Merging All the Official Google Blogs (English Only) and Showing Top 25

This week in search 11/27/09

A Googler — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 02:34:00 -0800

This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs on Fridays. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

This Thanksgiving week, and just in time for the holiday season, we give thanks to you, our users, with two new search features.

Holiday Interfaces
Last Friday, we started showing off our seasonal spirit with holiday-themed result pages. For the weeks surrounding various holidays in late November and December, results for seasonal queries will be adorned with decorative dividers. Try searching eid-ul-adha sometime in the next week, and your results will be separated from right-hand ads by a chain of crescent moons. In a few weeks, a search for [hanukkah lights] or [christmas trees] will also result in delightful holiday-themed pages. Put a cuddly knit sweater on your browser when you search!

Mobile Movie Results
For those of you who who plan to head to the movies this week, we've launched a mobile version of Google Search results for movies, making it even easier to find the latest holiday blockbuster playing in your area. From the web browser on your iPhone, Palm WebOS, or Android-powered device, simply search for [movies], and then tap on the "More movies" link. From there, you can either browse a list of movies or select the "Theaters" button to view a list of the ones near you.

With the added functionality to play trailers right on your phone, access movie ratings, find the closest theatre, and view upcoming showtimes, this new search feature is sure to make entertainment options on the go much easier. Here's a 1.25-minute video about it:

Hope you enjoy these new features. Stay tuned for more next week!

Posted by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow

Update your tax forms this holiday weekend

Inside AdSense Team — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:04:00 -0800

We hope you had a great Thanksgiving. Here in the U.S., we on the AdSense Team are spending the Friday after Thanksgiving enjoying holiday shopping, American football, and leftovers.

On this vacation day, we'd like you to remind you that tax season is approaching quickly, so you may wish to take a moment to review your address information and even re-submit your tax information to make sure it reflects your most current tax standing.

If you haven't entered tax information before, you can choose a form directly or follow our handy tax wizard within your account. If you're updating your tax information, feel free to click the 'change your tax information' link.

In addition, now would be the perfect time for our publishers in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico to verify their bank accounts for Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) payments. If you're eligible for a payment at the end of December, you have until December 15, 2009 to select your bank account for payment, so we hope you give it a try!

Posted by Elizabeth Ferdon - AdSense Payments Team

The new Black (Friday)

A Googler — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 21:00:00 -0800

The traditional kick-off to the holiday shopping season, Black Friday, has arrived. If you're anything like us, you'll be seeking out the newest, coolest products and best deals today as you make those special holiday purchases.

Using Insights for Search, we took a look at some of the holiday gifts that were most searched for this year: Zhu Zhu Pets, Nerf N Strike, Mindflex and the "Twilight" soundtrack were at the top of kids' wishlists, while netbooks, mini notebook computers and mp3 players will (hopefully) fill our "bigger" stockings.

But it's not just about keeping up with the latest and greatest this holiday. The Internet can be a great holiday shopping resource, making it easy not only to find information on the hottest items for this year's holiday shopping season, but also to track down the best prices for those items. You can see this as holiday shoppers are searching more than ever for deals online. Search terms like coupons, promo codes, free shipping and black friday sales have all increased recently. And, as more people turn to their mobile devices to search for deals, coupons are now also available on the go.

In recent years, we've also seen the proliferation of websites dedicated to Black Friday deals — these sites saw a 21% increase in visits during the week of Thanksgiving last year. You can find these sites easily with a search on Google for [black friday sites].

Retailers are increasingly responding to these deal-seeking shoppers. In fact, 60% of retailers report that they are increasing their promotional efforts during this holiday shopping season.* JCPenney, for example, is already promoting their 4 a.m. doorbuster sales and even offering wake-up calls from Cindy Crawford, Rascal Flatts and Kimora Lee Simmons to ensure we don't sleep through the savings. We also love their YouTube homepage ad today, and hope that it encourages some happy holiday purchases (and keeps some significant others out of the proverbial doghouse).

And in-store sales are not the only places to save this year. Many of us will opt out of crowded malls in favor of cuddling up to our laptops, and retailers are taking their sales to the web during this traditionally in-store focused weekend. In fact, 40% of retailers are increasing free shipping offers during this holiday shopping season* — so watch for those deals both in-store and online!

If you're interested in reading more about the holiday shopping season, including what shrewd retailers are doing and how you can take advantage of the same, check out the Google Retail Blog for insights from the Retail industry team.

Now after all this talk of shopping, it's time to get started!

* OTX/Google 2009 Holiday Retailer Survey, May 2009. (Q20) Which of the following advertising tactics has your company used or does your company plan to use in 2009? n=600

Posted by John Mcateer, Managing Director, U.S. Sales

Happy Thanksgiving

Inside AdSense Team — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 03:20:00 -0800

We'd like to wish all our U.S. publishers a very Happy Thanksgiving. As always, we'd like to give thanks to our Inside AdSense readers for your participation and support. If you're traveling, we hope your journey is safe, and wish you a fun holiday weekend with your family and friends.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Posted by Dia Muthana - Inside AdSense Team

GENERIC CIALIS on my website? I think my site has been hacked!

John Mueller — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 19:23:00 -0800

How to use "Fetch as Googlebot", part 1
Webmaster level: Intermediate

Has your site ever dropped suddenly from the index or disappeared mysteriously from search results? Have you ever received a notice that your site is using cloaking techniques? Unfortunately, sometimes a malicious party "hacks" a website: they penetrate the security of a site and insert undesirable content. Sophisticated attackers can camouflage this spammy or dangerous content so that it doesn't appear for normal users, and appears only to Googlebot, which could negatively impact your site in Google's results.

In such cases it used to be very difficult to detect the problem, because the site would appear normal in the eyes of the user. It may be possible that only requests with a User-agent: of Googlebot and coming from Googlebot's IP could see the hidden content. But that's over: with Fetch as Googlebot, the new Labs feature in Webmaster Tools, you can see exactly what Googlebot is seeing, and avoid any kind of cloaking problems. We'll show you how:

Let's imagine that Bob, the administrator of www.example.com, is searching for his site but he finds this instead:

That's strange, because when he looks at the source code of www.example.com, it looks fine:

With much surprise Bob may receive a notice from Google warning him that his site is not complying with Google's quality guidelines. Fortunately he has his site registered with Webmaster Tools, let's see how he can check what Googlebot sees:

First Bob logs into Webmaster Tools and selects www.example.com. The Fetch as Googlebot feature will be at the bottom of the navigation menu, in the Labs section:

The page will contain a field where you can insert the URL to fetch. It can also be left blank to fetch the homepage.

Bob can simply click Fetch and wait a few seconds. After refreshing the page, he can see the status of the fetch request. If it succeeds, he can click on the "Success" link...

...and that will show the details, with the content of the fetched page:

Aha! There's the spammy content! Now Bob can be certain that www.example.com has been hacked.

Confirming that the website has been hacked (and perhaps is still hacked) is an important step. It is, however, only the beginning. For more information, we strongly suggest getting help from your server administrator or hoster and reading our previous blog posts on the subject of hacked sites:

My site's been hacked - now what?

A quick security checklist for webmasters

Message center warnings for hackable sites

Best practices against hacking

If you have any questions about how to use the Fetch as Googlebot feature, feel free to drop by the Webmaster Help Forum. If you feel that your website might be hacked but are having problems resolving it, you might want to ask the experts in our "Malware and Hacked sites" category.

Written by Javier Tordable, Software Engineer and John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Hard facts about comment spam

Maile Ohye — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 11:17:00 -0800

Webmaster Level: Beginner

It has probably happened to you: you're reading articles or watching videos on the web, and you come across some unrelated, gibberish comments. You may wonder what this is all about. Some webmasters abuse other sites by exploiting their comment fields, posting tons of links that point back to the poster's site in an attempt to boost their site's ranking. Others might tweak this approach a bit by posting a generic comment (like "Nice site!") with a commercial user name linking to their site.

Why is it bad?

FACT: Abusing comment fields of innocent sites is a bad and risky way of getting links to your site. If you choose to do so, you are tarnishing other people's hard work and lowering the quality of the web, transforming a potentially good resource of additional information into a list of nonsense keywords.

FACT: Comment spammers are often trying to improve their site's organic search ranking by creating dubious inbound links to their site. Google has an understanding of the link graph of the web, and has algorithmic ways of discovering those alterations and tackling them. At best, a link spammer might spend hours doing spammy linkdrops which would count for little or nothing because Google is pretty good at devaluing these types of links. Think of all the more productive things one could do with that time and energy that would provide much more value for one's site in the long run.

Promote your site without comment spam

If you want to improve your site's visibility in the search results, spamming comments is definitely not the way to go. Instead, think about whether your site offers what people are looking for, such as useful information and tools.

FACT: Having original and useful content and making your site search engine friendly is the best strategy for better ranking. With an appealing site, you'll be recognized by the web community as a reliable source and links to your site will build naturally.

Moreover, Google provides a list of advice in order to improve the crawlability and indexability of your site. Check out our Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide.

What can I do to avoid spam on my site?

Comments can be a really good source of information and an efficient way of engaging a site's users in discussions. This valuable content should not be replaced by gibberish nonsense keywords and links. For this reason there are many ways of securing your application and disincentivizing spammers.

Disallow anonymous posting.
Use CAPTCHAs and other methods to prevent automated comment spamming.
Turn on comment moderation.
Use the "nofollow" attribute for links in the comment field.
Disallow hyperlinks in comments.
Block comment pages using robots.txt or meta tags.

For detailed information about these topics, check out our Help Center document on comment spam.

My site is full of comment spam, what should I do?

It's never too late! Don't let spammers ruin the experience for others. Adopt security measures discussed above to stop the spam activity, then invest some time to clean up the spammy comments and ban the spammers from your site. Depending on you site's system, you may be able to save time by banning spammers and removing their comments all at once, rather than one by one.

If I spammed comment fields of third party sites, what should I do?

If you used this approach in the past and you want to solve this issue, you should have a look at your incoming links in Webmaster Tools. To do so, go to the Your site on the web section and click on Links to your site. If you see suspicious links coming from blogs or other platforms allowing comments, you should check these URLs. If you see a spammy link you created, try to delete it, else contact the webmaster to ask to remove the link. Once you've cleared the spammy inbound links you made, you can file a reconsideration request.

For more information about this topic and to discuss it with others, join us in the Webmaster Help Forum. (But don't leave spammy comments!)

Written by Adel Saoud and Paolo Petrolini

Episode # 3 - Rapid Fire Web Analytics Q and A with Avinash and Nick

Nick — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 05:35:00 -0800

This is the third video in our recent Rapid Fire series where you share your most burning questions via the Google Analytics Google Moderator site and we answer them!

Generally we want to focus on your questions about key metrics and analysis techniques, but this week we get a little technical.

In this episode we discuss:

How to group referrals from common sources
How to setup Google Analytics to track multiple web sites and view all the aggregate data in one profile
Strategies to track websites that support different languages
The value of using Google Analytics on You Tube partner channels
Troubleshooting discrepancies in Google Analytics Data
Best practices for implementing E-commerce tracking for E-commerce sites
Simplifying customizing the date range in GA
How to track segments of users who interact with internal referrals/cross sell campaigns
Tracking Social Media campaigns

Here are links to resources we discussed in the video:

If you found this helpful, we'd love to hear your comments.

If you have a question you would like us to answer, please submit a question or vote for your favorite question in our public Google Moderator site. Avinash and I will answer your latest questions in a couple of weeks with yet another entertaining video.

Please add your thoughts about the Q&A via comments below. Thanks!

Posted by Nick Mihailovski, Google Analytics Team

Save on holiday shopping

Jessica — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 04:19:00 -0800

With the holiday shopping rush underway, Google Checkout can help you find great deals this season. Over 900 Checkout stores including TigerDirect.com, BlueNile.com, and Petco.com are offering exclusive discounts of $5, $10, or $20 on what you buy through December 17th.

What's more, it's easy to find places to save as you shop quickly and securely with Checkout. You can either search for products on Google.com and look for the Google Checkout promotion badge, or browse participating stores on our new Checkout deals page. Good luck out there!

Posted by Anita Barci, Product Marketing Manager

Discover v2009: Setting ad parameters with the AdParamService

AdWords API Team — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 23:30:00 -0800

In a blog post yesterday we introduced ad parameters, a new AdWords feature that allows for dynamic insertion of numeric and currency values into ads while retaining ad history. To manage ad parameters, a new service was added to the v200909 API: the AdParamService.

In the example introduced earlier, you own a business selling antique cups that wants to add price and inventory information to your ads. To leverage ad parameters you create a text ad like:

and you configure the following ad parameters on your keywords:

keyword	param1	param2
antique cups	$80	18

A user searching for "antique cups" would will see the following ad text:

Text ads, even those with ad parameter placeholders, can be created using the normal methods of the AdGroupAdService. The AdParamService is only used for setting ad parameter values on keywords. This service allows for the getting and setting of AdParam objects, which contain the ad group ID and criterion ID for the target keyword, the insertion text, and the parameter index.

For example, to set the ad parameters for "antique cups" we would use the following PHP code (using the AdWords API PHP Client Library):

$adParam1 = new AdParam($adGroupId, $criterionId, '$80', 1);
$adParam2 = new AdParam($adGroupId, $criterionId, '18', 2);

$operation1 = new AdParamOperation($adParam1, 'SET');
$operation2 = new AdParamOperation($adParam2, 'SET');

$adParams = $adParamService->mutate(array($operation1, $operation2));

Existing ad params can be selected by ad group ID or by ad group ID and criterion ID. To get the ad parameters set above we would run the following:

$selector = new AdParamSelector(array($adGroupId), array($criterionId));
$adParamPage = AdParamServiceTest::$service->get($selector);

Some key points to remember about the ad parameters and the AdParamService are:

Ad parameters are set on keywords, not ads.
Ad parameters can only accept numerical and currency values, but the default text of the placeholder in the ad can be any string.
The length of the default text in the placeholder contributes to the total length of the line in the ad, but the curly braces, parameters name, and colon do not.
Ad parameters are 1-based indexed, meaning the two parameters are "1" and "2".
The AdParamOperation should always use the "SET" operator, even when you are setting the parameters for the first time.

To help you get started, we've included support for this service in our client libraries. As always, we are here to answer your questions, collect feedback, and assist with migration to v2009 of the AdWords API.

Iraqi Government on YouTube

A Googler — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 16:01:00 -0800

(Cross-posted from the YouTube Blog)

Governments, heads of state, and leaders from around the world are on YouTube, including the Pope, the Royal Family, and Queen Rania and presidents from the United States to France, South Korea to Estonia. Today we're especially pleased to announce that the Iraqi Government has launched a dedicated YouTube channel, at youtube.com/iraqigov. Learn more from Iraq's Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki:

Earlier this year, I visited Baghdad as a guest of the U.S. State Department to engage in conversations about the role of technology in Iraq. In discussions with elected officials, private companies and NGOs, I routinely heard the desire to connect with fellow citizens, Iraqis outside the country's borders, and cultures across the world. But it wasn't just the Iraqi Government who expressed an interest in YouTube — I was pleasantly surprised by the high level of awareness from a wide variety of Iraqis. One young student told us she uses YouTube to understand what is really happening in her country based on the variety of opinions, citizen journalism and news reports uploaded to the site. There was little difference between her examples and those we often hear in other countries, which speaks to both the global community on YouTube and the universality of the video experience.

Just this past week, our CEO Eric Schmidt traveled to Iraq to meet with government officials there about the challenge and opportunities they face. While in Iraq, Eric shot this video for Citizentube:

We hope that by launching on YouTube, the Iraqi Government and their citizens will also find it easy to use YouTube to engage in such conversations, and bring their proceedings, policies and ideas to a larger audience around the world.

Posted by Hunter Walk, Director of Product Management

Google Apps Premier Edition Innovation – Year in Review

Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 13:35:00 -0800

Google Apps is helping millions of companies save money, but more importantly, Google Apps helps businesses move beyond the slow, multi-year innovation cycle typical of legacy technologies. We’ve released over 100 significant improvements and updates over the last year, and businesses automatically have access to these updates without having to manage complex and costly upgrades.

Last week I hosted a webcast titled Google Apps Premier Edition Innovation – Year in Review to spotlight the most important improvements we’ve made recently. You can watch the replay below or see it on YouTube.

Innovation happening across the web is rapidly translating into better business email tools, more efficient collaboration choices for coworkers, and more secure, higher reliability technology for companies. We’re excited about what’s in store for Google Apps, and to keep up with future developments, you can subscribe to the Google Apps Updates RSS feed, or sign up for email alerts.

Posted by Jeremy Milo, Google Apps Marketing Manager

New search ad formats

A Googler — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 02:35:00 -0800

At Google, we're committed to giving you the information you want — regardless of the form in which it might appear.

Text is often useful, but sometimes videos and pictures are a more effective way to receive information. For example, if you want to learn a magic trick, a video showing you how to perform the trick is likely the best result. So over the past few years, we've blended videos, images, maps and more into the search results on Google.com.

It also makes sense to provide you with richer types of information in the ads. If you're looking to buy your mom a new handbag for the holidays, for instance, you might want to see pictures, prices, the addresses of boutiques in your area and a map of how to get there — all within the ad.

To provide a better search ads experience, we've been developing and testing a variety of new ad formats. These formats are focused on giving you the information you need, while retaining what you love about Google advertising: that the ads are relevant and useful.

If you’re in the U.S. you may have already seen a number of these ad formats when searching on Google.

Some of them include visual elements. For example, if you’re curious about the movies that are playing this holiday season, you might see an ad with a video that lets you watch a trailer.

You might also see an ad with more links so you can quickly find a specific page in an advertiser’s website. If you're researching airfare to visit your relatives for the holidays, it saves time to go directly to Priceline's page about booking flights, rather than the general homepage or rental car page.

Or, if you’re trying to find a holiday bouquet to bring to your dinner party hostess, you might see an ad that shows your local florist's location on a map and provides driving directions.

Other new ad formats might help you find all the addresses and locations of a chain store in your area. So if you're vacationing abroad this season and have a craving for something familiar, the ad might show you all the nearby Pizza Huts that can deliver to your hotel.

And starting today, you might spot ads that include images and prices for specific products. When shopping for the ski outfit your nephew has been hinting about all year, you might see pictures from the retailer’s inventory to help you quickly determine if they have the color and style you had in mind.

Still other ad formats may introduce new ways of presenting information, such as Comparison Ads, which allow you to specify exactly what you're looking for and to compare rates and prices in a single location. With the approaching new year comes resolutions to get things in order, so you might want an ad that lets you see side-by-side refinancing offers.

While we experiment with new formats, we'll remain loyal to our core principle: that getting the right ad to the right person at the right time matters. As we continue to think up innovative ways to give you the information you want, you’re likely to see even more ad formats until we pinpoint the most useful, relevant and engaging ones. We’ll keep trying new things until we discover the “perfect” ads that improve your overall search experience.

Posted by Susan Wojcicki, VP, Product Management

Product extensions available to all U.S. advertisers

Inside AdWords crew — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 02:27:00 -0800

Beginning today, all U.S. advertisers can get started with a new feature of AdWords called product extensions. Like Ad Sitelinks, which we introduced earlier this month, product extensions are a way for you to enrich your existing AdWords ads with more relevant and specific information. Product extensions allow you to use your existing Google Merchant Center account to highlight your products directly in your search ads. When your AdWords text ad appears, and your Google Merchant Center account contains products that are relevant to the searcher’s query, product extensions show the images, titles, and prices of your products in a plusbox under your ad.

(click for full size image)

With product extensions you can show users the products from your site that are most relevant to their current query. You're charged the same cost-per-click (CPC) whether a user clicks on your main text ad or any of the offers within the product extensions plusbox; however, you won't be charged if a user simply expands the plusbox without clicking through to your site. Advertisers who implemented product extensions during our beta found that the additional product information helped improve the performance of their search campaigns. For example, Zeta interactive, who manages advertising for SonyStyle.com, reported seeing over a 10% increase in clickthrough rate (CTR) for their ads with product extensions.

Like Product Listing Ads, which we announced as a limited beta earlier this month, product extensions are part of our effort to make ads more useful and relevant for shopping-related queries by allowing advertisers to include relevant product information directly within the ad. However, unlike Product Listing Ads, which are automatically targeted and priced on a cost-per-action (CPA) basis, product extensions are priced on a cost per click (CPC) basis and will only display when your ad is triggered by one of the keywords in your product extensions enabled campaigns. What's more, product extensions give you the option to prefer which products are displayed when a user’s query triggers your ads. For example, you may sell dozens of laptop computers but you want to promote the newest or best selling inventory using product extensions when a user searches for 'laptop computer' on Google.com. By making a simple addition to your Merchant Center account, you can easily control the products that display for certain queries. Of course, you can always use automatic targeting, and let AdWords determine the most relevant products in your account to a user’s query.

It's easy to get started with product extensions. First, log in to Google Merchant Center and add your Adwords customer ID to your account. Then, simply visit the campaign settings tab in your AdWords account, find the 'Ad extensions' heading and select the option to "Use product images and information from my Google Merchant Center account." No need to create new campaigns or ad groups, update your keywords or change your ad text. Product extensions are available now to all U.S. advertisers, but remain in a limited beta outside the U.S. Over time, we hope to offer product extensions to all advertisers globally.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew

Let your subscriptions' personality come through

Mihai Parparita — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 02:13:00 -0800

We recently asked you for your ideas (and votes) on how to make Reader better. One of the more popular suggestions was adding favicon support for subscriptions, so today we're introducing just that (thanks to 20%-er Shreyas Desai).

We realize that not everyone wants their subscription list to turn into a multi-colored extravaganza, so we've made it into a setting that you can access from your subscriptions menu.

Be on the lookout for more ideas being implemented, and feel free to let us know how you like this feature on Twitter or in our help forum.

Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise Server now connects businesses of all sizes

Ellen Petry Leanse — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 00:30:00 -0800

When we launched the Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry® Enterprise Server in August, we focused on addressing the needs of companies operating their own BlackBerry Enterprise Servers, typically supporting a couple hundred BlackBerry smartphone users per server.

Of course, companies of all sizes are adopting Google Apps, and their needs for supporting BlackBerry smartphones are as diverse as their businesses. So today we're making it easier for companies large and small to manage their BlackBerry smartphones and save money.

With Google Apps Connector for BES version 1.5, large businesses can now support 500 BlackBerry devices per server, double the previous capacity. This lets them serve more users with fewer servers.

Small businesses get more flexibility too. The Apps Connector now supports BlackBerry Professional Software, which is designed for up to 30 BlackBerry smartphones. We've also made it possible for a single BlackBerry Enterprise Server to serve users across multiple companies, enabling low-cost hosting services to be offered by hosting partners.

Stay tuned for more announcements from partners offering hosting services for Google Apps customers with BlackBerry smartphones. In the meantime, we're going to continue to make it easier for you to manage mobile devices of all types with Google Apps.

Posted by Zhengping Zuo, Software Engineer and Darrell Kuhn, Site Reliability Engineer

More Dynamic Ads with Ad parameters

AdWords API Team — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 23:27:00 -0800

We're excited to announce that a new feature of the v2009 API, called Ad parameters, is now available. Ad parameters enable you to change numeric information (for example: prices, discount percentages, etc.) within your text ad, while keeping the history and statistics associated with the ad.

Here's a hypothetical scenario illustrating how Ad parameters might help you make your ads more specific and appealing:

Let's say that you sell high-end antique tea cups on your website and it is important for you to qualify users before they even click on your ads. After running some tests, you have found that you can attract serious buyers to your website by including a starting price in your ads. You also want to include the number of varieties of tea cups you currently have in stock, to make your ad appear fresh.

You would like to update your ad text via the AdWords API in response to price and availability fluctuations within your inventory system, but you don't want to lose the statistics associated with your ad. Ad parameters can solve this problem for you.

With Ad parameters, you can specify an ad like this:

Notice that you can specify default values for param1 and param2 within the ad text. You need to set dynamic numeric values for param1 and param2 at the keyword level via the AdParamService of the v2009 API.

On a certain day, if your inventory of tea cups starts at $80 with 18 designs in stock, you can set these values for the relevant keywords within your ad group, as follows:

keyword	param1	param2
antique cups	$80	18

A user searching for "antique cups" subsequently will see the following ad:

For more information on using Ad parameters, be sure to check out our Discover v2009 blog post on this topic (coming soon).

Finally, a few notes about this feature:

Ad parameters can only be updated via the AdWords API. Updates are not currently supported in AdWords Editor or in the AdWords interface
You can specify at most two parameters
While the default value of the parameters (specified within the ad text) can be non-numeric, the dynamic value of the parameters (specified via the AdWords API) must always be numeric. Currency symbols are allowed
As usual, your ads must comply with our AdWords Advertising Policies

-- Shreyas Doshi, Product Manager, AdWords API

Google Product Search on the Official Google Blog

vivek — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 10:16:00 -0800

Earlier today, Jeff and Sameer from the Product Search team shared some holiday shopping updates on the Official Google Blog. Check out their post to see a recap of some of the work we've been doing over the past few months, including local store locations, video product reviews, and our new gallery view, among others.

Posted by Vivek Tata, Product Marketing Manager, Google Product Search

Think2010: Experimentation is worth the risk

Inside AdWords crew — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 08:37:00 -0800

When it comes to testing and experimentation, there's always a risk-reward scenario to play out. You could go with what you know and what feels comfortable -- or you could try something new and see how it fares. It could really pay off, but it could also flop. If you're responsible for cooking a big Thanksgiving feast this week, you may feel that lots of experimentation is clearly not worth the risk. When you think about your approach to marketing in 2010 however, testing and experimentation should be key elements.

With digital marketing, testing is a low-cost, fast way to learn. The ability to start, stop, or change your approach is easy and actually applying what you learn -- so you can capture the greatest opportunity -- can happen very quickly.

When you market online, the cycle of launching, measuring, and optimizing happens quickly and continuously. The more nimbly you manage this cycle, the stronger your results will be. Don't be afraid to try and possibly fail -- whether you're testing a new creative message, a new communication platform, a new promotion, or another strategy. The long term benefits of successful testing can quickly and easily outweigh the short term costs.

Brett Keller, CMO of Priceline.com, echoes these thoughts on the value of experimentation.

Here are a few testing ideas to apply in 2010:

Use Website Optimizer to test content (e.g. headline, copy, images) or design alternatives for your landing page. This tool will help you quickly identify and implement the combinations that drive most conversions.
Use YouTube as a focus group. Beyond monitoring views, ratings, and comments, use YouTube Insight to learn what's resonating, and where. Based on what you learn, invest in your 'winning' content by driving traffic via sponsored videos, altering your associated messaging in search campaigns, and ramping up geo-targeting in the areas where your video over-indexes in popularity. You may even consider testing that video as a TV spot (e.g. via Google TV Ads).
If you're not yet using display ads, commit to testing them. Use Display Ad Builder to build display, rich media, and video ads in minutes by incorporating your own text, images, and logo into one of our professionally designed templates. This allows you to test a creative message and learn what is working before investing in a deeper level of creative support.

Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew

A deeper look at channels: Custom channels (Part II of III)

Inside AdSense Team — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 06:42:00 -0800

In the second part of our channels series, we'll focus on custom channels. Boyar Naito will walk you through how to set up custom channels to track the performance of specific ad units. You'll learn about the three pieces of information that are most important to us: ad size, ad location, and page content, and how to analyze this information to figure out what ad formats work best for your website.

You can find more information about custom channels in our Help Center. Catch the last part of this series next week, when we'll cover targetable channels.

Posted by Dia Muthana - Inside AdSenseTeam

Version v200906 beta will be shut down on February 2, 2010

AdWords API Team — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 05:33:00 -0800

The v200906 API, which we released as a limited beta in June 2009, will be shut down on February 2, 2010. The recently-launched v200909 API is a full replacement for v200906 and it adds substantial additional functionality. For most developers, the migration from v200906 to v200909 will be just a matter of updating the version in the namespace and re-compiling/building their application.

If you are using one of our client libraries, the changes required for migration will be as easy as

Java

Change import com.google.api.adwords.v200906.cm.CampaignServiceInterface; to import com.google.api.adwords.v200909.cm.CampaignServiceInterface;
Change CampaignServiceInterface campaignService = user.getService(AdWordsService.V200906.CAMPAIGN_SERVICE); to CampaignServiceInterface campaignService = user.getService(AdWordsService.V200909.CAMPAIGN_SERVICE);

DotNet

Change using com.google.api.adwords.v200906; to using com.google.api.adwords.v200909;
Change namespace com.google.api.adwords.samples.v200906 to namespace com.google.api.adwords.samples.v200909
Change CampaignService service = (CampaignService) user.GetService(AdWordsService.v200906.CampaignService); to CampaignService service = (CampaignService) user.GetService(AdWordsService.v200909.CampaignService);

Python

Explicitly set version, campaign_service = client.GetCampaignService(version='v200909')

Ruby

Change campaign_srv = adwords.get_service('Campaign', 200906) to campaign_srv = adwords.get_service('Campaign', 200909)

Perl

Change version in types, Google::AdWords::v200906::Types::SomeType to Google::AdWords::v200909::Types::SomeType

Defaults to v200909

As always, the AdWords API team is available to help ensure a smooth transition to the new v200909 API. Feel free to post your questions on the forum. Finally, to learn about the exciting new features of v200909, we encourage you to check out the weekly posts in our Discover v2009 series.

--Stan Grinberg, AdWords API Team

Easy holiday shopping with Google Product Search

A Googler — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 04:13:00 -0800

This holiday season, whether you're shopping for a new sweater for Fido, a Lego set for young builders, or that fancy camera you've been eyeing all year, Google Product Search can help you find what you're looking for at a great price. You can compare products and prices from merchants across the web, from popular retailers like Amazon and Best Buy to places to buy unique gifts like eBay and Etsy.

Check out some of the recent improvements we've made to Google Product Search:

Our new gallery view shows larger, higher-resolution images to help pick the style or model that is right for you. Check out some [digital cameras] or [sweater boots].

Check the Reviews section of our product pages before you buy — we're now including review summaries to help you see what people are saying at a glance.

We've recently integrated video product reviews from YouTube, which appear right on the product pages so you can get an in-depth look at items before you buy.

If you want to see or purchase an item in person, click nearby stores to see a map of nearby store locations for that seller.

Product Search works great on mobile phones, so you can compare prices, read reviews and even find coupons from the Local Business Center while you're shopping. You can also use the nifty barcode scanner on your phone to compare prices quickly and easily.

We hope these new features help you find the perfect gifts for your friends and family (and maybe even something nice for yourself) this holiday season.

Happy shopping!

Posted by Sameer Samat, Product Management Director & Jeff Bartelma, Senior Product Manager

Explore Images with Google Image Swirl

yushi — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 02:12:00 -0800

Posted by Yushi Jing and Henry Rowley, Google Research

Earlier this week, we announced the Labs launch of Google Image Swirl, an experimental search tool that organizes image-search results. We hope to take this opportunity to explain some of the research underlying this feature, and why it is an important area of focus for computer vision research at Google.

As the Web becomes more "visual," it is important for Google to go beyond traditional text and hyperlink analysis to unlock the information stored in the image pixels. If our search algorithms can understand the content of images and organize search results accordingly, we can provide users with a more engaging and useful image-search experience.

Google Image Swirl represents a concrete step towards reaching that goal. It looks at the pixel values of the top search results and organizes and presents them in visually distinctive groups. For example, in ambiguous queries such as "jaguar," Image Swirl separates the top search results into categories such as jaguar the animal and jaguar the brand of car. The top-level groups are further divided into collections of subgroups, allowing users to explore a broad set of visual concepts associated with the query, such as the front view of a Jaguar car or Eiffel Tower at night or from a distance. This is a distinct departure from the way images are ranked by the Google Similar Images, which excels at finding images very visually similar to the query image.

No matter how much work goes into engineering image and text features to represent the content of images, there will always be errors and inconsistencies. Sometimes two images share many visual or text features, but have little real-world connection. In other cases, objects that look similar to the human eye may appear drastically different to computer vision algorithms. Most difficult of all, the system has to work at Web Scale -- it must cover a large fraction of query traffic, and handle ambiguities and inconsistencies in the quality of information extracted from Web images.

In Google Image Swirl, we address this set of challenges by organizing all available information about an image set into a pairwise similarity graph, and applying novel graph-analysis algorithms to discover higher-order similarity and category information from this graph. Given the high dimensionality of image features and the noise in the data, it can be difficult to train a monolithic categorization engine that can generalize across all queries. In contrast, image similarities need only be defined for similar enough objects and trained with limited sets of data. Also, invariance to certain transformations or typical intra-class variation can be built into the perceptual similarity function. Different features or similarity functions may be selected, or learned, for different types of queries or image contents. Given a robust set of similarity functions, one can generate a graph (nodes are images and edges are similarity values) and apply graph analysis algorithms to infer similarities and categorical relationships that are not immediately obvious. In this work, we combined multiple sources of similarity such as those used in Google Similar Images, landmark recognition, Picasa's face recognition, anchor text similarity, and category-instance relationships between keywords similar to that in WordNet. It is a continuation of our prior effort [paper] to rank images based on visual similarity.

As with any practical application of computer vision techniques, there are a number of ad hoc details which are critical to the success of the system but are scientifically less interesting. One important direction of our future work will be to generalize some of the heuristics present in the system to make them more robust, while at the same time making the algorithm easier to analyze and evaluate against existing state-of-the-art methods. We hope that this work will lead to further research in the area of content-based image organization and look forward to your feedback.

Displaying the best display ad with Teracent

A Googler — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 01:32:00 -0800

Can you spot the difference between these two sample display ads? Of course you can. However, the most important difference is not discernible to the naked eye.

The lower ad was customized and chosen from thousands of different creative elements, automatically and in real-time, by machine-learning algorithms developed by Teracent, a San Mateo, California startup.

We think that this technology has great potential to improve display advertising on the web. That's why we're pleased to announce today that we've entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Teracent. The transaction, which is subject to various closing conditions, is expected to close this quarter.

As you know, we've been busy releasing new features and products to help improve display advertising on the web for everyone. We believe that Teracent's technology fits neatly into these efforts.

Teracent's technology can pick and choose from literally thousands of creative elements of a display ad in real-time — tweaking images, products, messages or colors. These elements can be optimized depending on factors like geographic location, language, the content of the website, the time of day or the past performance of different ads.

This technology can help advertisers get better results from their display ad campaigns. In turn, this enables publishers to make more money from their ad space and delivers web users better ads and more ad-funded web content.

We're looking forward to welcoming the Teracent team to Google and to making this technology available to our display advertising clients — including those who run display ad campaigns on the Google Content Network and our DoubleClick clients.

Posted by Neal Mohan, Vice President, Product Management and Joerg Heilig, Engineering Director

This week in search 11/20/09

A Googler — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 07:58:00 -0800

This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs on Fridays. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

This week brought a number of new features to the fore.

Google Translate
The biggest and most visible release this week was our update to Google Translate. New changes to the interface help you translate instantly and see translations as you type. We have also introduced both input and output transliteration: for selected languages, our tool will show you letter by letter how a word or phrase appears in a different language as you type. We have also added text-to-speech, so you can figure out how to pronounce new words as you learn them.

Rich Snippets in Japanese
On the topic of international launches, at our Searchology event in May we announced the launch of Rich Snippets, which webmasters can use to help Google show more useful information from the page. For example, if you are thinking of trying out a new restaurant and are searching for reviews, Rich Snippets could include things like the average review score, the number of reviews, and the restaurant's price range. Starting this week, this feature is available in Japanese.

Flu shot finder now on results pages
Following in the footsteps of last week's launch, we have now added our flu shot finder to the search results page.

Example searches: flu shot, h1n1 shot, flu vaccine

Site hierarchies in search results
Google usually shows a green web address, or URL, at the bottom of each search result to let you know where you're headed. Tuesday we began rolling out an improvement that replaces the URL in some search results with a hierarchy showing the precise location of the page on the website. The new display offers valuable context and new navigation options. For example, on the eHow.com result below, you can see that this page is in the Martial Art Techniques section.

Example searches: venn diagram, how to punch harder, hodgkins lymphoma, keurig

Hope you enjoyed this week's new features. Stay tuned for more!

Posted by Johanna Wright, Director of Product Management, Search

Captions available for all Google I/O videos

Mike Marchak — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 01:40:00 -0800

We work hard to make sure that the videos on the GoogleDevelopers channel on Youtube are captioned, but when I/O added over a hundred hours of video content, we got a little behind. I'm happy to announce that we're finally caught up! Every English and Spanish video from I/O now has captions that you can turn on in YouTube.

Didn't know we had captions? Just click to select captions from the menu in the lower right corner of the video player.

Some caption and subtitle-related news:

A group of volunteers from Russia used the translated.by software to crowdsource translation for Google Wave video captions. Thank you, habratranslation! Check out one of the Wave videos with Russian subtitles. (You have to choose Russian from the caption menu in YouTube to see them.)

If you'd like to help translate captions for any of our videos, please email google-video-captions@googlegroups.com with a request. We'd be happy to share any caption files that you might be interested in under a creative commons attribution license. If you send us the translation, we'll credit you in the video caption track and blog about how awesome you are.

In addition to machine translation for captions, YouTube now provides experimental automatic caption transcription using the same speech recognition algorithms found in Google Voice. The GoogleDevelopers channel is part of the initial pilot, so this feature is available on many of our videos. To learn more, check out the blog post on the Official Google Blog.

By Naomi Bilodeau, Google Developer Team