Google who’s mission to organized the worlds information has once again stepped up with an initiative to bring old newspapers to the digital age with the help of News Archives. Google partnered with around 100 newspapers to digitize them and make scanned copies available online. Not only you can search these old newspapers but you will also be able to browse through them exactly as they were printed (photographs, headlines, articles, advertisements etc and all).

“This is huge,” said Google’s Marissa Mayer. “We’re branching into a new form of content.”

It is quite fun to go through the old papers you can see the old ads, the old offers and even classifieds. Reading an old & original article from a 1969 edition of Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Americas oldest paper publishing since 244 years) was really exciting.

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So finally Google jumps into the browser world and comes with the most simpler form of its browser called Chrome.

Since we spend so much time online, we began seriously thinking about what kind of browser could exist if you started from scratch and built on the best elements out there. We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that’s what we set out to build.

So today we’re releasing the beta version of a new open source browser: Google Chrome.

Being in the beta phase Chrome seems like a minimal browser with a very few handpicked features by Google. If i compare Google’s Chrome with other browsers of the industry then in terms of features and functionality Chrome is way behind Firefox or even IE. Yes Chrome is minimal with a nice simple design not over cluttered with features and functionality works quite quickly but it does crash, it does not improve or enhance your browser experience, very little option of customization & of course a long way to go for Google to have a huge user base for Chrome. (more…)

Google in a recent development have announced that it has attained the ability to crawl websites made in flash. Previously Adobe presented Google & Yahoo with there SWF libraries so as both the companies could work on it to develop technology that could help there search engines to show results from flash based websites.

Flash or SWF was a glory of its time and gained tremendous attention from user end, it changed the face of the web by giving freedom to develop websites full of interactive media. But the only flaw in the system came to life when search engines were unable to crawl content within a flash website thus causing lack of traffic for website owners.

With this new development of Google being able to crawl thought a flash site new dimension and a new scope for flash based website is about to rise.

According to Google:

Google has been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files of all kinds, from Flash menus, buttons and banners, to self-contained Flash websites. Recently, we’ve improved the performance of this Flash indexing algorithm by integrating Adobe’s Flash Player technology.

• Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. So if your web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file, in which case it will not be indexed.
• We currently do not attach content from external resources that are loaded by your Flash files. If your Flash file loads an HTML file, an XML file, another SWF file, etc., Google will separately index that resource, but it will not yet be considered to be part of the content in your Flash file.
• While we are able to index Flash in almost all of the languages found on the web, currently there are difficulties with Flash content written in bidirectional languages. Until this is fixed, we will be unable to index Hebrew language or Arabic language content from Flash files.

On a series of photos taken by Damien Spain, you can see that even the mighty Google is not immune to getting tickets.

Ever wondered where actually a website is hosted, what if there are bunch of guys living next door and have tons of equipment could they be your web host. Well thanks to Server IP location now you can locate physical location of your web host or physical location of any website on a Google map and find out where actually is there web server.

This cool tool is made by 81solutions an SEO / Hosting & commerce company. The IP Tool location asks you to enter a website address and the Google map on the page will show you the exact location of where you data center is. So in one way you can find out exactly where it is, you can cross check if the sales guys are lying about there locations or you can just have few minutes of fun and find out most of the web hosting is done in California.

But the real purpose according to the inventors

For SEO purposes it maybe useful to locate servers in the country you wish to serve. For example, if you are targeting the UK market, thus UK search engines then it maybe advantageous to your websites position on the search engine results pages to host your website in the UK. Hosting in your target country may also increase customer satisfaction as webpages will load quicker and have faster response times.

Check it out Server IP Location

Thought orkut have not opened this channel of customized theme but people have found a way around of changing the themes of the orkut pages. But this change hardly makes any difference, firstly you can change the theme to the one you like but that theme will only be viewable to you only and not your friends.

Still if you want you can change the theme and a get a new look you would need:

1. Mozilla Firefox ( a free web browser)
2. GreaseMonkey or Stylish (firefox plugins)

If you don’t want to use Mozilla Firefox you can change the orkut theme with Internet Explorer as well just install

1. Internet Explorer 7
2. Trixie Plugin for IE

Once you have installed the plugins restart you browser, and then either go to [orkutplus] or go to userscripts install the scripts and start enjoying the themes. Though previously orkut experimented by releasing a theme for Holi an Indian holiday for Indian users only so very soon orkut will be officially launching the ability to chose your own theme.

As the globe is turning into a single marketplace regional clocks and keeping an eye on the time in different locations has become an important habit. What if you are working on a project where your designer is in Paris your programmers are in Germany & your Marketing team is in India with completely opposite timezones and remembering he no of hours of difference is quite difficult. So to solve this problem there are two way a Google way or the Firefox way.

Google has been a great help in that regard and i have been using it for a while, with google you can check the current time of any location around the globe by just typing location of the city or country in the Google search bar e.g. ( time : Paris ) and the result page will come up with the exact time of that location.

Another option for global time check could be with the help of Firefox Plugin, though if you want to keep a very strict eye on the clocks around different regions you can simply install FoxClocks , which lets you keep an eye on clocks around the world by putting up small clocks in your statusbar. You can set you own time formats, color code different clocks move them to toolbar or switch icons for it. FoxClock also comes packed with Zone Picker tree to browse virtually the world’s time zone by country / region or city.

Check out more on FoxClocks or download it

Google released a new beta release of Google RSS reader for mobile. Mobile browsing has gone a long way but iPhone has gone way ahead. It not only Google RSS reader that have been launched for iPhone but previously Google also launched Google Gmail and other mobile apps specially for iPhone. Looks like iPhone is a new industry standard for who’s market share has grown to such a level that companies like Google convert it products specially for iPhone.

The Google RSS Reader for iPhone is in its beta release and thus to access it from you iPhone you would have to use the URL http://www.google.com/reader/i/ as the RSS reader will not automatically direct you to the iPhone reader version if you access it from you iPhone.

This new version is designed to offer many of the same features as the desktop, while making it quick and easy to act on items. If you’ve used list view, then it should be familiar to you. Scan the titles for an item that interests you, tap and it expands in place. Starring, sharing, and keeping unread are done in place, so you never have to leave the list view or refresh the page. We think it’s a very fast way to power through your reading list.

Source: [Google Reader Blog]

Google has come up with a very ambitious project named ‘Friend Connect‘. The Google Friend Connect lets you add social network features to your website with snippets of code from different websites into your own website. Seems more like web widgets which Google have named at ‘Friend Connect’.

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Recently Google Inc. Launched ‘Google Ad Manager’ , which is a bi product of Google’s previous accusation of Double Click for 3.1 billion. Google Ad Manager though currently in a beta phase and for invitation only is quite simple technology that enables publishers to have more options to deploy & manage there Ad’s. Recently Many publishers were not satisfied with the Adsense and revenue generated with Adsense. For more interactive Ad’s they used to either sign up with companies like Double Click & Federated Media to deliver more Ads targeted directly to there web, or they used to directly deal with advertisers for ad deployment on there website. Keeping this industry problem Google presented the world with Google Ad Manager which will definitely centralize the control of Advertisement on the web. So lets see what exactly Google Ad Manager is.
What is Google Ad Manager ?
Google Ad Manager provides an easy to use tool for Publishers to define Ad spots on there web properties where they can place ads by either directly dealing with there Advertisers. As the Google Ad Manager comes pack with statistics for the Ad i.e is Impressions, click through rate hence publishers would be able to bring there direct advertisers to those rates as well. Apart from that incase the publisher does not have ads for there spot on the web, then the Google Ad Manager will display Google Adsense Ads or other Ad Network Ads. Some of the key features

• Inventory management
• Yield optimization
• Ad targeting
• Trafficking, ad delivery, and order booking
• Creatives and rich media management
• Reporting
• User interface navigation
• Account administration

Keeping the launch of Google Ad Manager, Microsoft could not let this portion of net un avaided and today Microsoft Annouced the accusation of RAPT.

Rapt is yet another powerful Ad Management application. Though these accusations & launch clearly indicate the growth of Online Advertisement, where the power of Ad selection has been provided to publishers and Advertisers using the strong foundation of Statistics & Impression based stats & charging to further increase & enhance the Ad revenue.