After more than 6 months of testing, Google’s new interface is finally available to everyone. The new UI is gradually rolled out today and the changes are noticeable.

Google’s logo has vibrant colors, the search box is bigger and it now includes the search button, the links from the homepage are no longer underlined.

Google’s search results pages include a persistent sidebar that suggests specialized search engines, advanced filters and related searches. By default, Google only shows suggestions that are relevant to your query, but you can click on “more” to see other ways to refine the results.

“Today’s metamorphosis responds to the increasing richness of the web and the increasing power of search — revealing search tools on the left and updating the visual look and feel throughout. The top section of the new left-hand panel builds on Universal Search by suggesting the most relevant genres of results for your query and letting you seamlessly switch to these different types of results. Our expandable Search Options panel launched last spring brought many rich slice-and-dice tools to search. The new left-hand navigation showcases these tools and enables you to get a different view of your results. In addition to the left-hand side changes, we’ve updated our look and feel in terms of our color palette and our logo. These changes are slight, keeping our page minimalist and whimsical, but make our overall look more modern,” explains Marissa Mayer.

Some of the features aren’t completely new: when Google launched Universal Search in 2007, an important new feature was that Google suggested relevant specialized search engines. The suggestion bar has been removed after a couple of months and now it’s back as a vertical panel.

As PostRank found out in a study of Buzz over 60% of the traffic is from Twitter accounts. I mean seriously people if all you are going to do is flood Buzz with your already boring crap on Twitter and then irritate me to follow you on both – go find a life somewhere else.

I have lost count of the number of follow request that when I go and check them out are nothing but Twitter messages. It gets even worse with they are Twitter messages from spammers and SEO marketing crap. Ya that make for a good user experience.

Not to be outdone the next highest use of Buzz apparently comes from bots, the kind used to spew out automated alerts from feeds. Like this was any surprise but between the bots and Twitter crap they account for 90% of Buzz traffic.

And to think that Google is getting hauled over the coals over privacy concerns. Ya I guess all those bots are upset about being found out.

Google launched Buzz last Tuesday to the public after its announcement. The new service piggybacks off Gmail automatically so users do not have to update their email account. According to USA Today, Buzz has been receiving harsh criticism over its default privacy settings as it taps into your Gmail contacts list.

This integration was done for the most part under the radar causing many to raise concerns over the way it was implemented. Buzz leeches off your contacts list by auto-following those who you may email frequently with. This is similar to Twitter where users can follow someone.

The controversy is around the “auto-follow” feature that automatically links those who you email frequently with in your Gmail account to Buzz. When posting something onto Buzz everyone can see who is following you. Basically this allows strangers to see who you email with frequently.

The problem is that most people don’t want the world to know who they email frequently with. Google attempted to rectify the problem by revising the privacy settings so that users have to jump through a few more hoops before being able to post. Some critics have even asked Google to completely disable the “auto-follow” feature from their Gmail accounts as they feel it violates their email privacy.

Buzz is definitely a brilliant idea as it seamlessly provides a new service without having the users sign up for something new. This pretty much tackles the main entry barrier for most users. However, Google will need to be extra careful since the way Buzz is implemented into Gmail could potentially be a nightmare when dealing with hackers and spammers.

The search-engine giant, which recently tweaked its search function to allow easier access to social media results, has planned an event for Tuesday at 1 p.m. ET at its California headquarters.

That comes a day after the Wall Street Journal quoted “people familiar with the matter” saying the feature would allow Facebook-style status updates, as well as pinging when users post something to affiliated sites like YouTube or Picasa.

If it appears as described, it would be a sort of anti-Twitter, making a user’s updates private by default, as opposed to open, as they are on the micro-blogging site.

The hands-down leader in the search engine world, Google has been branching out on projects that include its Nexus One smartphone — the company’s first foray into hardware marketing.

Late last month,Google announced that people could tweak their accounts to make results related to friends, co-workers and other members of their social networks appear above all other results.

The Social Search feature was introduced to a limited number of Google users last year and was made available to everyone in beta status on January 28.

The change came with a hint of more things to come.

“This is just a first step in our ongoing effort to ensure that Google Web search is always as social as the Web itself,” the company said in an instructional video posted to its official blog.

Google has just announced the news that it’s joining the long list of companies that will no longer support IE6. Once Google begins phasing out support for the archaic browser, Google Docs and Google Sites will be the first to go, but we should expect most Google products to become much less functional in IE6 in 2010.

Google writes:

“Many other companies have already stopped supporting older browsers like Internet ExplorerInternet Explorer 6.0 as well as browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers. We’re also going to begin phasing out our support, starting with Google Docs and Google Sites. As a result you may find that from March 1 key functionality within these products — as well as new Docs and Sites features — won’t work properly in older browsers.”

For a more in-depth look at why IE6 is a problematic browser, take a look at this post and then read up on a few more key reasons — think security and the fact that various governments are anti-IE .

In the immediate aftermath of a 7.0 earthquake that caused an unbelievable amount of destruction to Haiti’s capital, Google has been asked by relief organizations and users to show images of what’s actually happening on the ground.

In partnership with geospatial imagery company GeoEye, Google has just released a new layer for Google Earth showing post-earthquake devastation. Haiti was first added to Google Map Maker in response to hurricanes that wreaked havoc on the country more than a year ago. Read on for before-after pictures and details.

The Red Cross has stated that as many as 3 million Haitians have been affected by the earthquake, with as many as 100,000 deaths likely, according to Haiti’s prime minister. Since the quake’s epicenter was right off the capital city, Port-au-Prince, most of the official buildings, from government officials’ residences to jails and hospitals, have been significantly damaged or completely leveled. Google’s imagery shows exactly that:

Haiti on Google Earth
	Gadgets powered by Google

You’ll have to install the Google Earth plugin if you haven’t already to see this layer.

You can download the KML layer or open the file using Google Maps.

In a post just published by Googlers Dylan Lorimer and Jessica Pfund, they write, “We hope that Google Map Maker can also play a role in disaster relief efforts…Today, we have made this Map Maker data for Haiti available to the UN in its raw form for the earthquake relief efforts. If you have any local knowledge to share, please help us continue to build a better map of Haiti with Google Map Maker.”

For a list of ways you can donate money to help suffering Haitians and stay informed on Haiti-related breaking news, check out this post we published earlier today on resources, charitable organizations and news outlets.

Google has started coming down hard on affiliate advertisers using PPC. Lets understand why? It’s because (in the eyes of google) affiliates offer little or no value on their sites. The users experience is degraded and therefore Google is degraded. Something that is against the Google philosophy obviously.

And it’s not only limited to affiliates, some niche’s such as “Acai berry”, “Weight loss” and Home Business are also being heavily scrutinized and slapped at slightest lack of credibility.

Now this is an interesting twist from the “Big G”, as the initial success PPC also known as Adwords was largely brought about by affiliate marketers and this would still form a large portion of Goggle’s revenue today. However Google is prepared to ‘clean up’ these areas even at its own cost, because its mission first and foremost, is to serve relevant valuable content to it users.

What does this mean if PPC is your only, primary or secondary forms of marketing and Google no longer permits your ads? Your traffic is going down, W A Y D O W N !

Consider this little statement (a favorite of mine) .

“Adwords are temporary, Website Search Engine Optimization is forever.”

Bottom-line If you want to protect your targeted website traffic and ultimately your livelihood from the whims of Google you need to know how the search engines work and how to take advantage of them with good set of Internet Search Engine Optimization techniques.

You need to have your site(s) optimized for organic traffic, not even Google can control all of that. Whilst it may be able to exert a significant influence on this it’s true, but not at the flick of the switch like it can with its own Adwords program.

The knowledge of any policy adjustment is regard to organic search will circulate the community in advance and it will also take time to take effect. So if your site’s prepared and setup for SEO you will be able to adjust where required, well in advance – creating a nice competitive advantage over those that aren’t. If it’s not, well… don’t say I didn’t warn you!

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, although TechCrunch—which first reported that Google had purchased the startup—put the purchase price at $30 million. Gizmo5 had raised $6 million in a round of funding three years ago.

In September, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said the company was once again on the acquisition trail. He obviously was not kidding. After a streak of eleven months without a single purchase, Google has now bought up four companies in the last four months: video compression firm On2, “captcha” startup reCaptcha, mobile ad network adMob, and Gizmo5.

So, why might Google want Gizmo5? TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington suggested earlier this week that Google made the buy because Gizmo5’s VoIP service allows voice call connections between computers and real phones, something Google Talk doesn’t. The acquisition and Gizmo5 integration could also serve as a tidy way to transform Google Voice and Google Talk into a unified VoIP communications service—and true Skype rival.

Is it because everyone now expects the web to be social or is it because the full implications of Google Sidewiki have yet to fully realized?

I tend to think it is the latter.

This was the reaction of the New York Times Bits blog: “Google is rolling out a new service on Wednesday that will allow users to post notes alongside Web sites that can be read by other users.”

That’s putting it mildly.  What about the part where web site owners don’t control the comments?  They can’t edit them.  They can’t delete them.  And anybody who has Sidewiki will be able to read them in there entirety be they raving reviews or scathing criticisms.  It’s what every web operator needs – a public place for the crazies to leave their messages – permanently.

Google has basically made every single web page social – and that’s a paradigm shift of earthquake portions for brands, brand managers and communicators.

It’s a world where the third Sidewiki entry on the YouTube home page reads: “The new channel editor for you tube sucks. It’s gawd awful, please take that shit off.”

I’m sure that’s exactly the kind of intelligent discourse YouTube’s brand managers are looking for on the front page of their web site – for all to see.

Two analysts who do get the power of Sidewiki are Jeremiah Owyang and Charlene Li of Altimeter Group.  They wrote a post yesterday addressing Google’s “stealth” move into social media by quietly making the web social (thereby weakening the grip of large social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook).

The post goes on to say:

“This is the stealth threat — that today’s social networks won’t really be losing share to the “Google network,” but rather, that they will become slowly less relevant as EVERYTHING gets social thanks to advances by Google.  Their end goal?  Google’s social network is designed to exist everywhere –not be centralized in any one location.”

That’s it in a nutshell.

So far the response by web owners and companies have been surprisingly muted.  The mainstream press has done few hard-hitting analysis on Sidewiki.  Is it because Sidewiki hasn’t reached critical mass yet?

What do you think?

First Day of Spring

Hidden behind the inconspicuous link “Show options…” on the Google search engine result pages, lie a large number of new tools for refining search results.

Some two years ago Google (GOOG) introduced Universal Search, which essentially means that the search results combine various types of content: web, images, video, news and blogs.

The good thing about this is that inexperienced searchers may, at once glance, see results of all these types.

Universal Search also fulfills the Google credo of keeping search engine result pages simple and uncluttered.

However, it does make it harder for searchers to focus their search on one type of information.

Search options

If you click on the “Show options” link (which you find right under the Google logo on the English language versions of Google), Google will add a left hand column to the result page.

It looks a little bit like the one Ask had before they decided to become more like Google.

The column presents four sections with tools for refining your search. The first bullet point on each section is the default choice for a regular search.

When you click on one of the options, Google will filter the results accordingly, adding new options to the menu according to what kind of information you are looking for. If you click on video, Google will — for instance — add options for different durations.

Types of sources

• All results
• Video
  (restricts results to videos indexed by Google Video Search, including YouTube)
• Forums
  (restricts results to information found in discussion forums)
• Reviews
  (restricts results to pages that Google believe contain reviews of products, sites or services. These are most likely identified by Google finding the word “review” on the page.

Note that Google does not include options for News or Images, probably because these are options listed at the very top of the pages.

Why Google has singled out Videos for the option list, in spite of the fact that Videos are listed at the top of the page as well is unclear. The results are not identical!

Moreover, we find it baffling that Blogs are not included as a separate options. To restrict results to blogs you have to click on the “more” link at the top of the page, which is far from intuitive.

This section also presents the most glaring omission, namely real time search from social media.

We would have liked to see an option that mixed results from Twitter and other microblogs with the latest blog search results, which is why we believe Google acquiring Twitter would be a good thing.

Restrict result by time

The next section focuses on the timeline:

• Any time
  (i.e. default search results)
• Recent results
  (restricts results to information found in the last few hours)
• Past 24 hours
• Past week
• Past year

Bullet point two and three could be considered some kind of news search function, but while the Google News Search only includes results from hand picked sites, these results seem to give you data from various Google indexes, at least when you have selected “All results” in section 1.

More info on each hit

The next section is basically an option that lets you decide how Google is presenting the results. That being said, the ranking of results may be different for the different options.

• Standard results
  (gives you a mix of results from different Google indexes in the traditional way: headline, snippet and URL)
• Images from the page
  (presents one or two images from each web page listed)
• More text
  (is identical to Standard results, but adds longer snippets from the page)

Especially the last option might be helpful, as it might save you from visiting a large number of web pages in order to identify the most relevant ones.

We would love to have thumbnail viwe of the search results as an option as well.

Refining the search query

The final section gives you ways of exploring the web by helping you rephrase the query.

• Standard view
• Related searches
  (adds a list of alternative search queries at the top)
• Wonder Wheel
  (adds a “wheel” with subtopics at the end of the spokes. Click on one of the subtopics and Google will narrow your search accordingly)
• Timeline
  (lets you restrict your search result to a certain publication date or a date in history. A search for “Chinese Art” may, for instance, gives you pages about art from 3000BC, while you may narrow a search for “search engine marketing” to the year of 2004.)

All in all we think Google has done great job with developing these options.

Rich snippets

Google has also added so called “Rich Snippets” to some search results.

As Google puts it:

“Rich Snippets provide summary information, including important page-specific attributes, to help you quickly identify the relevance of your results.”

The rich snippets appear, like the old fashioned text snippets, below the title of the search result and may include review information, prices, information that helps you distinguish between people and more.

To display Rich Snippets, Google looks for markup formats (microformats and RDFa) that you can add to your own web pages. The Google Blog has more on how you can do that.

Google Squared

Google is also planning another new alternative way of presenting search results called Google Squared.

Google Squared will present results in a spreadsheet format that can be edited and saved. In other words: You may use the search results as you would a database.

What does it all mean? One, that sales of the first Android-based phone, the T-Mobile G1, must be going very well. Only available for sale since this fall, the iPhone-like device made by long-time OHA member HTC is expected to sell around 500,000 units this year. Now, handset makers like new member Ericsson, which plans to release its Android device in mid-2009, want in on the action — particularly since the cost of Android-based handsets is lower than that of phones made with operating systems from Nokia and Microsoft, according to researcher NPD Group. Motorola recently announced it’s going to focus on Android come next year as well.

Second, and most important, carriers and handset makers who’ve just joined the Alliance are, in effect, expressing their dissatisfaction with Android’s long-established rivals, Nokia’s Symbian and Microsoft’s Windows Mobile software. And no wonder. Symbian is going through a major restructuring, and it’s unclear exactly what it will look like come next year. Microsoft has been losing developer interest, sources tell me.

The bottom line: Until today, Android’s future looked uncertain. Only a minor handset maker, HTC, was making Android-based phones. T-Mobile was the only carrier globally to offer G1, and only in a few markets, including the U.S. Motorola’s support helped but not that much, as the company is in a fragile financial state, and its own future is unclear. That’s why today’s announcement is so important. Vodafone’s support is huge. The carrier has 280 million customers worldwide. Sony Ericsson’s involvement is important as well (larger handset makers like LG are already part of the Alliance). Clearly, big guns are joining this game, and lining up their pawns on Google’s side.

A side note: I find it interesting to see Austek and Toshiba in the new members list. It’s long been expected that Android will be used not only in phones but also in netbooks, which are tiny laptops with screens of less than 10.2 inches. Austek is the largest player in the netbooks category, and today’s announcement could indicate that Android-based netbooks may be coming out, and soon.

Google Friend Connect was previewed at a Campfire One gathering of third-party software developers at the company’s “Googleplex” campus in Mountain View, California on Monday.

The unveiling of the plan comes just days after top social networking websites MySpace and Facebook broke down walls of their online communities to let members share profile information at other websites.

“Social is going mainstream,” Google director of engineering David Glazer said during a conference call with reporters.

“What used to be hard and proprietary is becoming easy and open. It’s the evolution of social networking.”

Glazer described the MySpace and Facebook announcements as “big steps forward in giving users control over their data” and said Friend Connect is intended to further advance the movement.

“We see the web moving toward an end state where people can use any application on any website with any of their friends,” Glazer said.

“Social activity on the web has been bottled up in a handful of sites. As things mature on the web they become more open and more interoperable.”

Friend Connect lets website owner’s add social-networking features such as registration, member galleries, message boards, and fun or useful third-party applications called “widgets” by simply adding snippets of free computer code.

People visiting websites using Friend Connect will be able to interact with contacts they know from online communities such as Facebook, Google Talk, orkut, Plaxo or hi5.

To demonstrate, an iLike application was incorporated into an official website of musician Ingrid Michaelson so that visitors don’t have to leave to connect with friends at their social networking profiles.

All website operators using Friend Connect see are user nicknames and images, if any, posted along with them.

Concerns about protecting people’s profile data prompted Google to decide to work individually with website operators interested in Friend Connect, according to Glazer.

Website owners are invited to put their names in a “white list” queue online at www/google.com/friendconnect.

Google wants to be at the heart of the Internet trend of people building online identities that play, share, and conduct business in virtual environments, according to Silicon Valley analyst Rob Enderle.

“Much like Google kind of controls the overall online advertising experience I think this is Google trying to figure out how to own the virtual representation of a person on the web,” Enderle told AFP.

“Monetizing the virtual person on the web is where the money is and they are trying to figure out how to do that. If you want to have the door into my wallet you want to be as close to my information as you can get.”

Google plans to phase in more websites and social networks in the months to come, with the Open Social software platform as a basis for interoperability. Google launched Open Social last year to promote common protocols so developers can make applications that work on any social networking website involved in the effort.

“The web is moving rapidly to being more open and more social and that is good for everyone,” Glazer said. “And, yes, it is good for Google. When the web is healthy, and more people have more ways to be engaged online, our business is healthy.”