. My design sense is about as well-tuned as my singing. I think this makes me appreciate the importance and value of design even more. Since I'm not the expert here, I'm just going to tell you what works for me when getting other people to make things look pretty:

• Wireframes are your friend: although I hate paper for almost everything, I used to always sketch ideas on paper. Recently I have been a late convert to the power of drawing wireframes on the computer. I am, however, definitely sold. Choose your weapon of choice - I'm currently liking MockingBird but have also seen cool stuff from (Balsamiq, gliffy, Pencil (a Firefox plugin - thanks Simon Lilly) and Mockflow)..
• Pay attention to the users of your data: carefully consider the width, colour scheme and any associated links in the embed code to make the most of embedding opportunities
• Get professionals involved early: don't lock your limited-design-skills-self in a darkened room only to emerge with something that even a pro couldn't make look pretty. When you're at the wireframe / outline stage, show what you have to a designer and get feedback before kicking off the final data collection and design phases
• Brief as well as possible:  provide a few examples of the style you are looking for and visual elements you particularly like. Include comments about anything you don't like in the examples you provide. Try not to be that guy who says I just don't like it - can't quite put my finger on why...

The example wireframe that follows is for entertainment only. Any relationship to real infographics real or imagined is coincidental:

If you are including graph-based data, choose your charts carefully (tip: pie charts are often bad). I found this neat flow-chart for choosing what style of graph to use the other day - from Advanced Presentations by Design by Andrew Abela:

4. Consider interactivity for widgets

Any time you are working with data online, you have opportunities to provide your users with interactivity. Sometimes, static infographics are plenty enough to get links and sometimes you will get significantly more if you are providing a widget that allows people to offer their visitors interesting functionality.

You don't always have to build this yourself. We recently started working with Tableau Software whose business intelligence software has a kick-ass free, public version that is really cool for just dropping in data and creating widgets for embedding. Here's a subset of the UK politicians on Twitter data:

Sheet 1

Powered by Tableau

5. Quirky is at least as important as correct

You all read the internet. You know the power of random facts, cute animals, in-jokes and comedy references. It's generally not enough to present just the raw facts - interesting comparisons and strong imagery improve the shareability of any piece. We are all wired to remember (and therefore to repeat) comparisons better than plain numbers.

I'm still working on which elements of my infographic might make for quirky comparisons. For example, did you know that an Oscar is the same height as an adult pygmy marmoset monkey? From a client's recent Oscars infographic:

Source: LocateTV

6. Know who your targets are

Finishing on a couple of strong SEO points, if your goals are improved rankings, you are doing this primarily for links (and if you are doing it for branding purposes, the sharing is critical). So you need to know who your targets are and find a way to reach them. If your target market happens to overlap with Reddit, StumbleUpon etc. then they are obviously going to be great, but don't forget to drop people in your niche a line as well.

Bonus tip: don't forget the infographic fans.

7. Provide the embed code (with a link)

You want to provide the embed code for two reasons:

1. to make it easy for non-tech-savvy bloggers to share your content
2. to make sure (as far as possible) that you get a link out of it

If you can style and include the link in a relevant way (especially if it links to more data or more information) you increase the chance that the people embedding your content will embed the link along with it. If you want to go even further, you could provide your graphic under a Creative Commons Attribution license.

Please keep the comments for discussions of techniques and ideas, not for politics. Any political comments included above are for amusement only and may or may not reflect the political views of the author, or anyone else.

Technorati Tagsdata, visualization, graphics, infographics

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(Cross-posted from the YouTube Blog)
When the first ball of this year’s Indian Premier League cricket season is bowled, fans across the planet will have a front row seat in the world’s biggest online sports stadium. Tonight the Deccan Chargers and Kolkata Knight Riders will face off in Mumbai at 8pm IST, and the YouTube global community will be able to tune in to the IPL’s YouTube Channel (www.youtube.com/ipl) for streaming and on-demand access to witness the start of what promises to be one of the most widely-distributed sporting events in history. Fans can watch matches, highlight videos, player interviews and much more all on the IPL’s YouTube channel.


Named by Forbes as the "hottest sports league in the world" with revenues comparable to the world’s most popular leagues, the IPL season is a 60-match, 43-day tournament that features some of the best talent in cricket today. You can come to YouTube and keep up with the action any time, anywhere and connect with fans across the globe. Watch as the match happens, or if you missed a match, tune in later to see what happened. The entire season will be streamed around the world on YouTube, except in the US, where matches will be time-delayed and made available 15 minutes after the match ends.

On the IPL Channel, you’ll see three tabs:

• Today’s Matches: This is where you can watch streamed matches as they happen. (Note that the stream will be delayed by a few minutes.) Click through at any time to see the match scorecard.
• Recent Matches: Catch up any time on the full action of matches that have already happened. Watch Sachin cream the ball through the covers, Warney taking his latest wicket and more.
• Highlights: If you’re short on time, check in here for short videos of player interviews, match highlights, greatest plays and more.

And for all of you who want to cheer or commiserate with others, check out our Twitter gadget on the channel page to be part of the conversation. You can keep up with the discussion on Twitter with the YouTube IPL hashtag (#youtube_ipl). Share, rate and comment on videos throughout the channel, or upload your own video responses to the action. There's also a link so you can join the Official DLF IPL community on Orkut (www.orkut.com/ipl).

We'll be watching the donkey drops, the five-fers, the flippers and floaters, the half-yorkers and slow sweeps — and cheering alongside you!

* A googly is a kind of pitch similar to a baseball pitch or a bowling throw in the game cricket; a wicked googly would be a really good pitch.
Posted by Amit Agrawal, Strategic Partner Development Manager, YouTube

This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs weekly. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

This week's enhancements include:

Locking SafeSearch now in 39 languages
Last November, we announced the option to password protect your SafeSearch setting and filter out sexually explicit web sites and images from your search results. While no filter is 100% accurate, SafeSearch Lock helps you avoid content you may prefer not to see or would rather your children did not stumble across. We're pleased to roll this out globally in 39 more languages. It's easy to set your preference, and once you do, you'll see a visible change to your search page. Even from across the room, you'll be able to see bright colored balls on the top of the screen. Check out this video to learn more.

Microdata support for Rich Snippets
HTML (hypertext markup language) is the core language of the web. And since it was created, HTML5 has become the fifth major revision of HTML. What's different about HTML5? The specification includes a description of microdata, a new markup standard for specifying structured information within web pages. Paritcularly of interest to webmasters, this week we were excited to announce support for microdata for use in rich snippets in addition to our existing support for microformats and RDFa.

By using microdata markup when web pages are created, you can specify reviews, people profiles, or events information on your web pages that Google may use to improve their presentation in Google search results.

To learn more about rich snippets and microdata support, here are some links:

• Rich snippets documentation
• Overview of microdata
• Official microdata specification
• Rich snippets testing tool

Stay tuned for next week's post on launches, more enhancements and news about search.

Posted by Jen Fitzpatrick, VP, Engineering

The Google Apps team here in New York City is a hotbed of movie fanatics. But while planning a recent movie night, we realized we spend too much time organizing our events and not enough time discussing, debating and watching movies.

To take the hard work out of planning, we turned to Google Apps Script, which lets you write short programs that automatically perform simple actions within a spreadsheet. For example, our Movie Night script figures out which movies are playing close by and invites everyone to vote on what they’d most like to see.


Google Apps Script has been available to businesses, schools and other organizations using Google Apps since January, and today we’re excited to bring it to everyone who uses Google spreadsheets. Apps Script can be helpful for all kinds of things, from customized party invites to sending out holiday letters — in fact Apps Script can be especially helpful for those repetitive, time consuming tasks.

To help you find useful scripts, we’ve also launched a public gallery where you can check out our Movie Night script and browse other available scripts. If you’re feeling adventurous, try your hand at writing your own script and submit it to the gallery for others to use. To see the gallery or install a script in your spreadsheet, click on “Insert” and select “Script.”

Check out the Google Docs blog for more information about Apps Script, and to learn about writing your own scripts, visit the Google Apps Developer Blog.

Posted by Evin Levey, Product Manager, Google Apps

• Sending Email From Your Web Site [Alex Reisner] - A nice summary of all the factors to consider if you're setting up a web server which will be sending emails.Tags: Linux; Email; Server; Tips; 
• Cool Tools and Toys for Web Developers - Some tools to optimise your CSS and a CSS3 sandbox for you to test some of the new features interactively.Tags: CSS; Tools; 
• The i, b, em, & strong elements | HTML5 Doctor - Two stray dogs of presentational HTML have been transformed into meaningful HTML5 elements, ready to be adopted into your markup once again.Tags: BlogPost; HTML5; Tips; 
• Cross Browser CSS Transforms – even in IE - A library to implement cross browser rotation, shadows and gradients.Tags: BlogPost; CSS; Javascript; Library; 
• london2: what’s on - London based technology meetups.Tags: London; Technology; Lecture; 
• HTML: The Markup Language - The content creator's version of the HTML5 specification.Tags: HTML5; Standards; Reference; 

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

This is part of a regular series of Google Apps updates that we post every couple of weeks. Look for the label "Google Apps highlights" and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

Today’s update includes a handful of experimental features, a bunch from third-party developers and one that lets you build new features yourself. Enjoy!

Fast new windows in Gmail
Working with email in a single window can slow you down, so throughout Gmail there are places where you can launch what you’re doing into a new window and accomplish two things at once. For example, you can search your inbox and compose a new message at the same time. While this has been part of Gmail for a while now, we’ve just made it better by dramatically speeding up how quickly new windows open. No more waiting for the new window “Loading...” bar to finish — now you can do what you do in Gmail faster!


Gmail Labs updates
We’ve made a handful of updates in Gmail Labs, our experimental testing ground where Google engineers can quickly launch new Gmail features and get feedback from users. Based on usage and user feedback, six Labs have graduated to become full-fledged Gmail features: Search Autocomplete, Go To Label, Forgotten Attachment Detector, YouTube Previews, Custom Label Colors and Vacation Dates. We also retired five Labs that weren’t as popular. Finally, we introduced one new Lab: Refresh POP Accounts. If you use Gmail to retrieve messages from another email account with POP, this Lab immediately checks your other account for new mail when you click the “Refresh” link in Gmail.


Calendar Labs updates
We also have Labs in Google Calendar, and we’ve cooked up a few new experiments there as well. Event Flair lets you add custom icons to appointments, Gentle Reminders prevents event reminders from interrupting your flow in the browser and Automatically Declining Events blocks people from double-booking time on your calendar when you’re already busy.


Apps Script Gallery
Google Apps Script is a flexible system that lets you add custom menus, buttons and functions to spreadsheets, as well as make the components of Google Apps work together in new ways. For example, you can trigger a set of automated Gmail messages and add appointments to your calendar based on changes in a spreadsheet. On Wednesday, we made Google Apps Script available to everyone — not just businesses, schools and organizations — and we launched the Apps Script Gallery to share script examples and help you get started scripting.


DocVerse joins Google
We’re always looking for ways to help people transition smoothly to the cloud. With this in mind, last week we acquired DocVerse, a small team that’s built a powerful set of add-ons to help teams work together more efficiently with Microsoft Office. With DocVerse, people can begin to experience some of the benefits of web-based collaboration using the traditional Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint desktop applications that they’re familiar with. Stay tuned for more information about our plans with DocVerse.

More apps for Google Apps
Google Apps customers often decide to move even more of their technology into the cloud, but it hasn’t always been easy for them to find good web-based solutions that meet their needs and to integrate those solutions with Google Apps. This Tuesday, we launched the Google Apps Marketplace to help customers find technology from trusted providers and give developers a platform where they can sell their products. When Google Apps administrators find something they like in the Marketplace, it takes just a few clicks to integrate a developer’s application with Google Apps. Authentication to third-party applications can be handled automatically by Google Apps, and developers’ applications can integrate with and securely share data among services like Gmail, Google Docs, Google Sites and Google Calendar. There are more than 50 applications available in the Marketplace today, ranging from accounting and project management apps to graphic design and customer relationship management tools.



Who's gone Google?
We’re pleased to welcome another crop of new businesses and schools to Google Apps. More than 11,000 crew members at KLM Royal Dutch Airlines took flight with Google Apps, and the Sports Basement switched teams from Microsoft Exchange. National Geographic is exploring the world of real-time collaboration, and Hamilton College is learning a few new tricks with Google Apps, too.

Hope you're enjoying the latest round of new features, whether you're using Google Apps with friends and family, with colleagues or with classmates. For details and the latest news in this area, check out the Google Apps Blog.

Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager

At Yahoo! Search, we pay attention to what’s popular on the Web and what matters most to you. We know that celebrities rank near the top of the buzziest searches on Yahoo!, so this is one area in search that we’ve been working on to make even better. As we’ve already started to do with news, local, sports, music and movies searches, we want to make your pop culture search results more useful.  Now you can find photos, videos, news and other interesting information right on top of our Search results page, without digging through all 10 blue links.

Our brilliant scientists are working hard behind the scenes to uncover the relevant details and content hidden in the billions of pages on the Web. What this means is that we can surface the nuggets scattered across what we call the “Web of Things” to show you the stuff that matters to you, right on your Search results page. Our aim is to save you many clicks and a lot of time, while creating a fun way to conduct searches for related topics of interest.

For entertainment junkies, there is all kinds of great information we can find for you in our rich Search results. For example, if you’re a TV fan looking for details on your favorite show we just launched a new TV shortcut that will display the latest video clips, bonus videos (or even entire episodes), episodes list, ratings, show times from Yahoo! TV, and photos – all with just one click from the Search results page.

On the left side of the page, we show suggestions of related celebrities, movies or TV shows related to your entertainment queries. Check out the search results for “Days of our Lives” actor Jensen Ackles. If you click on Ackles’ result, we’ll show you a brand new rich shortcut with photos, videos and tweets about him. Plus you’ll get new suggestions to explore more Search results for his co-stars, like Jessica Alba and Orlando Bloom, or some of the movies he’s been in.

Click on Orlando Bloom and you’ll see that the new Celebrity shortcut brings up news, along with his photos, videos and tweets.

So go on and search for your favorite entertainment topics on Yahoo! We are curious to know what you think!

P.S. If your favorite celebrity has an official Twitter feed, you can see their tweets right on the search results page! This way, you won’t miss a minute of their lives.

P.P.S. We’re also now showing enhanced shortcuts for a broader range of movies and music to include even more of your favorite stuff. Take a look at our search results for music artist Tommy Emmanuel or the movie Pretty Woman.

Alexandra Levich and Yuko Kamae

Yahoo! Search

Posted by great scott!

Test, test, test! That's the mantra these days. Conversion Rate Optimization is the buzzword on everybody's lips (and tweets). So why are we telling you NOT to test?  Well, we're not, we're just saying to be smart about it.

People often get a testing platform ready to roll and then start obsessing over just how intricate they can get with multi-variate tests...it's a walk before you crawl scenario. Start with the big picture: A/B tests of major page layouts, even MVTs on major design changes. Those things can yield MAJOR uplifts in conversions and they're the things you need to focus on before you worry about what color font you use in your H1 tag and the 0.0001% lift you get from it.

We're not saying small changes and new recipes from complex MVTs can't yield meaningful results, we're just saying to start with the big picture and work on the details later.

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More than ever, governments around the world are threatening online free expression. Forty countries have taken measures to limit this freedom, up from only a handful a few years ago. Google and YouTube services are or have been blocked in 25 of those nations.

On Thursday night in Paris, we took an important step to highlight this crucial issue by sponsoring the first Netizen Prize (or more elegantly, “Le Prix de Net Citoyen”) awarded by the Paris-based advocacy group Reporters Without Borders. And on Friday, March 12, we’ll be helping highlight the fight for Internet freedom by marking the group’s World Day Against Cyber Censorship on YouTube.

Fittingly, Reporters Without Borders chose to give the first Netizen Prize to the Iranian creators of the website Change for Equality, first established in 2006 to fight for changes in laws in Tehran that discriminate against women. That site has since become a well-known source of information on women’s rights in Iran, documenting arrests of women activists and becoming a rallying point for opponents of the regime.

Over the past year those leaders in Tehran have distinguished themselves — and earned the opprobrium of people all over the world — for their brutal crackdown on the rights of its critics to question their rule. Last year's killing of unarmed Neda Agha-Soltan during post-election protests in Tehran, seen around the world on amateur video, has become a symbol of the regime's ferocity — and the power of the Internet to reveal what governments do not want the world to see.

At the award ceremony in our Paris office, our Senior Vice President David Drummond said that we are at a critical point in the future of the Internet: "All of us have a choice. We can allow repressive policies to take flight and spread across the globe, or we can work together against such challenges and uphold the fundamental human right to free expression.”

David went on to praise the role of NGOs like Reporters Without Borders, the Obama Administration’s commitment to the promotion of Internet freedom and the efforts of all groups that have joined the Global Network Initiative. Under the initiative, major U.S. Internet companies, human rights group, socially responsive investors and academic institutions agreed to guidelines promoting free expression and protecting the privacy of their users around the world. “In the spirit of the undiplomatic American come to European shores," he said, "let me make a plea for European governments, companies and groups to rise to the occasion. Any effort that is limited to the United States is bound to fall far short of its global potential.”

Posted by Robert Boorstin, Director, Public Policy

Like many of you out there, we’re gearing up for the SXSW Interactive Festival, which starts tomorrow, March 12 in Austin, TX. In just a few short hours, dozens of Googlers and YouTubers will be descending on Austin for a packed weekend of panels, demos and parties. Of course, we’ve also got a few fun things up our sleeve:

• Representatives from Google and YouTube will be speaking on more than 20 panels on a variety of subjects, including open source, mobile, real-time communication and user experience design.
• At the Google booth, we’ll be doing demos on a wide range of products, including Google Maps, Blogger, Wave, Reader and YouTube, and sessions on building apps for App Engine, extensions on Chrome and accessibility APIs and hacks for Android.
• On Sunday, our all-day Hackathon will give you the chance to get your hands dirty and build applications using a variety of Google technologies. At the end of the day, we’ll award prizes, including Android phones, for the best apps.
• We’re sponsoring the festival’s first Mothers’ Room, where nursing moms can go for comfort and privacy.

Finally, we’ll be seeing you at as many parties as we can go to at one time, including Bikehugger’s Mobile Social, where representatives from the Google Maps team will be handing out schwag and dishing dirt on how they built bike directions, the Blogger/Reader party, where you’ll have a chance to chat with members of those teams about new features, and (last but not least) the SXSW Film Closing/Music Opening, co-sponsored by YouTube and VH1.

You can read more about all of the Google happenings on our SXSW website, and follow @googlesxsw on Twitter for last-minute updates and news from Austin. We can’t wait to hit the ground running (or biking), and we look forward to seeing you there!

Posted by Emily Wood, Editor, Google Blog and Twitter team

In Blogger’s more than 10 years, we’ve learned that blogging is a powerful way for people to express themselves. More than 350,000 words are written on Blogger every minute of every day and over the years we’ve added a bunch of features to ensure that writing those words is as easy, fun and rewarding as possible. Today, we’re happy to announce the launch of the Blogger Template Designer on Blogger in Draft, our experimental playground where you can try out the latest features Blogger has to offer. Instead of creating a lot of new templates that will grow stale over time, we decided to go beyond static templates and reinvent the whole process of designing your blog, making it even easier to express yourself online.

The Blogger Template Designer is our big first step in improving not just our template designs, but all the ways that you can customize the look and layout of your blog. If you try out the Blogger Template Designer, you’ll find:

• Fifteen new professional templates to start from (and more on their way)
• Custom blog layouts with one, two and three columns
• Hundreds of free professional background images from iStockphoto, the leading microstock image marketplace
• Customizable colors, fonts and more

Check out this video for a peek at what you can do with the Blogger Template Designer:



For more info, check out our post on the Blogger in draft blog. Give the Blogger Template Designer a test drive, and then let us know what you think!

Posted by Pete Hopkins, Tech Lead, Blogger