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HP
Invited Lab To Shoot Its Hardware
The high-tech ballistics center managed by National Technical Systems (NTS) in
Camden, AR, pulled off the kind of test that system administrators worldwide dream
about: taking a rifle and putting a bullet into a piece of hardware.
Cisco
Rounding Up Digital Talent
A $250,000 promotion conducted by networking giant Cisco and Viacom's mtvU college
network will support a "Digital Incubator" for broadband content.
Google
Scholar Wants To Keep You Updated
There are geeks and there are nerds, so the Eighties told us (dorks and dweebs,
too, but these have yet reach to any type of social prominence). You may have
guessed by now that I'm a nerd - I like to study. Google Scholar's new addition,
then, will just increase the hours I spend in ancient civilizations -- for another,
their time in quarks.
WebmasterWorld
Boston 2006 Pubcon Wrapup
This year's Pubcon in Boston was held at the Elephant in the Castle, a good sized
Boston bar/pub.
Yahoo
Promoting Earth Day Pledges
Through a special website hosted at Yahoo, visitors can pledge to take energy-saving
measures that may help improve the quality of life on Earth.
In
The Mood For Blog
Software created in Amsterdam can track and detect the general mood of the LiveJournal
corner of the blogosphere, by assessing the emoticons used by posters in their
blog entries.
Google
Miro Logo A No-No
Today's Google logo features elements of work by Spanish surrealist Joan Miró
to commemorate the artist's 1893 birth, but an organization representing the artist's
estate exploded in anger over what they called a copyright violation.
Rose
Speaks Out On Digg Fraud
After seeing complaints posted at the forevergeek.com blog complaining of suspicious
mass-promoting of stories and its banning from Digg, site creator Kevin Rose addressed
them in his Digg the Blog.
Yahoo!
Adds AJAX/Flash Map APIs
Yahoo! has been promoting two new Yahoo! Maps APIs for AJAX and Flash that webmasters
can work with to publish customized maps on their websites. The Yahoo! Maps team
says each API has features that may cause one to "geek out."
Porn's
Next Web Move Spooks Hollywood
As the Internet transforms into a high-speed content medium, video distributors,
eyeing a world without middlemen and hardware costs, debate about the methods
by which to serve up content.
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Friday Apr 21, 2006 |
Google's doing something very interesting with all the money they're making: they're
spending it. CEO Eric Schmidt promised us in January that 2006 would be a huge
year for innovation, as the company geared up to launch a lineup of new products
in the second and third quarter.
Editor's Note: What does Google do with all that money?
Do they overspend? What would you like to see them devote this vast amount of
capital towards? Discuss in WebProWorld.
 There's
plenty of speculation as to what exactly Google plans to innovate this year. The
more sensible will remind the starry-eyed
dreamers that the Big G will continue to do what it has been doing.
Namely:
1. Making search searchier through steady improvements
2. Expand infrastructure and data centers; enhance with speed, depth, flexibility
3. Push more server-based applications to reduce reliance on traditional PCs
4. Expand advertising channels (that's where the money comes from) through video, audio, and print
5. Scare the bejeezus out of Microsoft (and eBay too)
Though Google is very tight-lipped about their future plans (which regularly creates a web of wild speculation and devastating disappointments outside the Googleplex), the now publicly traded company cannot be so quiet about its money. The first-quarter report revealed some incredible expenditures.
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An anonymous investment blogger explains it well:
· Dramatic capital expenditure -- Google has been investing at a blistering pace in new data centers, spending $838 million in new capital equipment, plus $600 million in expensed R&D in 2005. Already in the first quarter of 2006, Google ramped up investment again, with $345 million in capital expenditure and $247 million in R&D -- more than 40% of 2005's already giant investment in just one quarter. CFO Reyes said analysts should expect the rate of investment growth to exceed the rate of revenue growth -- with revenue growing at 79%, that means 2006 capex of at least a $1.5 billion, and R&D of at least $1.1 billion. That's a *lot* of servers and innovation.
Indeed it is. In fact, says Henry Blodget, Google is spending twice as much as Yahoo! and more than Yahoo! and eBay combined.
"The difference between the CAPEX levels, moreover, is so vast that it seems safe to assume that either Google is overspending (in which case, the question is "on what?") or Yahoo! and eBay are underspending (in which case, free cash flow is about to take a hit at both of those companies as well)," writes Blodget.
Some believe one of Google's motivation is to stay ahead of major competitors like Microsoft and Yahoo! who are getting the reputation of being cumbersome, stagnant, or worse - always on the heels of Google.
Microsoft is certainly shaken by this new competition, but the Beast of Redmond, if it has to, can outspend its new nemesis. Even if it did, Microsoft would still have to find a way to be faster than Google. And though Gates and Co. have adjusted their strategy, pushing their own services to the Web (something again on the heels of Google), they have to become nimbler and even more forward thinking than they're known to be.
So why all this money so fast? Why this upcoming blitz of Google products? Our anonymous blogger points to Paypal's Max Levchin from last September:
"If you can go fast, no one will ever catch up," said Levchin. "Can you strike the fear of God into your competitors by releasing every two weeks the features that takes them three months to write? And by the time they're done copying the features that you built last week, you've got three more months on them?"
This isn't to count Microsoft out - only to count them behind. But that all could change in the blink of an eye.
About
the Author:
Jason is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. |
|
Google Calendar opened an API for developers; Scholar received a new feature;
and the AdWords team reminded everyone, again, there will be some downtime this
weekend.
Yes, it's time for that old journalistic standby where we take three little stories, combine them into one longer story, and make you the reader think we're both resourceful, brilliant, and insightful.
Since WebmasterWorld's PubCon Boston ended this week, the talk of the online community, at least the part that finds the search industry more interesting than 24, has been Google and its amazing financial results.
But we've covered those numbers already. Google's a money magnet and the big dog in search advertising. Been there, done that, got the commemorative t-shirt and ate the commemorative burger. We're full.
Google has offered a few other noteworthy items this week. In opening an API for Calendar, Google permits client applications to view and update calendar events in the form of GData feeds.
"GData is a new protocol based on Atom 1.0 and RSS 2.0," according to Google. "GData provides a general model for feeds, queries, and results. You can use it to send queries and updates to any service that has a GData interface."
That extends where users can receive information beyond the browser. The Calendar would be one place to pick up such content.
Google Scholar added a new feature for researchers. A Google Blog post from Dejan Perkovic has more about that change:
It's not just a plain sort by date, but rather we try to rank recent papers the way researchers do, by looking at the prominence of the author's and journal's previous papers, how many citations it already has, when it was written, and so on. Look for the new link on the upper right for "Recent articles" -- or switch to "All articles" for the full list.
Indeed, Scholar does provide some interesting resources in our sample search for "dihydrogen monoxide," a substance that can be lethal to humans in small quantities and has been blamed for millions of tragedies going back even beyond Biblical times.
And again, the AdWords blog team reminds everyone that they will celebrate Earth Day with a symbolic system outage while they perform some necessary maintenance for a four-hour period, 10am to 2pm PDT.
So please don't email support during that window and say, "I can't log in to my account." That would be evil.
About
the Author:
David is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. |
|
Mistakes Can Effect Rankings
Causing Google's search engine spider confusion can have some very negative effects
in relation to result positioning. Take the poster in today's WPW spotlight post.
Apparently, some issues with the Google bot finding the wrong page for one of
his clients' sites caused negative adjustments to the SERPs being targeted. Take
a look at Google's letter to the poster about confusing the Google bot and what
you should avoid. If you have any advice for our wayward poster, please share
it.
|| Chris||
Google
Listing Wrong Domain in SERP
I help manage over 100 clients web sites who are all under our one IP address.
We have not had any problems with Google until this last month when Googlebot
had trouble caching four of my client's homepages and listed the domain of another
client instead of the correct one. If you do a Google search on "scrubs"
you will see my client (www.sassyscrubs.com) in the fourth position but it has
my other customer's domain listed. Worse yet it actually points to my other client's
site.
My customer is losing business and this is Google's official response:
Thank you for contacting us. The problem you are reporting is likely due to a
configuration error that occurred at your webhost at the time we crawled your
site. If the host inadvertently shows the wrong page for a short period of time,
and the Googlebot web crawler happens to visit your site during that window of
time, then our automated crawler confuses the two sites.
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WebPro Question: |
I got a beta testing invitation to try the Google AdWords editor. Does anybody
have any experience with this? Is it worth a try?
- arius
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