Search Enginges have become the portal to our internet world. They let you search any websites in reference to your inquiries, and give you the most likely results based on your searches. During the course of the years, search engines have become more and more crowded, with the many players entering the industry and the advancement in the internet technology. But, in terms of their results presentation and engine, have there been significant improvements? SearchMash (hopefully) aims to change that.

SearchMash is a web2.0 ajax based search engine that lets you search the internet in new ways. It is constantly evolving as it comes up with new ideas and figures out what works and what doesn’t. Currently SearchMash is still in development phase, and would likely to have more features in the future. Here are its features at the moment:

• Start Typing
  You don’t have to have your cursor in the search box to start typing your query.
• Streamlined Display
  Find the results you need faster, without having to wade through distracting links and text.
• Related Results Panel
  See results related to your search above the standard web results.
• Hide Details
  Click on “hide details” in the title bar to collapse the display of web or images results, allowing many more results to fit in view.
• More Results Bar
  Click the “more results” bar at the bottom of the page (or hit the space bar) to show more results, instantly

Now here’s the MOST interesting fact. Try to search the WhoIs entry for “searchmash.com“. You will find that Google owns that domain name (DNSStuff result HERE). Is SearchMash part of Google‘s big project to simplify the web? If it is, then SearchMash will likely be (yet again) the pioneer in the search engine industry. SearchMash has simple design and theme which reminds us of Google in the old days, and the search engine works pretty much the same way as before (only faster and more convenient). You can click on the Image tab to bring out the image search result, and similarly, you can click on the Blog, Video or the WikiPedia tabs to bring out their respective search results.

Overall, SearchMash does seem to bring the term “search engine” to a whole new level. Not only it is faster, but it also simplify how things are in terms of search results. Set on a simple light purple and white background, SearchMash focuses more on the how the search works, not how it looks. Be sure to see it in action and give us feedbacks on what you think is the future of the Search Engine!

Google Desktop has been updated several times during the past few weeks of November 2006. In case you have forgotten, Google Desktop is a desktop search application that provides full text search over your email, files, music, photos, chats, Gmail, web pages that you’ve viewed, and more. It doesn’t just help you search your computer; it also helps you gather new information from the web Sidebar and Google Gadgets, which can be placed anywhere on your desktop to show you new email, weather, stock information, photos, personalized news, RSS/Atom feeds, and more.

Here, we will be posting them within one post. Here are the new Google Desktop gadgets:

• NPR Now Playing – Are you a fan of NPR? Well, they’ve created a new gadget for you. You can keep the NPR Now Playing gadget in your Sidebar or on your desktop for easy access to NPR programming. You’ll never be far from your favorite programs and you can start listening with just a push of the button.
• Moon Phase – Google Desktop now has a gadget about phases of the moon. This latest gadget tells you where we are, lunar-phase-wise, on your desktop. Simply place this virtual moon anywhere you want and hover your mouse over it to get more details.
• Wikipedia Search – With this new gadget, whenever there’s a topic you want to explore or just something you don’t know about, theWikipedia search gadget lets you quickly search Wikipedia. It also shows results and suggestions while you type, and saves your recent searches for easy access.
• The Google Desktop Sidebar has been updated to Google Desktop 4.5, featuring a Sidebar with a new look. The new Sidebar look is now transparent, so it fits seamlessly with your desktop environment. Gadgets that fought for attention now look right at home, and content-heavy gadgets get new frames and icons that make it easier to tell them apart.

Furthermore, if you want to customize your Sidebar, there are several ways to do it. From the Sidebar options menu, you can turn off the “Always on Top” feature to allow it to go to the background (easily bring it to the front by pressing shift twice). Or select the “Auto-hide” feature from the same menu to hide the Sidebar off the screen when your mouse isn’t near it. And just drag the edge of the Sidebar to adjust the width.

Here is our previous post on Google Desktop. To find out more about Google Gadget, please click HERE!

Recently, Google has won an exclusive deal of becoming the exclusive provider to provide general Web search, site search, and vertical-type searches for MySpace.com and the majority of sites run by Fox Interactive Media, the News Corp. online division.

The integration of Google‘s search and advertising services into MySpace.com and the other Web sites will start in the fourth quarter of 2006.

The deal also stated that Google has the responsibility to generate a revenue-sharing payments of at least $900 million in total to Fox Interactive Media between the beginning of 2007′s first quarter and the end of 2010′s second quarter. In turn, Fox Interactive Media must provide Google with various traffic and other goals set aside by the deal.

Before the deal, MySpace.com used Yahoo‘s search engine with sponsored search ads from its network. With Google‘s system proven to be more accurate and flexible than Yahoo‘s, there was a high probability that News Corp. had been noticing and trying to strike a broader, more profitable deal with Google.

On further note, Google also signed a video-distribution deal with MTV Networks on last Monday, August 7, 2006. In that deal, Google is to distribute ad-supported video content from Viacom International’s MTV Networks to Web sites in its extensive advertising network. This would probably be another area of collaboration between the companies, as Google can distribute its ad-supported content from MTV to targeted Website publishers via News Corp. network.

All and all, this should be interesting to watch!

On August 1, 2006, Google Analytics Blog announces that Google Analytics can now track multiple subdomains and different parts of a website. Now, you can create profiles for your subdomains or any parts of your website. The default number of profiles have been increased from 5 to 10.

A website profile is essentially a set of rules that define the reports that you see. Generally, a website profile corresponds with a domain – you’ll have one profile per domain, so that you can view reports for each domain separately.

You can also use profiles to track subdomains separately, by setting up filters on the profile to return data only from that subdomain. Google Analytics has provided instructions on setting this up – please read this page on “How to track different subdomains in separate profiles“.

If you would like to track sections of a site, you can again create multiple profiles and use filters to return the applicable data. Please read this page on “How to track different parts of your websites separately“.

Profiles are also useful for controlling report access. As the types of reports available for a profile are defined with the profile’s settings, you may create two or more profiles for a domain, each with a different set of reports. Assigning users to the appropriate profile will ensure that they are viewing only those reports that apply to them. Please read this page on “How to restrict a user’s access to certain domains or reports”.

For Adwords accounts, however, you can only link 1 account to 1 Google Analytics account, so if you have multiple AdWords accounts (often for separate sites), please create a unique Google Analytics account for each AdWords account.

Currently, Google Analytics is offered by invitation only. You can request for a Google Analytics account HERE!

Google Talk has some new features that will (hopefully) turned the bad numbers of Google Talk users to start increasing. Tonight Google has released 3 significant new features to the product, which are File Transfer, VoiceMails, and Music Status.

The explanation for the 3 features are as follows :

File Transfer
With this top requested new feature, you can send unlimited files and folders to your friends through Google Talk. There is no restriction on the file type or size and the peer-to-peer transfer is fast and reliable. A small note: A small percentage of users (such as those behind restrictive proxies) will not experience the highest level of file transfer speed possible.

Voicemail
If a friend isn’t around to answer your call, now you can leave a voicemail. You can even leave voicemail messages for your friends who don’t use Google Talk — they’ll receive an email with the message attached as an audio file.

Music Status
Listening to music while on Google Talk? Now you can let your friends see what you’re listening to by selecting “Show current music track” in your status menu. Your status message will change when your song does!

Information on all of these features is HERE.

Code.google.com is Google‘s site for external developers interested in Google-related development. It’s where they’ll publish free source code and lists of Google API services.

A lot of people worked together to both prepare source code for release and prepare code.google.com for launch and ongoing maintenance. It shows that Google really does care about free and open source software (F/OSS) at Google, and this site is one aspect of that affection.

Current projects on Code.google.com can be found at http://code.google.com/projects.html.

The Code.google.com initially releasing is targeted at professional software development engineers who work with multi-threaded templated C++ code or who want functional features in python. Although this is a somewhat limited audience; Google made this decision specifically so they can work with a smaller community to iron out any bugs in our release and ongoing maintenance processes. Over time, Code.google.com plans to release more tools useful to broader groups of developers.

Google has officially announced a new AdWords feature enabling advertisers to have a much more detailed picture of invalid click activity in their account. The metrics of “invalid clicks” and “invalid clicks rate” will show virtually all the invalid clicks affecting an account.

http://adwords.blogspot.com/2006/07/estimating-invalid-clicks.html

Here’s their official explanation of the new feature:

“These clicks are filtered in real-time by our systems before advertisers are charged for them. The resulting data will of course differ from one advertiser to the next. In addition, a much smaller number of invalid clicks may also be credited to advertisers? accounts after-the-fact, as the result of a publisher being terminated from the AdSense program for invalid click activity. These will appear as account-level credits.One of the most controversial issues related to the topic of click fraud has been estimating how big the problem is. Estimates from third-parties (usually from consultants who have a financial incentive to make the problem seem very large) have been both inconsistent and greatly exaggerated due to their methodologies. Advertisers have always been able to compare their log data with their AdWords charges to calculate an estimate of the number of invalid clicks in their own account. This new tool will make estimating invalid click activity much easier.

Remember, when we determine that clicks are invalid, you are not charged for them, and they do not affect your other campaign statistics. You may include the invalid clicks and invalid click rate columns in yearly, quarterly, weekly, and daily reports. More information about the new reporting can be found here.”

As is published in their AdWords Help Center, Google has three powerful tools for protecting your clicks:

Detection and filtering techniques: Each click on an AdWords ad is examined by Google system. Google looks at numerous data points for each click, including the IP address, the time of the click, any duplicate clicks, and various other click patterns. It then analyzes these factors to try to isolate and filter out potentially invalid clicks.

Advanced monitoring techniques: Google uses a number of unique and innovative techniques for managing invalid click activity, and is currently improving its technology.

The Google Team: In addition to its automated click protection techniques, Google has a team that uses specialized tools and techniques to examine individual instances of invalid clicks. When the system detects potentially invalid clicks, a member of this team examines the affected account to glean important data about the source of the potentially invalid clicks.

Weirdtechnewshub blogspot has posted a guide on how to run a report with data from an invalid clicks.

Google Books, a program that’s been raising controversy in the US, has reportedly struck a deal with four publishing houses in China. Baidu, which has been Google Books‘s rival, had deals with Chinese libraries instead – its program has access to 15 million books, the largest online collection of Chinese books in the world.

Working with libraries is the approach Google came under fire for in the US when publishers said their copyrighted material was being included in the program without their permission. The search company took an opt-out approach in the US. It’s notable that Windows Live Book Search has an opt-in program for publishers and Google appears to be following its lead when formulating its China strategy. Google Books Search China will give readers access to excerpts from books and require payment to read the full works.

PhotoZou – Free online photo sharing service with integration with Google Maps, tagging, integration with blogs, and the ability to upload 10,000 photos and videos. The Japanese version has 60,000 members and the English version is being released in private Beta now.

PhotoZou is still a closed beta. An exclusive invitation is needed to become a member. The PhotoZou team is currently circulating invitations so look forward to your invitation coming soon! If you cannot wait, check out PhotoZou Encounters? a Weblog with a blog content that picks up on topics related to Japan and has a visual twist by using photos from PhotoZou.

Receive PhotoZou updates by leaving us your Email address below! Randomly selected people will have the special privilege to enjoy our services before anyone else.Users are already raving about PhotoZou and craving for more!

Google Checkout launched early this morning and may significantly change the online shopping sector. The system offers low transaction costs for merchants and mediation between buyers and sellers online in exchange for access to what will be a huge amount of data about shopping and sales conversions. There doesn’t appear to be many benefits for buyers in the system. There are $10 discounts at many participating stores, but in order to accept a new system like this, certainly, we would need features that beat what’s already available.

Not a stored value system like PayPal, Google Checkout is more like a unified shopping identity for buyers who can give their credit card number to just one company (Google) and limit email contact received later from places they shop online. The Google Checkout site is in its infancy, with only about 100 stores listed as participating at the program’s inception and few variant URLs that redirect yet to the program page. The program, though high profile in the media, is described on its page almost entirely in terms of its benefits to sellers. The system is limited to sellers in the US, many people were hoping that it would be available in more countries than PayPal is.

AdWords participants will gain extra benefits, with a $10 credit in Google Checkout fees for every $1 they spend on advertising with Google. Transaction fees are remarkably low, roughly 2/3 of PayPal’s basic rates. The service’s pricing structure may ultimately be profitable enough for Google, but the major strategy here could be to access shopping data. The biggest question then appears to be whether consumers trust the Google brand enough to look to the company for more than just access to the rest of the world’s data, but as a repository for our own data kept private from a world of online shopping vendors. The benefits over PayPal seem clear for sellers, but whether consumers will react favorably is a question we’ll have to wait to be answered.