Competitors hope everyone prefers a mess

The oldest email in any given person's inbox probably confirms their account's password.  After that, there may be some important note-to-self stuff.  But if the following messages are just moldy jokes or ancient conversations, some tidying up may be in order, and a new experiment in Gmail Labs should help.

Pal Takacsi explains both his approach to a neat inbox and the new feature on the Official Gmail Blog, writing, "More often than not, as I reply to a me... Read more »

Expectations met so far; release may be near

While there's still no telling when - or even if - GDrive will be released, there's fresh evidence that the product exists in some form of development.  It looks like Google may be close to presenting GDrive to the public, too, as the evidence amounts to an official product description.

Brian Ussery went digging into a file in the Google Pack bundle of software and found a mention of GDrive under the heading "Online file backup and st... Read more »

Can you say Intra-Disk Parallellism?

Google has a reputation for spearheading or funding great research, and the company just announced funding three new research initiatives at Stanford, Virginia, and Carnegie Mellon universities.

At the Google Research Blog, Juan V... Read more »

Pics Make it to Street View Then Removed Upon Request

Google has a lot of ground to cover when it comes to collecting imagery for Google Maps Street View. It is not surprising that some hiccups would occur along the way. If you don't know, Google has drivers with cameras on top of their vehicles going around to capture the images it uses to compile the Street View feature some people find exceptionally cool, while others find it invasive and creepy.

One of those hiccups occurred recently as one of the drivers collided with a deer (which apparently lived and left the scene). Pictures of this m... Read more »

Favoring Positive Obama Results and Negative Bush Ones?

There are people who think Google is incorporating political bias into search results. As examples they use misspellings of George Bush and Barack Obama. Are the results of misspelled queries really something Google would take the time to specifically alter to inject their political beliefs though?

Search for Barack Aboma in Google and you will get a "Did you mean: barack obama" suggestion, and the top 2 results for Barack Obama:

... Read more »

New Tab Page, Right-to-Left Text Support

Today Google announced a couple new features for the Google Toolbar in Firefox. The first one is the addition of a "new tab page."

This feature allows you to open different pages when you open a new tab, so you don't just get the standard blank white page. Now you can bring up one of your favorite pages or one that you recently viewed. You can choose from up to 9 different thumbnails you have stored as well as recent bookmarks and recently closed tabs:

... Read more »

If you're site goes down for whatever reason, get it back up quickly or risk being de-listed from Google's index.

Though it has been thought there may be somewhat of a grace period, it now seems robots only notice what's there when they arrive.

SEORoundtable points us to a webmaster struggling with a hosting company's reliability raised the question in a Google Groups thread about why the webmaster's well-ranking site had disappeared from the search results.

Google's Vanessa Fox responded verifying that the site had i... Read more »

So here’s the question; are behavioural metrics being used in modern search? You do remember them right? Those warm and fuzzy little signals such as bounce rates that there all the rage in late 2008 in the search engine optimization world? Sure you do… but let’s take one last look.

Although bounce rates received the biggest attention, we would be remiss not to start by quickly listing some signals commonly looked at by information retrieval folks. The two elements include implicit and explicit data (actions and interactions) – examples can include;

Implicit signals

1. Query history (search history... Read more »