YouTube and Checkout Non-profit programs

Google blog has announced YouTube and Checkout Non-profit programs.

YouTube unveiled its Non-Profit Program at the Clinton Global Initiative to help non-profit organizations more easily connect with the world's largest online video community. Online videos has emerged as a unique tool for demonstrating the needs of organization in a uniquely compelling fashion. Initially there are 13 participating organizations including American Cancer Society, Friends of the Earth, and YouthNoise.

Google Checkout for Non-profits offers the ability to collect & process donations. Checkout for Non-Profits can be implemented directly into a non profit site. Another major feature is that It offers supporters the satisfaction of knowing that 100 percent of their contributions will be sent to the non-profit, as Google has committed to processing donations through Checkout for free through at least the end of 2008.

More information available at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/09/youtube-and-checkout-for-non-profit.html

HAVE GOOGLE, YAHOO, MSN, MAMMA, ASK, ALLTHEWEB, WIKIPEDIA TOOLBAR IN ONE TOOLBAR

Yes, You can have all these toolbars in one toolbar i.e. Groowe Search toolbar.

Groowe Search toolbar bundles toolbar functions for many search engines, shopping sites, download sites, including Google toolbar, Yahoo, Amazon, EBay, Ask, Msn, Download.com, Wikipedia, Digg, del.icio.us and others. The entire toolbar reconfigures when you select a different site and it includes many advanced features found in each engine or site. You can also easily repeat your search on all sites included in toolbar.

Toolbar is available for Internet Explorer and Firefox.

More information available at http://www.groowe.com/

Google on Top again

Google has received 64% of all US searches in August 2007. Hitwise has announced that Google has accounted for 63.98% percent of all US searches in the four weeks ending September 1, 2007. Yahoo! Search, MSN Search and Ask.com each received 22.87%, 7.98% and 3.41% percent respectively. The remaining search engines encountered 1.68% of all search engines.

MSN Search percentage has gone down from last months 8.79% to 7.98% & Ask.com percentage has increased from 3.21% to 3.49%. Google & Yahoo are rock steady on the top.

More info available on Hitwise

Official DMOZ blog

Open Directory project has launched the official DMOZ blog. The blog will be the official source for information, insight, and updates about DMOZ, the Open Directory Project (ODP).

The blog will be used by them for:

- Provide authentic messages about DMOZ and the efforts of our volunteer community.
- Highlight enhancements, both current and future.
- Allow editors to showcase their categories and describe, in their own words, why DMOZ is so important.
- Recruit new editors

Additionally they also want to use the blog to get the feedback from the community as what they think about DMOZ, is there anythin which they want to get fixed etc. etc.

More information available at http://blog.dmoz.org/

New Adwords feature

Google Adwords blog has announced that they have launched a new Adwords feature: the Conversion Optimizer beta. This feature will automatically manage bids according to a maximum CPA goal. Maximum cost-per-acquisition (CPA) bid is the amount advertiser is willing to pay for a conversion. With this feature the process of monitoring and adjusting cost-per-click (CPC) bids in order to get more conversions for a lower cost is automated. You simply specify a maximum cost-per-acquisition (CPA) bid for each ad group. The Conversion Optimizer manages your CPC bids for you, making adjustments and showing your ads only when you're likely to get conversions.

More information is available on Adwords Blog

Microsoft in Talks to Buy Facebook Stake

Microsoft is in talks to buy 5% stake in Facebook, putting the valuation of Facebook at $10 billion or higher according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

The articles also states that Google has also expressed strong interest in a Facebook stake which can lead Microsoft to another battle with Google.

More information about this is available on The Wall Street Journal.

Google Search trends are now updated daily

Google blog announced that Google Trends will now be updated daily with the latest information. Before that it was updated only once a month. In addition to that they have also created a feed for Hot trends. Hot trends can give you information about the fastest rising search queries are on Google.

Emoticon search :)

Ask.com blog reveled that they have started emoticons search. You can simply search for most popular emoticons by simply entering the characters into a search box. Each result appears as a Smart Answer at the top of a results page, containing a definition of what the emoticon stands for..

They have also given few examples of what people can search for:

:-)

:-(

;)

X(

:-O

Smiley -:) is 25 years old

Happy Birthday Smiley -:) ...

25 years ago, the first email message with a smiley emoticon :-) was sent by Carnegie Mellon Computer Science Professor Scott E. Fahlman.

Now Internet is changing and text is not the only way to communicate online, emoticons have become an essential part of communicating online. We are using them into e-mails, message board posts, and instant messages.

More information is available on News.com

Google Gadget Ads

Google has introduced Google Gadget Ads. This enable individual advertisers and agencies to create ads using maps, images, audio, video, Flash, HTML or JavaScript. The ads can reach Internet users in more than 20 languages and over 100 countries. Advertisers will be able to choose between cost-per-click and cost-per-impression pricing models as well as target their ads based on site context, domain, geography and demographics.

http://www.google.com/adwords/gadgetads/

Windows Live Translator

Microsoft has launched Windows Live Translator. It can translate from English to German, French, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, Korean etc. You can translate up to 500 words.

http://windowslivetranslator.com/

http://translator.live.com/

Eleven Tips For Optimizing PDFs For Search Engines

Strictly Business - A Column From Search Engine Land The SEO purist may argue why anyone would ever want to use PDF content on a website for search purposes. The reality, however, is that many businesses have a lot of PDF assets. These may include sell sheets, brochures, white papers, technical briefs, etc. The purist simply says why not convert these to html? In the real world, not everyone has the time, budget, and expertise to do that. There may also be other “marketing” reasons. Perhaps a company wants its prospects to experience the content along with all the other brand elements inherent in its print materials. Whatever the reason, there are lots of PDFs available on the web, and you can optimize PDFs to get high-ranking search results. Here are some tips on the right way to do it.

1. Make sure your PDFs are text based. Okay, this first one is pretty obvious. However, we still find companies whose materials were designed in an image-based program. When the PDF is made using these programs, the PDF is an image; there is no text for the search engines to read.

2. Complete the document properties. It seems like the vast majority of PDFs are without specified document properties, the most important of which is the Title. The Title property, if present, almost invariably represents the words that will be displayed as the heading of the search result. It’s the equivalent of the html title tag. If you don’t complete the Title property, the search engine is going to generate a title from the PDF’s content, and it may not be what you would choose. We’ve all seen some pretty goofy looking titles to search results associated with PDFs. Not only do they look ridiculous, but they probably won’t get clicked. In the full version of Acrobat, go to File>Document Properties to specify the Title.

There are other document properties (meta data) you can supply, including Author, Subject, and Keywords, but presently these appear to have little search-related affect. It would be nice if Subject acted as the meta description to be displayed under the heading of the search result, but I haven’t seen this to be true. For now, however, I’d complete the Subject property as if it were a meta description. Perhaps in the future search engines will treat it as such.

3. Optimize the copy. Copy in text-based PDFs is no different than web-page copy. Optimize it.

4. Build links into PDFs. Make sure you include links in your PDFs, and pay attention to the anchor text used. Search engines do recognize these links. Not very often, but sometimes you’ll find backlinks in PDFs. Their limited occurrence, however, is likely related to the fact that most people don’t put links into PDFs; most people treat PDFs as static print documents. In addition to including links in PDFs for search-related purposes, there’s also a good business reason. Often, PDFs are passed along to others via email. Accordingly, a reader may be viewing the PDF in isolation (i.e., not associated with your website.) By placing links into PDFs, you give these readers an easy way to click back into your site, where you can further influence them.

5. Pay attention to the version. While search engines do “read” and index PDFs, search engines’ capabilities tend to lag new versions of Acrobat. Although Acrobat 8 is out, for now you should save your PDFs as version 1.6 (Acrobat 7) or lower to ensure search engines can index the content.

Not only is saving PDFs at a lower version good for the search engines, it’s also good for users. Not everyone has the latest versions of Acrobat Reader. Accordingly, I’d recommend saving PDFs as version 1.5 or lower. This way it will be good for search engines and most readers.

6. Optimize the file size for search. Don’t post a huge PDF for download. Not only is this annoying and unnecessary for site visitors, it’s also burdensome for the search engines. If it’s too big, the search engines may abandon the PDF before even getting access to its content. Using the full version of Acrobat, select Advanced>PDF Optimizer to “right-size” the document.

You may also want to enable the "Optimize for Fast Web View" option in the Preferences>General Settings panel. This allows the PDF to be “loaded” a page at a time, rather than waiting for the whole PDF to download.

7. Pay attention to placement. If you bury links to PDFs deep within your site’s file structure, they’re less likely to get indexed. If you want to use PDFs for high-ranking search results, links to those PDFs should be on web pages closer to the root level of the site’s file structure.

8. Influence meta descriptions for PDFs. For web pages, the meta description is what is displayed under the title in a search result. With PDFs, the search engines search the copy of the PDF and select something to display. While with PDFs you have less control of what is displayed as the description to the search result, you can still influence this. The best way to do this is to make sure that you have a good, optimized sentence or two near the start of your PDF. If these sentences correspond to the search term used, it’s likely that these sentences are the ones that will be displayed as the description under the search result’s heading.

9. Specify the reading order. As noted above, search engines search the copy of the PDF and select something to display as a description under the search result’s heading. Depending on how the reading order of your PDF is specified, this may lead the search engine to select some pretty strange stuff to display.

Every PDF has a reading order. Similar to properly optimized web pages, you want to make sure that valuable content is read first. How do you know the reading order? With the PDF open and while using the full version of Acrobat, select Advanced>Accessibility>Add Tags to Document. Then select Advanced>Accessibility>Touch Up Reading Order. Then the reading order of the PDF will be displayed.

10. Tag your PDFs You can also add tags to your PDFs, similar to html tags. Again, with the PDF open and while using the full version of Acrobat, select Advanced>Accessibility>Add Tags to Document. Acrobat will give you a document report and recommend things you may want to consider changing. You’ll have the ability to tag headings, alternate text for images, etc.

11. Pay attention. Every time you open a PDF, make even a small change, and save it once again, major unseen things may change. The reading order may change automatically. You may inadvertently save it as a higher version. It may get saved using the default size setting instead of a properly optimized size. If you’re going to further optimize existing PDFs, may sure you check all of these things before posting a new version of the PDF.

http://searchengineland.com/070912-095906.php

Google Docs new presentation feature

Google has launched Presentation, a tool for making presentations, much like Microsoft’s PowerPoint or Apple’s Keynote. Google Presentation is part of Google Docs, a suite of tools that was previously called Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

The new presentations feature of Google Docs helps a user to easily organize, share, present, and collaborate on presentations, using only a web browser.

You can import your existing presentations or you can create new presentations using new slide editor. Presentations can be edited, shared & published using the Google Docs interface. Presentation feature is available in 25 languages. Participants can get connected via Google talk, when the presenter is presenting the presentation, to chat about the presentation as they are watching.

More information available at: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/09/our-feature-presentation.html