With companies now able to apply to use their own brand as a top-level domain (TLD), there have been suggestions that doing this might be an easy way to get a boost in search-engine rankings. For example, that Samsung using something like www.phones.samsung might get more hits than the usual samsung.com domain. Not so, says Google …
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Google announced a few updates for YouTube Analytics today on the YouTube Creators blog. The new tools for content creators include enhanced “time watched” data, a beta version of “Annotations report,” and a few UI improvements.
For time-watched data, which Google originally rolled out earlier this year, channel owners can now see an enhanced Views report that includes “estimated minutes watched”. It also features other metrics from a “Compare metric” drop down menu, such as: “Monetizable views”, “Unique viewers”, “Estimated minutes watched”, and “Total estimated earnings”. You will also now find “Annotations (Beta)” in the YouTube Analytics sidebar, allowing you to “view data on the performance of your video annotations, with insights on viewer click and close rates.
As for design changes, there is now a Date Slider to easily adjust the time period you are viewing data for, a metadata section with data for video duration and lifetime views, and video hover cards to quickly view a thumbnail and info for your videos.
Google just combined Trends and Insights for Search into one product.
According to Google Support:
We have launched a new version of Google Trends, bringing the great functionality of both Google Insights and Google Trends into one. Following the release of the revamped of hot trends and the special olympics addition, this release should make it even easier for you to tell stories about search and explore what people are interested in around the world.
As these product are now one, Insights for Search is being deprecated. We are working hard to make sure that any URLs you might have stored for Insights/Trends will be gracefully handled by the new united site.
Google Trends previously detailed how often a particular term is Google searched relative to the total volume of searches conducted across the world; where as Google Insights for Search provided, well, insights into those search terms. Unlike Trends, Insights for Search also provided a visual graph.
Now, both products have been folded and redesigned into a fancy new tool:
Google Goggles received a decent update today that brings more than a few new features and enhancements. Most notably, users no longer have to enable search history to use the “search from camera” function. Google also noted object tracking in continuous mode is now “faster and more robust.” Google then explained a number of ways it improved scanning QR codes with a URL encoded:
– When scanning a QR code that has a URL encoded:
– The thumbnail of a page is shown
– URL is checked against a malicious URL blacklist
– More complete barcode coverage
– Support for non-autofocus cameras
– When Goggles fails to find an exact match – search for products that look similar.
As always, the updated version of Google Goggles for Android devices running 2.2 and up is free from Google Play now.
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Google experienced more copyright removal notices for URLs in the last month than it did for all of 2009.
The search engine processed more than 4.3 million URL removal requests in the last 30 days, and it plans to redirect this data as a signal for search rankings. The bevy of infringing Web content spurred Google to take into account valid copyright removal notices for websites to verify its search algorithms yield the highest quality results.
Google elaborated on its Inside Search blog:
- Sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in our results. This ranking change should help users find legitimate, quality sources of content more easily—whether it’s a song previewed on NPR’s music website, a TV show on Hulu or new music streamed fromSpotify.
The Google Crisis Response team just issued a new crisis map for the 2012 U.S. wildfire season.
Major media outlets are reporting on the massive wildfires wreaking havoc in Colorado and Utah, and Google is working to provide related information to those affected by way of maps that feature fire perimeters cropped from the U.S. Geological Survey, Red Cross, and satellite imagery by DigitalGlobe.
“Use the checkboxes along the right-hand panel to turn on and off the layers of information, and the ‘Share’ button at the top of the map to grab the URL or embed code. Note that both the URL and the embed code will automatically restore your current view of the map, including the set of layers that you have turned on,” wrote Googler Pete Giencke on the Google Lat Long Blog, while explaining how to navigate the crisis map.
A new report from The Next Web claimed a “source close to the product’s development” confirmed Google has a new commenting system in the works. With continued integration of Google+ into the rest of the company’s web services, the report claimed Google will likely aim to take on Facebook and its third-party commenting platform. The report explained:
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