Why Pyra? Google Uses Blogs To Display Adwords -

Well, it looks like one of the reasons Google purchased
Pyra Labs, maker of the popular Blogger software, is to
increase the distribution of Adwords.

The new distribution method for their keyword focused
Adwords program is called Content-Targeted Advertising.

Essentially, Google will display text ads on certain
content sites in addition to their search engine results
pages.

So far, content-network partners include: HowStuffWorks, Weather Underground, and (surprise surpise) Blogger. They mention having "other" partners but no details have been made available.

Google must have had the Blogger acquisition in the works for some time to already be rolling out the program.

As mentioned on Webmasterworld, it is interesting that
Overture acquires AltaVista and AllTheWeb to eventually
expand their ad placement while Google is already expanding their efforts.

Google may be one step ahead yet again.

For more information:

Google Content-Targeted Advertising


FAQ for Content-Targeted Advertising




Are You Gaga for Google? -

ABC News

When British marketing company Interbrand surveyed people around the world with that question, an online Cinderella story was quantitatively proven.

Leading the pack with 15 percent of the total global vote
was Google. The streamlined search engine beat out Apple Computer (second place with 14 percent of the vote), Coca-Cola (third, 11 percent), and Starbucks (fourth, 10 percent).

An interesting side note: In the United States and Canada, Target stores took top honors with 19 percent of the vote. Apple took second place.

Cindy McCaffrey, vice president of marketing for Google,
attributes the company's brand awareness to the rise of the Internet.



Is Google Invading Your Privacy? -

PC Magazine

Every year, Chris Hoofnagle organizes the US Big Brother
Awards under the auspices of a public interest group called Privacy International. "These are awards we give out to government institutions and businesses who've done the most to invade our privacy," says Hoofnagle, who also serves as deputy counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), another public-interest group concerned with maintaining civil rights on the Internet.

The awards won't be announced until March, but Hoofnagle recently received a nomination that he found particularly worthy of investigation. Representatives of a Web site called Google Watch sent him an e-mail complaining about privacy infringements by none other than the Web's most popular search engine. Basically, the e-mail accused Google of disseminating spyware. Google, the message said, was using its Toolbar application to collect reams of information about the surfing habits of the world's PC users.



Google asks to be removed from dictionary -

Google Weblog

Paul McFedries: Google trademark concerns. Google's
trademark lawyer writes: "We ask that you help us to
protect our brand by deleting the definition of "google"
found at wordspy.com or revising it to take into account
the trademark status of Google."...



Google + Blogger = Mainstream Weblog Acceptance?

Weblogs are the Rodney Dangerfield of the media world. They just can't get no respect. "Hey, I knocked off Trent Lott and people started to notice. I broke the whole shuttle crash thing, and it didn't make a dent. When are they gonna listen to me?" But then came the news that Google is buying weblog pioneer and hosting service Pyra, which built Blogger. Nothing could have given bloggers more street cred than this. The seemingly only cool pre-IPO Silicon Valley company validating the online self-publishing revolution. The birth of a new cyber-cool in a time when gee-whiz technology has taken a backseat to the boring old bottom line....



New Program Could Make Google Searching Easier?

Groxis

Software company Groxis creates web search utility, that
could make searching sites easier and could be used to
improve Google searches.



Why Did Google Want Blogger? -

Forget war and strife, the only news that mattered on the Web this week was Google's acquisition of Pyra Labs, the scrappy San Francisco startup behind the Blogger weblogging tool.

News of Pyra's sale for an undisclosed sum broke on Feb.
14, but details about the deal have so far been scant.
Neither Google nor Prya is saying much about it. Evan
Williams, Pyra's co-founder, blogged his day-to-day life
for the last three years right up until it got interesting.
Williams pulled his blog offline earlier this week.



Deal May Freshen Up Google's Links -

NYTimes

Google's recent purchase of Pyra Labs, creators of the
Blogger service for publishing the online soapboxes known
as Weblogs, was a happy ending for a much-loved startup that at times seemed on the edge of collapse.

But people who follow Weblogs are curious about what
Google, the world's leading search engine, expects to gain from the deal.

Is Google too powerful? -

BBC

Everyone's favourite search engine now owns the world's
most popular blogging tool.

With its purchase of Pyra Labs, Google now runs Blogger and with it the weblogs of hundreds of thousands of opinionated net users.

The story of the buyout was, appropriately enough, broken on a weblog by journalist Dan Gillmor, shortly followed by an 'official' announcement on his personal blog from Prya Labs co-founder Evan Williams.

Then the blogs and technology news sites went wild, making this the net news story of the week, if not the month.



Bloggle -

Business 2.0

Google is buying Pyra Labs, the maker of Blogger. The sound you hear is the cheering of hundreds, maybe thousands, of blogging enthusiasts. There have been several fairly high-profile attempts to merge blogs, or online diaries, with traditional news coverage, most conspicuously by MSNBC. But such celebrity blogs have, for the most part, just served as evidence of why writers need editors. (A big exception: Dan Gillmor's "eJournal," for the San Jose Mercury News.) This is different. With Google -- the site that everyone you know visits every day -- sponsoring a blogging tool and hosting service, blogging could now become as mainstream as sending e-mail. Indeed, at a time when all our inboxes are stuffed with spam, blogging may become a more compelling way to communicate than e-mail.



Fame or misfortune beckons for weblogs? -

BBC

Google has bought the company which helped make weblogs a worldwide phenomenon. Does this mean blogs will now really hit the big time - or could going mainstream destroy their cult appeal? When a successful search engine buys a software company, it usually is not interesting enough to warrant a lot of attention from ordinary people. But when Google (the search engine-du-jour) purchased Pyra (a hip software company), and thereby acquired the technology behind Blogger (the software/website that powers millions of weblogs all over the world), it got a lot of attention.



G o o g l i n g F A S T e r

Credit goes to CodingTheWeb for first linking to this.
Don't get me wrong. I like Google!, and I think the
PageRank algorithm truly shows an understanding of the web as a tool for individual empowerment (all search engines now implement some form of this by the way). But what I do object to is the geek worship. "If Google! does it, it must be...



Google's Competition Continues to Grow -

ABC News

Advertising-driven search engine Overture Services Inc. on Tuesday announced it will buy fallen Internet star
AltaVista for $140 million, upping the stakes in a quest
for search engine supremacy. Pasadena-based Overture will pay $60 million in cash and $80 million in stock for Palo Alto-based AltaVista, which introduced a pioneering search engine in 1995.

AltaVista fell out of favor, though, after it expanded to
duplicate Yahoo's smorgasbord of online services, opening
the door for search engine upstarts like Google to
establish themselves.



Google Goes Blog-Crazy -

Forbes

With its acquisition of Pyra Labs, Web-search juggernaut
Google.com apparently sees dollar signs in the business of letting anyone easily publish their comments and thoughts on the Web.

Blogging, as it's often called, has become, in the last
year, a trendy Web toy for the stream-of-consciousness set.

Pyra's Blogger, with more than a million users, allows
users to write and publish online almost as quickly as a
thought strikes.




18th-century theory is new force in computing -

News.com

Search giant Google and Autonomy, a company that sells
information retrieval tools, both employ Bayesian
principles to provide likely (but technically never exact)
results to data searches. Researchers are also using
Bayesian models to determine correlations between specific symptoms and diseases, create personal robots, and develop artificially intelligent devices that "think" by doing what data and experience tell them to do.




Google Deal Ties Company to Weblogs -

NYTimes.com

Google, the operator of the Web's leading search engine,
has bought Pyra Labs, the creator of software for
publishing Weblogs, a form of hyperlinked online journal
that has become an increasingly popular way to distribute and collect information on the Web.

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free



Google deserves your nomination for
Big Brother of the Year -

Google-Watch

Google was the first search engine to use a cookie that
expires in 2038. This was at a time when federal websites
were prohibited from using persistent cookies altogether.

Now it's years later, and immortal cookies are commonplace among search engines; Google set the standard because no one bothered to challenge them.

This cookie places a unique ID number on your hard disk.
Anytime you land on a Google page, you get a Google cookie if you don't already have one. If you have one, they read and record your unique ID number...



Larry Page: Google Was an Accident -

SlashDot

DarklordJonnyDigital writes "Ars Technica is reporting that
Google founder Larry Page has admitted that the Google
project wasn't originally intended to be a search engine at all. "It wasn't that we intended to build a search engine. We built a ranking system to deal with annotations." ' Of course, happy accidents have often been the cause for advancement, technologically or otherwise.



Your name linked to ServiceMagic -

Surf on over to Google.com, enter “Lennox Scott Realtor”
and click the search button. Then scan the color-shaded
boxes on the right-hand side of the search results page and you’ll spot a curious “sponsored link” ad that reads,
“Lennox Realtor. Let top Realtors compete for your
business. Free, no obligation. www.servicemagic.com,” and includes live links to ServiceMagic’s Web site from the phrase “Lennox Realtor” and “www.servicemagic.com.”



Google goes public -

CodingTheWeb

If only technology's most successful private company would go public, the reasoning goes, then the industry would thrive once again. Too bad business doesn't operate on "ifs" and "onlys."



Google As Big Brother

Google Blog

The cookie is a serious issue. Google assigns everyone who visits a cookie that uniquely identifies them to Google for all time. There's very few legitimate reasons to do this, and they certainly don't outweigh the harm done. (Google could easily assign a cookie that only contained your preferences and not a personal identifier.)



Google Tops Apple, Coke in Branding Poll -

Reuters

Minimalist Internet search engine Google was voted "brand of the year" by branding junkies on Tuesday, proving once again that less is more as it pipped giants such as Coca-Cola and Starbucks to the top slot. Google, the powerful search tool that presents Net surfers with a
minimum of visual clutter, came top in a global poll of
1,315 respondents to a survey by Interbrand, the leading
British branding agency.



Google falling victim to succes -

Oakland Tribune

It's easy to spell. It's fun to say. The site is easy to
view and the search is quick. How long will Google stay top dog?

For more than three years, Google of Mountain View has been the dominant search engine. Some users know only "Google" as an option. The brand's penetration has been so successful that its name has become a verb. (Unlike Xerox or Kleenex, which have urged the public not to use their brand names as generic terms, there is no evidence that Google is discouraging the use of its name to denote the search process.)

AOL Now Showing Four Google Sponsored Adwords

When performing a search on AOL, the search results now list four Google Adwords ads at the top. The popularity of paid inclusion is growing and Google's Adwords program continues to grow and prosper. 2004 will be the year that paid inclusion plays really takes off.



Another Google Country

This week Google Paraguay Launched




Google Directory Update Coming Soon?

Axandra.com

After five months, the DMOZ RDF dump has been
updated. The RDF dump is used by hundreds of search sites to display DMOZ results, for example Google, Lycos and Netscape Search.

If you submitted your site to dmoz.org within the last five months, chances are that your site can now be found in a DMOZ search. This might mean that the Google Directory (which is based on DMOZ) will get a full update next month.

http://www.dmoz.org
 

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