All About Google

Google Earth

2006-08-05T12:23:00.002-07:00

Google Earth is a free-of-charge, downloadable virtual globe program. It maps the entire earth by pasting images obtained from satellite imagery, aerial photography and GIS over a 3D globe.

Overview

Formerly known as Earth Viewer, Google Earth was developed by Keyhole, Inc., a company Google acquired in 2004. The product was renamed Google Earth in 2005 and is currently available for use on personal computers running Microsoft Windows 2000 or XP, Mac OS X 10.3.9 and above, and Linux (Released on June 12 of 2006). In addition to releasing an updated Keyhole based client, Google also added the imagery from the Earth database to their web based mapping software.

Many large cities are available in a resolution high enough to see individual buildings, houses, and even cars. In cities such as London, Washington DC, and Seattle, individual people can be clearly discerned. The degree of resolution available is based somewhat on the points of interest, but all land is covered in at least 15 meters of resolution. Cambridge, MA and Fulton County, NY have the highest resolution, at six inches. Google Earth allows users to search for addresses (for the USA, Canada, and Europe only), enter coordinates, or simply use the mouse to browse to a location.

Google Earth also has digital terrain model data collected by NASA's Shuttle Radar Topography Mission. This means one can view the Grand Canyon or Mount Everest in three dimensions , instead of 2D like other map programs/sites. In addition, Google has provided a layer allowing one to see 3D buildings for some major cities in the US.

Many people using the applications are adding their own data and making them available through various sources such as the BBS or blogs mentioned in the link section below.

Google Earth is available in a free version, and in licensed versions for commercial use. It is currently officially available on Windows XP, Mac OS X and Linux. A leaked version of working non-public beta of Google Earth for Mac OS X started to appear on the internet on December 8, 2005.

When started up, Google Earth's view is centered on Lawrence, Kansas. The director of engineering for Google Earth is Brian McClendon, whose online biography says he is a 1986University of Kansas. This default view could also be due to the fact that Lawrence, Kansas represents a location very close to the exact center of the contiguous United States.

3D Buildings

A feature implemented by Google after its acquisition of Keyhole is a 3D dataset for (as of June 2006) 38 US cities.This data is provided by Sanborn Citysets. This feature is limited to displaying grey overlaying "blocky" buildings. On march 14, 2006, Google acquired @Last Software, makers of SketchUp, who had created a plugin for 3D renderings in Google Earth.

The cities currently included are only from the United States. However, 3D buildings are available for certain buildings around the world using programs from other websites. The cities include: New York City (Manhattan below Central Park and West Brooklyn), Chicago (the Loop, near Magnificent Mile, and residential areas north, south, and just west of those areas along the lake), Los Angeles (downtown, areas along the Miracle Mile, Wilshire Blvd), HonoluluSan Fransisco (the northeastern quadrant), PhiladelphiaHouston (downtown), Washington, Boston, Dallas, Minneapolis, Saint Paul, Miami, Atlanta, Denver, Seattle, Detroit (downtown), Arlington, Baltimore, St. Louis (downtown), Pittsburgh, Cleveland, San Diego, Long Beach, Sacramento, Cincinati, Tampa, Fort Lauderdale, New Orleans, Kansas City, Buffalo, Portland, Las Vegas, jersey City (along the Hudson River), Newark, Memphis, phoenix, and St. petersburg, Florida, USA.

Specifications

Coordinate System
- Data is stored and presented using the standard WGS84 datum.
Baseline resolutions
- U.S.: 15 m
- Global: Generally 15 m (some areas such as certain oceanic islands are in extremely low resolution).
Typical high resolutions
- U.S.: 1 m, 0.6 m, 0.3 m, 0.15 m (extremely rare; e.g. Cambridge, Ma. and Google Campus)
- Global:
Altitude resolution:
- Surface:
- Seabed: Not applicable (the seabed is "printed" on the spherical surface).
Age: Usually less than 3 years old. (For example, the image area around Taipei 101 shows the building before the red construction elevators were removed in 2004 and the new WAPA Path 15 power line is still under construction (also in 2004).)

Google Earth is unlikely to operate on older hardware configurations. The most recent downloads available document these minimum configurations:

Pentium 3, 500 Mhz
128 MB RAM
400 MB free disk space
Network speed: 128 Kbit/sec
3D-capable graphics card with 16 MB of Video RAM
1024x768, "16-bit High Color" screen

The most likely mode of failure is insufficient video RAM: the software is designed to declare failure if 32 MB of video RAM is not available. The next most likely mode of failure is Internet access speed. Except for the very patient, broadband internet (Cable, DSL, T1, etc.) is required. Again, resolution is not uniform, some towns such as St. Petersburg are only partially available in high-resolution. Compare the resolution of these older B&W data:

http://terraserver-usa.com/image.aspx?T=1&S=10&Z=17&X=3284&Y=20743&W=1

versus what is currently available with Google Earth in color:

Maps and aerial photos
- WikiSatellite view at WikiMapia
- Street map from MapQuest or Google Local
- Topographic map from TopoZone
- Aerial image or topographic map from TerraServer-USA
- Satellite image from Google Maps or Microsoft Virtual Earth.

In this case, the TerraServer-USA data can identify individual trees but its data is structured in cumbersome tiles. As with much GIS data, the utility of the data is application-dependent for the purpose of determining if resolution is sufficient. Also note that from a usability point of view, TerraServer loses its center point when one zooms in and out where Google Earth browsing is smooth; a clear benefit, but at the price of the somewhat demanding requirements imposed upon the video card.

It is worth noting however, that with some work, images from TerraServer can be integrated as Image Overlays into Google Earth, allowing the user to combine the higher (in some cases) resolution imagery from TerraServer over the smoother Google Earth program.

Mac OS X Version

A version for Mac OS X was released on january 10, 2006, and is available for download from the Google Earth website. With a few exceptions noted below, the Mac version appears to be stable and complete, with virtually all the same functionality as the original Windows version.

Screenshots and an actual binary of the Mac version had been leaked to the internet a month previously, on December 8, 2005. The leaked version was significantly incomplete. Among other things, neither the Help menu nor its "Display License" feature worked, a pretty sure sign that the version was intended for Google's internal use only. Google released no statement regarding the leak.

Currently, the Mac version runs only under Mac OS X versions10.4 and 10.3.9. Currently, there are no "Plus" or "Pro" versions for the stable release. There is no embedded browser and no direct interface to Gmail. Fullscreen mode does not work. There are a few bugs concerning the menu bar when switching between applications. There are a few bugs concerning annotation balloons and printing.

The latest version is 4.0.1694 released on July 17, 2006, is currently available as a beta version and features amongst others a new user interface and the option for Mac OS X users to upgrade to the "Plus" version.

link title==Linux Version== Starting with the version 4 beta, Google Earth functions under Linux. However, it is not a native application; instead, it is run through a WINE layer. Google has taken the position that it will attempt to make Google Earth compatible with all mainstream distributions.

Minimum System Requirements :

Kernel: 2.4 or later

CPU: Pentium 3, 500 MHz
System Memory (RAM): 128 MB
Hard Disk: 400 MB free space
Network Speed: 128 kbit/s
Screen: 1024x768, 16 bit color
Tested and works on the following OSs:
- Ubuntu 5.10/6.06
- Suse 10.1
- Fedora Core 4/5
- Linspire 5.1
- Gentoo 2006.0
- Debian 3.1
- Red Hat 9
- Slackware 10.2
- FreeBSD 6.1/7.0 with Linux Emulation

Accuracy

Most land areas are covered in satellite imagery with a resolution of about 15m per pixel, and some population centers are also covered in aircraft imagery(orthophtography) of several pixels per meter. Oceans are covered in much lower resolution.

Due to the limited spatial resolution of the altitude map, altitudes are often inaccurate, especially the altitude of small features, like mountain tops; e.g. Mount Everest's height is short by 253m, and the sea near Gibraltar is shown with an altitude of 252m.

Unlike the satellite images, the orthophotography has a perspective from close to the surface, leading to distortions when used in a mosaic. Tall buildings sometimes appear to be leaning towards each other (conspicuous in e.g. Chicago at South Clark Street, in the middle of downtown; or near the Empire State building in New york City). The Fatih Sultan Mehmet Bridge on the Bosporus may be another example of this effect. However, this effect is inevitable with any source of aerial photography, and is present in Getmapping's imagery of England and Wales, and the providers of much of the detailed photography have processed the images so that the joins are as seamless as possible.

Google has resolved many inaccuracies in the vector mapping since the original public release of the software, without requiring an update to the program itself. An example of this was the absence of the Nunavut territory in Canada, an area comparable in size to Western Europe. Google Earth's map boundaries of Northern Canada showed only the Northwest Territories, not the division of Nunavut created on April 1, 1999. This inaccuracy was corrected by one of the data updates in early 2006. Recent updates have also increased the coverage of detailed aerial photography, particularly in western Europe. Yet aeroplanes that were in flight as the pictures were taken are clearly visible - a prime example being a plane flying over the Devil's Punch bowl, Hindhead, Surrey, UK that dramatically blocks the view.

Place name and road detail vary greatly from place to place, and are most accurate in the USA and Europe, although regular mapping updates tend to improve this. Also, the north and south Poles are marked as 89°59'60" N and 89°59'60" S respectively, rather than the correct 90°00'00" N and 90°00'00" S.

The images are not all taken at the same time, but are generally current to within three years. Image sets are sometimes not correctly stitched together. Updates to the photographic database can occasionally be noticed when placemarks appear to shift unexpectedly across the earth's surface. Though the placemarks have not in fact moved, the imagery is composed and stitched differently. Such an update to London's photography in early 2006 created shifts of 15-20 metres in many areas, noticeable because the resolution is so high.

The "Measure" function shows that the length of equator is about 40,030.24 km, giving an error of −0.112% compared with the actual value of 40,075.02 km; for the meridional circumference, it shows a length of about 39,963.13 km, also giving an error of −0.112% compared with the actual value of 40,007.86 km.

The stars in the background are not random. Google Earth uses a real star map to render the background.

Criticisms

US bias

The software, in particular the search engine, is criticised for its US-bias; for example, entering in searches for "Birmingham" and for "St. Petersburg" bring up US cities, as opposed to the original and larger cities of those names (in the UK and Russia respectively). Fortunately, in Google Earth 4 (beta), more major cities can be found without typing in the country name (eI: Melbourne, Singapore, Shanghai, Cairo, Cape, Town, Colegne (Köln), Lima, and Jerusalem). Still, some places outside of the US can't be found with the search function unless the country name is added and written out in full (except for "UK" and "MX"), while you can simply abbreviate states for US locations.

The default setting is to U.S. customary units, despite metric units being the international standard officially adopted by every nation but three (the U.S, Liberia, and Myanmar, although Liberia and Myanmar use metric in practice). Critics assert that while the units can be changed, they should be set to metric by default, as well as pointing out that the 3D buildings feature is also limited at present to major US cities. Others counter that, as an American creation by a predominantly US-based corporation, it is Google's right to give preference to that country. Additionally, Google Earth has recently had their largest update of earth imagery, making at least 33% of land covered by satellite images.

Google has also admitted problems with the software on systems using non-ASCII characters, for example, Chinese or Japanese.

Naming disputes

Some South Korean users have been angered by the fact that Google Earth and Google mapsKorean Peninsula. Examples include bays near Busan (labelled Nakutogu Po and Kanrai ho), Masan (labelled Masan Ko, Kisan-ko, and Unchen Wan), and Goseong (labelled Kojo-wan, Toto wan, Nan Wan, and Toei kawan). use Japanese names for bays along the southeastern coast of the

The software was criticized by Taiwanese users because the island was labelled as a province of mainland China. This has since been changed, but the change has angered the People's Republic of China.

Google Earth confuses towns in Poland and Germany: Jelenia Gora in Poland is incorrectly referred to as hirschberg, whereas Gorlitz on the west side of the border is called Zgorzelec, the name of its Polish neighbour.

Google Earth, under "alternate place names," includes "Jerusalem" and "Yerushalayim" but does not include the Arabic name for the city, "Al Quds".

National security and privacy issues

The software has been criticised by a number of groups, including national officials, as being an invasion of privacy and even posing a threat to national security. The typical argument is that the software provides information about military or other critical installations that could be used by terrorists. The following is a selection of such concerns:

The Indian president APJ Abdul Kalam has expressed concern over the availability of high-resolution pictures of sensitive locations in India.
The South Korean government has expressed concern that the software offers images of the presidential palace and various military installations that could possibly be used by their hostile neighbour North Korea.
Operators of the Lucas Heights nuclear reactor in Sydney, Australia asked Google to censor high resolution pictures of the facility. However, they later withdrew the request.

Additionally some citizens, particularly the rich or famous, as well as victims or perpetrators of crime, may have concerns over aerial information depicting their properties and residences being diseminated freely. As relatively few jurisdictions actually guarantee the individual's right to privacy, as opposed to the state's right to secrecy, this is an evolving, but minor, point. Perhaps aware of these critiques, for a time, Google had Area 51 (which is highly visible and easy to find) in Nevada as a default placemark when Google Earth is first installed.

As a result of pressure from the United States government, the residence of the Vice PresidentNumber One Observatory Circle is obscured through pixelization in Google Earth and Google Maps.at

Google Earth Community

The Google Earth Community is an online forum which is dedicated to produce placemarks of interesting or educational perspectives. It may be found on the Google Earth webpage or under the Help section on the program itself. After downloading a placemark, it will automatically run Google Earth (if not opened), and fly to the area specified by the person who placed it. Once there, you can add it to your "My Places" by right clicking on the icon and selecting "Save to My Places". Additionally, anyone can post a placemark for others to download; as long as you have an account.

Google Earth Plus

Google Earth can be upgraded to a "Plus" edition for $20. Google Earth Plus is an individual-oriented paid subscription upgrade to Google Earth and adds the following features:

GPS integration – read tracks and waypoints from a GPS device. 3rd party applications have been created which provide this functionality using the basic version of Google Earth by generating KML files based on user-specified waypoints. However, these tools only work with specific GPS devices whereas Google Earth Plus provides support for the Magellan and Garmin product lines, who together hold a large share of the GPS market.
Higher resolution printing.
Customer support via email.
Annotation – adds draw/sketch tools for richer annotations (can be shared as KML).
Data importer – read address points from CSv files.

Google Earth Pro

Google Earth Pro is a business-oriented paid upgrade to Google Earth that has more features than the "Plus" version and costs $400 to purchase. The Pro version is capable of running additional add-on software

Google Video

2006-08-05T12:23:00.001-07:00

Google Video is a free Google service that allows anyone to upload video clips to Google's web servers as well as make their own media available free of charge or commercially through the Gogle Video Store. Users can search and play videos directly from Google Video, as well as download video files and remotely embed them on their webpages.

Competing services include YouTube, iFilm, MetaCafe and IFC Medialab.

Video content

Google Video, while officially still inbeta, is targeted towards offering a large archive of freely searchable videos. Besides amateur media, internet videos, viral ads, and movie trailers, the service also aims to distribute commercial professional media, such as televised content and movies.

Various media companies offer content on Google Video for purchase, including CBS programs, NBA music videos, and independent film. Initially, the content of a number of broadcasting companies (such as ABC, NBC, CNN) was available as free streaming content or stills with closed captioning. In addition, the U.S. National Archive uses Google Video to make historic films available online.

Video distribution methods

Google Video offers free services and commercial videos, the latter protected with digital rights management. An Adobe Flash viewer plays videos in Flash Video (.flv) format inside the web browser. Alternatively Google Video Player is available for download, a VLC media player-ased application which runs on Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X. The open-sourceGoogle Video File (.gvi) media format and supports playlists in Google Video Pointer (.gvp) format. Google Video Player renders files in Google's own

GVI format and conversion

Google Video Files (.gvi) are Audio Video Interleave (.avi) files with an extra list with the FourCC "goog" immediately following the header. The video is encoded in Divx4 alongside an MP3 audio stream. DivX video players and various portable video players such as the Archos AV500 can render Google Video Files without format conversion after changing the extension from .gvi to .avi. Among other software VirtualDub is able to read .gvi files and allows to convert them into different formats of choice.

AVI and MP4

Besides Flash Video and GVI, Google provides its content through Audio Video Interleave (.avi) and MPEG4 (.mp4) files. Not all formats are available through the website's interface, however, depending on the user's operating system.

Third-party extensions

Third party browser extensions, corresponding scripts, bookmarklets and websites facilitate direct and straightforward access to all available formats as well as offering access to users of operating systems not officially supported by Google Video.

External embedding of Google Video files

Google Video allows select videos to be remotely embedded on other websites and provides the necessary HTML code alongside the media, similar to YouTube. This allows for websites to host large amounts of video remotely on Google Video without running into bandwidth or storage capacity issues.

Uploading videos

Users may choose to upload videos either through the Google Video website (limited to 100MB) or alternatively through the Google Video Uploader, available for Microsoft Windows , Mac OS X and Linux. Major producers with a thousand or more hours of video can apply for Google's Premium Program.

While the application is available as three separate downloads, the Linux version is written in java, a cross-platform programming language, and will therefore also work on other operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, without modifications, providing that the Java Runtime Enviroonment (JRE) is installed. Also worthy of note is the fact that this Java executable (.jar) file is a standalone application that does not require installation. Consequently, it can be run from removable media such as USB flash drives, CD-ROMS, or network storage. This allows the user to upload video even if the computer terminal on which he or she is working will not allow him or her to install programs, such as a public library computer.

Availability of service

While initially only available in the United States, over time Google Video has become available to users in more countries and can now be accessed from many other countries, including France and Germany.

Regardless of general availability, content providers are given the opportunity to limit access to video files to only users from certain countries of residence. However, methods of circumventing geographical filtering exist.

Criticisms

Google Video is sometimes criticized for its poor video quality, although this criticism is not unique to Google. The video quality may depend on a variety of factors, including the quality of the original media, conversion into video formats used by Google Video, and reduction of resolution to fit the website.

Another popular criticism is that Google Video has little organization of content and no noticeable pricing scheme. However, pay content is arranged in a few categories. A video ranking in the form of a Top 100 has been introduced and the official Google Video Blog features "Google Picks" (videos considered noteworthy by Google) on a regular basis. "Google Picks" are currently also available via the Google Video homepage.

While the lack of a fixed pricing scheme may be perceived as confusing by a number of users, it does offer content providers a wider scope in terms of individual pricing. Whether this pricing concept will be accepted and retained beyond beta remains to be seen.

There has also been criticism regarding varying standards used by Google on evaluating the content of each video for suitability. For example, Google might accept a video featuring graphic violence and profanity, but reject a milder one, with no apparent means of objective analysis.

The video uploading tool also receives various complaints, due to its "Uploading failed" error message which seems to appear in random cases without any explanation why the upload was not successful. Google has not yet addressed this issue.

Menus & Annotations

Additional criticism of Google Video has been on a lack of end user tools to add tables of content and chapters to the videos. Tools that make the videos easier to annotate, view, navigate and understand. This is very true for longer format videos, those more than a few minutes in length. This will limit the growth and acceptance of the service for longer format videos like lectures, sporting events and distance education.

Google File System

2006-08-05T12:23:00.000-07:00

Google File System (GFS) is a proprietary distributed fie system based on Linux and developed by Google for their applications' use. It does not appear to be publicly available; as it builds on and does not actually incorporate any ext3 or Linux's GPL'ed code, there is no legal requirement to distribute it.

Design

GFS is optimized for Google's core data storage needs, web searching, which can generate enormous amounts of data that needs to be retained;Google File System grew out of an earlier Google effort, "BigFiles", developed by Larry page and Sergei Brin in the early days of Google, whilst it was still located in Stanford. The data is stored persistently, in very large, even multiple gigabyte-sized files which are only extremely rarely deleted, overwritten, or shrunk; files are usually appended to or read. It is also designed and optimized to run on Google's computing clusters, the nodes of which are comprised of cheap, "commodity" computers, which means precautions must be taken against the high failure rate of individual nodes and the subsequent data loss. Other design decisions select for high data throughputs, even when that makes latency worse.

The nodes are divided into two types: Master nodes and Chunkservers. Chunkservers store the data files, with each individual file broken up into fixed size chunks (hence the name) of about 64 megabytes, similar to clusters or sectors in regular file systems. Each chunk is assigned a unique 64-bit label, and logical mappings of files to constituent chunks are maintained. Each chunk is replicated a fixed number of times throughout the network, the default being three, but even more for high demand files like executables.

The Master server doesn't usually store the actual chunks, but rather all the metadata associated with the chunks, such as the tables mapping the 64-bit labels to chunk locations and the files they make up, the locations of the copies of the chunks, what processes are reading or writing to a particular chunk, or taking a "snapshot" of the chunk pursuant to replicating it (usually at the instigation of the Master server, when, due to node failures, the number of copies of a chunk has fallen beneath the set number). All this metadata is kept current by the Master server periodically receiving updates from each chunk server ("Heart-beat messages").

Permissions for operations are handled by a system of time-limited, expiring "leases", where the Master server grants permission to a process for a finite period of time during which no other process will be granted permission by the Master server to access the chunk. The modified chunkserver, which is always the primary chunk holder, then propagates the changes to the chunkservers with the backup copies. The changes are not saved until all chunkservers acknowledge, thus guaranteeing the completion and atomicity of the operation.

Programs access the chunks by first querying the Master server for the locations of the desired chunks; if the chunks are not being operated on (if there are no outstanding leases), the Master replies with the locations, and the program then contacts and receives the data from the chunkserver directly (similar to Kazaa and its Supernodes).

Criticism

There can only be one Master server- the code does not allow multiple Masters. This appears to be a flaw limiting the system's scalability and reliability, since its maximum size and up-time is limited by the Master server's capability and up-time, and since it catalogs all the metadata, and since also almost all actions and requests flow through it; but Google's engineers argue that it is not, as GFS scales very well. Metadata is very compact, mere kilobytes to the megabyte, and the Master server is typically one of the most capable nodes on the network; for reliability, there is typically a "shadow" Master server, mirroring the main Master server which steps in if the Master server fails. Also, it is rarely a bottleneck, since clients only request the metadata, and typically cache it; subsequent interactions proceed directly with the chunkservers. Similarly, using a single Master server drastically cuts down on the software complexity that would be requisite to ensure data integrity, atomicity of operations, load balancing, and security, (to name only a few issues) if there were multiple Master servers

Google Groups

2006-08-05T12:11:00.000-07:00

Google Groups is a free groups and mailing list service from Google. Using Google Groups, one can find groups related to their interests and participate in threated conversations. Besides posting to the group through the Google Groups web interface, users also can post to a group by sending an e-mail to the group's e-mail address. They can also create their own groups and access Usenet newsgroup dating back to 1981.

History

In February 2001, Google acquired Deja.com which provided a search engine to access an archive of Usenet newsgroup articles. Users were then able to access these Usenet newsgroups through the new Google Groups interface. By the end of 2001 the archive was completed with messages dating back to 11 May, 1981. Shortly after, Google released a new version, which allowed users to create their own (non-Usenet) groups.

In February 2006, Google added several features to Google Groups. These features include an enhanced interface, profiles and rating posts.

Interface features

Groups search

Google Groups allows users to use Google Search to easily search all groups with the search box at the top. The search will return the posts which most match the search query, and if any groups match, they will be displayed at the top of the results with a link to the Google Groups directory.

There is also a feature, which searches the group in real time when writing a new message - in a box titled "Have you looked at these messages?", probably to decrease the number of threads dealing with the same topics over and over again.

Profiles

Users may create public profiles which display their name, nickname, location, title, industry, website, blog and quote, as well as the most recent posts they made. Their profiles are accessible to anyone by clicking on "View Profile" beside any of their posts.

Joining/subscribing to a group

Subscribing to a group offers the following benefits:

The subscriber will be e-mailed posts that are posted to the group.
Most groups require you to subscribe to them in order to post replies, and some require you to subscribe to read the group archive.
The subscriber is allowed to select a Nickname which will appear beside all their posts in the group. If a user posts as a non-subscriber, their e-mail address will appear beside their posts, which invites spam.

There are four subscription options, Email, Digest Email, Abridged Email and No Email:

Email: Every time a post is sent to a group, it will be forwarded to the subscriber through e-mail
Digest Email: For every 25 posts sent to a group, the subscriber will receive an e-mail with the messages.
Abridged Email: A summary of activity in the group, including the number of posts and topics posted, together with a list of the most active threads, will be sent to the subscriber daily.
No Email: The subscriber will not receive any e-mail from the group.

Reading a group archive/list of threads

There are two options for viewing the list of threads. "View with message text" is the default. It shows the title of a thread, the first few lines of the originating post, the author, number of messages, date and rating. The threads are sorted by the time they were created, with the newest thread going on top. "Viewing titles only" has two sub-options, "Sort by date of first message", which displays the title, rating, number of messages, author, and date the thread was created; and "Sort by date of most recent message" (see screenshot on right), which displays the title, rating, number of messages, name of last poster for each thread, and the date/time of the last post in each thread.

Posting and reading in a thread

In the default view, Google Groups displays posts in a thread in pages of 25 posts each. However, in "view as tree" mode, Google Groups displays posts in pages of 10 posts each. If there are new messages in a thread since the user last checked, clicking on the thread name jumps to the first new post. Otherwise, it jumps to the last page.

Above every post is a box displaying the poster's nickname, the post's rating, the date the post was sent, and a "show options" link, which opens up options for removing the post (only if the user is the poster, a manager or owner), reporting it to Google, finding all posts by the same author, printing the post, forwarding the post to a friend, and viewing the message headers.

Below every post, there is a "reply" link which, when clicked, opens a text box for users to quickly send replies. There is another slower method to reply, accessible through Show Options, which allows a user toquote the original post. There is another option to send an e-mail reply to the original poster, also accessible through Show Options. Replies will be displayed in the thread almost immediately, unless the group or user is moderated; in that case, the post will be sent to the moderators who will have to approve the post before it is displayed.

Users can submit posts with images and files by attaching the file to an e-mail message and sending it to the group's e-mail address. If, for example, a user does not have the rights to post to the group, or the user or group is moderated, posts sent using this method will be treated accordingly, as if they are normal posts.

Rating posts

A user can rate a post with 1 to 5 out of 5 stars. A post's rating is based on the average of all the user ratings it gets, and a thread's rating is based on the average rating of all the posts in the thread, and is displayed next to the thread author (in View with message text mode) or thread name (in Viewing titles only mode).

Starring threads

In the thread list, there is a star next to every thread. Once clicked on, the star turns yellow and the thread is "starred", and it appears in the user's "My starred topics" list.

E-mail masking

To prevent scammers or spammers from harvesting e-mail addresses from a group, Google replaces the last three letters of a username in an e-mail address with periods. To view the full e-mail address, one has to click on the periods and enter a verification code to prove they are human, after which a page will load with the full e-mail addresses displayed.

Creating groups

Google Groups allows users to easily create their own groups. During the creation proccess, the user is prompted for a group name, e-mail address, description, and access setting, and then adds or invites members to the new group.

Managing groups

A moderator (owner or manager) can edit the group's name, description and e-mail address, get a promotion box, add or remove categories to the group, modify the access settings (access of memberships, invites, archives, and directory listing), modify posting and delivery settings (posting privileges and moderation, availability of replies and subject prefixes), modify related groups, and browse the membership list (invite, add, ban or unsubscribe members, and make them a manager or owner, and change their delivery type).

Adding or inviting members

Members of a group with the privileges to do so can invite or add new members to the group. In the process, they will be asked to set a subscription type for the new member, and enter a welcome message. The new member will receive a notification e-mail. People who do not have a Google Account may be invited or added, but they need to create a Google Account to accept the invite and post to the group.

Technical

URL and e-mail address of a group

When creating a group, the owner must specify a group name which will be part of the group's URL and e-mail address. The "username" can be changed later.

The URL of a Google group is http://groups.google.com/group/ followed by the group's name.

The e-mail address of a Google group is the group's name followed by @googlegroups.com.

For example, if the group's name is MinorsMajor, the group's URL will be http://groups.google.com/group/MinorsMajor and the e-mail address will be MinorsMajor@googlegroups.com.

Google Groups vs. Usenet

Google Groups provides access to Usenet newsgroup as well. When AOL discontinued access to Usenet, it recommended Google Groups instead.

Google Groups honors the "X-No-Archive : Yes" header field, and removes messages with it (in the message header or as first line of the message body) from its archive after 7 days.

The URL for accessing Usenet newsgroups through Google Groups is http://groups.google.com/group/ followed by the group's hierarchy. For example, the Usenet group alt.games.neopets's URL is http://groups.google.com/group/alt.games.neopets.

With some tricks Google Groups allow to search related newsgroups for a given topic, an example is the shorthand (redirect) for searches in net-abuse groups:

http://purl.net/net/abuse/topic

http://purl.net/net/abuse/google

Criticism

Google Groups is often accused of lacking security. Many trolls, spammers and flamers have joined Google Groups to carry out their intended purpose without being identified. There are cases of people who join groups, request managerial privileges, and then delete the entire group before moving on to another group. The recent introduction of profiles is evidently intended to deal with this problem.

Owners of Google groups have little flexibility in controlling the privileges their managers have. Managers can do almost everything owners can, except removing or banning owners, and deleting groups. This makes it easier for managers to destroy groups. Yahoo! Groups, the main competitor to Google Groups, allows owners to decide the privileges given to managers.

Groups lack customization options, such as color schemes, logos etc. Unlike Yahoo! Groups, it does not have attachment, poll, and other "fun" features. Currently the only way to send a file to a group as an attachment is to email it to the group address.

Google Groups also suffers from many well-known bugs. A number next to a group name indicates the number of unread posts in that group. However, the post count is seldom accurate. Groups that one has subscribed to often appear under "Recently visited" instead of "My recent groups". Sometimes the date attached to a post is several hours in the future. Some users have blocked moderators from adding them to groups, but a bug in the membership list that moderators can access allows them to invite the victim first, and then add them from the open invitations list.

After Google introduced profiles and post ratings, it was accused of being presumptuous and trying to take over Usenet. Users who post to Usenet newsgroups through a newsreader will not understand when users who post through Google Groups talk about ratings and profiles.

Finally, threads which have no replies for a month become frozen, after which they may not be replied to.

Ad serving

2006-08-05T12:10:00.000-07:00

Ad serving describes the technology and service that places advertisements on web sites. Ad serving technology companies provide software to web sites and advertisers to serve ads, count them, choose the ads that will make the web site or advertiser most money, and monitor progress of different advertising campaigns.

Two types of internet companies use ad serving: web sites and advertisers. The main purpose of using an ad server is different for both of them:

For a web site, the ad server needs to look through all the ads available to serve to a user who is on a page, and choose the one that will make the web site the most money, but still conform to the rules that the advertiser and web site have agreed. For example if a web site has 10 different advertisers that have paid for a big square ad, the ad server must decide which one to serve (or display). One advertiser may have only agreed to pay for ads from 9am - 5pm. If it is after 5pm, then the Ad Server must not serve that one. Another advertiser may only have paid to show one ad to each user per day. The ad server must therefore see if a user has seen that ad before, on that day and not serve it again if the user has seen it. Another advertiser may have agreed to a high price, but only if the person watching the page is in the United States. In that case, the Ad Server needs to check the IP Address to determine if the user is in the US and then decide which is the highest paying ad for that user, in the US, at that time, given what that user has seen in the past.

For an advertiser the ad server needs to try to serve the ad that is most likely to result in a sale of the product advertised. For example if a user is viewing a page, the advertiser's ad server needs to decide from previous history, what ad that user is most likely to click on and then buy the product advertised. If the user is on a technology page, then the ad server may know that on technology types of pages, the ad that works best is a blue one with mostly text and pricing and numbers, not the green ad with a picture of a model and little text. The central ad server will therefore serve this ad, to try and get the highest probability of a sale from the ad.

Ad Serving is most complex when it is used by an Advertising Network. An advertising network buys ads from many web sites and therefore acts like an advertiser user of Ad Serving. When the network buys ads, it tries to place ads on sites where they work best. However an ad network then sells its aggregated ad inventory to advertisers. When doing this, it uses its Ad Serving software as a web site does. In this case it tries to make the most money by only running the ads from advertisers that pay most.

Gmail

2006-08-05T12:08:00.000-07:00

Gmail is a free webmail and POP3 e-mail service provided by Google, known for its abundant storage and advanced interface. It is known as Google Mail in the United Kingdom and Germany. Its competitors include AIM Mail, Windos\ws Live Mail (also known as MSN Hotmail) and Yahoo! Mail.

Initially released on April 1, 2004, Gmail was almost immediately successful in reaching a wide range of users, rapidly evolving in response to suggestions and criticisms. After two years, Gmail is still in "beta". Currently, access to the service is restricted to those who had received an invitation from an existing account holder, from blogger, or through their mobile phone. Google has stated that the purpose of the invitation system is to reduce the amount of abuse, as spammers cannot register near-infinite numbers of accounts as they can do with other services such as Hotmai, where registration is completely open.

Overview

Gmail inbox

The main inbox view, as rendered by the Mozilla Firefox browser in Windows XP. Rather than showing individual e-mails, Gmail groups e-mails into Conversations, which are threads of e-mail correspondences, with the number of messages in each indicated in parenthesis.

While Gmail is not entirely open to the general public yet, most Gmail users have many invites to spare, as Google gives users anything from 2 to 100 free invitations (and frequently replenishes them, as a reward for users who frequently check their Gmail accounts. It is also possible to sign up if one has a mobile phone from Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Turkey, New Zealand, Philippines, or the United States via SMS Signup or a .edu e-mail address from an accredited U.S. institution. One can find free Gmail invites at various Web sites, such as the ones shown under External Links or even for sale at online auctions. However, Google has prohibited the sale of Gmail addresses.

The service is notable for providing over 2.7 gigabytes (and counting) of storage space, increased from the original limit of 1000 megabytes. This change was announced on April 1, 2005, and was made for the one-year anniversary of Gmail. The announcement was accompanied by a statement that Google would "keep giving people more space forever." All Google will say about this now is that it will keep increasing by the second as long as they have enough space on their servers. Although Gmail's storage space continously goes up, Google is increasing the inbox capacity by a nominal four one-millionths of a megabyte (as of July 31, 2006).

Gmail also has an integrated calendar named "Google Calendar" (formerly CL2) that was launched on april 12, 2006.

Gmail makes intensive use of Ajax (specifically, the AjaxXSLT framework), employing modern browser features such as java Script and keyboard access keys, allowing for a rich user experience, while retaining the benefits of a web application. Most importantly, the service is available on any computer with a supported browser: internet Explorer 5.5+, Mozilla Application Suite 1.4+, Firefox 0.8+, Safari 1.2.1+, Netscape 7.1+. Gmail also offers "Basic HTML view" to allow users to access the Gmail messages from almost any computer running browsers that do not fully support the more advanced features, such as Internet Explorer 4.0+, Netscape 4.07+ or Opera 6.03+. Gmail's Help Center provides a list of fully supported browsers. Gmail has recently also become accessible through WAP-enabled mobile phones. It also works on the PSP web browser, but is not fully supported.

There has been some criticism about Gmail's information and privacy policies. Much of it stems from phrases in Gmail's Privacy Policy which state that Gmail will keep all e-mail for "some time" even if it has been deleted or the account terminated and that Gmail will disclose personal information (including the actual text of e-mails) if it has a "good faith belief" that such a disclosure is necessary for various reasons such to "protect the rights, property or safety of ... the public." Similarly, some privacy advocates criticize the lack of disclosed data retention and correlation policies. More than 30 privacy and civil rights organizations have urged Google to suspend the Gmail service until these issues are resolved.

Awards and support

Gmail was ranked second in PC World's "The 100 Best Products of 2005", behind Mozilla Firefox. Gmail also won 'Honorable Mention' in the Bottom Line Design Awards 2005. mail has drawn many favorable reviews from users.

Features

Conversation views

The main innovation of Gmail might be its method of categorizing e-mails, which Google calls Conversation View. In contrast to other e-mail services, Gmail keeps track of individual "conversations" (an original message, along with all the replies to that message) by grouping them together. This allows users to easily view all the e-mails related to a specific message, and it keeps the inbox more organized. Gmail's algorithm for determining how conversations fit together is not perfect, however: Single conversations sometimes become fragmented (especially when a replier changes the e-mail's subject line) and unrelated conversations occasionally become attached together. Also, if a conversation has more than approximately 100 messages, it splits into two separate storage sections, sometimes resulting in 5 or 6 chunks making up a whole conversation.

Labels instead of folders

Gmail allows users to categorize their e-mails with "labels." Labels give users a flexible method of categorizing e-mails, since an e-mail may have any number of labels (in contrast to a system in which an e-mail may belong to only one folder). Users can display all e-mails having a particular label and can use labels as a search criterion. Gmail also allows users to set up filters which label incoming e-mail automatically.

Auto save enhancement

Google has added an Auto Save feature to Gmail, a system for avoiding loss of data in case of a browser crash or other error. When composing an e-mail, a draft copy of the message and any attachments are saved automatically. Although messages begin to be saved once a minute, saving times vary depending on the size of the message.

Keyboard shortcuts

Gmail allows users to navigate its interface by using the keyboard as an accessible alternative to the mouse, which is the norm for site navigation. This feature is not enabled by default, although instruction on how to enable it are provided.

Optional dots

Gmail usernames must be between 6 and 30 characters (inclusive) and made up of only letters, numbers, and dots. The use of dots, however, are optional (that is, Gmail ignores dots when resolving addresses). Google states that "Gmail doesn't recognize dots (.) as characters within a username. This way, you can add and remove dots to your username for desired address variations." For instance, the account google@gmail.com receives mail sent to goo.gle@gmail.com, g.o.o.g.l.e@gmail.com, etc. Likewise, the account goo.gle@gmail.comgoogle@gmail.com. However, when signing in it is necessary to include any dots used in the creation of the account. receives mail sent to

Plus-addressing

Gmail also supports "plus-addressing" of e-mails. Messages can be sent to addresses in the form: username+extratext@gmail.com where extratext can be any string. Plus-addressing allows users to sign up for different services with different aliases and then easily filter all e-mails from those services.

Chats

Gmail's chat feature allows you to chat with other people that have a Gmail account. It interacts with the whole Jabber network, so it can be synchronised with Google talk. However, only text-based chat can take place within Internet Browsers; voice calling is Google Talk's advantage.

Because of the move away from e-mail, and therefore the name "Gmail", Google has changed the logo for Gmail, so that it includes '+ talk'. The logo also has a glossier finish compared to its predecessor.

The introduction of Gmail Chat allows Gmail users to easily connect to the Google Talk network on computers that do not have the Google Talk client installed, without needing third-party clients (such as Psi, miranda IM, iChat and Gaim) or web-based applications (such as Gtalkr (now defunct) or Meebo). Using the web interface, a user can have up to three chats at once.

Gmail Chat also allows the user to keep an archive of chats in their Gmail account - although this is disabled if either user in a conversation objects (called 'off the record mode' by Google). However, 'off the record' mode does not guarantee anonymity, since the other user could be using a third-party client with its own logging ability such as Gaim. The other user could also copy and paste the conversation into a text editor and save it.

Gmail also recently introduced contact pictures and introduced sound into Gmail Chat, so users receive auditory notifications when receiving an instant message through Gmail Chat.

Gmail offers a "standard without chat" view. This is the regular standard view without the chat functionality. Opera 8 supports "standard without chat" view, although it does not support "standard" view.

Calendar

Google Calendar.

On April 13, 2006, Google rolled out another addition to Gmail, the Google Calendar. Highly rumored for over six months, Google fully integrated this into Gmail.

Google Calendar, like all other applications, is written in Javascript and uses AJAX. It allows the user to view their appointments by day, week, month, and the next 4 days (the length of this can be changed in settings). It allows 'quick adding' of events, in which an appointment can be added by entering a natural-language phrase containing the details of the event, rather than by filling out a detailed form. Additionally, Google Calendar provides an agenda tab that allows the user to see all upcoming events in list form.

The settings of the Calendar are highly customizable, allowing the user to change their timezone on the fly, change the day that the week starts on, create of multiple calendars, and send notifications to a cell phone.

The service allows users to invite other people to appointments and events, regardless of whether they have a Google Account. They can then RSVP, stating whether they will attend and leaving a note or comment. If the organiser enabled the feature, invitees can have the ability to send invitations and view the guest list.

The calendar also supports importing from programs such as Microsoft Outlook and iCal.

Criticism

The conversation view groups related messages in a linear stack, which can be expanded and collapsed. While this does provide an innovative view of an e-mail thread, it does not provide any way to differentiate messages that branch off from the original thread. This can occur when mail is sent to multiple recipients who respond individually.

Google seems hesitant to release any upcoming plans for the implementation of these features.

Absent features

There are several features that are absent from the Gmail interface. Some of them are provided by another kind of computer program, such as Eudora, Outlook Express or Apple Mail, which can be used with a Gmail user account. For example features present in Linux mail programs (such as Kmail) are: automatic spell-checking (by red underline), "attachment warning," and automatic bounce-back of unwanted mail (imitating a mail-daemon message). Some of these absent features are offered by other webmail applications (sometimes for a price). Also, the lack of IMAP support is the most common complaint according to Most Wanted Gmail features.

Non-US interfaces

Because Google is located primarily in the United States, non-US interfaces tend to lag behind in upgrades and features:

Web Clips are not available through the Gmail interface
Google Calendar is not available through the Gmail interface

However, if non-US users change their language to "English (US)" they can access these services. Support for entering bi-directional text is currently available only in the Arabic and Hebrew interfaces.

The privacy issue

There has been a great deal of criticism regarding Gmail's privacy policy. Some of the controversy surrounded the clause "residual copies of e-mail may remain on our systems for some time, even after you have deleted messages from your mailbox or after the termination of your account." Many believed that this meant that Google would intentionally archive copies of deleted mail forever. Google continues to rebut some of this criticism by pointing out that Gmail is using mostly industry wide practices. Google later stated that they will "make reasonable efforts to remove deleted information from our systems as quickly as is practical."

Most of the criticism, however, was against Google's plans to add context-sensitive advertisements to e-mails by automatically scanning them. Privacy advocates raised concerns that the plan involved scanning their personal, assumed private, e-mails, and that this was a security problem. Allowing e-mail content to be read, even by a computer, for advertising purposes, raises the risk that the expectation of privacy in e-mail will be reduced. Furthermore, non-subscribers' e-mail is scanned by Gmail as well, and these senders of e-mail did not agree to Gmail's terms of service or privacy policy. Exacerbating the situation is the fact that Google can change its privacy policy unilaterally, and that Google is technically able to cross-reference cookies across its information-rich product line to make dossiers on individuals. However, again the practice is standard across all email systems - it is the only way spam mail checkers can work.

Opponents of these views state that when one's e-mail is checked to see if it is spam, it is being scanned by the same process. Because a human is not reading the message, they say, it is not a problem.

Another unresolved issue discussed among privacy advocates is the lack of disclosed data retention and correlation policies. It is possible for Google to combine information contained in a person's emails with information about his Internet searches. It is not known how long such information would be kept, and how it could be used. One of the concerns is that it could be of interest to law enforcement agencies. More than 30 privacy and civil rights organizations have urged Google to suspend Gmail service until these issues are resolved.

Development history

Gmail was a project begun by Google developer Paul Buchheit years before it was ever announced to the public. For several years, the software was only available internally, as an email client for Google employees.

Gmail was finally announced to the public in 2004 amid a flurry of rumor. Owing to April Fool's day, however, the company's press release was greeted with skepticism in the technology world, especially since Google already had been known to make April Fool's Jokes (such as Pigeon Rank). However, they explained that their real joke had been a press release saying that they would take offshoring to the extreme by putting employees in a " Google Copernicus Center" on the Moon. Jonathan Rosenberg, Google's vice-president of products, was quoted by BBC News as saying, "We are very serious about Gmail."

Gmail also initially received a lot of criticism for a statement they made in their original terms of use, refusing to guarantee that all e-mails at Gmail would be deleted upon request by the user. Google later clarified that they were referring to backup copies of e-mails, and promised that all deleted mails would eventually be expunged completely from their servers. This, along with the feature that advertisements would be generated by software-based scanning of e-mails in order to better target them, gave rise to a controversy on web privacy.

Before being acquired by Google, the gmail.com domain name was used by the free e-mail service offered by Garfield.com, online home of the comic strip Garfield. This free e-mail service has moved to e-garfield.com.

As of the 22nd of June, 2005, Gmail's canonical URI has been changed to http://mail.google.com/mail/ instead of http://gmail.google.com/gmail/.

Gmail for your domain

On February 10, 2006, Google introduce Gmail for your domain. This service, currently in beta testing, allows organizations to offer e-mail services through Gmail using their own domain. Google may eventually open the service to all domain owners, as Microsoft has with its Windows live Custom Domains service.

Google Mail

On july 4, 2005, Google announced that Gmail Deutschland would be rebranded Google Mail. From that point forward, visitors originating from an IP address determined to be in Germany would be forwarded to googlemail.com where they could obtain an email address containing the new domain. Any German user who wants a gmail.com address must sign up for an account through a proxy. German users who were already registered were allowed to keep their old addresses.
On October 19, 2005, the United Kingdom version of Gmail was converted to Google Mail, because "Gmail" is trademarked by another company in the UK. However, this can be bypassed by using a proxy. Curiously, even though UK users' address shows up at the top of their inbox and in emails they send as xxx@googlemail.com, emails sent to xxx@gmail.com still reach the intended recipient. Users who registered before the switch to Googlemail face no problems whatsoever - they keep their gmail address (although the logo in the top-left of the page appears as 'Googlemail'.

Competition

After Gmail's initial announcement and development, many existing web mail services quickly increased their storage capacity. For example, Hotmail went from giving some users 2MB to 25MB (250MB after 30 days, and 2 GB for hotmail plus accounts), while Yahoo! Mail went from 4MB to 100MB (and 2 GB for Yahoo! Mail Plus accounts). Yahoo! Mail storage then proceeded to 250MB, and finally, in late April of 2005, to 1GB. These were all seen as moves to stop existing users from switching to Gmail, and to capitalize on the newly rekindled public interest in web mail services. The desire to catch up was especially visible for MSN Hotmail, which upgraded its e-mail storage erratically from 250 MB to the new Windows Live Mail (beta) which includes 2 GB of storage over a number of months. In August of 2005, AOL started providing all AIM screen names with their own e-mail accounts with 2 GB of storage. Another example of competition came from 30gigs.com (www.30gigs.com) who were offering 30 gigabytes of storage, and was also invite only, but now offers free accounts for anyone.

Every account which is inactive for 6 months is labeled dormant, and 3 months later (a total of 9 months), gets deactivated by Gmail. All stored messages get deleted and the account gets "recycled", which means the account name can be used by any other users afterwards. Other webmail services, like Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail, have different, often shorter, times for marking an account as inactive. Yahoo! Mail deactivates dormant accounts after four months, while Hotmail deactivates accounts after only one month.

Other than the general increase of storage limit, there has also been an improvement of the e-mail interfaces of Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail after the launch of Gmail. Gmail's ability to have an attachment size of 10MB was also matched by Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail during 2005. Following the footsteps of Gmail, Yahoo! launched the Yahoo! Mail Beta service and Microsoft launched Windows Live Mail, both now incorporating Ajax interfaces.

Help in Gmail

When users first sign up for Gmail, they are prompted to take the Gmail Tour which teaches them the basic features and what makes Gmail different. There is also a help page teaching new Gmail users how to import their contacts from their previous webmail account using CSV. However, it only offers personalized help for Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail; it has also been reported that recently-created Gmail accounts will receive a welcome e-mail with the link to the switching guide. Clicking "Help" at the top right hand corner of Gmail takes a user to the Gmail Help Center. If the Gmail Help Center does not answer a question, a user can contact Gmail. Alternatively, a user can also ask other users for help on Gmail Help Discussion, a Google group for users to give and receive help concerning Gmail.A

Google Calendar

2006-08-05T12:01:00.000-07:00

Google Calendar, previously code-named CL2, is a contact- and time-management web application offered by Google. It allows users to synchronize their Gmail contacts with a web-based calendar. It became available on April 13, 2006 and is currently in beta stages. While users are not required to have a Gmail account, they are required to have a free Google account in order to use the software.

Features

The interface of Google Calendar is similar to desktop calendar applications such as iCal on Mac OS X or Brown Bear Software's Calcium. The Ajax-driven interface enables users to view and add events without reloading the page, and sports a variety of view modes, such as the weekly, monthly and agenda views. Users can "quick add" calendar events by typing standard English phrases, such as "Dinner with Michael 7pm tomorrow". Users can also set the number of days to show in their custom view mode. All events in a Google Calendar can be commented on by its users.

Events are stored online, so in the case of a hard drive failure, no data is lost. The application can import Microsoft Outlook calendar files (.cvs) and iCal calendar files (.ics) (the de facto open calendaring file format), although at this stage only when the fields are all in U.S. format. Multiple calendars can be added and shared, allowing various levels of permissions for the users. This enables collaboration and sharing of schedules between groups or families. There are also general calendars available for importing into one's account which contain national holidays of various countries.

Google Calendar is integrated with Gmail, Google's web e-mail service. When an e-mail that contains trigger words (such as "meeting", or dates and times) arrives, an "add to calendar" button is automatically displayed alongside it. This feature is not yet available to all Gmail users.

Currently, Google Calendar can only be synchronized with mobile devices (e.g. BlackBerry, Palm, Pocket PC) or with PC applications (e.g. Microsoft Outlook) via third party software. This feature is offered by its main competitor, Yahoo! Calendar. Event reminders are available via SMS to most mobile phones, but only in the United States.

Compatibility

Since Google Calendar is a web-based application, it supports virtually any operating system, provided that it has a browser which supports the web technologies that it employs. Since it is a relatively new application, browser compatibility is limited to Microsoft Internet Explorer 6, Mozilla Firefox 1.0+ and Safari 2.0.3 with other browsers encountering rendering errors or even failing to load the page at all.

http://calendar.google.com/

Google Answers

2006-08-05T11:54:00.000-07:00

Google Answers is an Internet search and research service offered for a fee by Google, "answer brokering". It was launched by Google in April 2002, and went out of Beta in May 2003.

General

After the failure of the Google Questions and Answers service from August 2001, Google launched a new service called Google Answers in April 2002. It is an extension to the conventional search; rather than doing the search themselves, users pay someone else to do the search. Customers ask questions, offer a price for an answer, and researchers answer them. Researchers are not Google employees. They are limited in number (according to Google, there are more than 500 Researchers; in practice, there are probably fewer active Researchers) and are screened through an application process that tests their research and communications abilities.

Prices for questions range from $2 to $200; After a question is answered, Google keeps 25% of the payment, and sends the rest to the Researchers. In addition to the Researcher’s fees, a client who’s satisfied with the answer can also leave a tip.

If a question has not been answered, the client will not pay the question's price. However, in addition to the question's price, determined by the client, Google also charges a non-refundable, $0.50 listing fee. Naturally, most questions in the $2-$5 price range do not receive an answer. Once a question is answered, it remains available for anyone to browse and comment on for free.

Each question page has three parts:

The client's question, on which the Researcher can respond with a request for clarification
The answer, which may remain empty if the question hasn't been answered. Only a Researcher can post the answer. After the answer is posted, the client may communicate with the Researcher to ask for clarification on the answer; the client can also rate the answer and may tip the Researcher.
The comment section, where any registered user, Researchers and non-Researchers alike, can comment on the question. Some questions are "answered" in comments. Naturally, this section, too, could be left empty, if no comments have been posted.

Researchers with low ratings can be fired, encouraging eloquence and accuracy. Also, Google states that people who comment may be selected to become researchers, therefore inspiring high quality comments. This service came out of beta in May 2003 and currently receives more than one hundred question postings per day. For a Researcher, a question is answered by logging into a special researchers page and then "locking" a question they want to answer. This act of "locking" claims the question for that researcher.

Constraints

Google Answers’ policy prohibits the Researchers from answering questions about the following subjects:

questions whose answers would promote illegal activities (for example, how to make a bomb)
copyright infringements and violations
Breach of privacy (for example, private phone numbers, email address, etc.)
Homework assignments
Questions about Google Answers itself, or about Google policies and mechanisms (Page Rank), for example).
Google Answers prohibits its Researchers from answering with links to adult oriented.

Criticism

Librarians

Some librarians have criticised Google Answers as a service selling services that are part of the tasks of public librarians (in the United States). The most vocal of these critics has been a former Google Answers Researcher, whose contract has been terminated after violating the site’s terms of service. Other librarians have claimed that the service provides useful help, in parallel, and not instead of, reference librarians.

Google Answers as encouraging plagiarism

Some of Google Answers critics have claimed that the service encourages plagiarism. The official Google Answers policy is to remove questions that are seen as school assignments. However, some journalists have expressed their concern that sometimes it is difficult to distinguish between a “legitimate” question and a homework assignment, especially in regards to sciences and programming. Google Answers’ public structure, or the fact that all answers will be later publicly available, prevents much plagiarism.

Unconventional usages

Except for the conventional usage — asking questions and getting answers that are appropriate to the price offered — several unique unconventional usages have been developed. Despite its professionalism, Google Answers has also developed its own unique cyberculture.

Nonsense questions

One of the popular non-conventional usages is to ask — usually but not always within the realm of the $2-$5 price range- nonsense questions. One of the most popular questions of this genre is in fact one of the most frequently asked questions on Google Answers — “What is the meaning of life? Others questions request jokes or Chuck Norris "facts". Google Answers Researchers are not always keen to answer such questions.

Spamming

Because the comment section is open for any registered user, it is sometimes abused by spammers, attempting to promote a site’s PageRank by mentioning their sites. Google Answers' team removes such spam.

Political discussions

Similarly to those posting nonsense questions, some users present their Google Answers version of trolling, by posting political statements in order to provoke a discussion, rather than get an answer.

http://answers.google.com/answers/

Google Analytics

2006-08-05T11:50:00.000-07:00

Google Analytics (GA) is a free service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about the visitors to a website. Its main highlight is that a webmaster can optimize his ad campaigns through GA's analysis of where the visitors came from, how long they stayed on the website, and their geographical position.

Google's service was modeled upon Urchin Software Corporation's analytics system, Urchin on Demand (Google acquired Urchin Software Corp. in April 2005). Google still sells the standalone installable Urchin software through a network of value-added resellers.

The Google-branded version was rolled-out in November 2005 to anyone who wished to sign up. However due to very high demand for the service, new sign-ups were suspended only a few days later. As capacity was added to the system, Google began using a lottery-type invitation-code model. Currently, Google is sending out batches of invitation codes as server availability permits.

Google has been working to improve system performance, and reports now generally update in less than 1 hour. All users can officially add up to 5 site profiles, and "pre-free" customers can add up to 50. Each profile generally corresponds to one URL.

GA's approach is to show basic dashboard-type data for the casual user, and more in-depth data further into the report set. There are currently over 80 distinct reports, each customizable to some degree. GA also offers three dashboard views of data, Executive, Marketer, and Webmaster.

http://www.google.com/analytics/

AdWords

2006-08-05T11:47:00.000-07:00

AdWords

AdWords is Google's flagship advertising product, and main source of revenue. AdWords offers pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and site-targeted advertising for both text and banner ads. The AdWords program includes local, national, and international distribution. Google's text advertisements are short, consisting of one title line and two content text lines. Image ads can be one of several different Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) standard sizes.

Pay-Per-Click advertisements (PPC)

Advertisers specify the words that should trigger their ads and the maximum amount they are willing to pay per click. When a user searches Google's search engine on www.google.com, ads for relevant words are shown as "sponsored link" on the right side of the screen, and sometimes above the main search results. The ordering of the paid listings depends on other advertisers' bids (thus the system is classified as P4P) and the historical click-through rates of all ads shown for a given search. The auction mechanism that determines the order of the ads has been called a "generalized second price" auction. It is a variation of the Vickrey auction.

Site targeted advertisements

In 2005 Google introduced site-targeted advertising. Using the AdWords control panel, advertisers can enter keywords of interest, and Google will recommend relevant sites within their content network. Advertisers then bid on a cost per mille (CPM) basis for placement.

AdWords distribution

All AdWords ads are eligible to be shown on www.google.com. Advertisers also have the option of enabling their ads to show on Google's partner networks. The "search network" includes AOL search, Ask.com, and Netscape. Like www.google.com, these search engines show AdWords ads in response to user searches.

The "content network" shows AdWords ads on sites that are not search engines. Google automatically determines the subject of the pages and displays ads for which the advertiser has specified an interest in that subject. The ads show in boxes resembling banner ads, with the designation "Ads By Gooooooooooogle." These content network sites are those that use AdSense, the other side of the Google advertising model.

AdWords is used by publishers who wish to bring traffic to their websites. The biggest competitors are Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture) and Microsoft adCenter.

History

The AdWords product was launched in 2000. At first advertisers would pay a monthly amount, and Google would set up and manage their campaign. To accommodate small businesses and those who wanted to manage their own campaigns, Google soon introduced the AdWords self-service portal. As of 2005, Google provides a campaign management service called Jumpstart to assist advertisers in setting up their campaigns.

In 2005, Google launched a program to certify individuals and companies who have completed AdWords training and passed an exam. Due to the complexity of AdWords and the amount of money at stake, many advertisers choose to hire a consultant to manage their campaigns.

Legal context

AdWords has generated lawsuits in the area of tradermark law and click fraud. Google recently settled a click fraud lawsuit for US$90 million.

Ad blocking and Adwords

Search

The ads are displayed on the top or right hand side of the natural search results. The ads are pure text, and thus difficult to block for normal ad-blocking software. However, the Mozilla Firefox extension CustomizeGoogle can remove them.

Content network

Advertisements on content websites are displayed via javascript-generated iframes and can be easily blocked, either by turning off javascript or using ad-blocking software such as adblock.

Proxies

The search proxy Scroogle allows users to perform Google searches without receiving Google advertisements.

Technology

The AdWords system was initially implemented on top of the MySQL database engine. After the system had been launched, management decided to use a commercial database (Oracle) instead. As is typical of applications simultaneously written and tuned for one database, and ported to another, the system became much slower, so eventually it was returned to MySQL.

Google Alerts

2006-08-05T11:46:00.000-07:00

Google Alerts is a service offered by search engine company Google which notifies you (by mail) about the latest web and news pages of your choice.

Google currently offers four types of alert searches: "News", "Web", "News & Web", and "Groups". A News alert is an email that lets you know if new articles make it into the top ten results of your Google News search. A Web alert is an email that lets you know if new web pages appear in the top twenty results for your Google Web Search. A News & Web alert is an email that lets you know when new articles related to your search term make it into the top ten results for a Google News search or the top twenty results for a Google Web search. A Groups alert is an email that lets you know if new posts make it into the top fifty results of your Google Groups search.

Google Alerts also allow you to determine the frequency in which checks are made for new results. Three options are available: "once a day", "once a week", or "as it happens". These options do not necessarily control how often you will receive alerts. The first option, for example, means you will receive at most one alert email per day. The "as it happens" option can result in many alert emails per day, depending on the search.

The service can help track new pages for any topic (such as celebrities, computers, animals). Google Alerts are available in plain text as well as HTML.

Click-through rate, Click fraud

2006-08-05T11:41:00.000-07:00

Click-through rate or CTR is a way of measuring the success of a online advertising campaign. A CTR is obtained by dividing the number of users who clicked on an ad on a web page by the number of times the ad was delivered (impressions). For example, if your banner ad was delivered 100 times (impressions delivered) and 1 person clicked on it (clicks recorded), then the resulting CTR would be 1%.

Banner ad click-through rates have fallen over time, often measuring significantly less than 1%. By selecting an appropriate advertising site with high affinity (e.g. a movie magazine for a movie advertisement), the same banner can achieve a substantially higher click-through rate. Personalized ads, unusual formats, and more obtrusive ads typically have higher click-through rates than standard banner ads.

CTR is most commonly defined as number of clicks divided by number of impressions and generally not in terms of number of persons who clicked. This is an important difference because if one person clicks 10 times on the same advertisement instead of once then the CTR would increase in the earlier definition but would stay the same in term of later definition.

Click fraud

Click fraud occurs in pay per click online advertising when a person, automated script, or computer program imitates a legitimate user of a web browser clicking on an ad, for the purpose of generating an improper charge per click. Click fraud is the subject of some controversy and increasing litigation due to the advertising networks being a key beneficiary of the fraud whether they like it or not.

Use of a computer to commit this type of fraud is a felony in many jurisdictions, for example as covered by Penal code 502 in California and the Computer Misuse Act 1990 in the United Kingdom. There have been arrests relating to click fraud with regard to malicious clicking in order to deplete a competitor's advertising budget.
In 2004, a California man created a software program that he claimed could let spammers defraud Google out of millions of dollars in fraudulent clicks. Authorities said he was arrested while trying to blackmail Google for $150,000 to hand over the program

Pay per click advertising

Pay per click advertising or PPC advertising is an arrangement in which webmaster (operators of web sites), acting as publishers, display clickable links from advertisers, in exchange for a charge per click. As this industry evolved, a number of advertising networks developed which acted as middlemen between these two groups (publishers and advertisers). Each time a (believed to be) valid web user clicks on an ad, the advertiser pays the advertising network, who in turn pays the publisher a share of this money. This revenue sharing system is seen as an incentive for click fraud.

The largest of the advertising networks, Google's AdWords/Adsense and yahoo! Search Marketing, act in a dual role, since they are also publishers themselves (on their search engines). According to critics, this complex relationship may create a conflict of interest. For instance, Google loses money to undetected click fraud when it pays out to the publisher, but it makes money when it collects it from the advertiser. Because of the spread between what Google collects and what Google pays out, click fraud directly and invisibly profits Google.
Non-contracting parties

A secondary source of click fraud is non-contracting parties, who are not part of any pay-per-click agreement. This type of fraud is even harder to police because perpetrators generally cannot be sued for breach of contract or charged criminally with fraud. Examples of non-contracting parties are:

Competitors of advertisers: These parties may wish to harm a competitor who advertises in the same market by clicking on their ads. The perpetrators don't profit directly, but force advertiser to pay for irrelevant clicks thus weakening or eliminating a source of competition.

Competitors of publishers: These persons may wish to frame a publisher. It is made to look like the publisher is clicking on its own ads. The advertising network may then terminate the relationship. Many publishers rely exclusively on revenue from advertising and can be put out of business by such an attack.

Other malicious intent: As with vandalism, there's an array of motives for wishing to cause harm to either an advertiser or a publisher, even by people who have nothing to gain financially. Motives include political and personal vendettas. These cases are often the hardest to deal with, since it is hard to track down the culprit, and if found, there is little legal action that can be taken against them.

Unwanted "friends" of the publisher: Sometimes upon learning a publisher profits from ads being clicked, a supporter of the publisher (like a fan, family member, or personal friend), will click on the ads to "help". However, this can backfire when the publisher (not the "friend") is accused of click fraud.

Advertising networks try to stop fraud by all parties, but often do not know which clicks are legitimate. Unlike fraud committed by the publisher, it is hard to know who should pay when past click fraud is found. Publishers resent having to pay refunds for something that is not their fault. However, advertisers are adamant that they should not have to pay for phony clicks.

Organization

Click fraud can be as simple as one person starting a small web site, becoming a publisher of ads, and clicking on those ads to generate revenue. Oftentimes the number of clicks, and their value, is so small, that the fraud goes undetected. Frequently publishers will claim small amounts of such clicking is an accident, which is often the case.

Much larger scale fraud also occurs. Those engaged in large scale fraud will often run scripts which simulate a human clicking on ads in web pages. However, huge numbers of clicks appearing to come from just one, or a small number, of computers, or single geographic area, look highly suspicious to the advertising network and advertisers. Clicks coming from a computer known to be that of a publisher also look suspicious to those watching for click fraud. A person attempting large scale fraud, alone in their home, stands a good chance of being caught.

Organized crime can handle this by having many computers with their own internet connections in different geographic locations. Often scripts fail to mimic true human behavior, so organized crime networks use Trojan code to turn the average person's machines into zombie computers and using sporadic redirects or DNS-cache-poisoning to turn the oblivious user's actions into actions generating revenue for the scammer.

Impression fraud is an insidious variant of click fraud in which the advertiser is penalized for having an unacceptably low click-thorugh rate for a given keyword. This involves making numerous searches for a keyword but without clicking of the ad. Such keywords are disabled automatically, enabling a competitor's lower-bid ad for the same keyword to continue while several high bidders (on the first page of the search results) have been eliminated.

It is very difficult for advertisers, advertising networks, and authorities to pursue cases against networks of people spread around multiple countries.
Litigation

Disputes over the issue have resulted in a number of lawsuits. In one case, Google (acting as both an advertiser and advertising network) won a lawsuit against a Texas company called Auction Experts (acting as a publisher), which Google accused of paying people to click on ads that appeared on Auction Experts' site, costing advertisers $50,000. Despite networks' efforts to stop it, publishers are suspicious of the motives of the advertising networks because the advertising network receives money for each click, even if it is fraudulent.

In July of 2005, Yahoo, the company that invented the PPC advertising model, settled a class action lawsuit against it by plaintiffs alleging it did not do enough to prevent click fraud. Yahoo paid $4.5 million in legal bills for the plaintiffs, and agreed to settle advertiser claims dating back to 2004.
Solutions

Proving click fraud can be very difficult, since it is hard to know who is behind a computer and what their intentions are. Often the best an advertising network can do is to identify which clicks are most likely fraudulent and not charge the account of the advertiser. Ever more sophisticated means of detection are used, but none is foolproof.

The pay-per-click industry is lobbying for tighter laws on the issue. Many hope to have laws that will cover those not bound by contracts.

A number of companies are developing viable solutions for click fraud identification and are developing intermediary relationships with advertising networks. Such solutions fall into two categories:

a) Forensic analysis of advertisers' web server log files

This analysis of the advertiser's web server data requires an in-depth look at the source and behavior of the traffic. As industry standard log files are used for the analysis, the data is verifiable by advertising networks.

b) Third-party corroboration

Third parties offer web-based solutions that might involve placement of single-pixel images or Javascript on the advertiser's web pages and suitable tagging of the ads. The visitor may be presented with a cookie. Visitor information is then collected in a third-party data store and made available for download. The better offerings make it easy to highlight suspicious clicks and they show the reasons for such a conclusion. Since an advertiser's log files can be tampered with, their accompaniment with corroborating data from a third party forms a more convincing body of evidence to present to the advertising network.

Google AdSense Anti Click Fraud Software

There are numerous companies and software products designed to assist advertisers reduce click fraud. One non-commercial product is AdLogger (Google AdSense only)

The open source AdLogger software allows specific IP address to be blocked from viewing certain ads, and also allows for the automatic banning of repeat clickers. These methods help a site owner to monitor where their Google AdSense click throughs are coming from on the internet and therefore able to spot patterns that could indicate click-fraud. Once a source of clicks has been identified as potentially fraudulent the software can be used to block the location of those click from continuing.

Pay per click

2006-08-05T11:21:00.000-07:00

Pay per click, or PPC, is an advertising technique used on websites, advertising networks, and search engines.

With search engines, pay per click advertisements are usually text ads placed near search results; when a site visitor clicks on the advertisement, the advertiser is charged a small amount. Variants include pay for replacement and pay for ranking. Pay per click is also sometimes known as Cost Per Click (CPC).

While many companies exist in this space, GoogleAdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing, which was formerly Overture, are the largest network operators as of 2006. MSN has started beta testing with their own PPC services MSN adCenter. Depending on the search engine, minimum prices per click start at US$0.01 (up to US$0.50). Very popular search terms can cost much more on popular engines. Abuse of the pay per click model can result in click fraud.

PPC engines can be categorized in "Keyword", "Product", "Service" engines. However, a number of companies may fall in two or more categories. More models are continually being developed. Currently, pay per click programs do not generate any revenue from site traffic to sites using these programs. Only when visitors click on banner advertisements or pop-ups is revenue generated. See Cost Per Click

Keyword PPCs

Advertisers using these bid on "keywords", which can be words or phrases, and can include product model numbers. When a user searches for a particular word or phrase, the list of advertiser links appears in order of bidding.

As of 2005, notable PPC Keyword search engines include: Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, GaZabo.com, Miva, which was formerly FindWhat, SearchFeed, Enhance (formerly Ah-Ha), GoClick, 7Search, Kanoodle, ePilot, Search 123, Kazazz, Pricethat, Search FAST and others.

An industry of professional services firms that can assist advertisers in marketing their products and services on search engines has also developed. Many of these firms will be members of various trade bodies such as IABUK, SMA-UK, and SEMPO, while other reputable firms have chosen to avoid these bodies, as many of them remain heavily biased toward the firms that first got together and founded them.

Product PPCs

"Product" engines let advertisers provide "feeds" of their product databases and when users search for a product, the links to the different advertisers for that particular product appear, giving more prominence to advertisers who pay more, but letting the user sort by price to see the lowest priced product and then click on it to buy. These engines are also called Product comparison engines or Price comparison engines.

Some of the PPC Product search engines are: JustCompareIt.com, BizRate, NexTag, PriceGrabber.com, Pricescan, Pricethat, Pricewhat, PriceLeap, Shopping.com

Service PPCs

"Service" engines let advertisers provide feeds of their service databases and when users search for a service offering links to advertisers for that particular service appear, giving prominence to advertisers who pay more, but letting users sort their results by price or other methods. Some Product PPCs have expanded into the service space while other service engines operate in specific verticals.

Examples of PPC services include NexTag, Pricethat, [Vazaro], SideStep, and Tripadvisor.

Pay per Call

Similar to pay per click, pay per call is a business model for ad listings in search engines and directories that allows publishers to charge local advertisers on a per-call basis for each lead (call) they generate. The term "pay per call" is sometimes confused with "click to call". Click-to-call, along with call tracking, is a technology that enables the “pay-per-call” business model.

Pay-per-call is not just restricted to local advertisers. Many of the pay-per-call search engines allows advertisers with a national presence to create ads with local telephone numbers.

According to the Kelsey Group, the pay-per-phone-call market is expected to reach US$3.7 billion by 2010.

Cost Per Action, Cost Per Impression, Effective Cost Per Action

2006-08-05T11:17:00.000-07:00

Cost Per Action

Cost Per Action or CPA (as it is often initialized to) is a phrase often used in online advertising and online marketing circles.

CPA is considered the optimal form of buying online advertising from the advertiser's point of view. An advertiser only pays for the ad when an action has occurred. An action can be a product being purchased, a form being filled, etc. (The desired action to be performed is determined by the advertiser.)

A related term, eCPA or effective Cost Per Action, is used to measure the effectiveness of advertising inventory purchased (by the advertiser) via a CPC, CPM or CPT basis.

The CPA can be determined by different factors, depending where the online advertising inventory is being purchased.

Cost Per Impression

Cost Per Impression is a phrase often used in online advertising and marketing related to web traffic. It is used for measuring the worth and cost of a specific e-marketing campaign. This technique is applied with web banners, text links, e-mail spam, and opt-in e-mail advertising. (Although opt-in e-mail advertising is more commonly charged on a CPA basis.)

The Cost Per Impression is often measured using the CPM (Cost Per Mille) metric. (A CPM is the cost of one thousand (1,000) impressions.)

CPM is considered the optimal form of selling online advertising from the publisher's point of view. A publisher gets paid for each ad that is shown.

This type of advertising arrangement closely resembles Television and Print Advertising Methods for speculating the cost of an Advertisement. Often, industry agreed approximates are used. With Television the Nielsen Ratings are used and Print is based on the circulation a publication has.

For Online Advertising, the numbers of views can be a lot more precise. When a user requests a Web Pages, the originating server creates a log entry. Also, a third party tracker can be placed in the web page which will verify how many accesses that page had.

CPM and/or Flat rate advertising deals are preferred by the Publisher/Webmaster because they will get paid regardless of any action taken.

For Advertisers a Performance Based system is preferred. There are two methods for Paying for Performance: 1) CPA - Cost per Action/Acquisition and 2) CPC- Cost per Click Through.

Today, it is very common for large publishers to charge for most of their advertising inventory on a CPM or CPT basis.

A related term, eCPM or effective Cost Per Mille, is used to measure the effectiveness of advertising inventory sold (by the publisher) via a CPC, CPA, or CPT basis

Cost Per Mille

The initialization CPM comes from print world (and is a latin word), and stands for Cost Per Mille in the US or, more correctly, in the UK Cost Per M, with M representing the Roman numeral for thousand. When online advertising started gaining momentum, those in the industry used this term (rather than something like CPI) as a metric for describing the Cost Per Impression largely because advertisers were already familiar with the term CPM.

It is important to remember that when someone says something like, "our CPM is $5". That this means that the Cost Per Impression is $0.005 -- half a cent.

Effective Cost Per Action

Effective Cost Per Action (often abbreviated to eCPA) is a phrase often used in online advertising and online marketing circles.

CPA is considered the optimal form of buying online advertising from the advertiser's point of view, as they only pay for an advert when an action has occurred. An action can be a product being purchased, a form being filled, etc. (The desired action to be performed is determined by the advertiser.)

eCPA is used to measure the effectiveness of advertising inventory purchased (by the advertiser) via a CPC, CPM or CPT basis. In other words, the eCPA tells the advertiser what they would have paid if they purchased the advertising inventory on a CPA basis (instead of a CPC, CPM, or CPT basis).

How to earn an income with Google Adsense

2006-08-05T11:15:00.000-07:00

How to earn an income with Google AdSense

AdSense is considered as one of the most powerful tools in a website publisher's arsenal today. It is a program that enables any person who owns a website to monetize their sites quite easily. If used properly, it can generate quite a generous income for them on a monthly basis.

The key to building a site that will make money with Adsense is that you should start by writing some quality content articles, incorporating keywords which pertain to the subject of your website. If writing comes easy to you, why not make it work in such a way that you will be earning some extra cash in the process?

If you don’t know or do not have the time to write articles yourself, don’t despair - you can still do it even if you don’t know how to write a single sentence. You can easily find writers that will write good articles for you by doing a search for freelance writers or ghost writers.

There are actually three steps you will have to follow to earn good money with Adsense. These are: 1. Do Keyword research.

Find some popular subjects, keywords or phrases that fit your chosen niche subject . Select the ones which you think will have more people searching for it. You can use the Google Suggest tool here: http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en This tool will tell you exactly how many people searched for a spesific keyword or phrase during the last month.

2. Write original content articles. Start writing original article content around the keywords that you have selected - or do what I suggested above by getting someone else to write your articles for you.

3. Build a Quality content site. By using your orignal articles you will be building a quality content site that the search engines will love. Now, you should be incorporating Adsense ads that targets the subject and keywords of the articles on your websites. It is at this point that you will start earning your first money from Adsense. Continue to build your sites with quality content and you will earn a good income from it eventually. If you do not have an Adsense account you, you should go here to apply for one: https://www.google.com/adsense/?hl=en_US&sourceid=aso&subid=us-et-ads Make sure that you have your site up and running first though! To be approved for Adsense your site will have to have good content, and at least 5 or more pages first.

Once you have an Adsense account, you should look at optimizing your ads. The proper positioning of your ads should be done with care. To optimize the effectiveness of your ads, you should definitely study the tips that Google gives to webmasters here: Link

You should blend the ads so that they fit in with your site and you should try and position them where surfers are most likely to click on them. According to research, the one place that surfers look first when they visit a certain site is the top left. The reason behind this is not known. Maybe it is because some of the most useful search engine results are at the top of all other rankings. So visitors tend to look in that same place when browsing through other sites. Some of those who are just starting at this business may think they are doing pretty well already and thinking that their clickthrough rates and CPM figures are quite healthy. However, there are more techniques and styles to generate more clicks to double your earnings. By knowing these techniques and working them to your advantage, you will realize that you could be getting three times more than other people who have been previously doing what they are doing, so do study the tips that Google gives you..

Finally, the Adsense program has excellent tracking statistics that allows webmasters and publishers to track their results across a number of sites on a site by site or page by page basis. You should make use of these statistics and make the most of it because it is one powerful tool that will help you find out which ads are performing best. This way, you can fine tune your Adsense ads and focus more on the ones being visited the most rather than those who are being ignored.

One thing you should keep in mind is that banners and skyscrapers ads are not effective any more. Ask the experts. So forget about using banner and skyscraper formats as surfers universally ignore them. The reason behind this is that they are recognized as adverts and most people have become what they call “banner blind”.

To really start making money with Adsense, you should have a definite focus on what you want to achieve and how you will go about achieving it. As with any other kind of business ventures, you will need patience coupled with a bit of work on your part.

Once your site has been built, add some new content occasionally just to keep it “alive” in the eyes of the search engines. Then go on and create another quality content site to increase your Adsense income even more.

You will love building your sites, as well as the sense of achievement that comes with it when you recieve your first Adsense check!

AdSense

2006-08-05T11:14:00.000-07:00

What is Adsense?

AdSense is an advertising program run by Google. Website owners can enroll in this program to enable text and image advertisements on their sites. These ads are administered by Google and generate revenue on either a per-click or per-thousand-ads-displayed basis. Google utilizes its search technology to serve ads based on website content, the user’s geographical location, and other factors. Those wanting to advertise with Google’s targeted ad system may sign up through AdWords. AdSense has become a popular method of placing advertising on a website because the ads are less intrusive than most banners, and the content of the ads is often relevant to the website.

It currently uses JavaScript code to incorporate the advertisements into a participating site. If it is included on a site which has not yet been crawled by the Mediabot, it will temporarily display advertisements for charitable causes known as public service announcements (PSAs). (Note that the Mediabot is a separate crawler from the Googlebot that maintains Google’s search index.)

Many sites use AdSense to monetize their content and some webmasters work hard to maximize their own AdSense income. They do this in three ways:

They use a wide range of traffic generating techniques including but not limited to online advertising.
They build valuable content on their sites; content which attracts AdSense ads and which pay out the most when they get clicked.
They use copy on their websites that encourage clicks on Ads. Note that Google prohibits people from using phrases like “Click on my AdSense ads” to increase click rates. Phrases accepted are “Sponsored Links” and “Advertisements”.
The source of all AdSense income is the AdWords program which in turn has a complex pricing model based on a Vickrey second price auction, in that it commands an advertiser to submit a sealed bid (not observable by competitors). Additionally, for any given click received, advertisers only pay one bid increment above the second-highest bid.

AdSense for feeds
In May 2005, Google unveiled AdSense for feeds, a version of AdSense that runs on RSS and Atom feeds that have more than 100 active subscribers. According to the Google Blog, “advertisers have their ads placed in the most appropriate feed articles; publishers are paid for their original content; readers see relevant advertising — and in the long run, more quality feeds to choose from”.

AdSense for feeds works by inserting images into a feed. When the image is displayed by the reader/browser, Google writes the ad content into the image that it returns. The ad content is chosen based on the content of the feed surrounding the image. When the user clicks the image, he or she is redirected to the advertiser’s site in the same way as regular AdSense ads.

AdSense for search
A companion to the regular AdSense program, AdSense for search lets website owners place Google search boxes on their pages. When a user searches the web or the site with the search box, Google shares any ad revenue it makes from those searches with the site owner.

How AdSense works
Each time a visitor visits a page with an AdSense tag, a piece of JavaScript writes an iframe tag, whose src attribute includes the URL of the page. Google’s servers use a cache of the page for the URL or the keywords in the URL itself to determine a set of high-value keywords. (Some of the details are described in the AdSense patent.) If keywords have been cached already, ads are served for those keywords based on the AdWords bidding system.

The storage requirements of an AdSense system are stunningly modest. If each URL has just 8 “high-value” keywords, each represented by a single 32-bit number, then the keywords for each URL could be represented with just 32 bytes. The high value keywords of 4 billion URLs could be stored in 128GB, which would cost only $100 (circa 2006). 400 billion URLs or 100 drives (for a redundancy of 100) would require only $10,000 in storage costs.

AdSense serves a very large number of pages each day. If each day around 1B people saw 10 AdSense impressions (or 100M people saw 100 AdSense impressions), then AdSense would serve around 10B requests/day, or 115,741 requests/sec. If one machine can serve 20 reqs/second (seek times to read a random 4096-byte location on a drive allow for bursts of well over 100 reqs/second), then Google would require 5,787 servers to serve these 10B reqs/day. If each of these servers were hosted at a cost of $100/month, then it would cost $579K/month to run the adservers needed.

Suppose these 10B impressions/day generated clicks at a clickthrough rate of .3% and an average CPC of $.10. Then each day Google would receive 30M clicks/day (347 clicks/sec), generating $3M/day ($34.77/sec), or 900M clicks/month, generating $90M/month.

Abuse of AdSense
Some webmasters create sites tailored to lure searchers from Google and other engines onto their AdSense to make money from clicks. These “zombie” sites often contain nothing but a large amount of interconnected, automated content (e.g. a directory with content from the Open Directory Project). Possibly the most popular form of such “AdSense farms” are splogs (”spam blogs”), which are centered around known high-paying keywords. Also many sites use the free Wikipedia content to attract visitors. These and related approaches are considered to be search engine spam and can be reported to Google.

Criticism of AdSense

Due to concerns about click fraud, Google AdSense has been criticized by some SEO firms as a large source of what Google calls “invalid clicks”. In response, Google says that it “removes publishers from their partner network on a daily basis”. Some disabled publishers have complained that the process is not transparent or accountable

https://www.google.com/adsense/

Google Accessible Search

2006-08-05T11:05:00.000-07:00

Google Accessible Search is a search engine for visually challenged people. It prioritizes usable and accessible web content, as well as using Google's PageRank technology.

As well as the websites containing results being accessible, the Accessible Search interface is also rendered clearly and simply. For example, AdWords results have not been implemented, so they cannot distract the user from the main links.

A similar technology has been used with Google Co-Op, where regular results are sorted in a different manner.

The product is currently in early stages of development, and is classified under Google Labs production.

http://labs.google.com/accessible/

List of Google services and tools

2006-08-05T06:29:00.000-07:00

List of Google services and tools

Accessible Search

Google Accessible Search is a search engine, aimed at the blind and visually impaired. It prioritises usable and accessibel websites in the search results, so the user has minimal distractions when browsing.

AdSense

AdSense is a advertisement program run by Google. Website owners can enroll in this program to enable text, image and, more recently, video advertisements on their sites. These ads are administered by Google and generate revenue on either a per-click or per-thousand-ads-displayed basis. Advertisements shown are from the Google "pool" using contextual relevancy to determine the subject matter of the page, and display a related advertisement. (Ads are placed via AdWords)

AdWords

AdWords is Google's flagship advertising product, and main source of revenue. AdWords offers pay-per-click (PPS) advertising, and site-targeted advertising for both text and banner ads.

Alerts

Google Alerts are emails automatically sent by Google when there are new Google results for a user's chosen search terms. The service offer four types of alerts: News, Web, News & Web, and Groups. Alerts can be configured to be mailed daily or as soon as news is discovered.

Analytics

Google Analytics is a free service that generates detailed statistics about traffic to a website. It was launched on November 18, 2005. The service is mainly aimed at webmasters who can optimize their ad campaigns through the analysis of where visitors came from, how long they stayed on the website, and their geographical locations. The service is based on the Urchin software that Google acquired when it acquired Urchin Software Corporation

Answers

Google Answers allows users to pay approved researchers to answer questions for them. Customers ask questions, offer a price for an answer, and researchers answer them. Past questions can be browsed or searched for free.

Base

Google base is a free services, currently in beta, that enables content owners to submit content, have it hosted and make it easily searcheable via Google. Information within the database is described using Labels and attributes. it was launched on November 15, 2005.

Blog Search

Google Blog Search is a search engine for blogs. It was launched on September 14, 2005. Results include all blogs, not just those published through Blogger. Users can currently search in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Brazilian Portuguese.

Bookmark

Google Bookmarks is a free online bookmark storage service available to Google Account holders which organizes bookmarks with tags. Bookmarks labelled homepage will be displayed on the user's Personalized Homepage.

Book Search

Google Book Search is a search engine for the full text of books that Google scans and stores in its digital database. Depending on the arrangement with the publishers, users may view: a short extract with their search terms highlighted, sample pages of the book, a limited number of pages, or the entire text. Links to buy the book online are provided. The legality of Google's scanning texts without the author's consent is still an open question. It was launched as Google Print in October 2004.

Blogger

Blogger is a weblog publishing tool. Google acquired Pyra Labs, and with it Blogger services, in 2003. Blogger allows users to create a highly-customisable weblog with features such as photo publishing, comments, group blogs, blogger profiles and mobile-based posting with little technical knowledge. Blogger also provides free weblog hosting.

Browser Sync.

Google Browser Sync for Firefox is an extension that continuously synchronizes browser settings – including bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords – across multiple computers. It also allows users to restore open tabs and windows across different machines and browser sessions. It was launched on June 7, 2006.

Calculator

Google Calculator is a free calculator built into the search function which includes complex fuctionality.

Calendar

Google Calendar is a free online calendar. It is similar to those offered by yahoo! and MSN. It was launched on April 13, 2006. Google Calendar can export calendar files in iCal and XML formats. It can import calendar files from Microsoft Office Outlook, Yahoo! Calendar and iCal. Features include: simple Google-style interface, calendar sharing, Gmail integration, and "Quick Add".

Catalogs

Google Catalogs is a search engine for over 6,600 print catalogs (acquired through Optical character recognition).

Checkout

Google Checkout is an online payment processing service provided by Google aimed at simplifying the process of paying for online purchases. Website administrators can choose to implement Google Checkout as a form of payment. This service is currently only available to US residents.

Code

Google Code is Google's site for developers interested in Google-related development. The site contains Open Source code and lists of their API services.

Click-to-call

Click-to-Call is a service which allows users to call advertisers for free at Google's expense from search results pages.

Compute

Google Compute is a feature of the Google Toolbar that enables a user's computer to help solve challenging scientific problems when it would otherwise be idle.

Co-op

Gogle Co-op allows experts to create a list of sites about a particular topic and users to subscribe to these lists. Google launched the service on May 10, 2006. When a user subscribes to links and labels provided by a Google Co-op contributor this information is incorporated into that user's web search results when they search for a related topic.

Desktop

Google Desktop is a desktop search application that runs locally on a Windows XP or Windows 2000 SP3+ PC. The desktop search program allows a user to search their e-mail, computer files, music, photos, chat, and web history. It allows the installation of Google Gadgets, which are similar to Mac OS X's widgets. The first version was launched on October 14, 2004.

Directory

Google Directory is a collection of links arranged into hierarchical subcategories. It was launched in April 2000. The links and their categorization are from the Open Directory Project (ODP), but are sorted by PageRank. The directory can be searched or browsed.

Dodgeball.com

Dodgeball.com is a social networking site built specifically for use on mobile phones. Google purchased the website in 2005. Users text their location to the service, which then notifies them of crushes, friends, friends' friends and interesting venues nearby

Earth

oogle Earth is a free, downloadable virtual globe application. It maps the entire earth by pasting images obtained from satellite imagery, aerial photography and GIS over a 3D globe. It was released on June 28, 2005.

Finance

Google Finance features searchable US business news, opinion, and financial data. It was launched on March 21, 2006 (Official Blog Post). Features include: company-specific pages, blog search, interactive charts (with prices and news stories), information about executives, discussion groups and a portfolio

Froogle

Froogle is a price engine that searches online stores, including auctions, for products. It is also offered in Wireless markup Language (WML) form

Gmail

Gmail is a free webmail and POP e-mail service provided by Google, known for its abundant storage and advanced interface (based on Ajax technology). It is known as Google Mail in the United Kingdom and Germany. Its competitors include AIM Mail, MSN Hotmail / Windows Live Mail, and Yahoo! Mail. Gmail Notifier runs in the Windows system tray and informs users when they have new mail. It was first released in an invitation-only form on April 1, 2004, leading many to assume that it was an April Fool's Day joke

Groups

Google Groups (formerly an independent site known as Deja News) is a searchable Usenet archive. Google is currently testing a new version of its Groups service, which archives mailing lists hosted by Google in addition to Usenet posts, using the same interface as Gmail. As well as searching, users can join a group, make a group, publish posts, and track their favorite topics

Hello

Hello is a free application that allows users to send images across the Internet and publish them to their blogs

Images

Google Images is a search engine for images. It was launched in 2001. Results are based on the filename of the image, the link text pointing to the image, and text adjacent to the image. When searching, a thumbnail of each matching image is displayed. When clicking on a thumbnail, the image is displayed in a frame at the top of the page and the URL of the website on which that image was found is displayed in a frame below it

Joga.com

Joga.com is an Internet community for those interested in soccer. It is in the mold of services such as mySpace, in that each member has their own page, and can join groups based on shared interests. The service allows a user to meet other fans, create games and clubs, access athletes from Nike, and watch and upload video clips and photos. Joga.com is a joint venture of Nike Football and Google, launched on March 29, 2006

Labs

Google Labs consists of all of Google's experimental technologies. Google Labs is akin to a directory page that links to all Google technologies under development or in beta that have not yet been made widely available. From the Google Labs home page, a user can access Google Suggest, Google Desktop Search, and other web technologies.

Language Tools

Google Language Tools allows users to translate text or web pages from one language to another. It also allows searching in web pages located in a specific country or written in a specific language. It currently supports: English to German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Arabic, Korean, Japanese, Chinese (Simplified) and vice versa, and French to German and vice versa

Maps

Google Maps provides maps, satellite imagery, driving directions and local search for the USA, Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Australia and New Zealand. It was launched as a beta on February 8, 2005. It is also available as a mobile service

Mars

Google Mars provides imagery of Mars through the Google Maps interface. Elevation, visible imagery and infrared imagery can be shown. It was released on March 13, 2006, the anniversary of the birth of astronomer Percival Lowell

Measure Map

Measure Map provides statistics for blog writers. It was launched on February 2, 2006

Mobile

Google Mobile allows users to search using Google from wireless devices such as mobile phones and PDAs.

Moon

Google Moon provides NASA imagery of the moon through the Google Maps interface. It was launched on July 20, 2005, in honor of the first manned Moon Landing on July 20, 1969. As a joke, the closest zoom level features an image of cheese instead of the moon surface. Six moon landings are marked on the map

News

Google News is an automated news compilation service and search engine for news. There are versions of the aggregator for more than 20 languages. While the selection of news stories is fully automated, the sites included are selected by human editors. Google News was launched in April 2002 and left beta testing on January 26, 2006

Notebook

Google Notebook is a free service that provides a simple way to save and organize information when conducting research online. The tool permits users to clip text, images, and links from pages while browsing, save them online, access them from any computer, and share them with others. It was launched on May 15, 2006

Orkut

Orkut is a social networking service, where users can list their personal and professional information, create relationships amongst friends and join communities of mutual interest. New Orkut accounts are by invitation only from an existing member. Affinity Engines, a company based in Palo Alto, has filed a lawsuit alleging that their co-founder Orkut Büyükkökten illegally re-used Affinity Engines software code when he moved to Google

Pack

Google Pack allows users to download the following programs in a single package: Google Earth, Google Desktop, Picasa, Google Toolbar, Google Talk, Google Video Player, Google Pack Screensaver, Mozilla Firefox with Google Toolbar, Ad-Aware SE Personal, Norton Antivirus Special Edition 2005 (with 6 month trial), Adobe Reader 7, RealPlayer and GalleryPlayer. It was released on January 6, 2006

Page Creator

Google Page Creator is a beta release of a web-publishing program which creates pages and hosts them on Google's servers. The URL given to members is http://username.googlepages.com/ It was launched on April 20, 2006

Personlized Home

Google Personlized Home is a customizable, modular page which a user can access through their Google Account. It was launched in May 2005. The user selects the content of the page from RSS feeds as well as specialized modules offering services such as: language translation, recipe databases, new emails, Wikipedia search and weather forecasts

Personalized Search

Google Personalized Search prioritizes Google search results based on previous search habits. It makes use of Google's Search History feature. It was launched on June 28, 2005

Picasa

Picasa is a free, downloadable photo-organisation application. It allows users to organise photos into albums and collections, view in various orders, apply simple effects, create slidshows, print and order physical prints. Google Inc. acquired Picasa in August 2004

Picasa Web Albums

Picasa Web Albums is Picasa’s newest feature, designed to help users post and share their photos quickly and easily on the web. It was released on June 13, 2006

Reader

Google Reader is a web-based feed reader, or news aggregator, capable of reading Atom and RSS feeds. It allows the user to subscribe to feeds by URL, import/export subscription lists using OPML, and search for new feeds. The service also embeds audio enclosures in the page. It was launched on October 7, 2005

Ride Finder

Google Ride Finder is a service that allows users to find a taxi, limousine or shuttle using real time position of vehicles in 14 US cities. Ride Finder uses the Google Maps interface and cooperates with any car service that wishes to participate. It was launched on March 31, 2005

Scholar

Google Scholar a search engine for the full text of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and scholarly fields. Today, the index includes virtually all peer-reviewed journals available online, except those published by Elvesier, the world's largest scientific publisher. Google Scholar is comparable in function to Elsevier's Scopus and Thomson ISI's subscription-based Web of Science service, though more inclusive in sources and languages. It was launched in November 2004

Search History

Google Personalized Search History keeps a record of all searches and clicked results while a user is logged into a Google Account and allows this to be accessed and searched. This also tracks queries made to Google Images and Google News

Sets

Google Sets attempts to make a list of items when the user enters a few examples. For example, entering "Green, Purple, Red" produces the list "Green, Purple, Red, Blue, Black, White, Yellow, Orange, Brown. It is currently part of Google Labs

Sitemaps

Google Sitemaps allows Webmasters to generate a file that lists the URLs on the site for better indexing. It was released as a beta in June 2005

SketchUp

Google SketchUp is a simple 3D sketching program with many of the tools a professional 3D program has. SketchUp models can be directly imported into Google Earth and can be skinned with various premade colours and textures. It was released on April 27, 2004

SMS

Google SMS allows users to send text message queries from mobile phones to get information such as stock quotes, movie listings, and driving directions. It was released on October 7, 2004

Special Searches

Google Special Searches allows users to perform special searches such as U.S. Goverment Search, Linux Search, BSD Search, Apple Macintosh Search, and Microsoft Windows Search

Spreadsheets

Google Spreadsheets allows the creation and editing of spreadsheets online, as well as real-time chat collaboration and editing. It was released on June 6, 2006 on a 'limited test basis'. Users were granted access on a first-come, first-serve basis after requesting to sign up

Store

Google Store sells a range of physical Google-branded products. These include clothes, toys, office equipment and lava lamps

Suggest

Google Suggest uses auto-complete while typing to give popular searches. It is still in beta stage

Talk

Google Talk is a windows application for VoIP and instant messaging. Google Talk beta was released on August 24, 2005. It consists of both a service and a client used to connect to the service. It is integrated with Gmail

Toolbar

Google Toolbar is an internet browser toolbar available for Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox (with slightly different features). The two versions together include: a Google search box (for different Google sites, the current site, or other added sites), phishing protection, feed subscription, spellcheck, autolink, autofill, translator, pagerank display, address bar browse by name and pop-up blocker

Transit

Google Transit provides public transport trip planning through the Google maps interface. Google Transit was released on December 7, 2005, but only for the Portlans, Oregon area

Trends

Google Trends shows, as a graph, the popularity of particular search terms over time. Multiple terms can be shown at once. Results can also be displayed by city, region or language. Related news stories are also shown. The service was launched on May 10, 2006
University search

Google University search allows users to search within a large number of educational institution domains

Video

Google Videos allows users to search, buy, watch and upload videos. Users can also see stills and closed caption transcripts of some videos. Search is based on title, keywords, network and transcript. Google has signed agreements with CBS and the NBA to offer some programs online. The service was launched on January 25, 2005

Web Accelerator

Google Web Accelerator is a download that uses various strategies to increase the speed of browsing. It was released on may 4, 2005

Web API

The Google Web API (or Google Web Services) is Google's public interface for registered developers. Using Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), a programmer can write services for search and data mining that rely on Google's results. Also, users can view cached pages and make suggestions for better spelling.

Web Search

Google Search is an internet search engine. It was the company's first creation, coming out of beta on September 21, 1999, and remains by far their most popular and famous: it receives 200 million requests a day and is the largest search engine on the Internet. It uses a proprietary system (including Page Rank) to return the search results from its 8 billion Web Site index. A culture has grown around the search engine, and to google has come to mean, "to search for something on Google." When certain terms are used, Web Search automatically provides: calculations, conversions, definitions, movie information, music information, phonebook details, spellcheck, alternative terms, or weather information

Web Toolkit

Google Web Toolkit allows users to create AJAX interfaces for their websites. Google claimed it could be used to create similar interfaces to that of Gmail and Google Calendar. It was released on May 15, 2006.

Writely

Writely is an online word-processor. On March 9, 2006 Google acquired Upstartle, the maker of Writely. It is still in beta and is not available to new users

Zeitgeist

Google Zeitgeist is a collection of lists of the most frequent search queries. There are weekly, monthly and yearly lists, as well as topic and country specific lists.

Google

2006-08-05T03:43:00.000-07:00

Google Inc.is a U.S. public corporation, first incorporated as a privately held corporation in September, 1998, that designs and manages the Internet's most used search engine. The company employs approximately 8,000 employees and is based in Mountain View, California. Eric Schmidt, former chief executive officer of Novell, was named Google's CEO when co-founder Larry page stepped down. The name "Google" originated from a misspelling of "googol," which refers to 10¹⁰⁰ (a 1 followed by one-hundred zeros). Google has had a major impact on online culture. The verb "google" was recently added to both the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary, meaning "to use the Google search engine to obtain information on the Internet."

Google's services are run on several server farms, each consisting of thousands of low-cost commodity computers running stripped-down versions of Linux. While the company does not provide detailed information about its hardware, a 2006 estimate consisted of over 450,000 servers, racked up in clusters located in data centers around the world for more details on their technology).

According to the Nielsen cabinet, Google is the most popular search engine on the web with a 54% market share, ahead of Yahoo! (23%) and MSN (13%). It receives about a billion search requests per day, which are recorded and stored indefinitely "to improve its search engines

Beginning

Google began as a research project in January, 1996 by Larry Page and Sergery Brin, two Ph.D. students at Stanford University, California. They hypothesized that a search engine that analyzed the relationships between websites would produce better results than existing techniques (existing search engines at the time essentially ranked results according to how many times the search term appeared on a page). It was originally nicknamed "BackRub" because the system checked backlinks to estimate a site's importance. A small search engine called RankDex was already exploring a similar strategy.

Convinced that the pages with the most links to them from other highly relevant web pages must be the most relevant pages associated with the search, Page and Brin tested their thesis as part of their studies, and laid the foundation for their search engine. Originally the search engine used the Stanford University website with the domain google.stanford.edu. The domain google.com was registered on September 14, 1997, and the company was incorporated as Google Inc. on September 7, 1998 at a friend's garage in Menlo Park, CAlifornia. The total initial investment raised for the new company eventually amounted to almost US$1 million, including a $100,000 check by Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems.

In March, 1999, the company moved into offices at 165 University Avenue in Palo Alto, home to several other noted Silicon Valley technology startups. After quickly outgrowing two other sites, the company settled into their current home in a complex of buildings in Mountain View at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, in 2003. The complex has since become known as the Googleplex. Silicon Graphics leased the buildings to Google.

The Google search engine attracted a loyal following among the growing number of Internet users. They were attracted to its simple, uncluttered, clean design — a competitive advantage to attract users who did not wish to enter searches on web pages filled with visual distractions. This appearance, while imitating the early Alta Vista, had behind it Google's unique search capabilities. In 2000 Google began selling advertisements associated with search keywords. This strategy was important for increasing advertising revenue, which is based upon the number of hits users make upon ads. The ads were text-based in order to maintain an uncluttered page design and to maximize page loading speed. Keywords were sold based on a combination of price bid and clickthroughs, with bidding starting at $.05 per click. This model of selling keyword advertising was pioneered by Goto.com (later renamed Overture, then Yahoo! Search Marketing). While many of its dot-com rivals failed in the new Internet marketplace, Google quietly rose in stature while generating revenue.

U.S. Patent 6,285,999 describing Google's ranking mechanism (PageRank) was granted on Septemeber 4, 2001. The patent was officially assigned to Stanford University and lists Lawrence Page as the inventor.

Growth

With Google's increased size comes more competition from large mainstream technology companies. One such example is the rivalry between Microsoft and Google. Microsoft has been touting its MSN Search engine, and more recently its Windows live search in February, 2006, to counter Google's competitive position. Furthermore, the two companies are increasingly offering overlapping services, such as webmail (Gmail vs. Hotmail), search (both online and local desktop searching), and other applications (for example, Microsoft's Windows Live Local competes with Google Maps).

Click fraud has also become a growing problem for Google's business strategy. Google's CFO George Reyes said in a December 2004 investor conference that "something has to be done about this really, really quickly, because I think, potentially, it threatens our business model."Some have suggested that Google is not doing enough to combat click fraud. Jessie Stricchiola, president of Alchemist Media, called Google, "the most stubborn and the least willing to cooperate with advertisers," when it comes to click fraud.

While the company's primary market is in the web content arena, Google has also recently begun to experiment with other markets, such as radio and print publications. On january 17, 2006, Google announced that it had purchased the radio advertising company dMarc, which provides an automated system that allows companies to advertise on the radio. This will allow Google to combine two niche advertising media -- the Internet and radio -- with Google's ability to laser-focus on the tastes of consumers. Google has also begun an experiment in selling advertisements from its advertisers in offline newspapers and magazines, with select advertisements in the Chicago Sun-Times. They have been filling unsold space in the newspaper that would have normally been used for in-house advertisements. The company has also created other engines, such as Google Earth and Froogle.

Google was added to the Standar & Poor's 500 index (S&P 500) on March 31, 2006. Google replaced Burlington Resources, a major oil producer based in Houston which was acquired by ConocoPhilipps.

Criticism and controversy

As it has grown, Google has found itself the focus of various controversies related to its business practices and services. For example, Google Print's effort to digitize millions of books and make the full text searchable has led to copyright disputes with the Authors Guild, Google's cooperation with the governments of China, France and Germany to filter search results in accordance to regional laws and regulations has led to claims of censorship. Google's persistent cookie, and other information collection practices have led to concerns over user privacy . A number of governments have raised concerns about the security risks posed by geographic details provided by Google Earth's satellite imaging. Moreover, Google advertisers have filed several lawsuits against the company in 2006, claiming that up to 14-20% of the clicks on the bills were in fact fraudulent or invalid.

Products and services

Google's core business model revolves around its internet search engine, which also includes a tool to search for images, new stories, and peer-reviewed, academic publication. Froogle is a similar search engine that is geared towards searching online shopping websites for products based on price. Google Groups is a service that lets users search the complete archive of Usenet newsgroups, as well as hosting mailing lists and other discussion groups. In early 2006, the company also launched Google Video, which not only allows users to search and view freely available videos, but also offers various media publishers to offer their content for a fee, including television shows on CBS, NBA basketball games, and music videos. Videos offered via this service are protected using Google's own Digital rights management system.

Google Maps, also known as Google Local, provides road maps for the United States, Canada, the U.K, Ireland, and Japan. Medium-resolution satellite images are also available for the entire globe, and sister projects Google Moon and Google Mars provide satellite imagery of the Moon and Mars, respectively.

In 2004, Google and Keyhole provided Google Earth, a downloadable program that allows the user to zoom into nearly any spot on the earth, close enough to make out cars, and in some cases, people. The technology comes with hundreds of add-ons, like "Crime rate", to see the crime rate of the city you are zoomed in on, or "3D buildings", to create 3D models of the towers and buildings of larger cities. There are three available versions, "free edition", "plus", and "pro".

In 2004, Google launched its own free web-based email service, known as Gmail. Gmail features improved spam filtering technology, combined with the capability to use Google search technology on individual email messages. Gmail shook up the free, web-based email market by initially offering 1 GB of email storage, prompting competitors Yahoo! and Hotmail to increase their storage quotas considerably. Google has since expanded Gmail's mail quota (and continues to expand it); as of April, 2006, the quota was over 2.7 GB. The service generates revenue by displaying advertisements from the AdWords service that are tailored to the content of the email messages displayed on screen. This feature has proven controversial, with some privacy advocates expressing concern that the company was reading individual emails. Google maintains, however, that the process is fully automated and that no humans read the content of users' messages.

Google also branched into the instan messaging arena in August of 2005 by introducing Google Talk, a Jabber-based instant messaging service. Since February, 2006, Google Talk has been integrated with Gmail, allowing users to send instant messages directly from their email service, as well as to save and archive messages.

Google Desktop is a service that brings the search engine to the local computer desktop, allowing one to search individual files, folders, and emails that reside locally on one's own PC.

March 2006 saw the dawn of Google Page Creator, an easy to use, WYSIWYG webpage creator. The domains are currently limited only to individuals with a Gmail account, the users individual pages reside at http://username.googlepages.com

In April 2006, Google launched Google Calendar, a shared calendar application.

Salaries

Originally, typical salaries at Google were considered to be quite low by industry standards. For example, some system administrator earned no more than $ 33,000 — while $40,000 at that time was considered to be low for the Bay Area job market. Nevertheless, Google's excellent stock performance following the IPO has enabled these early employees to be competitively compensated by participation in the corporation's remarkable equity growth. In 2005, Google has implemented other employee incentives such as the Google Founders' Award, in addition to offering higher salaries to new employees. Google's workplace amenities, culture, global popularity, and strong brand recognition have also attracted potential applicants.

After the company's IPO in August 2004, it was reported that Founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, as well as CEO Eric Schmidt, have accepted a base salary of $1.00. They have all declined recent offers of bonuses and increases in compensation by Google's board of directors. In a 2006 report of the world's richest people, Forbes reported that Sergey Brin was #26 with a net worth of $12.9 Billion, and Larry Page was #27 with a net worth of $12.8 Billion.

Corporate culture

Google is particularly known for its relaxed corporate culture, reminiscent of the Dot-com boom. Google's corporate philosophy is based on many casual principles including, "You can make money without doing evil", "You can be serious without a suit" and, "Work should be challenging and the challenge should be fun." A complete list of corporate fundamentals is available on Google's website.The company encourages equality within corporate levels. Twice a week there is a roller hockey game in the company parking lot. Google's relaxed corporate culture can also be seen externally through their holiday variations of the Google Logo.

"Twenty percent" time

Every Google engineer is encouraged to spend 20 percent (20%) of their work time on projects that interest them. Some of Google's newer services, such as Gmail, google News and orkut, originated from these independent endeavors. In a talk at Stanford University, Marissa Mayer, Google's Vice President of Search Products and User Experience, stated that her analysis showed that half of new product launches originated from 20% time.

Googleplex

As a further play on Google's name, its headquarters, located in California, are referred to as "the Googleplex" — a googolplex being 1 followed by a googol of zeros, and the HQ being a complex of buildings (cf. multiplex, cineplex, etc). The lobby is decorated with a piano, lava lamps, and a real-time projection of current search queries. The hallways are full of exercise balls and bicycles. Each employee has access to the corporate recreation center. Recreational amenities are scattered throughout the campus, and include a workout room with weights and rowing machines, locker rooms, washers and dryers, a massage room, assorted video games, Football, a baby grand piano, a pool table, and ping pong. In addition to the rec room, there are snack rooms stocked with various cereals, gummy bears, toffee, licorice, cashews, yogurt, carrots, fresh fruit, and dozens of different drinks including fresh juice, soda, and make your own cappuccino.

April Fool's Day jokes

Google has a tradition of creating April Fool's day jokes such as Google Mentalplex, which featured the use of mental power to search the web. In 2002, they claimed that pigeons were the secret behind their growing search engine. In 2004, it featured Google Lunar, which featured jobs on the moon and in 2005, a fictious brain-boosting drink termed, Google Gulp was announced. In 2006 they came up with Google Romance. One can find other pranks hidden between Google's pages. Additionally, in the languages list one can find the bork! Bork! Bork! version, imitating the Muppet Show's Swedis Chef. They also offer versions in Pig Latin, Elmer Fudd, Hacker (H4X0R), and Klingon. Some people thought the announcement of Gmail in 2004 around April Fool's Day (as well as the doubling of Gmail's storage space to two gigabytes in 2005) was a joke. In 2005, featured on the Gmail homepage, was a comedic graph depicting Google's goal of "infinity plus one" GB of storage.

IPO and culture

Many people speculated that Google's IPO would inevitably lead to changes in the company's culture, because of shareholder pressure for employee benefit reductions and short-term advances, or because a large number of the company's employees would suddenly become millionaires on paper. In a report given to potential investors, co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page promised that the IPO would not change the company's culture. Later Mr. Page said, "We think a lot about how to maintain our culture and the fun elements."

As Google grows, many analysts are finding that the company is becoming more "corporate". In 2005, articles in the New York Times and other sources began suggesting that Google had lost its anti-corporate, no evil philosophy.

Google partnerships

On September 28, 2005, Google announced a long-term research partnership with NASA which would involve Google building a 1-million square foot R&D center at NASA's Ames Researche Center. NASA and Google are planning to work together on a variety of areas, including large-scale data management, massively distributed computing, bio-info-nano convergence, and encouragement of the entrepreneurial space industry. The new building would also include labs, offices, and housing for Google engineers.

Time Warner's AOL unit and Google unveiled an expanded partnership on December 21, 2005 including an enhanced global advertising partnership and a $1 Billion investment by Google for a 5% stake in AOL. As part of the collaboration, Google plans to work with AOL on video search and offer AOL's premium-video service within Google Video. This will allow users of Google Video to search for AOL's premium-video services. Display advertising throughout the Google network will also increase.

Additionally, Google has also recently formed a partnership with Sun Microsystems to help share and distribute each other's technologies. As part of the partnership Google will hire employees to help the open source office program OpenOffice.org.