Archive for September, 2010

A year ago, we launched the Bid Simulator, a feature that allows you to see how different keyword-level bids may have impacted your advertising results. Using data from the past seven days, the bid simulator re-calculates the number of clicks and impressions your ad could have received with different maximum CPC bids.

by Claudine Zap

Yabba dabba doo! "The Flintstones" are 50. Back in the Stone Age of television, there was "The Flintstones," the cartoon family show set in the Stone Age. Sort of. (More on that in a moment.)

The first episode aired back on September 30, 1960. That's right, 50 years ago, Fred, wife Wilma, and daughter Pebbles made their debut along with neighbors Barney, Betty, and Bamm-Bamm Rubble in their caveman subdivision in Bedrock.

The show, originally called "The Gladstones," was basically an animated version of "The Honeymooners." But there was a twist: The wacky inventions gave the comedy, which was set way back, all the conveniences of modern life.

The Flintstones have a car, it's just foot-powered. Fred Flintstone's construction work is assisted with a dinosaur-operated crane. Betty and Wilma get help with housework from an octopus dishwasher. A record player is powered by a bird's beak. It's life in the suburbs, shared with dinosaurs and wooly mamouths. The husbands even duck out of the opera with their wives to go bowling. But hey, what do you expect? They're cavemen!

Like other cartoon families, the Flintstones will forever be stuck in 10,000 BC. But what if they aged? Here, the real ages of our favorite cartoon characters.

Pebbles Flintstone and Bamm-Bamm Rubble. If you're counting by Flintstone years, Bamm-Bamm and Pebbles, roughly the same infant age, would technically be about 12,010, since the show was supposed to take place around 10,000 BC. For the sake of the show's age, we will call Bamm-Bamm 51 and Pebbles a youthful 50.

Bart Simpson. The perpetual bad-boy -- introduced on the sitcom "The Simpsons" in 1989 as a delinquent 10-year-old -- would now be in his early 30s.

Charlie Brown. The balding pessimist aged throughout the time of the "Peanuts" comic strip: But he was first introduced at the tender age of 4 in 1950. If he had continued on his miserable life at the original age, he'd be 64.

Judy Jetson. The daughter of the space-age family in "The Jetsons" was just 16. The show ended in 1963, which would make Judy a mature 63.

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It is Tech Thursday and, with a bit of delay, here are the links we considered interesting today.

• Dav Glass of the YUI team is blowing your mind with server-side widget rendering with YUI3 and node.js
• Don't wait for people to find your tweets — apparently retweets only happen in the first hour
• The voice of Kibera shows the power of Openstreetmap and SMS collation to tell the world about an hitherto unknown part of the world
• Play International Karate in your browser
• There quite a huge thread on hacker news of people giving up on building Facebook apps for clients - maybe a docs overhaul is needed
• The BBC have an in-depth explanation how BBC Zeitgeist works which shows the use of the Twitter streaming API
• Erkie allows you to shoot parts of any web site with an "Asteroids" ship done in Canvas - add the bookmarklet and show the web who is boss
• Dan Catt of the Guardian (and Flickr fame) has a great write-up on website redesigns and scaling issues with social elements.
• ThinkUp is a great tool to archive and analyse your social media use (yes, Twitter and Facebook)
• Krishna Kumar collected some interesting Characteristics of great programmers
• Chris Shiflett has a simple introduction to using Twitter oAuth
• A list of words blacklisted by Google instant – yes, they all are naughty
• The Bespin bookmarklet turns any textarea into a code editor
• A list of all the HTML5 Cross-Browser polyfills

Last week, in the first half of our series designed to help you better understand your earnings, we introduced you to the ad auction for AdSense for content. To recap, eligible ads compete to appear on your pages; our ad auction determines which ads show, and how much you can potentially earn from them.

Now, let’s talk about smart pricing, a tool designed to help advertisers bid efficiently and effectively on many publishers’ ad auctions at once. Our Chief Economist, Hal Varian, explains the purpose of smart pricing, how it plays a role in the ad auction, and how it benefits the entire advertising ecosystem of publishers, advertisers, and users.

Although we aren’t able to provide detailed explanations of our algorithms, we’d like to address a common misconception and show that smart pricing isn’t intended to be a ‘punishment’ for publishers. It’s designed to increase advertiser confidence in AdSense sites by helping them set more accurate bids that reflect the business results they’re looking for. This then allows advertisers to increase their maximum bids, which ultimately helps publishers earn more in the long run.

We’ll let Hal explain the concept of smart pricing in more detail:




Finally, we’d like to take a moment to address some of the questions we’ve received about the relationship between smart pricing and the AdSense for content revenue share. Smart pricing can impact which ad wins an auction for a particular content page. However, since the revenue share is fixed for all publishers, smart pricing doesn’t impact the percentage you actually earn for a valid click. Any changes to advertiser bids as a result of smart pricing will proportionately affect the amount both Google and the publisher earn.

Thanks for following our two-part earnings series. We hope you found the content useful, and that you now have a better understanding of the factors that influence your earnings.

Posted by Arlene Lee - Inside AdSense Team

(Cross-posted with the Google Lat Long Blog)

Every day, tens of thousands of people switch from Microsoft Outlook® and other client-based software to Google Apps. To make the transition as smooth as possible, we thought we’d share some tips on using Gmail.

Embrace conversations
Emails rarely come just one at a time; they’re usually part of a larger exchange. Gmail helps you manage messages more efficiently by grouping related emails into conversations. Conversations are a collection of messages with the same subject line and other similarities. When you click to read a conversation, you'll see all of the back-and-forth email responses that happen over the course of the entire email conversation.

This makes it easier to follow the full context of a conversation, and keeps your inbox less cluttered and more organized. If you prefer a more traditional view of your Inbox, you can always turn off Conversation view so that all emails arrive individually.


Forget delete, and archive your way to “Inbox Zero”
The average corporate inbox is only 300MB, which means too many people are forced to spend way too much time managing their inbox -- deciding which email to keep, and deleting the rest. With 25GB of storage, you probably won’t ever need to delete an email again because of storage limitations. And if you thrive on clearing your inbox, simply archive your emails to clear the clutter. They’re still fully searchable in an instant!

Search to sort
You may be accustomed to sorting email to find saved messages, which is a pretty limited way to find information because you usually know what you’re looking for. Gmail uses the power of search to help you quickly find what you want. You can even use advanced search operators to search by sender, date, attachment or a variety of other attributes. Try it and you'll find some of the qualities that Google.com is known for: great accuracy and really fast search results. Search is particularly more effective than sorting when you’re looking through multiple gigabytes of email!


Labels instead of folders
While you won't find folders in Gmail, labels give you even more flexibility to organize your email. You can’t put an email into multiple folders, but you can apply multiple labels to the same message, which makes it easy to manage information that may fall into more than one category.


By clicking on a label, you can view a chronological list of all conversations that have been tagged with that label. And you can even organize labels hierarchically, using the “Nested Labels” lab. (Your administrator needs to have enabled Labs for you to access them.)

Work offline
These days you’re probably almost always connected to the Internet. But in those increasingly rare moments when you’re not, you can still access Gmail. When you’re offline, you can work in your browser to compose messages, search, organize mail, and do all of the things you're used to doing while accessing your email online. Any messages you send while offline will be placed in your outbox and automatically sent the next time Gmail detects a connection. To enable offline Gmail, go to the ‘offline’ tab in Settings, select ‘Enable’ and then save changes.

New features
As a web application, Gmail can be updated and improved without the trouble of purchasing, downloading and installing updates. This means Gmail will continually offer new functionality to help you be even more productive, like Priority Inbox, integrated voice and video chat, and labs such as Apps Search and Desktop Notifications. To stay current on new features, we encourage you to subscribe to our RSS feed for updates to the Google Apps suite.

We hope you enjoy the experience we offer -- we believe that ultimately, a fully-searchable, delete-nothing inbox makes for happy, productive people. But if you’re still not quite ready to use Gmail’s web interface, you can keep using Outlook or other clients of your choice. For more tips, check out our detailed transition documentation, and let us know what else we can do to make your move to Gmail easier in the comments below.

Posted by Rajen Sheth, Google Apps Product Manager

Posted by Jakob Uszkoreit, Ingeniarius Programmandi

Ut munimenta linguarum convellamus et scientiam mundi patentem utilemque faciamus, instrumenta convertendi multarum nationum linguas creavimus. Hodie nuntiamus primum instrumentum convertendi linguam qua nulli nativi nunc utuntur: Latinam. Cum pauci cotidie Latine loquantur, quotannis amplius centum milia discipuli Americani Domesticam Latinam Probationem suscipiunt. Praeterea plures ex omnibus mundi populis Latinae student.

Hoc instrumentum convertendi Latinam rare usurum ut convertat nuntios electronicos vel epigrammata effigierum YouTubis intellegemus. Multi autem vetusti libri de philosophia, de physicis, et de mathematica lingua Latina scripti sunt. Libri enim vero multi milia in Libris Googlis sunt qui praeclaros locos Latinos habent.

Convertere instrumentis computatoriis ex Latina difficile est et intellegamus grammatica nostra non sine culpa esse. Autem Latina singularis est quia plurimi libri lingua Latina iampridem scripti erant et pauci novi posthac erunt. Multi in alias linguas conversi sunt et his conversis utamur ut nostra instrumenta convertendi edoceamus. Cum hoc instrumentum facile convertat libros similes his ex quibus edidicit, nostra virtus convertendi libros celebratos (ut Commentarios de Bello Gallico Caesaris) iam bona est.

Proximo tempore locum Latinum invenies vel auxilio tibi opus eris cum litteris Latinis, conare hunc.

Update on 10/1/2010: Confused? Learn more on the Google Translate Blog.

Ut munimenta linguarum convellamus et scientiam mundi patentem utilemque faciamus, instrumenta convertendi multarum nationum linguas creavimus. Hodie nuntiamus primum instrumentum convertendi linguam qua nulli nativi nunc utuntur: Latinam. Cum pauci cotidie Latine loquantur, quotannis amplius centum milia discipuli Americani Domesticam Latinam Probationem suscipiunt. Praeterea plures ex omnibus mundi populis Latinae student.

Hoc instrumentum convertendi Latinam rare usurum ut convertat nuntios electronicos vel epigrammata effigierum YouTubis intellegamus. Multi autem vetusti libri de philosophia, de physicis et de mathematica lingua Latina scripti sunt. Libri enim vero multi milia in Libris Googlis sunt qui praeclaros locos Latinos habent.

Convertere instrumentis computatoriis ex Latina difficile est et intellegamus grammatica nostra non sine culpa esse. Autem Latina singularis est quia plurimi libri lingua Latina iampridem scripti erant et pauci novi posthac erunt. Multi in alias linguas conversi sunt et his conversis utamur ut nostra instrumenta convertendi edoceamus. Cum hoc instrumentum facile convertat libros similes his ex quibus edidicit, nostra virtus convertendi libros celebratos (ut Commentarios de Bello Gallico Caesaris) iam bona est.

Proximo tempore locum Latinum invenies vel auxilio tibi opus eris cum litteris Latinis, conare hunc.

Jakob Uszkoreit, Ingeniarius Programmandi

As a young kid, I drew a lot of dinosaurs. My dad would bring home reams of dot matrix printer paper from work, which I'd take, fold into stapled booklets, and then fill with dinosaurs doing what dinosaurs did—eating, leaping about, facing off in epic combat on top of spewing volcanoes. What I didn't know was that dinosaurs were also quite handy. A brontosaurus tail made an excellent water slide, you could walk up a row of plates on a stegosaurus' back like a flight of stairs and the triceratops’ horns were actually cutting-edge can openers. For these paleontological insights into Stone Aged innovation, I have the Flintstones to thank.

The Flintstones may have lived in the prehistoric town of Bedrock, but their technology was on par with much of what we use today. Everyone drove human-powered vehicles (zero emissions!), composted scraps in a dinosaur under the kitchen sink, and even wore solar powered watches—that is, if you count sundials. In short, Bedrock was the modern city of the past... and I wanted to live in it! Unfortunately, that didn’t quite pan out, but to be able to pay tribute to one of my favorite childhood TV shows in the form of a Google doodle is easily the next best thing.


On the 50th anniversary of its first airing, we gladly salute “The Flintstones” for inspiring our imaginations and encouraging us to think outside of the box, even if it means taking a look back now and then. I hope you’ll join the rest of us here at Google in a little nostalgia to mark this fun occasion!

Oh, and if you know any saber-toothed tigers looking for an internship as a hole puncher, give me a buzz.

Posted by Mike Dutton, Google Doodler

Our aim with Google Instant is to make search faster and easier, and this week we’re rolling out two enhancements to take that a step further. First, we’ve introduced keyboard navigation to help you explore your Instant search results using just your keyboard, with no need for a mouse or touchpad. We’re also making Instant available within many of the search features in the left panel of the results page including Videos, News, Books, Blogs, Updates and Discussions.

Check out our quick video to learn how to use these new features: