October 23, 2009

7 Google Updates: Custom Search, AdWords API, Maps, Search Appliance and More

Google had another busy week pushing out updates. That's really no surprise considering Apple released product refreshes and Microsoft released Windows 7. Google hasn't let any major update from any competitor go by without their own news and this week was no different.

We've already covered Google getting a deal with Twitter (similar to Bing's deal with Twitter) as well as a new social search experiment set up in Google Labs.

Here are 7 updates that are slightly minor but you'll still want to know about:

Custom Search is now available for mobile search experiences on smartphone and higher-end devices. Google will even host your mobile-optimized custom search pages for you, or you can host it on your mobile site.

AdWords API has a new version that includes asynchronous calls, keyword and placement ideas, and a location extensions preview.

Google Maps for Mobile has introduced layers for Blackberry users.

Google Search Appliance, an enterprise search server, released an update that includes a Self-Learning Scorer.

Google Friend Connect has a new Wordpress plugin.

Webmaster Central has new instructions for verifying a Blogger blog in Webmaster Tools.

Google Reader added Popular Items and Personalized Ranking features.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 12:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

July 16, 2009

Google Reader's New Sharing Options (Plus a Shared Items Twitter Sharing Tip!)

Google Reader unleashed new sharing options this week, continuing the slow but steady trend of turning the newsreader into a social media platform.

Let's say I'm reading the Search Engine Watch expert column feed. I now have the option to "Like" the post. Google Reader tracks the number of people doing so and places the tally under the subject line.

If you click on the number of people liking a post, you'll get a list of those people. Click on a name and you'll be taken to their Google Profile page. From there, you can connect with that person depending on what they have shared. Users can share their Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed accounts and more.

This is a great way to find followers on Twitter. I've started to follow those of you liking SEW posts. And I'm getting return follows as well.

If you want to share your Google Reader shared items with your Twitter followers, I recommend using Twitterfeed.com. Just use the RSS feed from your shared items page.

Do you like Google Reader's new sharing options? Click "Like" to this post in Google Reader if you do.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 11:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 5, 2009

Google Goes for Social with Google Talk Location and Friends Expansion in Reader

Google is really going after social media with two updates. First up, if you use Google Latitude, you can now automatically update your location on Google Talk. This is very reminiscent of social networking apps we're seeing for mobile phones. Allow yourself to be found and chatted with - very trendy.

Next up, Google Reader is getting even friendlier by enabling profile boxes for commenters. In other words, say you're checking out the comments on a friend's shared item and you don't know who someone who made a comment is. Mouse over the name and a box will pop up with their profile to give you a little info on them.

Posted by Nathania Johnson at 1:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

December 27, 2007

Google Misses the Mark with Reader Shared Items

This might make the folks at Facebook feel better about the whole Beacon privacy fiasco. It appears that even Google can make a mistake, as they did this month when they made shared items in Google Reader accessible to all Google Talk friends. Without asking. And without an easy way to opt out, short of deleting contacts or not sharing anything.

I don't know if I'd go so far as some, who claim that the move by Google ruined Christmas, but it was an unnecessarily foolish move by Google, which could have been avoided by making the sharing an opt-in decision, instead of an opt-out one.

This week (being a slow news week and all), many bloggers took offense to the move. Some complained that Google is invading their privacy by sharing items with people who they didn't intend to share with. Others blame users for not understanding what "shared" means.

Last night, the product team responded on the Google Reader blog with a response to the "helpful feedback" it received from bloggers. The sharing feature is still automatic and opt-out, but now users can quickly create a new tag for all shared items and then decide which contacts to share those items with.

And a link is presented at sign-in to a page that explains the process in the Reader Help Center:"If for any reason you'd like to start your sharing afresh, you can always remove all your previously shared items. Just go to the Friends Settings and click Move or Clear Shared Items. You will be given an option to select or create a tag and move your shared items to that tag, or clear your shared items. The items will remain in their original feeds along with any tags you've given them, but will no longer be in your shared items feed."

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 5:28 AM | Permalink

September 12, 2007

Google Leaks Info on Google Reader, Social Networking Efforts

Seems an internal presentation on Google Readre and their planned social networking efforts was leaked, according to Philipp Lenssen at Blogoscoped.

The video presentation that a number of people online now have passed around was for Nooglers - new employees of Google, according to reports.

Among the details discovered: Google is developing a "standard for feed publishers to tell aggegrators about changes in the feed". "The Reader team is going to integrate more social features."

Posted by Frank Watson at 3:02 PM | Permalink

Google Reader Not Yet in Universal Search

Google Blogoscoped reports that an internal video titled Nooglers And The PDB: Reactor (Ben Darnell, September 6, 2007) was leaked from Google. Nooglers is the internal term for new Googlers, and Reactor is the internal code word for Google Reader.

There were a number of interesting points that Google Blogoscoped extracted from the video. One particularly interesting one was that there is no plan to integrate Google Reader with Universal Search: "This is because Universal Search doesn't provide its backends with user IDs (so Gmail results can't be shown either), and because it requires a lookup time of less than 1/4 second".

My own suspicion is that while there may be no short term plan to do this type of integration, Google would like to do this over the longer term. There is a strong commitment to Universal Search and Personalization within Google, and taking advantage of user specified feeds makes a lot of sense. After all, by subscribing to a feeed, a user is indicating that they trust that feed as a source of information.

Posted by at 10:35 AM | Permalink

September 6, 2007

Google Reader Adds Search Box...Finally

I'm finding it hard to get excited by the news that Google Reader now has a search feature to allow users to search in all of their feeds. It's certainly useful and all, but it just seems so un-Googley that it hasn't had a search box before now. It's something that Bloglines has had since June 2006.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 1:30 PM | Permalink

October 30, 2006

Google Reader Bug Swatting

Quick post from the Official Google Reader Blog - they've swatted some bugs in the product. On the most part, these are those small, but very irritating bugs that make a utility less enjoyable to use. It's a real miscellany as you'd expect, but includes things such as searching for feeds using keywords now works in Opera, the scrolling position is now always reset when moving between feeds or folders. The "none" color scheme for publisher clips now works, keyboard shortcuts in Internet Explorer should continue to work after using "gt" or "gu" (the tag and subscription selectors) and so on.

I'm glad to see that the Google engineers are doing their best to improve the product, but I've got two observations that will label me as less than charitable.

Firstly, in the announcement they say "Being an engineer isn't always about working on fun new features -- sometimes there are bugs that need to be fixed before anything else can happen." (My emphasis.) Having worked with engineers developing and improving products surely the point is that bugs need to be fixed because they ARE bugs and detract in some way from the product, not because they stop you doing something more interesting? The implication is that Google is prepared to leave bugs in products until and unless forced to fix them because of development plans; but I could be being far too pedantic here and mis-reading a comment.

Secondly is there any chance that the engineers working on Google Reader could be loaned out to Google Search, because there are a few long standing bugs there that need fixing, though since they only affect users rather than development plans they're considered low priority?

Posted by Phil Bradley at 11:08 AM | Permalink

September 29, 2006

Google Reader & Ask's Bloglines Undergo Updates

Both Google Reader and Ask.com's Bloglines have gone under some interface and usability updates, with some added features included.

The Google Blog announced the update last night, and posted screen captures at the Google Reader Blog. The new features include unread counts, mark all as read, folders, expanded view, subscription sharing options, and a new interface to support all these new features. It looks more Bloglines to me, and much more friendly to power RSS users.

Speaking of Bloglines, they have also released an update. Bloglines announced that they have no longer refresh the left pane when you click on a feed, instead they use a "fading yellow indicator" to speed things up. Also the feeds update automatically more frequently, instead of you having to refresh the page. Bloglines added DHL support for tracking DHL or Airborne packages. Finally, Bloglines recently enabled Skweeze for Mobile Bloglines that improves speed and readability of Mobile Bloglines.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:20 AM | Permalink

May 19, 2006

Google Reader For Mobile Phones

The Google Reader Blog announced that you can now use Google's RSS reader, Google Reader, on your mobile device. To access your RSS subscriptions at Google Reader on your phone or mobile device, go to http://www.google.com/reader/m.

I gave it a try on my Treo 650, and besides for it messing up when I logged in (taking me to a not found page), it worked fine. It is quick and easy to use. This is a nice addition to Google Reader. I am personally a heavy Bloglines user and I use Bloglines on my mobile device probably daily.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 8:36 AM | Permalink

May 5, 2006

Google Reader Added To Google Personalized Home Page

The Google Reader Blog announced the addition of a module to allow you to add the Google Reader, Google's RSS feed reader, to the Google Personalized home page. To add the module, you can click here. After you add the module, the Reader will show up in the top left box on your Google home page. When you click on the title of an article, it will pop up a box with the abstract and more links. It is cool, if you can't get enough of that AJAX.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:13 AM | Permalink

March 22, 2006

A Deeper Look At Personalized News Search Engines

Mark Glaser at MediaShift wrote a great review named Your Guide to Personalized News Sites. He reviews the history of personalized news sites, and discusses many of the new free options people have to search news with a personal touch. Here is a listing of some of the engines he reviewed;

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:31 AM | Permalink

Google Jumps Into Social Tagging With New Google Reader Feature

Philipp Lenssen notes that the Google Reader Blog has announced that you can now share the content you read with your friends, family, colleagues and others. This is a big move for Google, what seems to be the first time they've allowed people to both tag and importantly share that tagged content with others.

Google's had tagging in the form of "labels" at Gmail for some time and recently added (and also see here) bookmark/tagging features to the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer. However, items you tagged couldn't be shared with others.

In contrast, Yahoo allows people to share tagged content through its My Web 2.0 service, not to mention owning two posterchilds of the tag-and-share movement, del.icio.us and Flickr.

Now Google's on the sharing scene. Perhaps they'll even begin saying "tags" rather than "labels," as they did originally in the Google Reader announcement, only to later fall back to the preferred term of labels:

Additionally, if you use the tagging labeling feature of Reader, you can label items and share them.

To begin sharing your reading lists or add a clip to your blog, go to reader.google.com and open the Share tab. Check the 'shared' check box to opt-in to sharing your starred items or selected labels.

For examples, Philipp shared this page as items labeled "google". You can also share your "starred" pages.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 9:08 AM | Permalink

December 27, 2005

Google Feed API Coming

Run or building a feed reader? Google's planning a feed reader API, confirms Technorati's Niall Kennedy. He's got more details in Exclusive: Google to offer feed API. It's not clear to me whether this means tapping into data used for Google Blog Search or data that Google Reader develops for its own use or some combination of them both. But I'm sure more details will emerge.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 10:12 AM | Permalink

November 21, 2005

Add To Google & Save To Yahoo My Web Buttons Out

Nick at Threadwatch discovers a new Add To Google button, while I'm also overdue to discuss the new Save To My Web button that Yahoo kindly rolled out last month. Let's jump in!

The new Add To Google button is easy to implement. Fill out the form at Google, then you get the appropriate HTML. Insert the button on your home page, then when people click, they are directed to add your feed to either their personalized edition of the Google homepage or Google Reader. Adding it to Google Sidebar, sadly, isn't a third option. That should be supported as well. Hopefully, we'll see it come.

As for the new Yahoo button, Yahoo announced it at the end of last month. In fact, I'd been asking them for one publicly, so they came back in that post and specifically called me out to say "Here it is!" But I was on vacation at the time, hence me playing catch-up!

It's very welcomed. My Web is the future of where search is heading at Yahoo, as A Search Marketer's Look At Yahoo My Web 2.0 covers in more depth. Getting your pages added and part of the trust networks that My Webbians are building over there is important. This button makes it easy to encourage that type of saving.

To get the button, there's no form to fill out. You just grab JavaScript code from here. That puts a little button on your site. When people push it, your page title will be grabbed, along with the URL and some suggested tags for saving the page under.

Nick at Threadwatch has gone a step further. He's used the code to make a link-text only version of the save to my web feature. He discusses it more here, and the code is here.

Why not just use the button? By using Nick's code, you can custom the text of the link, in case you want to give people more instructions. For example, look over in our left-hand navigation area. I've used both the button plus Nick's code underneath, altering it to stress that this is "Yahoo" My Web, something the button doesn't say.

Down the line, I want to move that type of code over to the bottom of posts, to help encourage people to save them. Having that as a textual link makes it a bit easier. And if you're going to do it for My Web, why not for bookmarking service Del.icio.us? That's easily done through this code spotted via Threadwatch.

Are all these buttons worthwhile? I still can't tell if they are driving that many sign-ups, but I've fallen into the "learn to love them" category. While having one unified sign-up system might be better, if having an Add To Google or Add To Yahoo button means I'm going to get some additional visitors who recognize what that means, I'm going for it.

Want to love buttons yourself? See Getting Add To & Subscribe Buttons For Feeds, which I've posted for Search Engine Watch members. It takes you to the forms for popular services, so that you can merrily make your own badges.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:34 AM | Permalink

October 7, 2005

First Fast Impressions of Google Reader

I haven't had much time to "play" with the new Google Reader from Google Labs (beta) but here are a few VERY fast impressions, things I'm suprised not to see from the outset, and other things I would love to see in future releases. One thing is for sure, competition is almost always good for the searcher and it will be interesting and likely exciting to see what Bloglines, My Yahoo, and other web-based readers offer in their next releases.

+ Given that Google is a "search company?", I'm surprised that you're not able to only search content from your selected feeds. Bloglines does offer this feature.

+ No advertising on any pages. Is advertising coming?

+ Since it's all about sharing, what about being able to easily share individual posts with non-Gmail users?

+ Since Google is a global company (and beyond) I would have expected to see at least a few interfaces in a few non-English languages from the outset. Yes, it's a beta, I know.

+ I would appreciate an option to add feeds to my Google Reader directly from Google Blog Search. The same goes for feeds from specific news sources from Google News (assuming feeds are available).

+ I hope Google will eventually offer a mobile version of its reader. This is one of the primary ways I interact with feeds. My Yahoo feeds are available via My Yahoo mobile. Bloglines also offers a mobile version.

+ Let's see, I can have feeds in my Google Sidebar, on my Google Personalized home page, and now in my Google Reader. How about a way to unify my subscriptions and also what I've seen/read with all three tools.

+ The default sort of articles is by relevance. Google defines it this way, "[Google Reader will] guess what's most relevant to you based on how you use Google Reader (such as which items you decide to actually read). Btw, Findory launched a personalized feed reader a few weeks ago. More about that here. If sorting by time is more important to me, I can't seem to find a way to change the permanently change the default to time.

+ Options to change default font and point size.

+ A tool/widget to notify when new headlines become available. We've been told that one is likely to be available soon.

+ The chance to use Feed Reader with the Opera browser. At the moment, it's a no go.

+ Searching for new content. MSNBC offers 19 feeds but a search for "MSNBC" only shows 4 feeds. Yes, more are available when including other terms but a basic search should show all possible results.

+ How about spell check when searching for new content. A typo for "search engine rondtable" offers no suggested spellings/corrections.

+ More documentation via the FAQ. (Thanks to those who helped me access it. Some did say it was difficult to find.)

Postscript: Very cool, I must say. You can listen to podcasts/MP3 material directly from the Google Reader.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:11 PM | Permalink

New Google Reader For Feed Reading

Continuing its push into the universe of blogs and feeds, Google has launched a feed reader application. Google Reader is a browser-based application that works with virtually all popular browsers on Windows, Mac and Linux platforms.

Google Reader is "the most comprehensive feed finder available," said Jason Shellen, the Google product manager who spearheaded the development of the program. Comprehensive, yes, but Reader also adheres to Google's trademark simple, easy-to-use design philosophy. "We're trying to find an easier find and subscribe model for feeds," said Shellen.

The program features a Google search box at the top which allows you to search for feeds or do an entire web search. Like most other feed readers out there, Google reader has two panes. The left side displays your reading list and the feeds you've subscribed to, and a preview pane on the right allows you to read feed content.

Content can be displayed by relevance or date. Reader also employs algorithms that learn your content preferences and prioritizes content accordingly. This is similar to the auto-discovery feature for news that's part of the Google Sidebar.

Built-in sharing capabilities allow you to email feeds through your Gmail account, or post content to a blog (currently this only works on Google's Blogger-powered blogs). Don't have a Gmail account yet? If you're in the U.S. and have a SMS capable phone, you can sign up for an account by following these instructions.

Google allows you to import your feed subscriptions from other readers, and provide an export mechanism so you can move your Reader subscriptions to another feed reader.

Google just announced the Reader at the Web 2.0 conference, so I haven't had a chance to play around with it yet. I did get a demo of the program last August when I visited Google, and was impressed with what I saw at the time—particularly with the auto-discovery feature that recommended feed content based on what you read. Findory offers a similar service for feeds.

To get Google Reader, visit google.com/reader.

Gary is busy playing with Reader and will post his comments on the program shortly.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 1:30 PM | Permalink

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