Archive for May, 2010

Today, we're rolling out a few changes that will make the Google Merchant Center easier to use. We've simplified navigation between sections and we've merged the "Active" and "Inactive" product pages into one "Products" page. Additionally, we've added the ability to search for a specific product by product ID on this "Products" page, making it easy to zero in on any of your products. Lastly, we've made some minor stylistic and textual changes, like changing the term "Published" to the more descriptive "Searchable." Log in to your account to check out these changes, and ask any questions you have in the help forum.

Posted by Claudia Ciorascu, Software Engineer, Google Merchant Center

This Wednesday, May 26th at 5pm GMT, we’re hosting a live webinar to share some top tech tips with you.

To register for this webinar, please visit our Help Center.

The topics we’ll cover in this webinar are:

• How to determine which ad variations perform best for you
  
• How to use HTML/CCC to wrap text around ad units
  
• How to ensure your best-performing ad units are defined first in your ad code
  
• Using Google Analytics to better understand your users and make your ad implementations more effective
  
• Using Webmaster Tools to increase the index and rank of your site

Prior to the webinar, you can post your questions on our Google Moderator page and we'll address them during the webinar.

Posted by Caroline Halpin - AdSense Optimization team

Good add-ons are an important aspect of keeping IE running stable and fast. We made managing add-ons easier for users. We also made developing quality add-ons easier with clear guidelines and requirements for add-on developers.

When users can stay in control of their browser and their information, everyone is better off.   The IE guidelines and requirements are designed not only to aid in easier and faster development of add-ons but also to prioritize user control and protection of privacy.  As a result, when developers consistently follow the guidelines and requirements, users have a better experience.

Google recently released a new version of their Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer (and started their auto-updating process) with a few improvements worth noting:

• Pressing the toolbar close button now offers an option to disable the Google Toolbar permanently, not just hide it. Previous versions allowed users to hide the toolbar, but the toolbar code still ran. Selecting the close button option in the new version displays a close dialog for the Google Toolbar, which is consistent with the default toolbar disable experience in IE8.
• The Google Toolbar no longer modifies the IE new tab page, resulting in a predictable new tab experience for users.

Many thanks to the Google Toolbar team for their work here. We’re encouraged to see more add-on developers (following the Crawler Toolbar and AVG Security Toolbar) provide more predictable, reliable experiences for our shared customers. Developers contribute to a consistent and reliable experience in IE when they use only the supported, documented extensibility points.

- Marc Silbey and Herman Ng

Many website owners use Google Analytics and other web analytics tools to make business-critical decisions about how to improve their websites by understanding how users engage with their webpages. We’ve worked hard to make Google Analytics both a robust and reliable web analytics platform while also ensuring the trust and privacy of visitors of these websites. Today we’re taking additional steps to provide even more choice and transparency for both website owners and users.

First, we’re announcing the availability of the Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on. The opt-out provides users with a choice of whether information about website visits is collected by Google Analytics. The add-on stops data from being sent from your computer when you visit websites that use Google Analytics Javascript (ga.js) to track usage. The beta version of the opt-out that we are releasing today is available for Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome, and can be downloaded here: tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout.

Additionally, we’re also releasing new functionality for website owners to provide an additional level of privacy for visitors to their sites by offering an option to anonymize IP address information sent to Google. Google Analytics uses the IP address of website visitors to provide general geographic reporting. Website owners can now choose to have Google Analytics store and use only a portion of this IP address for geographic reports. Keep in mind, that using this functionality will somewhat reduce the accuracy of geographic data in your Analytics reports. You can learn how to implement this within your existing Google Analytics installation here: http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/gaJS/gaJSApi_gat.html

We’re committed to Google Analytics as an industry-leading web analytics platform that also provides users with transparency and choice when it comes to privacy.

Posted by Amy Chang, Director of Product Management, Google Analytics

The blog platform migration is now complete and the blog and comments are working as usual. If you notice any problems or want to comment on the new platform, please use this post to do so. Thanks for your patience. And now back your regularly scheduled programming...

The Sandbox Account Viewer is a sample application that demonstrates how to use the AdWords API client library to display contents of an AdWords sandbox account. It can be used to visualize the effects of a request on your account and to retrieve information such as IDs that are needed when running examples. We are sharing this code as open source to provide a starting point for new developers and to demonstrate some of the core functionality in the API.

The Sandbox Account Viewer does not attempt to replicate the official AdWords web interface, but rather displays information exactly as it is returned by the API. The objects in the account are displayed in a tree on the left, and when selected their details are displayed in a table to the right.



To get started, download the source code and open the project in Eclipse or your favorite Java IDE. Read through the README and javadoc comments to understand how the application works and use the Ant task "run" to launch it. We encourage you to modify the code and experiment with new functionality. If you develop a great feature let us know so we can upstream it in to the official source.

If you have Java enabled in your browser you can click here to launch a preview of the application. Bugs, feature requests, or contributions can be filed on the Java client library issue tracker and any questions can be posted to the AdWords API forum.

- Eric Koleda, AdWords API Team

Posted by Mihai Parparita, Software Engineer

Springtime is a great opportunity to clean up, take care of loose ends, and generally spruce things up. Since we still have a few weeks of spring left, the Reader team is taking this opportunity to clean things up a bit.

Simplifying comments

Ever since we launched support for comments on shared items, one of the most frequent points of confusion has been "who can comment on my shared items?" (or rather, "why can't I comment on my friends' shared items?"). Up until now, someone had to be in a designated sharing group to be able to comment on a post, even if you were sharing publicly. To make things a lot simpler, we've made it so that if you can see a shared item, you can comment on it.

For those of you who are sharing publicly, the next time you log in to Reader you'll get a choice between continuing to share publicly and allowing anyone to comment on your shared items, or switching to protected sharing:

Nothing will change for users who already had their shared items protected, since visibility and commenting for their shared items was already consistent. Keep in mind that you can always update who can view and comment on your shared items on the sharing settings page.

Phasing out support for older browsers

Reader is joining Docs (and many other sites) in removing support for older browsers, notably Internet Explorer 6, Firefox 1.0 and 2.0, Safari 2.0 and 3.0, and Chrome 1.0, 2.0. and 3.0. Reader is a cutting edge web application, and this will allow us to spend our time improving Reader instead of fixing issues with antiquated browsers. Starting on June 1, users of older browsers will begin to see a notification encouraging them to upgrade to any of Reader’s supported browsers.

Discontinuing offline access via Gears

We launched offline support three years ago, but only a minority of Reader users actively use it today. Because supporting offline access requires a large ongoing engineering effort, and because Gears itself is being surpassed by HTML5, we've decided to remove offline support in Reader starting on June 1.

Of course, we know that offline access is important to some of you, and with the wide range of third party clients that sync with Google Reader, you don’t need to give it up. Depending on your operating system, we recommend taking a look at:

• NetNewsWire (Mac OS X)
• FeedDemon (Windows)
• Liferea (Linux)

Each of these alternatives will sync your subscriptions and read state with Reader, and continue to provide offline access to your feeds. For more information, please see our help center.

We realize that removing features and support is not easy, but with this spring cleaning done, we've laid the groundwork for more Reader improvements down the line. We apologize for any inconvenience, and if you have any questions please head over to our forum, or message us on Twitter.

Some of you are likely familiar with our Related Searches offering, where we provide suggestions that are related to your current query. In Related Searches we offer you suggestions that help you further narrow your topic or expand your topic and also include names (if any) that are related to your query. Say you are searching for blueberries, in Related Searches we provide suggestions such as blueberry health benefits, growing blueberries and also suggestions such as strawberries and blackberries.

 

Recently we launched Related Questions, a right rail section where we provide interesting questions that are related to your query.  They are an extension of  the Q&A strategy we announced in November and are designed to help you explore added dimensions of your query.

 

So how does it work?  We take your query terms and search through the questions that other users are asking us, questions that are being asked on the web and questions that are currently being discussed in the news. From these we select and render the most interesting and what we hope will be the most useful questions related to your query.

 

Say you start out asking us who is Obama’s supreme court nominee? We are going to answer your question by letting you know that it is Elena Kagan. Then, in Related Questions we will help you understand much more about the supreme court and also offer questions discussed in the news.

 

Related Questions

Who Selects the Supreme Court Justices

Who Was the First Chief Justice

Who Is the Chief Justice of Supreme 
Court Today

Who Is the President Pro Tempore of the 
Senate

Mcconnell: Is Kagan On Obama's Team?

Can Obama Save His Afghanistan Surge?

 

Or say your niece suddenly wants to know What Causes Waves and you come to Ask.com to get the right answer. Not only will you learn what causes waves you can learn about causes of tides, why the ocean is blue and even how icebergs are formed. Aren’t you glad you asked?

 

Related Questions

What Causes Tides

Why Is the Ocean Blue

Why Is the Ocean Salty

Why Do Waves Break on the Shore

What Is Salinity

How Are Icebergs Formed

 

What if you come to us for regular searches, say chocolate pudding? We give you questions related to it and also remind you of the calories for which you need to watch out.

 

Related Questions

Does Tapioca Pudding Contain 
Chocolate

How to Make Chocolate Pudding?

Who Invented Chocolate Pudding?

How to Make Chocolate Pudding Pie

How to Make Chocolate Pudding Cake

How Many Calories Are in Chocolate 
Pudding?

 

We look forward to answering your questions. Let us know what you think of this new feature.  

 

Kalpana Banerjee

Senior Product Manager

and

The Related Questions Development Team

 

Some of you are likely familiar with our Related Searches offering, where we provide suggestions that are related to your current query. In Related Searches we offer you suggestions that help you further narrow your topic or expand your topic and also include names (if any) that are related to your query. Say you are searching for blueberries, in Related Searches we provide suggestions such as blueberry health benefits, growing blueberries and also suggestions such as strawberries and blackberries.

 

Recently we launched Related Questions, a right rail section where we provide interesting questions that are related to your query.  They are an extension of  the Q&A strategy we announced in November and are designed to help you explore added dimensions of your query.

 

So how does it work?  We take your query terms and search through the questions that other users are asking us, questions that are being asked on the web and questions that are currently being discussed in the news. From these we select and render the most interesting and what we hope will be the most useful questions related to your query.

 

Say you start out asking us who is Obama’s supreme court nominee? We are going to answer your question by letting you know that it is Elena Kagan. Then, in Related Questions we will help you understand much more about the supreme court and also offer questions discussed in the news.

 

Related Questions

Who Selects the Supreme Court Justices

Who Was the First Chief Justice

Who Is the Chief Justice of Supreme 
Court Today

Who Is the President Pro Tempore of the 
Senate

Mcconnell: Is Kagan On Obama's Team?

Can Obama Save His Afghanistan Surge?

 

Or say your niece suddenly wants to know What Causes Waves and you come to Ask.com to get the right answer. Not only will you learn what causes waves you can learn about causes of tides, why the ocean is blue and even how icebergs are formed. Aren’t you glad you asked?

 

Related Questions

What Causes Tides

Why Is the Ocean Blue

Why Is the Ocean Salty

Why Do Waves Break on the Shore

What Is Salinity

How Are Icebergs Formed

 

What if you come to us for regular searches, say chocolate pudding? We give you questions related to it and also remind you of the calories for which you need to watch out.

 

Related Questions

Does Tapioca Pudding Contain 
Chocolate

How to Make Chocolate Pudding?

Who Invented Chocolate Pudding?

How to Make Chocolate Pudding Pie

How to Make Chocolate Pudding Cake

How Many Calories Are in Chocolate 
Pudding?

 

We look forward to answering your questions. Let us know what you think of this new feature.  

 

Kalpana Banerjee

Senior Product Manager

and

The Related Questions Development Team

 

Today, in the spirit of greater transparency with AdSense publishers, we’re sharing the revenue shares for our two main AdSense products — AdSense for content and AdSense for search.

As you may already know, AdSense is comprised of several products. The most popular are AdSense for content, which allows publishers to generate revenue from ads placed alongside web content, and AdSense for search, which allows publishers to place a custom Google search engine on their site and generate revenue from ads shown next to search results. Since AdSense for content and AdSense for search offer publishers different services, the revenue shared with publishers differs for each of these products.

AdSense for content publishers, who make up the vast majority of our AdSense publishers, earn a 68% revenue share worldwide. This means we pay 68% of the revenue that we collect from advertisers for AdSense for content ads that appear on your sites. The remaining portion that we keep reflects Google's costs for our continued investment in AdSense — including the development of new technologies, products and features that help maximize the earnings you generate from these ads. It also reflects the costs we incur in building products and features that enable our AdWords advertisers to serve ads on our AdSense partner sites. Since launching AdSense for content in 2003, this revenue share has never changed.

We pay our AdSense for search partners a 51% revenue share, worldwide, for the search ads that appear through their implementations. As with AdSense for content, the proportion of revenue that we keep reflects our costs, including the significant expense, research and development involved in building and enhancing our core search and AdWords technologies. The AdSense for search revenue share has remained the same since 2005, when we increased it.

We also offer additional AdSense products including AdSense for mobile applications, AdSense for feeds, and AdSense for games. We aren’t disclosing the revenue shares for these products at this time because they’re quickly evolving, and we're still learning about the costs associated with supporting them. Revenue shares for these products can vary from product to product since our costs in building and maintaining these products can vary significantly. Additionally, the revenue shares for AdSense for content and AdSense for search also can vary for major online publishers with whom we negotiate individual contracts.

Of course, we can’t guarantee that the revenue share will never change (our costs may change significantly, for example), but we don’t have any current plans to do so for any AdSense product. Over the next few months we’ll begin showing the revenue shares for AdSense for content and AdSense for search right in the AdSense interface.

We hope this additional transparency helps you gain more insight into your business partnership with Google. We believe our revenue share is very competitive, and the vast number of advertisers who compete to appear on AdSense sites helps to ensure that you’re earning the most from every ad impression. Additionally, when considering different monetization options, we encourage you to focus on the total revenue generated from your site, rather than just revenue share, which can be misleading. For example, you would receive $68 with AdSense for content for $100 worth of advertising that appeared on your site. If another ad network offers an 80% revenue share, but is only able to collect $50 from ads served on your site, you would earn $40. In this case, a higher revenue share wouldn’t make up for the lower revenue yield of the other ad network.

We’re continually working on helping you improve the returns from your site while giving you more control and insight into AdSense. For example, we continue to improve our technology so that we can deliver even better matched ads and attract even more advertisers to your websites. Additionally, we recently began providing more granular ways to find and review the ads on your site, as well as the ability to filter more ads by category. We’re also focused on finding other ways to make AdSense better for you. As you may remember, last December, we asked for your ideas and feedback on how we can make AdSense better. We received more than 600 suggestions and 35,000 votes, and we’ve been reviewing them all.

Keep an eye on this blog for updates about the new features we’re building to help you maximize your advertising revenues.

Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President, Product Management