A happy (belated) Easter to everyone and a rather late round-up of some of the events at Google in the last month (and a little bit of this month).

Google Blogger, their free blogging platform, finally got an update to their templates with Blogger Template Designer. Though Blogger itself has been around for many years, there has been no significant change to the templates available. Currently only available to Blogger in Draft users, the template designer offers 15 new templates (with more promised), custom layouts and hundreds of background images. You can read more about the much needed update at Blogger Buzz here. Blogger Buzz also gave an update on the time saved by the introduction of their Auto Pagination feature which happened in February. The ten percent latency reduction is reported to already be saving users 1 million hours of waiting time a week, read more here.

Gmail introduced a new security feature, remote sign out and recent account activity information. The new feature will alert you if your Gmail account has recently been accessed from a different geographic location and will issue a warning, read more at the Google Online Security Blog here. Once more information has been gathered from usage this feature will be introduced to Google Apps and possibly other Google products.

The revenue generated from advertising is how Google makes most of it’s money and they recently launched Google Ad Innovations which is a place to check out new advertising technologies, watch demos and try out new tools. Find out more at the new Google Ad Innovations page here.

A few other odds and ends - Google Voice celebrated it’s 1st birthday on March 11, there has been further integration of YouTube and Facebook, with your Facebook feed now appearing on your YouTube page, read more here. Also this month the latest stable release of Google Chrome introduced Google Translate integration as well as better privacy controls, read about these new features at the Google Chrome Blog here. There has also been an integration of Google Analytics into the Microsoft Silverlight Framework which you can read more about here and there was also the launch of a new AdWords for mobile interface. Another new Analytics feature is the option to opt-out of Analytics reporting, which will be implemented with a browser based plug-in, read more at the Google Analytics blog here.

And finally, Google’s April Fool’s Joke, the announcement that it would be changing it’s name to Topeka, and vice versa, the town of Topeka would be changing it’s name to Google. Personally I am not sure how many people bought this particular April Fool’s Joke however if you want to read more about it check out the Official Google Blog Post here. And that’s about it for March 2010…

For the second in our new series of what will hopefully be a regular monthly round-up of the more interesting occurrences at Google, we will take a look at a few newsworthy stories doing the rounds this February.

Let’s start with the positives, Google Docs, the online office application suite from Google got a new web clipboard, allowing copying and pasting in the ‘cloud’, surely a good thing for any user of Google Docs. Read more at the official Google Docs Blog here. In other Google Apps news there are a few Gmail Labs features that will be graduating from Labs into normal Gmail - these include Search Autocomplete, Go To Label, Forgotten Attachment Detector and more. There are also a few Labs features that will be retiring, read more at the official Gmail Blog here.

A few other happenings in February, Google is planning to test ultra high-speed broadband networks in a small number of communities in the United States - read more here. The new beta release of Google Chrome for Mac added two key features (that were previously only available in the developer channel), bookmark synchronization and support for extensions along with other improvements - read more here.

The recent acquisition of Aardvark by Google is set to introduce a bit more of the ‘human touch’ to the Google experience. Aardvark (available at vark.com) allows users to ask questions and Aardvark will discover another human being in your network to answer the question, reportedly within minutes, providing a more social form of search. Aardvark is currently available as part of Google Labs here (or at the Aardvark site here).

One other small tweak this month, on the currently hot topic of geolocation, is the introduction of the new “Nearby feature” in the Search Options panel of the Google search page - read more here. And for any African university students who are interested in coding and an internship at Google along with special prizes and t-shirts, head over to Google Code Jam Africa 2010. You can also find out more at the official Google Africa Blog here.

And the middle-ground? Google Buzz…whether this is going to be a killer product in the future or another Orkut is debatable. Google Buzz is somewhere between Twitter and Facebook, though deeply integrated with other Google services (and Twitter itself, amongst others). Allowing (theoretical) real-time updates of status, picture posts, Twitter posts and more, the service was launched quite abruptly and not quite bug-free. Though no beta tag was attached on launch (surely a first for Google), many users raised concerns regarding security and the fact that Twitter status updates did not actually work for many users. Google Buzz seems to have been rushed out by Google and only time (and bug-fixing) will determine whether the product is adopted by it’s massive Gmail user base.

Unfortunately there is a cat amongst the pigeons this month, Microsoft is initiating a preliminary inquiry into competition complaints against Google regarding the algorithms it employs to determine search results, through companies it has interests in - read more about the complaints at the official Google European Policy Blog here and a response from Amit Singhal of Google regarding their algorithms here.

There doesn’t seem to a  quiet moment to be had for Google, who had a rather mixed bag this month. The eagerly anticipated ’superphone’ - the Nexus One was launched and despite all the hype surrounding the smartphone, sales figures have reportedly been poor. Comparatively, The iPhone 3GS sold over a million units within 72 hours of it’s launch, the Motorola Droid sold over 250,000 units in it’s first week, and the Nexus One? The initial week saw only an estimated 20,000 units being sold. Coupled to this is the fact that there have been a few complaints surrounding the phone itself, with some consumers reporting issues with the 3G connectivity and the fact that customer support for the device is lacking has made the launch of the Nexus One a bit of a bumpy one.

As Google’s products and services have become more and more a part of our daily online lives, so we have put more trust Google storing and keeping lots of valuable information safe. Unfortunately there was a recent breach of Google’s security originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property. The primary focus of the cyber attack seems to have been to access the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists - read more at the Official Google Blog here.

It hasn’t all been bad news however, the announcement of the fourth quarter and 2009 fiscal year financial results were very positive. Revenue is up 17% and paid clicks on ads saw an annual increase of 13%. So, despite widespread economic problems the search giant remains incredibly buoyant and continues to go from strength-to-strength financially.

Geo location is a hot topic at the moment, not just for Google, but many other companies as well. If you are using an iPhone or Android based device ‘Near me now‘ will make suggestions for services in your local vicinity such as ATMs or coffee shops. Another location based feature rolled out recently is optimized search suggestions based on where you are - read more at the Official Google Mobile Blog here.

Gmail is used by a lot of people and as such is a great platform for Google to display ads (it’s main source of revenue). As such the algorithms related to what ads display in your inbox have recently been updated to (hopefully) improve the relevancy of the ads that you see. Read more at the Official Gmail Blog here.

A few other odds and ends - Check out a demo of the Nexus One apps at the Google Nexus One web store here. ‘GDrive‘, it’s been talked about by many people for a long time, a much wanted cloud based storage solution from Google. Though not officially called ’GDrive‘ Google has rolled out the ability to upload and store any type of file to Google Docs up to 250 MB in size, with a limit of 1GB free storage (though you can buy more if needed) - read more at the Official Google Docs Blog here. And just in case you didn’t know, by tracking certain search queries, Google is able to estimate the current flu trends in near real time - read more here.

The online game is all about rapid change and 2009 was no different, here is a round-up of some of the good stuff from last year and how it affected (or will affect) the search market.

Missing something? Well, that would be Live Search from Microsoft, in it’s place we now have the (rather oddly titled) Bing. Strangely enough, the Live.com domain still ranks at No. 5 worldwide (at the time of writing) according to Alexa whilst Bing sits at No. 21, quite a way down. Microsoft is pushing Bing in a big way though, and whilst MSN and/or Windows Live never quite managed to catch up to Yahoo!, Bing has managed to pretty much bridge that gap (worldwide) in a short space of time and it’s gains in the US market vs Yahoo! continue. Shortly after the initial launch there were already a slew of updates to Microsoft’s ‘decision engine‘. Striking a deal with Wolfram|Alpha, launching a free Bing App for the iPhone and completing a very expensive deal with Verizon Wireless, much to the dismay of some Verizon customers, are all moves to promote Bing in Microsoft’s continuing struggle to raise it’s presence in search. Bing users are apparently more advertising click happy though, so even though there are less users, they are more likely to click on ads.

Yahoo! is still ranked No. 3 worldwide and though many people may talk them down, they are still a favourite for many internet users.  Their stock price is (currently) looking good and they are doing their best to fight off the aggressive push by Microsoft. On a site interaction level, the Yahoo! approach remains very different to that of Google or Bing, with a much more social ‘home page’ than Google’s minimalism or Bing’s really good-looking daily photos. They are now offering localized business results, integrated tweets into search results and have struck a deal with Facebook Connect, all moves which contribute to it’s targeting a different demographic of the search market.

Google dominated search in 2009 once again, branching out further and further into internet users daily lives. During the year Google’s products continued to infiltrate our online activities, not just in search but clever moves like Android (plus Nexus One), the much anticipated Chrome OS (and soon to come netbook), Google Voice and not forgetting the innovative Google Wave, mean things can only improve for the superpower in search. We are still waiting on Google Caffeine, an upgrade to Google Search, and rather peculiarly only got a fade-in effect on the homepage instead. The Top 10 Official Google Blog posts of 2009 are worth reading and don’t forget about the Google AdWords Blog for a refresher of what happened in search advertising in 2009. Whether Google can still be termed a ‘search engine‘ or rather now as a ‘lifestyle‘ is a debatable topic and 2010 will only continue to further this contention. Add to this the fact that even though many big firms may lose value in 2010, Google are still expected to turn a tidy profit, and we clearly have a winner amongst the big three.

What’s looking hot for 2010? Realtime search is something everyone is trying to incorporate into search results. Couple this with the equally hot trend in geo-location and you start to think of interesting opportunities for marketing and search results. An Apple iSlate vs Chrome OS Netbook war is on the cards as is one between the Nexus One (with Google Android) and iPhone, with Google trying to take a bigger slice of Apple’s pie.

Finally, the official search engine 2009 trends are here:

• Google Year-End Zeitgest
• Yahoo! Year in Review 2009
• Top Bing Searches in 2009

And, just for fun, check out the 2010 New Year’s Search Engine Logos here…happy new year!

 It is amazing how quickly we forget, just over a year ago saw the release of a rather buggy browser named Google Chrome. Our own staff, generally quick to praise Google, even had a few doubts. Today, the beta version of Google Chrome supports extensions and we are now at the point of seeing what impact Google Chrome will really have on the browser share market in the year to come.

Already Google Chrome has overtaken Opera, which is a much more mature offering, with some sources giving it a 4.66% share for November 2009 and Google has quietly upped the ante recently. One of the major detractions of Chrome was its lack of support for extensions, something that made users stick to Firefox as their default browser. However, if you install the beta build here (which I use and is stable), you can now install any number of extensions from the official gallery here - also worth reading ten must-have extensions here. Google themselves are incorporating search features into extensions, like Similar Pages, which will preview and explore pages similar to the one you are browsing on the fly.

Extensions is the big one but to grab an even bigger slice of the browser share market in 2010 Google needs to do a little more, and they have… Mac users can now download a beta release of Chrome, something OS X users have been waiting for. Linux users haven’t been left out either, there is now a beta release of Chrome for Linux available and both versions support extensions as well.

The Chrome marketing team are exploring other avenues as well. Whilst tech-savvy PC users will know what Chrome is, your average internet user might not be as up-to-date. If you have used Internet Explorer and navigated to the Google home page you will probably have noticed a little box prompting you to install a ‘faster‘ browser. Not stopping there, anyone downloading and installing the very popular Avast! antivirus software will now be prompted to installl Google Chrome as well. This agreement by Google is a very clever one, Avast! is soon to release version 5 and sometime this month will be celebrating it’s 100,000,000th user (that’s 100 million!), giving Chrome a much better distribution point, as it is not bundled with Windows (like Internet Explorer) and does not have the historical user base of Firefox. To top it all off, you can even give ChromeForChristmas, a site dedicated to distributing a gift-wrapped Chrome download to whomever you choose!

The very essence of Google Chrome (and the upcoming Chrome OS) is speed, that’s why people like it. Getting even more speed is tricky, Opera uses Turbo, a compression technology, but Google has gone one step further, launching it’s own Public DNS, hoping to make web surfing even faster. I used the DNS myself in combination with namebench, which is an open-source DNS benchmark utility from Google, and the results were interesting. Though Google’s new public DNS server was not faster for myself, namebench did discover an alternative (and faster) DNS, which I confirmed using Speedtest.net. Recommended if you have the knowledge to change your DNS settings (or read a tutorial here), be patient as running the namebench test took about 10 minutes.

Though not one for predictions, all these factors seem to indicate Google Chrome having a much larger browser market share by this time next year, and that is disregarding the upcoming release of Chrome OS - watch this space!

If you have every managed a campaign on Google AdWords, you will have come across a little button which asks you whether you would like your ads to display on ‘all devices’ or have the option of deselecting ‘mobile browsers’. Have you ever considered the real implications of choosing yes or no to mobile browsers?

The world of mobile browsing is a very different kettle of fish to what we see in the home or office. Whilst in the desktop browser war Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer dominate, we see two alternative browsers taking the top positions. Apple’s Mobile Safari, which runs on the iPhone and iPod Touch, competes head-to-head with Opera Mini, the mobile version of the Opera browser. Statistics vary, but these two browsers remain clear leaders, with Apple being the winner when numbers for the iPod Touch and iPhone are combined - view here.

Opera Mini by default, uses Google search, and Apple itself, though not the biggest fan of Google at times, integrates some Google products in it’s iPhone/Touch offerings. In October 2009 Opera Mini just about hit the 40 million user mark, which is an impressive number. According to sources this has helped Google achieve well over 90% of the mobile search engine market share, much higher than on desktops - view here and another source here.

Change is afoot and both Apple and Opera will need to step up their games in the next few years. Mozilla is coming to the party soon, Fennec, the codename for the mobile version of Firefox, is just over the horizon, with a stable 1.0 release on the way. Firefox has developed a strong user base in the desktop market over time and a mobile version of the browser might do the same thing on portable platforms.

Chrome OS is however, also on the way, and there is already talk that Chrome OS and Android will merge. Developed for mobile devices by Google, Android is an open source operating system that has none of the constraints enforced by Apple, who place limitations on what is sold at their App Store for example. Though having a slow initial uptake, there are already predictions that Android will overtake the iPhone in coming years - read more here. For current mobile metrics data relating to Android uptake read more at AdMob here. There is already integration of Google Maps in Android, making the purchase of a GPS redundant, whilst the official Google Mobile Blog continues rolling out new ideas, features and updates. So, with a tightly integrated, free and open source operating system available for various platforms an Android/Chrome OS combination could put a spanner in the works for Apple.

This can only mean good things for Google, though Mobile Safari and Opera Mini use some Google features, they lack the full integration of Android or Chrome OS with Google services. More mobile platforms switching to a Google OS will mean many more Google specific pageviews and hence more places to display advertisements. Though Apple is assured of continued market share, Google seems to be slowly chipping away at the foundations, and looks to hold a much more significant mobile user base, not just in mobile search, in the future.

Just before for the peak shopping days of the year Google released a new feature called Ad parameters. This feature, which was initially know as Live Ads enables advertisers to update numeric fields in their ad copy without actually deleting the existing ad and creating a new one (which is how the standard Adwords ad editing works under the hood). So why is this such a big deal?

Well it is very important for performance driven marketers since previously every time they updated an ad they would:

a. Have the new ad go through a review process again which could delay the campaign

b. lose the Quality Score and performance history related to that ad copy

With the new ad parameters, one can write really compelling ad copy highlighting real time pricing and stock levels without losing the ad performance history which is perfect for aggressive marketing.
There are however two important caveats to using this issue that affect a lot of advertisers:

1. Your product data needs to be up to date, i.e. don’t advertise a price or product that is not on your site or you will get plenty of dissatisfied customers. Sure, this sounds like common sense, but you would be surprised how many companies cannot provide this functionality

2. If your campaign is overly reliant on broad match terms (as more and more companies seem to do these days) you cannot control which ad is shown next to a search term. In effect, by having the wrong ad displayed you might actually be harming your campaign more than by showing a very generic, less targeted ad.

At the moment, Google is only releasing this feature via the API which means the people using it should be technically able to also use it correctly.

Clicks2Customers have been using this feature for a few retailers and the results are very promising, especially when the retailer is able to compete on price, and responds quickly to his competitors’ prices.
Updating tens of thousands of ad copies with cut throat live pricing has proven to lift CTR and CVR significantly. It will give an even bigger edge to savvy marketers, which is why we like it so much.

It has been a very, very busy time for the folks over at Google lately. The much hyped Google Wave is open to a few lucky individuals who got invitations (read more about it at Wikipedia here) and is set to revolutionize the way we communicate online. Not only that, the Google Wave interface is reported to possibly be rolled out to all Google Apps, read more at Engadget here.

That’s just about it right? Well, no… Google appears to be in the process of stockpiling at the moment. Along with Wave, the next-generation of Google search, aka Caffeine, may be just over the horizon. Designed to integrate more tightly with social networking, and apparently twice as fast and more accurate, Caffeine is set to change the way we search. There is a detailed test of Caffeine at Mashable here. Google also just purchased AdMob, a mobile display advertising company, for $750 million. AdMob is one of the largest mobile advertising platforms in the world, claiming to serve more than 7 billion ads a month! You can read more about it at the official press release here.

Finished? Definitely not! They have also just acquired Gizmo5, which will most likely add the ability to make calls to Google Voice. They even decided to release a new programming language, simply called Go. There was also the announcement of a project called SPDY (SPeeDY), which is set to improve upon the current HTTP standard. Read more about SPDY at the Chromium Blog here. Page load time is set to become a more important part of the search results page (read more at Search Engine Land here), Chrome for Mac is set for a December Beta release and finally Google dropped the prices for their extra paid storage, giving you twice the storage for a quarter of the price!

What are all the pieces of the puzzle adding up to? In my mind, only one thing, the coming release of Google Chrome OS. There is one place in the market where Google is forever losing and though there have been many battles, Microsoft continues to bundle Internet Explorer as the primary (and only) browser with Windows. On my installation of Windows 7, if I open Internet Explorer where does my homepage land? Not on Google, I am rather directed to the MSN portal page with a Bing search box.

Google, earns it revenue through advertising, whilst Microsoft sells software. Every person who doesn’t use Google, is one less prospective customer and one less possible click for Google. The chances of Microsoft (unless legally forced to do so) bundling a competitor’s browser (namely Google Chrome) with Windows is just about zero. The only way for Google to gain ground is to do exactly what it is doing now, undermine the very basis of Microsoft’s domination - Windows. Chrome OS will be open source, hence as open source it will also be free. The lure of this is (especially) in the budget PC and netbook market where the additional price of Windows software adds a sizable chunk onto the price. With Google offering Chrome OS free, and if it is good, they already have one foot very firmly in the door. The integration of Chrome OS with the Google suite of applications and services will mean one thing, more places to display advertisements!

Is this the beginning of a battle of the titans? Will we in a few years time see Google having a large piece of the operating system market, which at the moment is almost completely dominated by Microsoft? Only time will tell, but I get the feeling something is afoot…

Google recently lifted their restrictions on trademarks meaning advertisers can now include previously restricted brands in their ad copy. People, in general, tend to identify with brands. CTR (Click-through rate – read the definition at Wikipedia here) is in most cases higher on more targeted ad copy. Previously AdWords would disallow these trademarked terms completely.If your client allows it, all trademarks can now be used in ad copy, provided the website provides a product or service associated with the trademarked term. The question is, have you done it? As a copywriter in charge of multiple accounts I have been surprised at how many adverts have been running without brands and hence have been running as the ‘generic’ alternative.

It can also be a lengthy procedure as doing a manual analysis of the existing copy is the only way to ensure that you don’t miss the lesser-known brands as opposed to focusing on the more obvious such as “iPod” or “Nike”. However, only by taking a second look will you discover the generic adverts that can now run as more brand specific (and hence targeted) copy.

You can read the full Trademark Policy for Google AdWords & AdSense online here.

After its CEO publicly endorsed Barack Obama, Google is now urging Adwords advertisers to get out and vote in the upcoming elections (see screenshot below). Personally I doubt Adwords users will be swayed by Google’s call to action and I even find it slightly annoying that the company uses this platform for non-Adwords related messages. (Note: I’m not a US citizen so the message is completely irrelevant to me).

Is the company performing a civic duty here or are they blurring the line between business and politics (Although in reality there never is a clear line to start with)?