Archive for June, 2010

This is part of our summer series of new Search Stories. Look for the label Search Stories and subscribe to the series. -Ed.

When I first brought my dog Yoshka with me to work, I didn’t expect he would go on to become a part of our company history and help inspire our dog-friendly culture. At Google, any employee can bring their dog to work, and it’s rare that I reach my desk in the morning without seeing a pup or two on the way. All these dogs—my own and those I meet around campus—seem to possess that uncanny canine ability to bring a smile to my face. I hope this week’s Search Story, Dog, will do the same for you.



Visit www.youtube.com/searchstories to check out the whole collection, or to create your own story.


Posted by Urs Hoelzle, Senior Vice President, Operations & Google Fellow

Imagine you’re selling at a market or expo and want to take credit cards. Rather than hassle with cash, you can use the new Android Payment Extension for the Google Checkout Store Gadget on your laptop to allow Checkout customers to purchase from their phones.

This extension helps merchants quickly set up a store and accept payments via Google Checkout and Android by following the steps below:

1. Create a Google Checkout merchant account and configure your tax on the Settings Tab
2. Use the Google Checkout Store Gadget Wizard to generate a webstore template
3. Fill in the Google Spreadsheet with information about the items you wish to sell
4. Create a Google Sites page and follow the wizard to embed the Store Gadget
5. Install the Android Payment Chrome Extension

Once your customer tells you the items he or she wants to buy, you can create a cart with those items on your laptop. You then click the green Checkout with Android button and have the customer scan the QR code displayed with their phone. The QR code directs your customer to the buy page where they can complete their purchase.

While this payment method may not be perfect for all cases, we hope you find it useful for setting up a shop on the go and that it inspires further innovation in the mobile and payment developer communities.

Posted by Peng Ying, Google Checkout

Although its only been a few weeks since the previous release of the open source gadgets library for Google Web Toolkit (GWT), a major overhaul to the gwt-gadgets project has been underway and we are excited to announce that these changes are ready to be released as gwt-gadgets-1.2.0.

Gadgets allow a developer to create applications that can be embedded in another website. Sites that support gadgets include iGoogle, My Space, Orkut, Linked In or Google Wave. These sites all adhere to the Open Social Foundation specifications for gadgets and the Open Social API. This release incorporates the following features into the GWT bindings:

• Updates the API to make use of the gadgets.* JavaScript API namespace. Previously only the legacy gadgets API was supported.
• Adds OS Lite API (1.0) core support.
• Updates the Gadget RPC sample and provided a utility class to simplify use of GWT-RPC.
• Adds support for gadget Locale settings.
• HTML strict or quirks mode can be selected.
• Gadget manifest names can be generated with short or long format.
• Changes the Feature classes to interfaces to allow mocking for unit testing.
• Adds a new sample application with demonstrates the use of Open Social, OAuth, App Engine and the Maps API together in a gadget.

We would like to recognize Hilbrand Bouwkamp for helping update the GWT-RPC support in the library. Hilbrand is the author of cobogwave which adds Google Wave specific support for GWT based gadgets.

This new release is now available for download at Google Code

The Google API Library for GWT Team

We recently released a new version of our Google Chrome browser with Adobe Flash Player built in, automatically bringing you the latest and greatest updates. To celebrate, we teamed up with a few creative folks to make Chrome FastBall, a Flash-based game built for YouTube. Want to race?


Complete various games to get the shiny chrome ball to the finish line in the shortest possible time. (So far, the fastest time on the Chrome team is 1 minute, 20 seconds.)

Try your luck with Chrome FastBall, and if you haven’t taken Chrome for a test drive yet, download the newest stable release of the browser at google.com/chrome.

Update 7:20PM: All technical issues have been resolved now, so you can enjoy the game. Thanks for your patience!
Update 9:22AM: Due to the overwhelming response to the game, some things aren't quite working as we hoped due to server-side overloading. Please forgive the maintenance work as we get the game back up again. Thanks!

Posted by Jeff Chang, Product Manager

"Are my ads showing? If they aren't, why not?"

Whether you have ten keywords or ten thousand, making sure your ads are showing is a top priority. Now you can get detailed diagnostic information for multiple keywords at once by using a new keyword diagnosis option on the Keywords tab.

To get started, open the "More actions" menu on your Keywords tab (at the account, campaign, or ad group level) and select "Diagnose keywords."


On the keyword diagnosis menu, you have all the options available in the standalone Ads Diagnostic Tool. For example, if you're interested in seeing whether or not your ad is showing in a particular location, you can use the Location drop-down to narrow the scope of your diagnosis.


After clicking "Run test," you'll see the real-time results appear in the Status column next to each keyword. If all is well, you see "Ad showing." If not, you'll see a brief summary of the problem (for example, "Low bid or quality score"):



To get more details on a keyword's status, hover over any speech bubble icon. In the above example, viewing details for the keyword "meeting icebreakers" displays more information on the Quality Score issues that are preventing the ad from showing. To focus on one issue at a time, try creating filters for Keyword Status.

The next time your keywords need a check-up, try using keyword diagnosis -- it even makes house calls!

Posted by Miles Johnson, Inside AdWords crew

The Little Prince, Chapter 1 - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

If you are one of the millions of people that checks multiple social sites daily to stay on top of what’s going on, we have some fantastic news for you. Facebook, Twitter, and Yahoo! Updates have come to My Yahoo!.

Historically, My Yahoo! has been anti-social. It’s been your own personal sanctuary… your filter on the world… a place for your interests and passions devoid of any tweets and status updates or any likes and commenting. Until now.

If you use Facebook or Twitter, or want to find out what all the fuss is about, we have some really great apps for you. You can add the individual apps or add the Yahoo! Updates app which aggregates several social networks in one place with even more coming soon.

 

• Yahoo! Updates: Aggregate all your social networks in one place.
• Facebook: The best Facebook app out there.
• Twitter: Tweet directly from My Yahoo!. Search for trending topics.

 Michael,

– My Yahoo! Team Lead

At approximately 1:40pm Pacific Time today, we encountered an issue that prevented ads from being shown on Google.com and Search Partner sites.  Our engineering team has diagnosed the issue and is working hard to restore service. As of now, most of the service has been restored.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, and will update you with more details as soon as we've fully resolved the issue.

Posted by Miles Johnson, Inside AdWords crew

UPDATE 4:41pm PDT: We have fully resolved this issue. Again, we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. Our engineers are working to ensure that this type of issue doesn't occur again.

It’s the 10th Anniversary of Web Analytics TV! Happy Birthday to us!

In this exciting series, with Avinash Kaushik and Nick Mihailovski, you ask and vote on your favorite web analytics questions via our Google Moderator site for Web Analytics TV and we answer them.

Here is the list of last week’s questions.

In this action packed episode we discuss:

• Tracking un-subscriptions with negative values
• Best practices tracking social media
• Sources of keywords outside of Paid Search to help site optimization
• Custom reports sorted by date
• Tracking form validation with Google Analytics
• Why Exit Rate is 0% in the Google Analytics navigation summary report
• Tips to avoid sampling on landing pages
• Configuring Google Analytics to track test and production environments
• Comparing Google Analytics and Webmaster tools
• Best practices for tracking PDF downloads
• Getting the full referring URL in Google Analytics
• Sharing custom reports with advanced segments
• Best way to find keywords from mobile traffic
• Tracking dimensions over time in Google Analytics
• Tracking the impact of interactive TV

Here are the links to the topics we discuss:

• Best practices for creating custom alerts
• 4Q/Google Analytics survey integration
• Google Webmaster Tools
• Google Analytics Event Tracking Overview
• Obtaining the full referral url in Google Analytics
• Taking screenshots in OS X and Windows
• Migrating to Async Tracking
• Tracking Online impact of Offline campaigns

If you found this post helpful, we'd love to hear your comments, please share them via the comment form below.

If you have a question you would like us to answer, please submit a question and vote for your favorite question in our public Google Moderator site. Avinash and I will answer your latest questions in a couple of weeks with yet another entertaining video.

Thanks!

Posted By Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics Team

Posted by Diego Puppin, Engineer, and Brandon Badger, Product Manager