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Google and Breadcrumbs

Implement breadcrumbs navigation in your website and Google will reflect it on its Search Results, instead of the URL path that it normally shows (see below).

And the links in the breadcrumbs actually point to different sections of the website, just like the navigation on actual website. That’s cool.

I didn’t know they did that. Looks very user friendly to me. So, if you can, try implementing breadcrumbs in your online projects.

Breadcrumbs and Usability: www.useit.com/alertbox/breadcrumbs.html

       

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Track Number of Clicks on Your Bitly Links in Your Tweeter

Bit.ly, the popular URL shortening service has an extension for Chrome and Firefox browsers, which allows you to see number of clicks on your bit.ly links in a tooltip (see below screenshot from my twitter).

Clicking on “More information” link will take you to the details page for that particular link on bit.ly. I have been using it for a week now and find it very useful.

       

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Google Invites Giveaway

I have some (25) Google Wave invites. If you need one, just drop a comment on this post and I will send you. It will be sent to the first 25 commenters.

screenshot:

       

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Google and Your Privacy

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google has this to say about the Privacy issue on his interview with CNBC:

If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines — including Google — do retain this information for some time and it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities. watch the video

This statement from Schmidt has caused quite an uproar on the net, Mozilla’s Director of Community Development Asa Dotzler even pointed out that Bing has a better privacy policy than Google and encouraged people to change the default search engine in Firefox to Bing.

This kind of comment from Schmidt definitely won’t go well with their to-be-launched Operating System Google Chrome.

       

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Google News Timeline

Want to read Google News like a newspaper? Go to newly launched Google News Timeline by Google.

Google News Timeline is a web application that organizes search results chronologically. It allows users to view news and other data sources on a browsable, graphical timeline. Available data sources include recent and historical news, scanned newspapers and magazines, blog posts, sports scores, and information about various types of media, like music albums and movies.

URL: newstimeline.googlelabs.com/

       

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How to share Google Analytics reports with others

Google Analytics is a great service and it’s used by many. One of the features that I like about Google Analytics is - sharing your reports with others.

Sometimes advertisers or potential partners would ask for your blog’s/website’s traffic statistics. And in this time of fraud and forgery, screenshots won’t simply do it (perhaps this might do). They want to see the real, live statistics. So, in this kind of situations G.Analytics’ “share reports” feature is a great solution.

Sharing your reports is easy, can be done in 3 simple steps.

1. Login to your G.Analytics account and go to your overview page of your reports. At the end of the page you will see a link “User Manager”, click it.

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2. Next page will show you the list of emails (people) who have access to your reports. If it is your first time, you will only see your own email. Click on the “Add User” link.
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3. Enter the person’s Gmail, yes it should be gmail and not any other email. And select the access type, you can either make the person “admin” or “view only”. After that, choose the report of the site(s) for him to view, in case if you have more than one site being tracked by G.Analytics.

Note: Be careful when making strangers admin of your reports.
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That’s it. Now the person can login to his Google Account (Analytics) and see your reports inside his account. You can remove the person from your reports anytime.

       

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Google FriendConnect Toolbar Widget

Google FriendConnect added a toolbar widget. Now you can display it on top of your blog or at the bottom of it for your members to join and communicate with each other.

Unlike Yahoo’s MyBlogLog, Google FriendConnect is a bit vague in its positioning. I am still not very clear what its real objective is? How about you?

Do you use it on your blog? If yes, how it has benefited your blog? Share with us your experiences and success stories so to speak.

Here is its description on Wikipedia:

Google Friend Connect is an online service by Google that allows users on the internet to connect with their friends on different websites.

Google Friend Connect is an Open Social application offered by Google that started in May 2008. Google Friend Connect main focus is to simplify the connection between social and non-social websites and standardize the handling and presentation of social applications and content. It uses a blend of open standards, such as OpenID for signin, oAuth to control data, and Open Social for applications.

Google Friend Connect is free but requires approval of the website using it. It requires no knowledge of web programming and enables any website to offer social applications and content from Facebook, Hi5, Orkut, Plaxo, MySpace, Google Talk and other social networks.

At the time the interface is in English and there’s no option to choose other languages. Google didn’t announce any plans to translate it and most words can’t be translated by the site that implements it.

Examples of use are:

1. E-commerce site: Allow users to check whether friends purchased or review the product you are interested in on the product web page.
2. News sites: Allow users insert comments and opinions with their real profile.
3. Organization Sites: Increase marketing and communication within members of the organization.
4. Blogs and Personal Websites: Increase communication within author friends.

Source: Wikipedia

Now after reading that, it makes some sense. Join my FriendConnect by clicking at the toolbar below, let’s get connected!

Website: www.google.com/friendconnect/

       

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Monitor site-hacking with Google Alerts

Google Alerts is great in keeping track of keywords. But it can also be used to monitor your websites if anyone has hacked them (hopefully it won’t be the case), if it does happen Google would send you a notification. Google team blogged about it on their blog saying:

… Try a site: search on your site to see if anything unfamiliar shows up in Google’s results for your site. You can add words to the query that are unlikely to appear in your content, such as commercial terms or adult language. If the query [site:example.com viagra] isn’t supposed to return any pages on your site and it does, that could be a problem. You can even automate these searches with Google Alerts.

Source: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/01/open-redir…

       

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Moving FeedBurner account to Google

For the past few days my RSS feed counter has been showing wrong count. Instead of showing 1200+ subscribers it is showing 700-800 subscribers. It’s clearly something wrong, because even with fluctuations it should be around 1000+ subscribers. Plus/minus 200 subscribers is ok, but when almost 500 subscribers are missing then there is really something wrong.

I guess it’s time to move my FeedBurner account to Google. As you remember after Google acquired FeedBurner, they have been encouraging people to move their FeedBurner account to Google. Everyone must move by February 28, 2009.

Why is FeedBurner merging its product with Google’s?

Our vision when FeedBurner joined Google was to help bring the best of what FeedBurner offered in syndication publisher tools and solutions to the AdSense platform, and vice versa. In the time since the merger, the FeedBurner engineering team has joined the Google engineering team (but still focuses on the same set of tools for RSS monetization, analysis, and optimization) and is not managed as a separate company or subsidiary.

Why do I need to transfer my account?

We are moving all FeedBurner accounts to Google Accounts.

Since Google’s acquisition of FeedBurner, Inc. on June 1, 2007, we have been moving the FeedBurner application to Google hardware, software, and data centers. This allows the application to scale and perform like most Google applications and integrate easily with other Google platforms. It also means more reliability in delivering your content, analytics, and monetization, as well as a more secure and consistent experience for your users.

In order to provide an integrated experience and to support the new features we have planned for our feed platform, as well as to improve security, it is necessary for logins to be handled via a Google Account. from FAQ

Transferred!

It took few clicks and about 1 minute to transfer the account. My new RSS feed is now http://feeds2.feedburner.com/AdesBlog. Old feeds will automatically point to the new one, but for the new subscribers it’s recommended that you give the new feed url.

Google warns that the RSS count might temporarily show “0″ for the latest day, and it might take around one week for it to work normally.

So, when are you transferring yours? I hope not on the last day - 28th February 2009!

FAQ Page: www.google.com/support/feedburner/bin/answer.py?answer=126303
New Login URL: feedburner.google.com/

       

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Google’s SearchWiki - Next Social Powered Search Engine?

Google had launched a service called SearchWiki sometime last month. But it had disappeared for some reason. And now, for the past few days I have been seeing it back again.

SearchWiki is an additional feature for Google which appears when you login to your Google Account. Yes, it only works if you are logged into your Google Account (Gmail, Google Docs…etc). Once logged, when you do search on Google, small icons will appear beside each search result. With these icons you can either promote (i.e move up) or remove particular result from the results page altogether. (see below).

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The effects of your removing or promoting certain websites will only be visible to you. In other words, it won’t affect the real results of Google.com (at least for now).

So, it’s like… personalizing Google results according to your own needs. What if, you know a site that is not there in the results? Well, you can add them, as simple as that. (see below)

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“Add a result” link is located at the footer of the page. You can also manage all your promoted and removed results by going to “See all my SearchWiki notes”

What it means for Google

It means a small step for Google but a giant leap for better search results ;) Seriously, it means a big deal for Google. It’s a matter of time when SearchWiki results will replace the normal Google search results.

Because Google’s current PageRank based system for its search results is prone to manipulation. And it has been struggling to contain this issue - fighting all those who pass PR to other sites (i.e who do not use rel=”nofollow” code on their text ads and other outgoing links. Most banner formats are automatically added “nofollow” by Google).

Google is very smart, by leaving SearchWiki for “personal use only” for sometime, they will actually generate a different set of parallel results for the same keywords searched in Google. And most likely, these combined SearchWiki results will be a better, more accurate results. Simply because they are generated by millions of people.

When leaving it for “personal use only”, it’s also less likely to be spammed. Because people will be improving their own results without knowing that they are actually improving the whole search engine results.

Could it be spammed?

Sure, once it goes public, people will try to spam it. But it’s less likely to affect the results. Because the ratio of the spam entries (submitted by tens of people?) compared to the legitimate entries (submitted by millions of people) would be too small. And even if they make to the first page, people could easily removed such entries by clicking “X” near to it.

Summary

I think Google is onto something great here. When it goes public, we can expect less spam and more accurate results. With all the social networking things going on on the net, it’s definitely the right thing to do for Google - to let the people manage the results.

What do you think? Please leave your opinion in the comments.

       

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