Archive for August, 2006

I buy gas. You buy gas. We all buy gas. Thus, today's highlighted videos will be useful for all of us. How Stuff Works enlightens us on why gas prices are high, how to be more fuel-efficient, and how spiffy hybrid cars work.

Today's Highlighted Videos






New videos appearing on the Google Video Movers & Shakers list for August 31, 2006:







Think you have an even cooler video? Upload it!

Take a look at your settings — you know, the link up in the top right corner of any page when you’re logged in. It’s not cryptic anymore! Your settings pages are where you have all kinds of interesting options: importing and exporting bookmarks, enabling private saving, managing tags, and more. The pages used to be a little secretive about which option did what, so I've completely revised them to be much friendlier. For example, did you know you can put a Creative Commons license on the RSS feeds for your bookmarks?

Sick of skyrocketing gas prices? Trying to save the planet? Whether your motivation is to spend less on fuel or give a big hug to Mother Nature, maybe the new Tesla Roadster is for you.The newest entry into the

It's hard to believe the month is already over. It seems like just yesterday when Mike Gutner first announced that August was Optimization Month. Since then, members of the AdSense optimization team and Googlers representing other products have shared their findings and best practices for how to optimize your AdSense earnings. We hope you've come through the month with an arsenal of insightful tips and tricks for optimizing not only your AdSense ads, but also your site content for your specific audience.

We'd like to leave you with the following:

1. Nothing warms the hearts of our team more than hearing success stories from AdSense publishers. Please tell us yours!
   
   
2. The road to enlightenment begins with the Optimization Tips page. If you haven't seen it yet or it's been awhile, be sure to check it out.
   
   
3. Teach a person to fish, and you feed them for a lifetime. The AdSense Help group is a great community to post optimization tips and swap best practices with other publishers.

August was Optimization Month, yes, but remember -- you can "Augtomize" any month of the year.

Posted by Carolyn Bang - AdSense Optimization Team

In the spirit of posting quick but useful tips, here's a question (paraphrased from a post in the AdWords Help community) that we'd like to answer:

The state of California, where my office is located, shows under my ad. Why is that there? I'm not sure I want it there, so how do I get rid of it?

Here is what's happening: When an advertiser has targeted a city or region in their campaign, the name of that city or region will show under their ad to users who are identified by the AdWords system as being located in that area. This tells the user that your product or service is especially relevant to them - and is intended to help you reach more qualified users.

What to do: If you'd prefer that your ad appear without a region name (while still reaching qualified users), you may want to consider running a country- and territory-targeted campaign with region-specific keywords and ad text, rather than a regionally targeted ad. More details may be found right here.

Posted by Blake, Inside AdWords crew

Last time I posted about search I talked about our new extensibility mechanisms: window.external.AddSearchProvider, and Search Discovery.  Today I’d like to talk about enhancements we made since that post, and point you to a tool that you can use to create your own custom providers.

To recap the last post: In Beta 2, window.external.AddSearchProvider gave website authors the ability to put a link on their page to prompt users to add a new search provider.  We locked this call down using logic similar to how we lock down pop-up windows to ensure it would not be abused by bad sites.

Since then we have added a few additional features.

window.external.IsSearchProviderInstalled

Since Beta 2 we received feedback that sites really do not want to show those links for the people who already have their providers installed: similar to how our homepage API works.  To make life better for site authors we introduced a new API: window.external.IsSearchProviderInstalled. A site author can use this API to see if their provider is already on the search provider list and also check to see if it is the default.

In order to protect your privacy we created this API in a way that sites can only ask about providers with the same top level domain.  For instance: site1.com can ask if any site1.com search provider is installed, but cannot ask if a site2.com provider is installed.  For more details on this API please check out the MSDN article.

OpenSearch Referrer Extension

In Beta 3 we did not have a good mechanism to tell search providers whether the query came from the search box or the address bar.  OpenSearch has an extension for this (the referrer extension) and RC1 supports it. 

Here's an example for the following OpenSearch URL:

<Url type="application/rss+xml"
     xmlns:referrer=http://a9.com/-/opensearch/extensions/referrer/"
     template="http://www.example.com/search?q={searchTerms}&amp;src={referrer:source?}"/>

If the query came from the address bar IE will replace "{referrer:source?}" with "IE-Address", and if it came from the search box we replace it with "IE-SearchBox" allowing search providers to track which IE 7 entrypoint their search came from.

Search Discovery Sound

If you recall from my previous post, Search Discovery is a feature web sites can use to ‘suggest’ search providers in your search provider dropdown.  When you navigate to a site that supports Search Discovery the search button dropdown will change color, and the discovered provider will appear within the dropdown.  Since we introduced this feature we have seen adoption on various sites around the web.  A great example of a site that recently started supporting Search Discovery is Yahoo! Tech.

In Beta 3 we did not have a fully accessible notification for Search Discovery; we only had the ability for the button to light up.  In RC1 we added the ability to set a sound for this action.  It is off by default, but you can set this sound where you set other windows sounds (the “Sounds and audio devices” properties from the Windows Control Panel).  From this properties dialog select the “Sounds” tab and add a sound to the “Search Provider Discovered” event within the “Program events” box.

Build your own provider

Shifting gears slightly, another piece of feedback that we’ve heard is that people would like to know how to add custom providers not necessarily shown on the Windows Search Guide.  We hope that eventually your favorite site will leverage Search Discovery or AddSearchProvider, but until then you can add a specific provider yourself using this tool.

Have fun, and keep browsing!

Aaron Sauvé
Program Manager

Edit: Added amp; to XML example