Here is Google’s video explaining how their Spam Filters work:

For the full story: It’s not about the spam (Via Google)

• Up to 6 months of historical data
• Top query percentages
• Download Search Query Data
• Improved Freshness – Constantly updating results

As you know, the queries used to find your website in search results can change over time. Your website content changes, as do the needs of all the busy searchers out there. Whether the queries associated with your site change subtly or dramatically, it’s pretty useful to see how they transform over time.
Recognizing this, Top Search Queries in Webmaster Tools now presents historical data and other enhancements. Let’s take a closer look:

Up to 6 months of historical data:
Previously we only showed query stats for the last 7 days. Now you can jump between 9 query stats snapshots ranging from now to 6 months ago. Note that the time interval for each of these snapshots is different. For the 7 day, 2 week, and 3 week snapshots, we report the top queries for the previous week. For the 1 to 6 month snapshots, we report statistics for the previous month. And still others of you who log in may notice that you don’t have query stats data going back to 6 months ago. We hope to improve that experience in the future.
Top query percentages:
You might have noticed a new column in the top query listings. Previously we just ranked your query results and clicks. While useful, this didn’t really tell you to what extent one query was ranked higher than another. Now we show what percentage each query result or click represents out of the top 20 queries. This should help you see how well the result or click volume is distributed in the top 20.
Downloads:
Since we’re now showing historical data on the Top Search Queries screen, we figured it would be rude to not let you download it all and play with the data yourself (spreadsheet masochists, I’m looking at you). We added a “Download data” link that lets you download all the stats in CSV format. Note that this exports all query stats historical data across all snapshots as well as search types and languages, so you can slice and dice to your satisfaction. The “Download all stats (including subfolders)” link, however, will still only show query stats for your site and sub-folders for the last 7 days.
Freshness:
We’ve improved data freshness in Webmaster Tools a couple of times in the past, and we’ve done it again with the new Top Search Queries. Statistics are being now updated constantly. Top query results and clicks may visibly change rank a lot more often now, sometimes daily.
So enough talk. Sign in and play around with the new improvements for yourself. As always we welcome feedback (especially in the form of beer), so feel free to drop us a note in the Webmaster Help Group and let us know what you think.

Blast from the past (via Google Webmaster Central Blog)

This is a VERY welcomed improvement for Google Webmaster. I’ve gave feedback on this a long time ago and finally they heard me (and the possible thousands of others). Basically, the ability to control what Google displays regarding your web site is crucial. In addition, you play a direct hand in Google Search Engine Optimization. Here’s what Google has to say:

Sitelinks are extra links that appear below some search results in Google. They serve as shortcuts to help users quickly navigate to the important pages on your site.

Selecting pages to appear as sitelinks is a completely automated process. Our algorithms parse the structure and content of websites and identify pages that provide fast navigation and relevant information for the user’s query. Since our algorithms consider several factors to generate sitelinks, not all websites have them.
Now, Webmaster Tools lets you view potential sitelinks for your site and block the ones you don’t want to appear in Google search results. Because sitelinks are extremely useful in helping users navigate your site, we don’t typically recommend blocking them. However, occasionally you might want to exclude a page from your sitelinks, for example: a page that has become outdated or unavailable, or a page that contains information you don’t want emphasized to users. Once you block a page, it won’t appear as a sitelink for 90 days unless you choose to unblock it sooner. It may take a week or so to remove a page from your sitelinks, but we are working on making this process faster.
To view and manage your sitelinks, go to the Webmaster Tools Dashboard and click the site you want. In the left menu click Links, then click Sitelinks.

Thanks for your feedback and stay tuned for more updates!

Webmasters can now provide feedback on Sitelinks  (via Google Webmaster Central Blog)

Hippos in Africa

For more on the story, check out Google’s Zoom in on Google Maps

Well done guy who likes his Pizza who kind of looks like Trey from Phish! Anyway, here’s a video explaining GOOG 411 and a “Contest” of sorts. Pick from the people at the end and post your guess who’s the voice behind GOOG 411 on YouTube. Possibly a prize? Probably not…

Read the full story from Google at: GOOG-411 graduates from Labs

Apparently this week was a deadline for releasing new features for the Google Maps and Google Earth teams since both were quite busy with their announcements. To be quite honest, none of these announcements really interest me, so here they are for your reading enjoyment:

• Now Playing: YouTube videos in Google Earth
• Become a Google Earth Pro Expert!
• Explore even more with Google Earth
• Community maps in your search results
• More Street View cities to explore (Update)

In an update to their previous post on Monday, Google Explains Lesser-known (and secret) Picasa features,  here are some of the key points summarized:

1. Ability to backup photos directly to external hard drive
2. Backup is intuitive and only backs up updated or new photos
3. Color “tuning” tab is intuitive (and hard to find)
4. Turn thumbnails into 4 x 6 contact sheets
5. And a Radial Tint “Easter egg” feature

Read below for the full details:

Continuing Monday’s discussion of Picasa’s less-visible features, I thought I’d start by talking about Backup. This shouldn’t be considered a minor detail, really — keeping a backup archive is downright crucial.
If you tried our Backup feature in the past (look in ‘Tools -> Backup’) but had concluded that you no longer have enough blank CDs (or even 4.8-gigabyte DVDs) to easily store your growing photo collection, think again. Grab an external hard drive and try the ‘disk to disk’ backup, which eliminates the need to swap a big stack of CDs when creating your archive. (We built the ‘disk to disk’ feature to work over networks, too, so you can even use network-attached storage, like fancy RAID drives.)
It’s faster than you’d expect. After you first create your archive, Picasa is smart enough to only backup the most recent changes the next time around. Using an external drive with our backup feature is also a great way to migrate to a new PC, since it preserves all of your albums and edits in Picasa.
Sometimes we build little features into Picasa that are essentially invisible — they don’t show up in the interface at all. The color engine in Picasa 2.7 is one of those changes; it’s become far more adept at handling extra-orange or extra-blue photos. If you have some old ‘problem photos’ where the lighting just seemed hopeless, try going to the ‘Tuning’ tab and picking a neutral color with the picker. The color temperature slider in ‘Tuning’ also uses this new color model, and it can give you some wonderful results.

Other goodies? To see captions and filenames under thumbnails, you can enable this via the settings in ‘View -> Thumbnail Caption ->.’ You can also turn your thumbnails into cool-looking 4×6 contact sheets (sometimes useful for archival purposes) by using the ‘Print a Contact Sheet’ function in the ‘Album & Folders’ menu.
And if you’ve made it this far, I probably owe you an Easter egg! Try this: Edit a picture in Picasa and choose the ‘Effects’ tab. Hold down ‘Ctrl’ while clicking on the ‘Graduated Tint’ filter, and you will find the ‘Radial Tint’ filter — not listed anywhere else. You can make colored vignettes and really nice colored glows with this one. Enjoy!

Lesser-known (and secret) Picasa features, cont’d (via Google Photos Blog)

Seems like this was a key purchase for Google in the realm of messaging. They are definitely going to be integrating Jaiku’s services into their mobile applications and their upcoming social network releases… here’s a little big on Jaiku straight from them:

Here’s what Google had to say:

Technology has made staying in touch with your friends and family both easier and harder: living a fast-paced, on-the-go lifestyle is easier (and a lot of fun), but it’s more difficult to keep track of everyone when they’re running around at warp speed. That’s why we’re excited to announce that we’ve acquired Jaiku, a company that’s been hard at work developing useful and innovative applications for staying in touch with the people you care about most — regardless of whether you’re at a computer or on a mobile phone.
Current Jaiku users can still use the service normally, and new folks can sign up for an invitation to the service when we’re ready to expand. We plan to use the ideas and technology behind Jaiku to make compelling and useful products. Although we don’t have definite plans to announce at this time, we’re excited about helping drive the next round of developments in web and mobile technology.
We wish a hearty Google welcome to Jaiku, and are looking forward to working together on new and innovative ways of keeping people connected.

Reach out and message someone (via Google)

Wow! This post was absolutely amazing and further proves that the Google Software engineers are rather genius.  I’ve included their full post below, but here are some of the highlights that I picked out…

• Search Pictures by Camera the photos were taken with
• Search Pictures by if the Flash was or wasn’t included
• Search Pictures by dominant colors
• Search duplicate Pictures

Well, supposedly there’s more “secrets” coming on Wednesday, but here’s the full story:

Every piece of software has a couple of features that its designers think are pretty important. You can usually guess what those are simply by examining the user interface — the biggest, shiniest, and most prominent buttons tend to look that way because a developer thought, ‘Here’s something that’ll get used every day.’
Other features tend to get buried in menus, or sub-menus, or maybe implemented only as an Easter egg. Now, good software teams will move things around little by little, as they get a better understanding of how people actually use the software. Done right, this can make an application more usable over time instead of more complex and crufty.
Most of you reading this are already very familiar with the ‘big’ features in Picasa, so I thought I’d write a couple of blog posts about Picasa’s less-visible features, especially the ones you might not have discovered.
First up is search. Photos tend to be hard to search for, so we’ve been trying for a number of years to figure out what kinds of things users actually look for in their photos. Dates have turned out to be pretty important, so you can type ‘December 2005′ into Picasa’s search box and it will show you photos you took that month. Of course, you can also search for folder names, filenames, descriptions, and locations, too. But we also index information about the camera that took each picture: search for ‘Sony’ or ‘Canon’ or ‘Powershot’ and you’ll find the photos you took with each camera type. Or try this: ‘Flash’ will find photos taken with a flash, and ‘focal:50′ shows any pictures you took using a 50mm lens. Even ‘iso:400′ works as a search term.
For a little more fun, try searching for a color name, like ‘color:red’ or ‘color:gray.’ There’s a full list of available colors in ‘Tools->Experimental->Search for….’ Try it against your photo collection and see what happens!
Here’s another search feature that can be pretty useful: the ability to locate all duplicate photos on your hard drive. Try ‘Tools->Experimental->Show Duplicate Files’ to see this in action; the filter shows you only those files duplicated in more than one place on your hard drive. The neat idea here is that you can safely delete any file you see listed in these results, because there are at least two of them on your computer. (You might see both copies disappear from the list, but this simply means that the second copy isn’t a dupe anymore.)
Tune in Wednesday as I’ll tell you about a few other lesser-known features (and Easter eggs) that should please you, whether you’re a power user or just a regular photographer.

Lesser-known (and secret) Picasa features (via Google Photos Blog)

Within the past several weeks Google has not only been improving their stock prices, they’re also been improving their image in regards to several fields (Environment, Design, Webmaster Tools, etc). In this case, Google is openly open about encouraging their employees to help out in the open source community. Perhaps another sign and further proof that the gPhone is going to be open source mobile software…

Google encourages its employees to contribute back to the open source community, and there is no exception in Google’s Security Team. Let’s look at some interesting open source vulnerabilities that were located and fixed by members of Google’s Security team. It is interesting to classify and aggregate the code flaws leading to the vulnerabilities, to see if any particular type of flaw is more prevalent.

For the full story and examples of some bugs fixed, check out: Auditing open source software (via Google Online Security Blog)

I believe that Google improving their update frequency for your web sites will help boost your ranking on Google’s search results if your web site or blog is updated frequently, since Google seems to be favoring “current” information these days. However, only time will tell. Either way, this is an obviously welcomed improvement.

Common feedback we hear from webmasters is that you want us to improve the freshness of the data in Webmaster Tools. Understood. We’ve increased the update frequency for your verified sites’ data, such as crawl, index, and search query stats. Much of this data depends on the content of your site. If your content doesn’t change very often, or if you’re not getting new links to your site, you may not see updates to your data every time you sign in to Webmaster Tools.
Please continue to post your Suggestions & feature requests in the Webmaster Help Group. It’s one of our most important sources of feedback from the webmaster community. We seriously take it seriously.

Data freshness (via Google Webmaster Central Blog)

I think Google Desktop is genius, which is why I assume Microsoft copied it for Vista. Unfortunately for Microsoft I still use Google Desktop over the Microsoft Search. So, I’m really excited for these updates and widgets

Posted by Mendel Chuang, Product Marketing Manager
Google Desktop lets you not only search your computer easily, but you can also personalize your desktop. From cultivating a virtual potted plant, to reading the latest news and checking the weather forecast, you can customize your desktop with a variety of gadgets and a sidebar. Some of you have asked if you can also put gadgets on iGoogle homepages next to your other gadgets. And starting today, the answer is yes.

With Google Desktop 5.5 Beta, you can you now embed Google Desktop Gadgets right into your iGoogle homepage. Gadgets on an iGoogle homepage can have more advanced functionality, such as playing music from your computer. You can find them alongside other gadgets in the iGoogle Content Directory. We’ve also improved some of the other features; such as better looking Quick Search Box, support for multiple copies of a gadget, and improved Outlook search functionality. Read more on the Google Desktop Blog and check out these gadgets you can now add to your iGoogle homepage.

More types of gadgets for iGoogle (Official Google Blog)

Apparently Dunder Mifflin Infinity is #1 and #2 right now on Google Hot Trends, apparently as Google says above “Google Trends is really popular right now…”. HA! Google’s popularity on their trends website crashes it. Hysterical! FYI, Dunder Mifflin is a reference from NBC’s The Office and the ‘infinity’ part is now an My NBC site.

Now, you can learn about all of these features in one place on the Google Maps Video Tour page.
We’ve also added a brand-new Getting Started video that explains the basics. It’s perfect for educating beginner users, like the aunt who always calls you for tech support help.
Let us know what you think of the video by leaving some comments on YouTube. We’d love to hear from you.

Now Playing: The Google Maps Video Tour (via Google!)

Google’s recent acquisitions have been large and well done. There were some big names out there in various fields that got swooped up by Google. Postini is almost a household name in the e-mail security field, so congratulations! Here’s what Google had to say about their work since the 3 weeks the deal was officially closed…

Three weeks ago today was the official close of Google’s acquisition of Postini — and what a three weeks it’s been. “Official close” meant that integration work could legally begin, and so the Google Apps team and Postini team have been burning the midnight oil to get our services integrated. Now, Google Apps customers, Postini customers and everyone else can see the results.
Postini security and compliance capabilities are officially part of Google Apps Premier Edition. Google Apps customers get these services for free. Postini customers get an extended trial period for Apps. New customers can chose their entry point: Apps (including Postini security and compliance) or any of the standalone Postini services.
The benefits of software as a service are numerous — that’s why we’re seeing a huge interest in Apps. Businesses of all sizes are asking for these services, and we need to help customers embrace Apps without loss of features, functions, or security. I’m proud that Postini plays a role in this offering.
Postini was founded in 1999 with the vision of transforming how IT organizations consumed security and compliance products. We recognized the service delivery model brings huge leverage, and 36,000 customers around the world validated that vision. Google Enterprise is now scaling that vision. No one knows what the next three weeks will bring, but we’re all excited to be part of it.

3 short weeks (via Official Google Blog)