Month: December 2004

Google Launches Revamped E-Mail Groups

The new Google Groups which has been available as a Google Labs test since May, brings the search giant the type of community feature that has been a fixture for such competitors as Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp.’s MSN division.

For its e-mail list service, Google is emphasizing its combination of user-formed groups with Usenet and its search functionality.

Google Guy promises he wont take any action based on spam reports,

Google Guy promises not to take action based on spam reports, I’ll promise that no spam-related action will be taken based on the reports. If months later, the domain comes up for review for an unrelated reason, then that’s a different matter, but I’ll instruct whoever collects the feedback to only use it to check out how we pick canonical pages.

Click Fraud Biggest Threat to Internet Economy

Biggest Threat to Internet Economy So says Google’s chief financial officer, and he ought to know.Google CFO George Reyes, speaking at an investor conference sponsored by Credit Suisse First Boston, said that click fraud could potentially threaten his company’s whole business model. By extension, click fraud threatens Yahoo!, eBay, and other firms that depend on revenue from cost-per-click advertising. What happens in click fraud is that scam sites set up for the sole purpose of hosting ad links, then either humans or software click on those ad links to steal revenue. Some observers estimate that click fraud may be responsible for as much as 20 percent of all clicks on paid search ads. Reyes said that click fraud costs his company and others who depend on this type of paid advertising “tons of money.” It could seriously spoil things for the rest of us.

Rumour posting by a search engine watch forum user

Recently when i was going through the searchenginewatch.com forum, I came accross this thread, forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=3054, the guy who started this thread says he got a mail from google saying the toolbar pagerank display is for entertainment purpose only, this is what he posted,
“The PageRank that is displayed in the Google Toolbar is forentertainment purposes only. Due to repeated attempts by hackers toaccess this data, Google updates the PageRank data very infrequentlybecause is it not secure. On average, the PR that is displayed in theGoogle Toolbar is several months old. If the toolbar is showing a PR ofzero, this is because the user is visiting a new URL that hasn’t beenupdated in the last update. The PR that is displayed by the GoogleToolbar is not the same PR that is used to rank the webpage results sothere is no need to be concerned if your PR is displayed as zero. If asite is showing up in the search results, it doesn’t not have a real PRof zero, the Toolbar is just out of date”

In my opinion what he says is complete false statement, He just wants to spread some rumour and that is what he is doing here, I alert people not to listen to fake postings in forums, Google will never every say such a thing pubilically even if that is true, Red alert

Google’s new research center in tokyo, Google opens research centre in tokyo

Google seem to be expanding all over the world, They seem to start datacenters everywhere , Now they have opend an R&D center in Tokyo, Check this information,The centre’s role in Google’s global R&D network is yet to be defined and will be shaped by the people who are hired to work there, said Howard Gobioff, the centre’s engineering director and principal engineer.

Gobioff is one of two engineers currently working at the centre, and said their first job
is to recruit additional members. Three people have already been found although
none have started work yet.
Engineers accepted by Google can look forward to working on both company-assigned projects and in areas of their choosing under a system that encourages engineers to spend up to 20% of their time pursuing projects of interest to them. The projects do not need to be approved by the company but Google asks that they are in some way relevant to its
business.

Google Adwords account disabled

Recently I came across a posting in webmasterworld.com saying a guys account has been disabled due to some sort of bad tactics, This is what that guy posted in the forum

I have had an adsense account for just about 8 months now. My earnings were
moderate as my site doesnt get a whole lot of traffic. This past weekend i was
away visiting family and when i got back and logged into my account, I found
that it had been disabled due to fraudulant clicks.

I checked my server logs
to see if there was anything unusual or out of the ordinary, and i couldnt find
anything. The last time i had checked my adsense earnings prior to leaving for
the weekend, there hadnt been any spikes in impressions, clicks, CTR or
anything. Everything seemed pretty normal.

I replied to Google explaining my
findings and to find out what I could do to rectify the situation so that I dont
lose my account. I never did recieve any warnings from Google that there was a
fraudulant click being generated, and I assume that the fraudulant clicks they
discovered had to have happened over the weekend. But all i recieved back was
another automated response explaining that my account will remain disabled due
to fraudulant clicks. Is there anything I can do at this point? Or am I just out
of luck. I would greatly appreciate anyone’s insight.
P.S. Im pretty sure i
dont have any enemies or competitors that would do something like this, and i
dont have any friends, partners, etc that visit my site or would fraudulantly
click on the ads.

Amazing facts about Google,

Over four billion Web pages, each an average of 10KB, all fully indexed.Up to 2,000 PCs in a cluster.Over 30 clusters.104 interface languages including Klingon and Tagalog.

One petabyte of data in a cluster- so much that hard disk error rates of 10-15 begin to be a real issue.Sustained transfer rates of 2Gbps in a cluster.An expectation that two machines will fail every day in each of the larger clusters. No complete system failure since February 2000. It is one of the largest computing projects
on the planet, arguably employing more computers than any other single, fully
managed system (we’re not counting distributed computing projects here), some
200 computer science PhDs, and 600 other computer scientists.

Google’s English News channel inaccessible in China for more than a week

Google news seem to blocked in china, Dont know the exact reason but this posting will help,
The English version of Google’s news service has been inaccessible in China
for more than a week. Zhang Junwei, a Google Media official stationed in
Beijing, acknowledged that the company’s English News channel was inaccessible
when contacted by Interfax, but could not provide further comment.

The Google English News channel, which monitors more than 4,500 online news outlets,
has become a popular resource for Chinese netizens searching for information
from around the world. As Interfax previously reported, the Chinese government
blocked Google’s News channel in September of 2002.

Although Google’s English News channel is presently inaccessible in China, the search engine’s
Chinese language News channel was up and running as normal. Google’s Chinese
Language News channel does not display results from websites banned by the
Chinese government.

As of November 29, Interfax was still unable to access
the home page of Google’s English News through normal IP services, but was able
to visit the site through proxy servers, suggesting that it may have been
blocked by the authorities.
.