5 Key Trends of 2010: Half-Year Report for The Web

An interesting article on some trends that have developed thus far this year. Which trends are you following?

It's now a little over 6 months into 2010, so a good time to reflect on the highlights of the year so far. At the beginning of the year, we identified some key trends to track: (in alphabetical order) Augmented Reality, Internet of Things, Mobile, Real-Time Web, Structured Data.

Mobile and Real-Time Web have been particularly eventful in 2010. Augmented Reality and Internet of Things are both early stage trends, but have continued to edge towards the mainstream this year. The movement towards Structured Data has made significant progress in 2010, primarily thanks to RDFa and the adoption of that Semantic Web format by Facebook, Google and other big companies.

To read the full article 5 Key Trends of 2010: Half-Year Report for The Web on Read Write Web visit:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/5_key_trends_of_2010_half-year_report_for_the_web.php?utm_source=feedburner

9 for '09: Current Web Trends

by Jill Butler, Content Development Specialist

Our art and tech department banded together for this blog entry-- a survey of the top web design trends for 2009. Read on to find out all about how Technology, Creativity and Strategy are changing online.

TECHNOLOGY

1. Mobile Compatibility

Site: Pizza Hut

With more and more users getting their daily web surfing done on their iPhones or Blackberrys, smart websites have made the leap to offering content that either works well with or is specifically designed for these devices. Check out Pizza Hut's innovative iPhone app, that allows the user to order their pizza from the palm of their hand.

2. Online video/ Internet TV

Site: NBC.com

Regular TV-watching has become a thing of the past. After all, with the busy schedules and tightening household budgets of many tech-savvy TV lovers, cable just isn't convenient. So they turn to the Internet, which offers full episodes, either for download or streaming, whenever and however you want them. The smart networks, like NBC or the CW, have turned what might look like a cash-drain into an opportunity, offering exclusive content online and becoming the best source for reliable, quality online programming. As the old saying goes: if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

3. Personalization

Site: iGoogle

The web can only be what you make it--and the trend towards making it your own has been growing steadily. With leaders like Google, even the browser you use to surf the web can be completely customized to suit your taste and needs. That's more or less the entire purpose of iGoogle--one stop for local weather, custom features, and news feeds that cater you YOUR every demand.

CREATIVITY

4. The Big Picture (layouts)

Site: The White House

This is a hot one: designers have been going for the high impact statement more and more, with bold, eye-catching banners and header that incorporate content and are more than a pretty face. The White's homepage is a great example of that--using their carousel-style banner to display important links and information.

5. Minimal: White Space and Then Some

Site: Concentric Studio

Clean, straightforward and useful--the trend to have more of nothing has been catching on for a while now, as more designers opt to de-clutter their web spaces and put focus on only the most important elements of the website. The upside? The user doesn't get overwhelmed by too much information only choice -- there is only where you want to guide them.

6. Big and Bold: HUGE typography, illustrations and vibrant graphics

Site: National Television

If you want big, eye-catching communication, there's nothing like a sure bet. Placing emphasis on words and putting illustration front and center has a fresh, almost European feel, giving the website an equal focus on design and communication.

STRATEGY

7. Keeping up with social media

Site: Fuel Your Creativity

More website are realizing the power of putting social media front and center--like Fuel Your Creativity has done here. It's wise to put these hotlinks in a very visible place, making it as easy as possible for any interested users to click on your blog, visit your Facebook page, or subscribe to your Twitter. There's no point in hiding these links-- you want people to use them, so gathering them into a one-stop corner of your website is a smart move.

8. Closing the Back Door

Site: Web Design Ledger

The "back door," in this case, refers to ways that stop your readers from clicking away from your blog or website--namely, by getting them interested in something else they'll find useful. There are many ways to do this, but one that is gaining speed is the "Related Links" widget. By using this feature, placed at the bottom of a blog post or page, you can catch your user's attention while you've still got it, and point them in other directions they may find helpful. It's good for them--they find out more about a topic they're interested in--but it's great for you--you get to keep your reader for a longer visit.

9. “Speaking” navigation

Site: Intereactive

Looking for clarity? You can't go wrong by adding this feature. "Speaking" navigation is more or less what it sounds like--instead of having simple, one or two word navigation (such as "Home" or "About Us") you use the coveted space to expand just a little on your company. This is especially helpful if the navigation your company has chosen is unconventional. It also gives you another chance to be personable and really connect with the people using your website--which is never a bad thing.

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That's our top nine web design trends for '09. Got anything to add? Leave it in the comments; we'd love to hear your thoughts.

Microsoft Gaining Momentum in the Search Engine Ring

by Greg Pike, Web Developer

Typically when people think about search engines, they think of Google. In the past few months Microsoft has been working hard to reset that mentality, but even the successful launch of Bing left critics forecasting the search engine was nothing more than fresh hype.

They were wrong.

Microsoft’s Bing continues to collect more and more market share. So much in fact that the search engine giant Yahoo joined forces to take a stab at Google’s incredible market share.

Note: Microsoft attempted to purchase Yahoo! last year for $44.6 billion. At the time Microsoft was running two ailing search engines, MSN and Live. Yahoo! turned down the offer.

Bing’s beautiful new brand, successful hype, and innovative new search technology are not the only reasons they are closing the gap on Google’s market share.

Recently I received a phone call from Microsoft welcoming me and our company to Microsoft AdCenter, Microsoft’s version of AdWords. We signed up to start using AdCenter as soon as Bing started making an impression in the search engine world.

The phone call I received was not just any generic call. I was asked for by name and the lady on the line complimented the website we were advertising, which happened to be a tourism website, and said that she and her family had already made plans to visit that destination for next year.

She also told me about the different free services available to us.

When I got off the phone I came to the realization that not only would Google never make that call, but they make it impossible to obtain personable support...no matter that their online support documents are still second to none.

Suddenly, Microsoft’s continuing momentum in the search engine ring is no longer a puzzle to me.

Want to Get Caught Up?

New to the Applecore blog? Catch up up with our must read posts:

Technology
Which Mayoral Candidate Get Top Marks for Social Media?

Google Does It Again

What is gooleads.g.doubleclick.net?



Creativity

See What's Fresh in Logo and Branding 2009

Our Favourite Type


Strategy

That's It: The Twitter Conversation

Turn the Bad into Good: Using Online Feedback to Help Your Business

10 Harsh Truths About Corporate Websites


How To's and Tutorials
Understanding Bounce Rates

Using Gmail for Internal Email

Tourism: A Social Media Butterfly



Happy reading!

Microsoft and Yahoo! Join Forces: So What's Next?

by J. Butler, Content Development Specialist

The big news in the air this week is the announcement of the 10-year merger of Microsoft's Bing search engine and Yahoo's premium search advertising tools. While rumors of this deal have been floating a long time, the official announcement unleashed a storm of web articles, blog entries and news stories.

Obviously, the people this affects most directly is the minority of users that still prefer Yahoo—roughly about 20% of the Internet community. And, it’s worth noting that in the span of time since the announcement was made, Yahoo’s stock plummeted—while Microsoft’s has stayed relatively untouched.

But the real question is-- how does this affect Search Engine Optimization campaigns currently underway? Here at Applecore, we’ve done our research and reached our own conclusions…

Is Google in Trouble?

Hardly. Google has been turned into its own verb, turning the search engine into a synonym for 'searching on the Internet.’ That kind of ingrained loyalty doesn't erode overnight. What early speculations suggest is that this could spark a competitive era the likes of which Google hasn’t yet seen: since it garners most of its revenue (up to 90%) from their search ads, any dent in their top dog market position could prove more harmful than it would have been a year ago. But a dent--rather than a wide-gaping hole--is all it would be.

Where’s My Data?

Does this merger affect the way the search data of users is used? Well, in a nutshell, not really. Smart consumers already know that “free” services—Facebook, Google or even social sharing sites—are never really “free.” Calling them low to no cost would be more accurate. Any search engine we use on the Internet is still, at the end of the day, a profitable enterprise. Whenever you use a search engine, assume that somehow, somewhere, it’s being looked at for potential revenue. But rather than be terrified of the implications of that statement, try seeing it as a great tool for your business.

Does This Affect My SEO Campaign?

The one thing this merger will definitely change will be all current Yahoo ranks and costs. Some speculate that since the cost of Google keywords can average 25% more than either Yahoo or Microsoft, the deal could create a tempting alternative for marketers hoping to lower their costs.

But at the end of the day, it's not because Google owns the greater market share that you pay for each click. Whether your budget is $5/day or $500/day, you won't get more than $5/day or $500/day worth of clicks regardless of market share. It's all relative, and still mostly unknown whether the deal will have any effect on PPC.

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It seems unlikely that Google could be usurped anytime soon, but for the first time in a long time, it may not be for lack of trying.

In the News

Bing! Yahoo, Microsoft exchange vows for search and ads (Ars Technica)

Microsoft and Yahoo: Search partners (CNN)

Microsoft-Yahoo Search Deal: The Official Press Release (TechCrunch)

Google Takes Green to a Whole New Level

While recycling and watching your company's energy intake is all fine and good, the fine folks at Google decided to take 'going green' to a whole new level. When their Mountain View base in California noticed its grounds needed a trim, instead of hiring a mower, Google has rented goats to keep its lawns tidy. From the Google blog: 

A herder brings about 200 goats and they spend roughly a week with us at Google, eating the grass and fertilizing at the same time. The goats are herded with the help of Jen, a border collie. It costs us about the same as mowing, and goats are a lot cuter to watch than lawn mowers.

Talk about an alternative energy source!

Autobots Beware

A blow to 'bots everywhere. The electronic playing field might have just gotten a new entrance exam: 

Google has released research results about a new test to foil computers pretending to be humans by requiring them to orient an image so it's upright.

A persistent problem on the Internet is screening out automated computer systems that can be used, for example, to sign up for spam-sending e-mail accounts or post comments designed to improve a site's search results. Google, which already devotes a lot of resources to block e-mail and Web spam, has tried a new test to keep the bots at bay.

The test is the latest variation on a screening technique called a Captcha (completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart). The idea is that people can often tell which way is up in a photo, but computers have a harder time.

Captchas are in widespread use today, usually in the form of obscured or distorted text that people can still read. But there's a lot of work in the area, including identifying 3D images and distinguishing between cats and dogs.

Full story: What's up, bot? Google tries new Captcha method [cnet news]

Happy Birthday, Gmail!

by J. Butler, Content Development Specialist

Wishing Gmail a happy birthday may seem like whispering into the wind tunnel: with all the accomplishments Google had racked up in the past few years, why stop to pay attention to any one anniversary? But looking back and how and why Gmail came about tells us a lot about how far we’ve come in such a short span of time. 

When Gmail was first introduced, a typical webmail account could only store about five megabytes of mail. I can vouch for this firsthand: my old Hotmail account was perpetually full, and I had to resort to saving treasured emails in a file on my hard drive. It was hardly time effective, and made managing mail a chore. Then came Gmail, offering a full gigabyte of space; for some hardcore users, this was barely an upgrade, but for the typical email user, even one gig opened up a whole new world of storage—it’s five happy years later for me, and I’ve barely cracked 4%. And I delete nothing. 

Gmail was designed with one group in mind: the people who racked up a lot of email, and thus, needed a lot of space. Much of common email interface were frustrating to the designers, so they started essentially with nothing, building their new intuitive interface from scratch. Their site architecture was a hybrid of HTML and JavaScript (this later became known as AJAX), which was smoother and faster. This becomes important when you keep in mind that broadband connections and 56k modems were still the norm.

In the years following, Google has developed any number of additions for the basic Gmail structure that ranged from the practical (an ‘Undo Send’ app, ‘To Do’ task lists) to the personal (design themes, custom date formats) to the funny (Google Goggles, anyone?). But by any rate, Goggle’s worked hard to improve an by all accounts stellar service, paving the way for even bigger improvements to personal email in the near future. 

Here’s one stat that can’t escape highlighting: today, thanks in large part to Google, it’s almost commonplace to a 20 megabyte attachment—making that one email four times the size of an entire webmail account in 2004. 

Photo from Official Google Blog entry. 

Microsoft Internally Testing New Search Service dubbed 'Kumo'

by J. Butler, Applecore Content Development Specialist

Looks like someone's trying to get a piece of the Google pie...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Microsoft is testing a new version of its online search service internally under the name of Kumo.com, a spokesman for the software company said on Monday.

The service is not yet available outside the company, but may eventually form part of Microsoft's attempt to catch up with Internet search leaders Google Inc and Yahoo Inc.

The new service was unveiled in an internal memo sent by the head of research at the company's online services division on Monday. It did not provide details about the new features.

"Kumo.com exists only inside the corporate network, and in order to get enough feedback we will be redirecting internal live.com traffic over to the test site in the coming days," said the memo from Satya Nadella. "Kumo is the codename we have chosen for the internal test."

Coming on the heels of last year's attempt to buy up Yahoo!, this seems like a defensive move on Microsoft's to nip Google encroaching on their software business in the bud. Only time will tell how this project shapes up, but it's an interesting development indeed. Full story at Wired.com.

What is gooleads.g.doubleclick.net?

by Greg Pike, Applecore Web Developer

Last week, we were noticing some weird referrals listed under Google Analytics, our website statistics package. Being a naturally curious bunch, we wanted to get to the bottom of it. And so, after some research (which included trolling through online forums and calling up our Google contact), we determined these odd referrals were in fact coming from Google.

Last year when Google acquired DoubleClick, a digital marketing technology and services firm, it was integrated into their AdSense service. If you're running an AdWords campaign in the Google Content Network, you'll experience referrals from the domain googleads.g.doubleclick.net in your Google Analytics or equivalent stats package software.

These referrals aren't dangerous. Google has simply migrated much or all of their AdSense hosting to this network. Therefore, googleads.g.doubleclick.net referrals are just paid ads run through Google’s content network.

The Sides of a Golden Triangle

by J. Butler, Applecore Content Development Specialist

According to a Google-commissioned study performed by Enquiro Search Solutions, Inc, this is roughly how the human eye absorbs the information based on a first-time visit to a unique search query page. What follows is a heat map tracking a user's first viewing-- the darker the hue, the more time the eye spent on that area:

Notice that shape. It's what led to christening this pattern the Golden Triangle--a term that covers the area and order in which the eye reads and processes information. In the early days before this innovation, a big percentage of optimization was done on educated guesswork. But when the Golden Triangle was introduced at the Search Engine Strategies conference in 2005, it changed the way many designers, search engine marketers and users looked at how people use search engines.

The Golden Triangle doesn't just apply to Google—similar eye-tracking tests run against several other search engines, such as Yahoo or MSN, showed the same results:

So the big question: what does the Golden Triangle really mean? Well, it means that if your listing doesn’t fall inside that triangle, your chances of being clicked are drastically reduced, if not totally diminished. The top-three results draws 100 percent visibility, while result four gets 85 percent, and so on. Anything from result six onward has to fight for the remaining visibility of 50 percent .

Research like this gives real depth to the importance of search engine marketing, and how using Search Engine Optimization properly is key to any solid marketing plan.

Source: Eye-Tracking Study More Than Meets the Eye [Google Blog]

Using Gmail for Internal Email

by Greg Pike, Applecore Web Developer

A Little Background
At our office we use one email for sending all of our server-generated emails. We have scripts that connect to the server and use that email for sending notifications, contact forms, and other website-related emails. In the past our scripts could send emails and mask who they were coming from by simply changing the value of the "From" field. For instance, if I went to a contact form and entered my email as johnsmith@example.com and click Send, the email received should appear from johnsmith@example.com rather than the generic email used by the server for sending mail.

For years, with our host, this was never a problem. We recently switched our email host to Gmail and, along with a few other technical hiccups from the switch, we had a problem with masking emails as from a specific sender.

Why is there even a problem sending these emails from Gmail?
Gmail blocks server-generated emails from masking who they’re from. Gmail forces the developer to authenticate themselves as whatever email they want to send from. That is, if you wanted your script to send an email as John Smith you would need his username and password to send it from the server. This isn’t usually ideal, but Gmail is trying to prevent servers from sending emails from someone without their consent.

Disclaimer
We managed to come up with an ad-hoc solution to the problem for any small organizations, like ours, that run intranets or scripts that send external emails from employees or members. It isn’t glamorous and it unfortunately doesn’t really work for anyone who isn’t a part of your network, but it’s a solution that met our needs. And since we couldn’t find any references to it online, we’re making our own contribution.

Our solution
Log into the Gmail account you intend to send emails from. This account should be the one your web scripts access. Click Settings and go to Accounts. Here, add the account of each member of your network. You can do this by clicking "Add another email address." As long as John Smith is associated with the server email (the one you logged in to), Gmail can send emails as if they’re from his account. This goes for all members of the network.

It might be wise to explain to your organization ahead of time that you need them to confirm their association with this Gmail account. When you add them as an additional account they’ll receive an email that tells them they need to verify that they wish for their account to be associated with your server account.

Good luck with it! 

Understanding Bounce Rates

by Greg Pike, Applecore Web Developer

Bounce rate. It's one of the top Google Analytics metrics and yet many people are still confused by it. What does it mean next to exit rates? What's the difference?

 A “bounce” is when a user has shown little interest in your website. In other words, when a user hits your website only to leave or ignore it immediately.

 The bounce rate is therefore the percentage of users who bounce. If four out of every ten users bounce, your bounce rate is 40%. This says four out of every ten users came to your site, didn't find what they were looking for, and left.

 Bounce rate: "I came. I puked. I left." - Avinash Kaushik, Google’s Analytics Evangelist and author of Web Analytics: An Hour A Day.

Average Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is a performance measure for a website, particularly websites keen on converting users into customers like e-commerce websites. Most bounce rates will be somewhere between 35% and 60%. It's good practice to strive to reach the lowest possible bounce rate you can for a website.

Causes of High Bounce Rates

High bounce rates can be caused by a number of factors.

• Poor content. Users are nosy and want to learn more, but if your content isn't useful or not relevant they will not waste their time.
• Misplaced links, buttons, graphics or ads. Web users are very impatient and if they don't see what they want right away, they'll simply leave. Review how you're communicating to your users or redesign your website to draw them in. Google’s Website Optimizator will allow you to compare visitor metrics for multiple versions of the same page. Try creating several versions of a page to determine what will perform better.
• Abbreviated domain name. Many organizations share abbreviated names. For example, MWI is both the name of a search engine marketing company (mwi.com) and conflict mediation company (mwi.org).
• Start pages. Any user that has your website set as their start page will hit your website every time they open their web browser.
• Information pages. Users can be quick to jump around to find the information they desire. Information pages tend to have high bounce rates because users hit them to learn something specific, and when they acquire that knowledge they return to where they came from or move on.

There are some websites that will have high bounce rates and there's very little that can be done to change it. For the other websites that want to take action and lower their bounce rate, there isn't really one solitary solution. Every website has different content, different audiences and many other distinctive factors that make it unique-- which means improving bounce rate can only be taken on a case by case basis. That magic word or one-step process to give you a better bounce rate? It doesn't exist. 

Bounce Rate and Exit Rate

At first glance, it might be difficult to see a difference between bounce and exit rate. Exit rate is similar to bounce rate, but differs in that it calculates the percentage of users that "exit" the site from any particular page. For example, a user hits the default landing page and navigates to a news article. There is no bounce because the user stayed on the website. Then the user goes to google.com and searches for something. This is an exit. Exit rate is the percentage of users that leave the site from a given page divided by the total number of users that visit that same page.

 Let's break it down.

Ten users visit the Applecore Games page.

Two users hit this page from a search query and the other eight all get there from the site navigation (meaning they were already on the Applecore site before going to the games).

One of those two users (from the search engine) leaves the page and goes back to their search results and the other one clicks a link and plays one of the games.

Of the other eight, three users leave the website and go to eBay to buy books on the definition of Exit Rates.

The other five click on links and also play the games.

Bounce Rate: 1 / 10 - 10%
Exit Rate: 3 / 10 - 30%

 

Exit rate is not necessarily a bad thing. Users cannot stay on your website forever. It does, however, give you insight as to what pages leave your visitors feeling the need to move on.

Google Does it Yet Again

by J. Butler, Applecore Content Development Specialist

Google has become such a mainstay that it would hard to remember a world without it. In fact, the day that we all knew Google wasn’t just the latest technological trend probably came sometime in July 2005---when “Google” entered the English language as a verb:

goo·gle • \gü-gəl\: to use the Google search engine to obtain information about (as a person) on the World Wide Web.

 These days, Google is consistantly the leader of the pack when it comes to innovations. In late 2006, they bought the online video site YouTube for US$1.65 billion in stock. Come September 2008, Google launched Google Chrome, its own web browser.

Late last year, Google announced the introduction of Google Flu Trends, a service that will take the IP addresses of users searching for flu-related queries, compile them, and track the active areas of flu outbreaks weeks before the official data from the Center for Disease Control is released.

As of May 2008, Hitwise reports that Google is the most used search engine on the web accounting for 68.29% of all US searches, way ahead of the closest competition—Yahoo, for example, trails behind at 19.95%. But did you ever stop to think about the path Google took to become the household name that it is today?

Older search engines would only rank the importance of a site by how many times a search term appears on it—if you searched for “apple pie,” you’d be given pages based only on how often “apple pie” appeared on the site…not based on the overall quality level.

But Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two PhD. students out of Stanford University, had a bigger dream: to devise a ranking system that could accurately reflect the relevance and quality of a website.

And so, in January 1996, Google began as the research project of two students. The germ of their idea was a search engine that could create a more accurate ranking system by looking at the relationships between websites rather than just the web content alone. Revolutionary? We think so.

After much testing, the company was incorporated as Google Inc. on September 4, 1998 (making them Applecore’s slightly older brother). Their unofficial corporate motto? “Don’t be evil.”

            Google’s approach paved the way for Search Engine Optimization (or SEO). Search Engine Optimization is just what it sounds like—it’s enriching a website with the right tools (like keywords, links and content) to place it higher in the page rankings of Google and other search engines. Using SEO properly is two parts science, one part art, helping to achieve top rankings organically (at no cost). SEO has transformed into an incredible tool for attracting both the right kind and the greatest volume of traffic for a website.

It’s an exciting wait to see what other innovations Google will cook up next, because with every new invention comes inspiration from seeing people be their most creative, most insightful selves. 

Mozilla CEO: Ties with Google 'complicated' since Chrome

December 21, 2008 (Computerworld) Mozilla Corp. has a "reasonable" relationship with longtime partner Google Inc., but it's gotten complicated since Google launched its own browser, according to Mozilla's chief executive.

"We have a fine and reasonable relationship," John Lilly, Mozilla's CEO, said in an interview last week. "But I'd be lying if I said that things weren't more complicated than they used to be."

Responding to questions about Mozilla's take on the upswing in browser competition, Lilly also knocked another rival, Microsoft Corp., for dismissing attempts to boost browser performance as merely a "drag race."

"It's a pretty good time to be a browser user," said Lilly. "There are more smart people hacking on browsers than in a long time. But when I hear Dean [Hachamovitch, general manager of Microsoft's Internet Explorer] say JavaScript performance is for crazy guys to worry about, then that worries me."

[ Read Entire Article ]

1-800-GOOG-411

http://www.google.ca/goog411/

Windows 7: Microsoft's secret weapon against Google

October 27, 2008 (Computerworld) With the first public alpha release of Windows 7 due today at the Microsoft PDC2008 conference, the outline of the new operating system is taking shape. What you won't see when that alpha comes out is the way that Microsoft will try to use Windows 7 as a Trojan horse in its war against Google.

Google's domination of the search market continues unabated, but Microsoft hasn't given up on it. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer recently said that his company is willing to lose "5% to 10% of total operating income for several years" to fund its ongoing attempt to make inroads into the search market. Much more than search is at stake. Google wants to replace Microsoft's desktop-based applications, such as Office, with its cloud-based applications, such as Google Docs.

So where does Windows 7 come in? What new features can Microsoft possibly introduce that will help it overtake Google in search and retain its domination of productivity software such as Office?

Microsoft's secret weapon in Windows 7 is not what features the operating system has, but instead what features it doesn't have. Microsoft is stripping Windows 7 of some of Windows' best built-in applications, and it's making them available only as downloads on its Windows Live site.

[ Read Entire Article ]

Google Earth brings virtual tourism to iPhone

SAN FRANCISCO--Google already has customized some of its Web sites for display on the iPhone, but now the company also dived headlong onto Apple's highly regarded mobile phone with a full-fledge application, a handheld version of its Google Earth geographical software.

Google Earth lets people virtually fly around a 3D view of the world made from satellite and aerial imagery mapped onto the planet's mountains and valleys. The iPhone version reproduces this core experience, downloading imagery from Google's servers as the perspective shifts and dotting the map with landmarks, photos, and other information.

"The idea of having Earth on a mobile device is something people dreamed of back to the Keyhole days and before," said Peter Birch, Google Earth's product manager, referring to the satellite imagery company Google acquired in 2004. "This is the first opportunity we've had to be able to deliver a great experience."

[ Read Entire Article ]

Google for Webmasters Tutorial: Ranking

Linking out: Often it's just appying common sense

Creating outbound links on your site, or "linking out", is our topic for Day 3 of Links Week. Linking out happens naturally, and for most webmasters, it's not something you have to worry about. Nonetheless, in case you're interested about an otherwise simple topic that's fundamental to the web, here's the good, the bad, and answers to more advanced questions asked by our fellow webmasters. First, let's start with the good...

[ Read Entire Article ]