Someday you will google your Google to the Google to pick up some more google
– Some random person on Slashdot, I think
Just another quiet week for Google. Let’s see what happened:
- Gmail switching guide lets you help your friends join Gmail and keep all their contacts.
- Gmail contact groups so you can make a “family” group or “reading group” and mail people in one easy batch.
- Gmail available on mobile phones
- Gmail vacation autoresponder. w00t!
- Music search
- iGoogle personalization
- new Firefox extensions
- Integrating English Google News with Google Accounts, so you can get your personalized news from any computer.
- Google Desktop2 out of beta in 15+ languages. Here’s German, for example.
- Personalized search bookmarks/labels are now available on the main search page
- There’s a new Pittsburgh office
- Holiday searches. Huh. Christmas and Hanukkah and Kwanzaa work, but what about Boxing Day?!
- A WML version of Froogle in Germany.
And I’m sure I missed a couple things. Is that too dang much Googley Goodness for one week? Well, it is close to Chrismukkah, after all. Happy holidays from Google! 
I think the most under-reported things will be the Pittsburgh office and the personalized homepage API. The Pittsburgh office will no doubt have a large impact on Google over time as we work with smart people there. As for the homepage API: there are only five widgets listed there right now. The API documentation is readily available. If I were a netizen looking for attention or viral buzz, one way is to be the first to develop an AdSense status widget, a scratchpad, or a Flickr photo of the day. If you need ideas, check out the widgets that the Google Desktop supports.
Update: Sure enough, I missed Jingle and Jingle Audio, which are two proposed extensions to XMPP that will improve interoperability with Google Talk’s voice features. Open protocols make me go woof.
{ 38 comments… read them below or add one }
Speaking of APIs, why is the Web API so slooowwww. About 10-15x slower than Yahoo’s these days. Not a whole lot to complain about in regard to Google, but Yahoo certainly trumping Google with their APIs these days (Google web API is “beta” and been stagnant for 3 years now).
Exciting stuff. The GMail stuff is really cool.
Matt – Any word on Google Analytics? I just missed out after getting back from PubCon in Vegas. Right now I am on the dreaded waiting list. I have to have a new analytics package in place by Jan 1st. Got any insider information to share? I would hate to sign up with WebsideStory on Jan 1 and get an email from Google on Jan 2!
Don’t forget Google Talk Libjingle…
http://code.google.com/apis/talk/index.html
Desktop 2 – is there a Mac version on the horizon?
Nice round-up. How about posting a round-up every week? It’s too much to keep up with all of Googles activities.
yeah I’ve been having tons of fun with the google IG API.
I’ve done one for my internet slang translator (www.noslang.com/noslang.xml) to add it
and I’m working on doing one for my text message reminder site (click my name for the URL of that one) (only I can’t make it look good)
I’ve got about 3 or 4 more under way…
Google needs to provide us a way to have a user automatically add our widget to their IG though, as without a Google method for doing that, we can’t code that on our own. Most of my site’s visitors are too dumb to type in the URL of an xml file.
About the personalized homepage – Yep, not enough cool widgets, I checked it out and said to myself, nah, I will come back in a month or two and check it again. I think I am a good example of the typical user, yes indeed an Adsense widget would catch our attention. Yay @ that!
>Holiday searches
What, nothing for Festivus?
Just as long as your “Google SEO Webmaster User International Conference/ Expo” didn’t include virtual smell technology…. I think that’s one thing we could all do without
I m realy a google fan, can you please tell me when you will introduce gcalendar? i realy need it.
Actually, the holiday is Chrismahannukwanzaka.
Call 1-888-353-7667 for official verification (no, it’s not my number).
How about Google acquiring a 5% stake in AOL. That’s pretty big Google news.
Does anyone think that Google is just putting out way to many services, way too fast?? I think they are forgetting about FOCUS
Matt,
Your “Gmail contact groups” link returns a 404.
I totally agree with What a Maroon! An aluminum pole would have been so easy.
Hi Matt. We met at SES San Jose in 2004 and I just found your blog. Very cool. How do I get my band and our music into Google’s new and improved music search??? Thanks bro!
Catfish
Matt:
Boxing Day. that traditional english holiday where the lords give their leftovers (in a box) to the peasants on 12/26.
My wife sends a pair of boxers to her ex every year on this day. (Really don’t want to go into that one!)
“# Personalized search bookmarks/labels are now available on the main search page”
Where is this? I don’t see it.
Hi Matt
Any chance I can get a repsonse on a case of major spam that you guys are missing in a huge ecommerce market??
Clint
I made one of those fancy new Google widgets
http://andrewhitchcock.org/musicmobs/w.xml
It gives music recommendations and allows you to download XSPF playlists of the recommendations. Unfortunately, now I’m out of ideas for cool widgets.
Hello again!
Let me ask you about one new thing I’ve been wondering about. On one of your searches above Kwanzaa the first result gets four extra links right under it’s description. Why do they appear and what should a webmaster like me do to get those “extra links”?
You missed the Google Talk announcement
Good morning Huvet
You might find an answer to your question here:
UI fun: Better queries
Matt wrote:
“Other folks will ask things like “Are queries selected by hand–can my query get in on this? Is money involved?” And the answer is: it’s all algorithmic. The algorithms pick the queries where this could be helpful. Of course money isn’t involved at all.”
Cool, you guys at Google are busy. Somebode showed me this search with has a strange, what I think is, a suggestion box right in the middle of the results. (from position 4 to 6). The next page doesn’t start at position 11 but at position 8.
Could you explain it a bit what the philosophy behind these results is?
Thanks,
Peter
Aaron said: ” I think I am a good example of the typical user,”
Peter – What I meant was that I have the attention span of a fly, I am in fact the typical user, and if they want to impress me they need more widgets.
Not a problem, I am just waiting for something that integrates all Google services into one simple widget that resides in my system tray.
I agree that google is putting out way to many services.
They need to stop, and worry about how to integrate them all. None of them seem to know about the existence of others yet.
Google isn’t a “portal” yet, they’re more like 1 site that owns 20 others.
Matt, it seems you’ve missed the big news: Google will provide SEO services for AOL. Is this agreement for real? To get AOL fairly indexed and ranking you’ll need a bunch of smart SEOs
Congratulations to Google with their new release and acquisition.
@Harith: Thanks for your reply. I should have read back a bit. I guess that I was hoping for an answer like “Just make a good structure and the algos will add the links” or, “If your search is considered much more relevant than the second best you’ll get them”. But that’s perhaps giving out to much info in the algos, so I guess the trial and error method will have to do this time too
I created a couple widgets:
Blackjack
http://andrewhitchcock.org/gwidgets/blackjack.html
Imageshack Hosting
http://andrewhitchcock.org/gwidgets/imageshack-hosting.html
Or what about google commissioning 700 new jobs in Dublin, Ireland – surely a significant move….!
http://www.electricnews.net/news.html?code=9657888
>>How about Google acquiring a 5% stake in AOL. That’s pretty big Google news.
Yep, and the word going around is that Google will be providing special assistance so AOL stuff can rank higher.
Those music links are great, but I wonder how long the lyrics links will last when the music industry is now clamping down on sites with lyrics on?
Henry
Perhaps Google’s next development would be to eliminate the vast majoraty of web spam by changing AdSense so that the code is only valid for one domain – the one which was first used by the applicant to apply for an AdSense account.
I guess that would be too much to expect for Christmas…
that would lose alot of money for google. I personally run about 8 sites all on the same adsense ID. While it’s not even enough to pay my car payment each month, I do like being able to get that monthly check instead of having to wait until each website hits over $100.
If google consolidated it to 1 account per site, everybody would switch over to yahoo.
I’ve been beta testing YPN on one of my sites now, and it’s already paying more per click. Not sure if that will stay true as more sites get accepted into the program or they open it up.
I just tried the “Blogger Web Comments” firefox extension, its totally AWESOME !!!!!!!!!!
Thanks for the post !
More quality, original content in niche areas is the key to progressive success. It’s a bit pitiful though, having tested my traffic and found that more referrals come from newer search engines that don’t compromise their results.
I’d love to see google though coming back to the beloved search engine we all religiously used back in the old romantic days…ahhh. Nowadays I invest my fund to offline media; it works, thank Lord.