To celebrate its 15th birthday, Google decided to share a neat Easter egg showing how Google used to look in 1998. To see it for yourself, simply search for "google in 1998" (without the quotes). Sadly, you can't do an actual search on 1998 Google.
Google quietly made a huge change to its core search technology in the past month, one that affects about 90 percent of searches worldwide. Calling it Hummingbird, the technological update of Google search is designed to handle more complex queries.
It's easy to make a mistake when trying to create perfect HTML code that validates correctly every time. So how important is valid HTML when it comes to your Google organic search rankings? Not very, at least for right now, says Google's Matt Cutts.
Remarketing Lists for Search Ads opens up a lot of potential strategies for AdWords advertisers. Here are some of the most common strategies evolving for different types of advertisers to give you an idea of what could work for each one.
Regardless of your product or service offering, you should start reviewing, planning, organizing, and optimizing for Q4 right now. Here's a checklist of strategies and things to think about now to end the year the on a triumphant note.
Voice search can be more convenient, quicker, and it continues to gain popularity worldwide. Marketers must adapt new search strategies to optimize for local search, large brands or global enterprises, and conversational or long-tail queries.
When you think search, no doubt you think Google. But there are other popular major search engines (e.g., Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, and Baidu) that you can turn when searching for information, images, maps, videos, products, or something local.
YouTube has announced the launch of Audio Library. The YouTube Audio Library is available to all users and offers those creating and uploading videos a selection of 150 royalty-free tracks that can be used to accompany their footage.
YouTube comments that are more relevant will move to the top of the comments list instead of the most recent. Google said this means that comments from people you care about will rise so you can see them and there will be no more anonymous comments.
If a website gets hit by Google Panda, small fixes won't be effective. Panda absolutely can strike again, and if it does, webmasters might find themselves in a long yo-yo battle. Learn how to avoid this situation by making the right SEO decisions.
Trying to clean up your backlink profile? If your site has sunk in Google's search results due to a large number of unnatural links point to inner pages, you can quickly remove links by removing these pages. Here's how to do it correctly.
By understanding who your audience is, you're able to offer them a targeted message. While your personas and triggers may vary slightly, here are common distinctions in the consumer buying cycle and specific content types that work well for each.
Forty-eight percent of consumers trust ads in search engine results, online video, and social networks. That's according to a recent report from Nielsen, Trust In Advertising 2013, which found that consumer trust in online advertising is increasing.
The next time you just gotta gawk at your favorite celeb, take caution; McAfee exposed the top celebrity searches that put users at the highest risk of malware attacks. Topping the list is Lily Collins, Avril Lavigne, and Sandra Bullock.
Whether someone is searching on their mobile device for a restaurant, a local service, or a car rental, the presence of a click to call button increases click-through rates and brand perception, according to new Google/Ipsos research.
Dominating your niche on Google can be very profitable. Ranking well for keywords related to your specific niche helps drive higher quality traffic to your site and differentiates your brand. Follow these five steps to dominate your niche.
Ready to ignite a sincerely user-centric mobile plan? When it comes to your mobile SEO strategy, it's critical to identify user intent and motivation, find and optimize mobile-specific keywords, and focus on context rather than "killer content."
When it comes to hiring social media managers, it can be tough to separate the pretenders from experts. If you're looking to hire a social media manager, here are six areas you should look at when evaluating applicants' skill sets and background.
In August, 188.5 million Americans watched 46.7 billion online content videos, while the number of video ad views totaled 22.8 billion, according to comScore. AOL has climbed into second place with 55.9 percent more viewers than it had a year ago.
A New York crackdown targeted companies who purchased and created fake online business reviews. A total of seven companies offering "reputation enhancement" services were caught in the year-long investigation, along with their clients.
The Google bar, which appears above the search results and across many of their properties and apps, has a new look. Google has also added a new app grid and updated the color palette and letter shapes of the Google logo as part of the new design.
Nearly two years after making one of the biggest changes to secure search that resulted in a steady rise in "(not provided)" data, Google has made all searches encrypted using HTTPS. This means no more keyword data will be passed to site owners.
These are the core concepts of modern search – ranking factors, signals, graphs, and personalization. This is neither a guide to Google nor Bing. It is a starting point to better understand the landscape of how search engines rank web pages.
Regardless of whether you're in-house or agency-side, there are huge profits to be gained from SEO and social media teams strategically working together. Here are the top three ways to set up and benefit from this powerful collaboration.
Move over Carson Daly and "The Today Show". Meet the new social media talk shows: Google+ Hangouts and TwitterChats. Brands of all sizes can now gain influence and publicity channeled through today's largest social media news networks. Here's how.
, a loan program that will initially serve qualified existing PayPal merchant customers. PayPal won’t actually lend the money—its initial banking partner is WebBank. But borrowers aren’t saddled with fixed monthly payments or late fees: Rather, they repay the loan and a pre-set loan fee out of sales revenues processed by PayPal. The cost of the loan depends on the amount borrowed (generally, up to 8 percent of total annual sales processed by PayPal in the last year), the percentage of sales receipts dedicated to paying the loan (between 10 percent and 30 percent), and the merchant’s PayPal track record. The higher the percentage of sales the merchant is willing to allocate to paying back the loan, the lower the overall fee. In PayPal’s published example, for a business with $100,000 in annual sales that borrows the maximum, $8,000, the loan fee varies from $947 if the business opts to dedicate 10 percent of sales receipts to paying down the loan, to $281 for a business that dedicates 30 percent of its sales receipts to paying back the loan.
If that’s true, it was a very serendipitous mistake, and one that we should all be thankful for. Why? Because, as insecure as some perceive the Windows operating system to be, it could have been a thousand times worse if there were no keyboard interaction required to log on. That physical interaction tells the computer that you want to interface with the Microsoft Windows operating system, and ensures that rogue or spoofed software can’t dupe users into typing usernames and passwords. The graphical identification and authentication (GINA) library was an element of early versions of the Windows operating system that loaded almost immediately when the PC is powered up. The GINA was responsible for registering the CTRL-ALT-DEL sequence with the PC hardware at a very low level to ensure that key sequence could only be directed to the Windows logon screen. In Windows Vista and later versions, GINA has been replaced by a more flexible system of Credential Providers, but the general purpose is still the same—to handle some sort of secure attention sequence (like Ctrl-Alt-Del) that signals the computer to direct to the Windows logon.
A U.S. surveillance court has given the National Security Agency no limit on the number of U.S. telephone records it collects in the name of fighting terrorism, the NSA director said Thursday. The NSA intends to collect all U.S. telephone records and put them in a searchable “lock box” in the interest of national security, General Keith Alexander, the NSA’s director, told U.S. senators. “There is no upper limit” on NSA telephone-records collection, Alexander said. “I believe it is in the nation’s best interest to put all the phone records into a lock box that we can search when the nation needs to do it.” Alexander, other intelligence officials and several members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence defended the NSA’s data collection and surveillance efforts during a committee hearing.
For years, search engines have trained us to speak in certain cadences, using certain words, and to pick out our own results from a list of relevant queries. Google’s new Hummingbird algorithm strides further away from that, to a more natural interaction with a search engine. Hummingbird, which has crept into Google’s search engine for about a month now, provides better answers to more complex queries, the search company’s executives say. Over time, Google has continued poaching pageviews away from content partners by answering more and more questions itself; that trend appears to be continuing with Google’s latest improvements. To celebrate 15 years in the search business, Google highlighted the next step in its roadmap: intelligence features, going beyond some of the anticipatory work Google enabled with its Google Now offering. The current design actually plays more into the mobile space than on the desktop, with two new innovations specifically designed to return answers, not results: a new comparison engine, and better filters that leads more naturally into a “conversation” with Google on your mobile device. —the Mountain View, Calif. home originally rented to Larry Page and Sergey Brin by Anne Wojcicki, before she married Brin. As an example of the new comparison engine, Google suggested users ask Google to “compare butter with olive oil” or “compare Earth vs. Neptune”. Comparisons have traditionally one of the strong points of rival search engine Wolfram Alpha, so it’s interesting to see Google take a stab at ousting Wolfram from one of its traditional strengths.
Tizen is for tablets, smartphones and laptops, but the operating system could also be headed to printers, cameras and smart TVs. Intel and other Tizen backers are exploring the idea of adding “profiles” that would create versions of the open-source OS for products outside tablets, smartphones and cars, said Chris Norman, senior technical marketing engineer at Intel. Tizen is among a host of mobile operating systems, including Firefox OS, Sailfish and Ubuntu, that are trying to compete with Android and iOS. Intel is backing the development of Tizen along with Samsung, with both contributing code. Samsung, DoCoMo and Orange are expected to offer the first mobile devices based on the OS.
With the tap of a button on any of the new Kindle Fire HDX tablets, Amazon promises that a frustrated user can get free tech support and tips from a live agent via video, hopefully within 15 seconds. The function, called the “Mayday button,” allows an Amazon expert to appear in video on the screen of the Fire HDX and “co-pilot you through any feature by drawing on your screen, walking you through how do something yourself, or doing it for you,” said Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos. Amazon announced the new 7-inch and 8.9-inch on Wednesday. The smaller tablet will go on sale Oct. 18 for $229 and larger on Nov. 7 for $379.
Android users will find plenty of updates on their handsets ready to be installed today. As Google prepares to launch the Android 4.4 KitKat version of the mobile operating system, numerous members of the core apps are receiving new features. Here’s a look at the most notable updates of the last couple of days. Google’s been on a tear as it finalizes its new operating system, which is in the final stages of being prepared to ship in the next few days. The release is affectionately known as KitKat, a continuation of the sweets-and-desserts naming system that Google has used since version 1.5 of the mobile operating system. , including a Wonka-esque golden ticket promotion: crack open a package with the Android logo on the front and you could win a Google Play store credit.
This year's America's Cup will be remembered for Oracle Team USA's jaw-dropping comeback against Emirates New Zealand, but it should also be remembered for the huge role computers have come to play in the competition.
Microsoft wants to help web application framework developers tackle one of their thorniest problems, that of testing their libraries to ensure they work correctly across today’s dizzying combination of available browsers and operating systems (OSes). Working with software testing consultancy AppendTo and testing tools provider Sauce Labs, Microsoft has launched a new service that provides free automated unit testing for anyone who loads a JavaScript framework or library into a GitHub. it could be made to run more efficiently. “We see a lot of innovation [in web development] related to 3D graphics or animations, but we don’t see a lot of innovation on the testing side, and so that is where we wanted to help,” said Justin Garrett, Microsoft senior product manager for the Internet Explorer team. The idea is that having an automated testing tool would encourage more developers to build useful frameworks for the Web.
PC sales may continue to shrink, but hardware makers can point to a couple of bright spots—Chromebooks and touch-based Windows laptops. Chromebooks, which had negligible market share a year ago, accounted for 3.3 percent of U.S. sales during the back-to-school season, . Nearly 175,000 of these low-cost laptops, which run the browser-based Chrome OS from Google, were sold between June 30 and September 7. NPD has previously said that Chromebooks make up 20 percent to 25 percent of the sub-$300 laptop market. PC makers have been showing more interest in Chromebooks as a potential source of growth. Both HP and Lenovo began producing Chromebooks this year—with Lenovo targeting schools-only—and a may lead to a wider range of offline applications.
Sudan has regained access to the Internet after a nearly 24-hour blackout that may have been a government-directed response to violent rioting in the country over lifted fuel subsidies. Service was restored around 1 p.m. local time Thursday, according to an analysis performed by Renesys, an Internet performance management company. It was the largest national blackout seen since Egypt went dark in 2011, Renesys said. There is some debate over what caused the outage. The Sudan Embassy in Washington, D.C., said Wednesday that the Sudan government did not block Internet access. The blackout happened, the embassy said, because violent protestors burned the facilities of the Canar telecommunications company, which hosts the core of Internet services for the country. “These fires resulted in continuing Internet blackouts across Sudan,” the statement said. The embassy could not be immediately reached Thursday to comment on the Internet’s restoration.
The technological revolution that has empowered small businesses in so many ways continues to produce new solutions to all types of financial issues, from finding financing to accepting online payments and finding professional guidance without paying a small fortune. , a showcase for financial technology innovation. Zooz’s 3.0 technology empowers e-commerce merchants with easy-setup, user-friendly checkout modules that provide a consistent look and feel for any online platform from which a customer may choose to shop—Web, smartphones, or tablets. Zooz works with most popular payment gateways, and in the United States they have partnered with FirstData to offer competitively priced payment processing. : Payments can help generate new sales with PayWith’s mCards—basically, virtual credit/rewards cards on smartphones. MCards are linked to existing Mastercards, so merchants don’t have to install new point-of-sale technology, but incorporate rewards programs that can encourage repeat sales. Merchants, meanwhile, gain access to analytics based on mCard usage.
This desk raises, it lowers, it breathes -- and it’s watching you.
Microsoft chairman Bill Gates acknowledged that the “CTRL-ALT-DEL” means of logging into your Windows PC was a mistake, although done with the best of intentions. last week, said that the awkward three-finger combination was actually implemented for security purposes. ”Basically because when you turn your computer on, you’re going to see some screens and eventually type your password in, you want to have something you do with the keyboard that is signalling to a very low level of the software—actually hard-coded in the hardware—that it really is bringing in the operating system you expect,” Gates said. “Instead of just a funny piece of software that puts up a screen that looks like your login screen and listens to your password and is able to do that. ”So we could have had a single button, but the guy that wanted to do the IBM keyboard design didn’t want to give us our single button.,and so we programmed at a low level... it was a mistake.” Gates also said that it was able to take the IBM character set and do some “interesting things” with it.
Apple may be forced to abandon its proprietary 30-pin dock charger (shown above) if European politicians get their way. Members of the European Parliament’s internal market committee on Thursday voted unanimously for a new law mandating a universal mobile phone charger. The MEPs want all radio equipment devices and their accessories, such as chargers, to be interoperable to cut down on electronic waste. German MEP Barbara Weiler said she wanted to see an end to “cable chaos”. This is not the first attempt to set a standard for universal phone chargers. In 2009 the European Commission, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and leading mobile phone manufacturers drew up a voluntary agreement based on the micro USB connector.
Enterprises are increasingly interested in developing apps for Android-based smartphones and tablets, showing how Google’s OS is becoming more accepted, according to a poll. At the same time fewer are willing to spend resources on Microsoft’s OSes. For the second time, cross-platform tool company Appcelerator has queried IT directors, CEOs, development directors, CTOs and people in a number of other roles what their priorities are in the mobile market. The results hint at how the enterprise arena is slipping away from Microsoft, while at the same time acceptance for Android is growing and iOS is the number one priority. As part of the survey, Appcelerator asked the 804 participants how interested they were in developing consumer and enterprise apps for the various mobile platforms. Apple was on top, with 80 percent saying they were very interested in developing applications for the company’s smartphones and tablets, which is roughly the same response elicited by the first quarter version of the survey. The third-highest priority was Android-based smartphones, which 71 percent of the respondents said they were very interested in, an increase of 7 percentage points from the first quarter. But unlike Apple, Google and its hardware partners have so far failed to convince enterprises that Android-based tablets are as important as smartphones based on the OS. Fifty-nine percent stated they were very interested, though that was an increase compared to 52 percent during the first quarter survey.
Samsung has returned to the onerous practice of region locking with the Galaxy Note 3, and that means you'll need to shell out big bucks to use the tablet abroad.
A glitch in Google Talk routed instant messages incorrectly on Thursday morning, exposing private text chats to unintended recipients. and the moment it declared it solved. and social media outlets like Twitter, the bug may have been active for about five hours. The entries about the problem in the Apps Status site simply state that Google Talk wasn't "functioning correctly."
Put down that cable! This device can stream HD video from a source in one room to a display almost anywhere in your home.
Even in these days of Internet-capable HDTVs and set-top boxes, you still occasionally need to connect a PC to your television. You may have an Internet-capapble smart TV, a connected Blu-ray player or game console, and a dedicated streaming machine like a Roku, Chromecast, or Apple TV. But inevitably, at some point, you're going to want to watch streaming content from a Web site that none of your devices support. And you will want to watch it kicked back in an easy chair or with friends. That calls for a real television. So eventually, you'l need a way to connect your PC to your HDTV--and a way to control the PC from across the room. And yes, I know that a Chromecast can send virtually any Web-based video stream from a Windows PC to an HDTV. But in my experience--assuming you're not using a Chromecast-supported service like Netflix or Youtube--the experience is well below that of connecting your PC directly to the television as described below.
Metapad wants to completely replace the built-in Windows notepad, and some of the features being offered in Metapad could convince you to make that switch.
Although the number of malicious browser extensions has significantly increased in the past year many security products fail to offer adequate protection against them, while others are simply not designed to do so, according to a security researcher. Attackers have already used such extensions to perform click fraud by inserting rogue advertisements into websites or by hijacking search queries, but research has shown that this type of malware has the potential to cause much more damage. that could be controlled remotely by an attacker and could steal authentication credentials, hijack accounts, modify locally displayed Web pages, take screenshots through the computer's webcam, bypass two-factor authentication systems and even download and execute malicious files on a victim's computer. : "An increase in malicious browser extensions has been registered, aimed at taking over social network accounts."
Communications chipmaker Broadcom announced an 802.11ac/5G chip that will let cars sync better with mobile devices, and stream audio and video from those devices to multiple in-car displays. But don't get too excited: Cars that will use the chip have yet to be announced, and their longer development cycle means it could take a while to see such well-connected cars in dealerships near you.
A bipartisan group of four U.S. lawmakers has introduced legislation that will prohibit bulk collection of phone records of Americans. Called the Intelligence Oversight and Surveillance Reform Act, the bill introduced by Democratic Senators Ron Wyden, Mark Udall and Richard Blumenthal, and Republican Senator Rand Paul will also provide for the creation of a "constitutional advocate" to argue against the government in significant cases before the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. It will also set up a process for making significant FISC decisions public. Former National Security Agency contractor, Edward Snowden, disclosed through newspaper reports in June that the NSA was collecting phone metadata from Verizon customers in the U.S. as part of its surveillance, which was said to also include collection of data from Internet companies. The Internet companies denied reports that the NSA had real-time access to content on their servers for its surveillance. Under the proposed amendments in the new bill to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the government would still be able to obtain records of anyone suspected of terrorism or espionage, or anyone in contact with a suspected terrorist or spy. But the bulk collection of "records of law-abiding Americans with no connection to terrorism or espionage will no longer be legal," according to an explanatory brief of the proposed legislation.
Researchers at Stanford University have demonstrated the first functional computer built using only carbon nanotube transistors, according to an article published Wednesday on the cover of scientific journal Nature. Scientists have been experimenting with transistors based on carbon nanotubes or CNTs as successors to silicon transistors, as silicon is expected to meet its physical limits in delivering the increasingly smaller transistors required for higher performance in smaller and cheaper computing devices that are less power-consuming. Digital circuits based on the long chains of carbon atoms are expected to be more energy-efficient than silicon transistors. of the article. Made of 178 transistors, each containing between 10 and 200 carbon nanotubes, the computer can do four tasks summarized as instruction fetch, data fetch, arithmetic operation and write-back, and run two different programs concurrently.
The information superhighway is not for everyone. Fifteen percent of adults still don't use the Internet, primarily because it's not relevant to them or it's too difficult to use, a recent Pew survey said. Of American adults ages 18 and older who do not use the Internet, 34 percent said the Internet was not relevant to them, according to the results of a survey released Wednesday. By that they meant they're not interested, they don't want to use it, or they have no need for it. . The percentage of people who don't go online because it's too hard to use the Internet is a bit higher than in earlier surveys. In previous years, offline adults cited usability as a deterrent less than 20 percent of the time.
Beware Gmail users: Inserting images into the body of an email message can get you temporarily banned from your account. this year, saying it's faster, simpler and altogether better than the old basic HTML interface. Google has acknowledged the problem but hasn't been able to stamp it out. with more than 250 posts.