Tag Archives ⇒ Google

Google Sets Out To Buy Hulu

· Brandon Hann

If owning YouTube wasn’t enough, now the technology giant sets its sights on Hulu. Currently, Hulu is a jointly-owned outfit run by the likes of Disney, NBC Universal and News Corp. The service picks up the slack where YouTube drops it off—broadcasting tv shows and other specials that are wholly owned by mass media outlets like NBC Universal, CBS, ABC, etc.

If this purchase were to happen, it would be hard to imagine what or who could get in Google’s way. Google already has the largest and most popular search engine today and the most populated self-promoting video site available. If they add Hulu to that mix, they would have a trifecta from hell! Well, maybe it won’t be that bad, but the idea that one company could theoretically be at the helm of the web’s top three search, video and tv site is pretty scary.

Google is already in hot water over allegations that they favor their own services in search results when compared to paying advertisers. Their complaint is that other companies can’t compete with Google due to the massive amount of services and products they offer. I have to agree, but is all these ill-thoughts toward Google valid? I mean, if a company makes great products and people love using them, how is it their fault that competitors have it tough?

At any rate, the Hulu purchase would further allow Google into the connected devices of Americans all over the country via the Hulu Plus subscription. Hulu Plus allows paying members the ability to connect Hulu accounts to almost any media device: Blu-ray players, gaming consoles, smartphones, Internet-tvs and those new refrigerators that have built-in wi-fi and LCD screens. Google had already expressed major interest in a Google TV service that offered these features. Maybe it’s safe to say that Google can now proceed with that idea and adding Hulu to the mix as a fore-front content provider. Or maybe Google can simply re-brand Hulu into Google TV.

Whatever the case may be, let’s just hope things get better instead of worse. Right now, there’s an epidemic of floundering websites and media services that come and go by the night, all competing for your eyes. Only time will tell who the victor is, but one thing’s for sure, the mega powerhouse Google is not going away anytime soon.

OS X Lion Coming, Automatic Facebook Updates and Google Antitrust Case

· Brandon Hann

For Friday’s offering, I bring you 3 top stories that I haven’t already covered this week. Speaking of which, after this week’s articles, I have successfully talked myself into getting a Windows Phone 7 device, practically almost fell out of my seat when I realized I might be getting rid of iPhone once and for all and learned that Nokia might be stepping back into the U.S. marketplace with new Windows phones slated for 2012. In other words, I’m done talking about all these changes for now! See you next week!!

OS X Lion

Snow Leopard has received its final update in preparation of OS X Lion coming out very soon. The new 10.6.8 update provides better support for iPv6, improved VPN reliability and addresses some known security issues including:

  • Bogus Mac Defender software
  • Malicious fonts embedded into documents that wreak havoc on Mac machines
  • Maliciously embedded ColorSync profiles
  • Ability for network admins to view wireless tranmissions

The update also modifies the operating system to allow for a direct connection to the Mac App store allowing users wishing to upgrade to Lion the ability to do so as a direct download rather than going into an Apple Store to purchase the disc. Both options are available for $29.95. OS X Snow Leopard was more of performance and reliability upgrade rather than adding new features, but Apple promises OS X Lion will be all about new features.

If updating from 10.6.7, the new update download will be 275.3MB.

Automatic Facebook Update Service

If there was ever one of those times where you can say, “Why didn’t I think of that?”, this is it! According Precreate Solutions, clients have reported more home break-ins whenever they leave Facebook status messages claiming they’ll be out of town for extended periods of time. If we didn’t already have so much to worry about this day in age, now we have to wonder who will be seeing our updates as invitations to go to my house and steal my tv. I don’t know what’s worse—that people are actually actively looking for these things on Facebook or that one of my “friends” actually wants to rob me!

Anyway, Precreate Solutions is now offering a service that will monitor and update your Facebook statuses to give the impression that, not only are you home, but that your everyday digital life is continuing without interruption. Of course this service comes with a fee. A quick look at their website doesn’t seem to offer this service outright, but it may very well be an add-on service for existing clients.

The service works by using messages from a pre-approved message list to be applied to your Facebook status. Whether or not these messages can be created by the client is not known, but one thing’s for sure: don’t start posting your own statuses when you get to your vacation spot or you’ll instantly blow your cover!

Google Antitrust Case

Although Google claims they are still “unclear exactly what the FTC’s concerns are”, Federal regulators have launched an antitrust investigation into Google’s business practices. It seems that competitors are complaining that Google uses their enormous clout to favor their own services and business operations over those of their rivals. Google stated on their blog site: “We make hundreds of changes to our algorithms every year to improve your search experience, [and] not every website can come out at the top of the page, or even appear on the first page of our search results.”

It would be hard to imagine Google playing this game considering that their main focus has always been on the user and the overall search experience. Google’s own philosophy is that if they focus on users, all else will follow. Since the complaints are coming from competitors and not users, one would think that the organic search results showing up on Google are being generated completely by the users.

Besides, if Google happens to offer a service for just about everything you can think of, wouldn’t you assume that their presence in the search results will be fairly large? I think the real complaint is that rivals are not getting the results they want and because Google handles 2 out of every 3 searches online these days, they just need someone to pin it on.

Google's New +1 Button

· Brandon Hann

Google has launched a new feature for search results called the +1 Button. It works like a recommendation button where you can click +1 on a particular website or webpage to help others know that it’s been recommended. If you’ve used sites like Digg.com, you know how this process works. Basically, after you’ve read some content on a website and decided you liked it, you click the +1 Button and it helps other web users by ranking your site/content like a score card. In turn, websites and web pages with higher “votes” can potentially gain higher rankings on Google search results pages (SERPs).

Adding the +1 Button to your site

After logging into my AdSense account, I was greeted with this lovely message:
Google +1 Button AdSense message
From there, I clicked on the link that took me to the code page where I had a choice of 4 different sizes for the icon as well as some other advanced settings. I didn’t spend too much time on this page as I wanted to get the button on my site ASAP! I simply chose the standard size and left everything else the same.
Google +1 Button
The code was easy to implement. In WordPress:

  1. Open your theme editor and begin editing header.php
  2. Find the </head> tag and place the code: <script type=”text/javascript” src=”https://www.ledfrog.com/content/images/2011/06/plusone.js”></script> right above it.
  3. Save header.php
  4. Begin editing single.php (if you want the button to appear on each post)
  5. Find the area you want the button to show up. On my site, I placed it right before the content starts so it’s at the beginning of every post.
  6. Place this code: <g:plusone></g:plusone> before <?php the_content();
  7. Save single.php

Now that you have all the code in place, go to one of your blog posts and verify that it’s showing up.

What’s Next?

Well as with any traffic-related feature on your site, all that you really can do now is wait. If the users want to vote up your content, they now have the option to do so within Google directly. If you find that you’re not getting a lot of response from this feature, try moving the button around your site to see where it works best.

The purpose of this feature is to help web users find valuable content as ranked by other web users that have already seen what you have to offer. This helps Google in their never-ending quest to filter out junk sites and sites with little to no content while pushing more valuable sites up to the top of the SERPs. Let’s just hope that this feature doesn’t get abused like so many other Google features have been in the past!

The Google Chromebook Netbook is Here

· Brandon Hann

When I was in New York back in February, the friend I was staying with received a mysterious package in the mail and decided to open it while we were all there. He pulled out a strange-looking black netbook that had no logos, brand names or stickers of any kind on it. It was small, sleek and didn’t have a rom drive. From the looks of it, it was your run of the mill netbook except with a 11.6″ screen.

Once he turned it on, the device booted into a strange, but refreshing operating system known as ChromeOS. He then told us that months before, he had signed up to become a beta tester for Google to test out the new OS they were building around Chrome. The arrival of this netbook was a surprise given that he had forgot all about signing up for it. At any rate, we played around with it and noticed that this wasn’t your average computer. It wasn’t a watered-down version of Windows and it wasn’t trying to do things it wasn’t meant to do…it was simply a cloud computer.

Samsung Chromebook

I’ve talked about cloud computing before and I have to tell you, ChromeOS nails it! The computer boots in 8 seconds and has nothing on it except the Internet. That sounds funny to say while you’re holding a laptop, but it really only has a web browser. Everything is managed over the Internet through integration with all of Google’s services like Google Docs, Gmail, Maps, etc. This video explains it all:

Amazon has already created the product pages for the new Chromebooks from Acer and Samsung. There doesn’t appear to be any price points at this time, but I can’t imagine this device costing much for than a few hundred dollars. More details to follow.

Google In Trouble for Location Tracking Software

· Brandon Hann

Directly on the heels of developments revolving around Apple’s iOS 4 privacy concerns, Google is now up to bat. Only this time, there’s a lawsuit involved. $50 million to be exact.

Now, $50 million seems like a drop in the bucket for the likes of Google, but as with most lawsuits, it’s the point that’s more important and this case is no different. According to Wired.com, “Detroit area residents Julie Brown and Kayla Molaski filed a class action lawsuit against Google over concerns that the location data that Android devices send to Google “several times per hour” is tied to a unique (though random) device ID.” What this tells me is that people are becoming more and more aware of just what kind of personal information is getting out to the world. The irony of this is we also live in a world where we’ve never been connected more.

With Facebook, Twitter, and personal blogs and the ability to “check-in” to practically all these, does it really surprise you to find your name on Google? If we learn anything from movies these day, we should all know just how traceable the cell phone world is, so does it also surprise you that your smartphone is sending data to the companies that run the software?

Of course not! In fact, it’s not even personal data that’s being transmitted (or so they say). It’s simply location data. Naturally, when you hear such a term, your first thought is a horror story about how Google (or Apple) will always know where you’re at. This is just not the case. At least in Apple’s story, they were collecting location data in the form of cache that allows them to reduce the amount of bandwidth required to pull the same data off the same cell towers everyday. To put it in English, if you are using an app that uses location mapping, your phone has to contact each local cell tower and download some data in order for your phone to know where you’re at. Part of the process includes your device uploading some data to that cell tower. Apple was basically storing that data for you so the next time you accessed it, the desired results would come to you much faster.

The other major concern in both of these cases was how accessible such data could be should your device fall into the wrong hands. In other words, if your mortal enemy got a hold of your phone, could he/she download files that would tell them where you’ve been? It would seem that in Apple’s case, that was true—this was fixed in the latest software update. In Google’s case, the data remained on the phone in an encrypted state that could only be accessed through a root connection (which on Android phones, it’s the equivalent of jailbreaking).

Lastly, the class action lawsuit is claiming that Android devices are collecting this data every few seconds and then transmitting it back to Google every hour or so. Google claims that this data is transferred with a unique (and random) ID number that in no way allows Google to know what device the data came from or who owns it. I for one, am not worried about this. Well, actually my only real concern would be the likelihood that my battery will die much sooner with all those “extra” connections.

Being Forgotten By Google

· Brandon Hann

This is not the kind of talk that any successful webmaster (or aspiring one) would ever want to entertain! Imagine one day, everything you’ve put into creating your place in the Internet world was simply forgotten by Google—ceased to exist, gone, goodbye, no more. However, it would seem that the desire to be forgotten is not that uncommon for regular people out there.

In Spain, there’s a court case against Google that is requesting they remove information on 90 people found within its indexes. Spain’s Data Privacy Agency is ordering that this information be removed after it received complaints about the content being old and now considered to be embarrassing if not libelous to the individuals involved. I’m not here to report the news, so if you want to read the full article go check out Yahoo’s ‘Right to be Forgotten’ article.

What I do want to talk about is just how much information there is out there in regards to your personal information. As for myself, I’ve always been very careful about what I put online and when I’m on Facebook, I’m very vigilant about staying on top of who’s posting comments and pictures involving me and removing items I don’t “approve” of.

Google yourself

As a test, I Googled my full name and I’m happy to report that where most people might find the top links to be some type of people-finding service and reverse phone-number lookups, I’ve managed to secure the top 10 results with various profile pages of mine and web projects I’ve created or worked on. The reason I’m happy about this is because I control every single one of those links. If one day, I don’t like that I posted my email address online, I can remove it and it will cease to exist from that link forever.

How do you fare when Googling your name? None of this may matter right now, but think about your future. Maybe one day you become famous or run for office and because of this wonderful Internet we have, practically all of your personal information is left to the world forever! We’ve all heard stories about people getting fired from their jobs because of unscrupulous Facebook posts and raunchy pictures. In fact, one of my favorite examples of this is the following:

Employee gets fired on Facebook

Becoming forgotten

According to the aforementioned case, one of the individuals involved is running a plastic surgery business and when his practice is searched, the top link shows you his site and relevant information, but the next one shows off a lawsuit that the surgeon was involved in back in 1991. His argument is that this information is detrimental to his business. I should say so! In fact, I’m kind of thinking that maybe people should know this information before getting involved in plastic surgery. On the other hand, is it right (or fair) to judge someone based on extremely old data?

It goes without saying that Google receives tons of removal requests like this from all over the world, but Google doesn’t remove a single one because they don’t want to jeopardize the integrity of their indexes.

So how does one become forgotten online? There is no complete solution to this dilemma because the Internet just keeps collecting data, day after day, after day. The only true way to control information on yourself is to control the source. If you can’t do that, then always remember this one simple rule: if you put it on the Internet, assume everyone in the world has seen it. And if they haven’t, it’s only a matter of time.

Google's New Panda Algorithm Changes The Face of Search Rankings

· Brandon Hann

In Google’s never-ending effort to rid their indexes of low or no-quality websites while boosting rankings for higher-quality sites, they have launched a new algorithm focused primarily on user feedback. As a publisher myself, this is a very important change. However, since I don’t practice in any deceiving tactics in order to boost my own traffic, I’m not too worried about it. As always, with any site that I write for or work on, what you see is what you get.

For those who have spent lots of time and other resources on building worthless websites, ripping content from higher quality sites, participating in link farms or any other form of “search fraud”, you can probably kiss your work goodbye. At this point, it’s only a matter of time until you lose your foothold and/or become removed altogether.

What did Google change?

To put it as simply as possible, Google changed the way it ranks websites. Before, it was all about keywords, how those keywords related to content, links and other factors. As of a month ago, it’s more about user opinions on particular sites. Essentially these are user feedback signals that can affect how well a site will rank compared to others of similar content. The goal for this change is to allow users (in time) to generate the popularity of the search results. While this may seem like a good plan on the surface, adding any human element of this magnitude can possibly carry some negative side effects:

  1. Some users mistake low-quality sites for high-quality sites and vote accordingly. For example, a person who has always gotten their “news” from AssociatedContent.com might feel like it’s more authoritative than Msn.com, thus making MSN rank lower.
  2. DoS-type attacks. I don’t know of any way to stop someone from creating some kind of bot that allows them to “vote down” targeted websites in hopes of getting their own site ranked higher.

More local search results

Another major change is the localization of results. For those of you who have some type of Google account, be it iGoogle, Gmail, AdSense, etc., you are already aware of how specialized the search results are for you based on a number of things like your previous searches, but this new update brings up more related results to your area based on your Internet connection.

Granted, this is helpful when you’re looking for local businesses or places to eat, but what about if you’re looking for national or international businesses? The Internet was designed to connect you to the world and some of the main reasons most people use it is to find those obscure places to buy products or to get information you can’t get locally. So what happens? Well, those results are more likely to get drowned out down into the next couple of pages.

The upsides

If you’ve built an all-original site and have continued to update it without the use of shady tactics aimed at gaining your higher search results, then you generally have nothing to worry about. In fact, these changes might actually help your site because it’ll clear out most of the junk that is probably ranking higher than you right now.

If you’re just a Google user, then these changes will help you dramatically because over time, the results you see will be based on what other people have said about a particular site and how great they felt the content was. Plus, we should be able to kiss the days when any search would pull up 20 spam sites goodbye!

My two cents

My one tip of advice: don’t write content just to get more traffic! Always write with the user in mind. Trust me on this. It will take longer to do and cause you to spend more time researching, but it will pay off greatly in the end. You can play the SEO game until you’re blue in the face, but what’s it all worth if you spend countless hours and money getting all this traffic to your site only to have Google make one simple change down the road that causes your site to lose 75% of your efforts?!

Use SEO as a way to make your already-great content shine even more. Don’t use it to just to play the ranking game. The best side-effect of this approach is that Google will never penalize great, original websites, so you’ll never have to worry about another Google update!

Web 2.0 – Hash Marks

· Brandon Hann

If you don’t know what a hash mark is, it’s the ‘#’ on your phone or SHIFT+3 on your keyboard. You may also call it a pound sign. Right about now, you might be asking what does this little symbol have to do with websites! I’m glad you asked because I’m here to tell you.

#?

This is a more advanced article regarding the usage of the hash symbol as a means to reduce duplicate content for the search engines. As mentioned much earlier, you never want to have duplicate content. This not only means copying content from other websites, but providing duplicate links from within your own site.

Let say for example you we interested in tracking ad results so you created three different ad links all pointing back to your site. Maybe the first ad was from Facebook, the second was from MySpace and the third was from Google AdWords. For tracking purposes, you would have setup three different URLs so you can see which ad generated the most traffic. These URLs might look something like this:

Homepage (Style 1)

Homepage (Style 1)

Homepage (Style 1)

These links by themselves are not causing any problems, but when a search engine begins indexing your website, it’s going to find and index all 3 separately. The problem is that all of these links point to the same exact page. If the search engine views these 3 different links pointing to the same page, it’s very likely that your site could be penalized for duplicate content.

Another problem this creates is that it spreads any link juice you might have over all 3 links even though they are still pointing to the exact same page! You don’t want this!!

To solve this, you would replace the “?” with a “#” to make the URLs appear like this:

Homepage (Style 1)

Homepage (Style 1)

Homepage (Style 1)

Search engines will stop at the hash, thus making your 3 links appear only as 1! Confused yet?? I don’t pretend to be the expert on this matter and therefore, for further reading, check out this page all about URL referrers.

My two cents

I recommend that you decide up front how the links to your website will be organized. Besides the information on this page, there’s a whole slew of problems that can arise from improperly linked webpages. It’s important that once you have a link structure in place, you stick with it and don’t change it.

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Web 2.0 – Groups

· Brandon Hann

Online groups are just as important and functional as groups in real life. They allow people that share common interests to network with each other and share information, opinions and ideas. Finding a group is easy and it’s something that you should always consider when you’re looking for a competitive edge in business.

What are groups?

Lets say you’re in the business of building websites and you’re having a little trouble finding clients or maybe you feel a little stuck with some of your skills and you need a little help. You could go it alone and spend countless hours scouring the Internet for all the resources you need, but imagine if you belonged to a group other other web designers and maybe a few web hosting providers?

You would now have access to countless amounts of free tools and help from people all over the world!

In the days past, web groups were all important for your business to gain that slight advantage and it was hard to find them, but today, groups have kind of taking on a new image.

Social networking has arrived and services like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Groups and Xing are providing a hybrid experience that incorporates everyday communications and updates with actual business-networking building tools.

Group websites

I have compiled a small list of websites that offer network building tools, user groups and more. This section was not expected to be very large considering the majority of this information will be available later when I begin discussing social networking, but here’s a small list of popular sites.

  • LinkedIn – LinkedIn uses a simple premise–connect with former and current colleagues and friends. Once you start building your connections in turn, you gain access to their connections and so forth. The more people you can connect with, the more networking you can do.
  • Xing – Xing takes global networking to a new level. They boast over 8 million professionals using their services for managing business contacts. You can even search for new employees for your business, advertise with other companies and use your profile to draw attention to your company.
  • Facebook – Although Facebook is mainly a social networking site, it does allow you to create a group for your business. This allows you to promote your services and get your name out there, but in comparison, I’d rather create a fan page. See my next topic for more information.
  • Google Groups – This is yet one more service from Google that’s less hyped and promoted compared to everything else they do, but it’s a great tool anyway. You can find a group for just about anything you could want. From what I noticed, the majority of people are using Google Groups to provide tech support and help, but it can still be used as a viable networking site.

Of course, there are plenty more out there, but the general idea is to connect yourself and your website with others in related fields. Before you know it, other people will be linking directly to your site and this will help increase your traffic!

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Firefox 3.6.2 Fixes Critical Security Hole

· Brandon Hann

This one is for all you Firefox users out there. It looks like no browser is safe from the threat of viruses and other threats. And yet another reason why I love my MacBook and Google Chrome browser. Together, they’re a strong team. If you’re using Internet Explorer or Safari, you too should consider Chrome.

Anyway, if you do use Firefox you should consider updating because this bit of information just came out:

Mozilla addressed a critical security vulnerability with a minor Firefox update, bringing the browser to version 3.6.2. The vulnerability could potentially allow an attacker to “crash a victim’s browser and execute arbitrary code on his/her system.”

Users of Firefox 3.6 will have this update automatically downloaded and installed, but you can also manually apply it by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu.

The release notes for Firefox 3.6.2 can be found here.

-Originally posted here at Mashable.com

For those of you who switched to Firefox because you didn’t like Internet Explorer, now you can switch to Chrome, a far better browser (at least until someone hacks it too).