Aug

7

Google Street View Astra busted in Bradford

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Aug

5

Google First, everything else: Miles behind.

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Jul

1

So now you are indexing Flash then?

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So it looks like Google and Adobe have teamed up, and now they are going to index flash files, this is good news for seo’s but bad news for designers. Hopefully we are not going too see a return to the late 90’s where every bloody website you visited had stupid swirling introduction flash animations saying welcome to my site.

You can read more about it on the official Google Blog here

My mouse finger is already hovering over the “skip movie” button in anticipation.

May

22

Google Sites, Get Stuck in

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this is official from Google

A few months ago we launched Google Sites exclusively as part of Google Apps for companies and organizations that wanted to use the service on their own domains. Now we’ve made it easy for anyone to set up a website to share all types of information — team projects, company intranets, community groups, classrooms, clubs, family updates, you name it — in one place, for a few people, a group or the world. You can securely host your own website at http://sites.google.com/[your-website] and add as many pages as you like for free.

Getting started with Google Sites is easy. You can create different types of pages from scratch with the click of a button, and you can embed documents, calendars, photos, videos and gadgets directly into those pages. Similar to Google Docs, built-in editing tools allow for popular text and formatting changes to be made in a straightforward, WYSIWYG manner. Once your site is up and running, inviting people to edit or view your content is as simple as entering in their email address (of course, you can change access levels at any time). And you (or anyone who has editing privileges) can add or edit information whenever you’d like.

Here’s a quick look:
Popout

Stay up to date with the latest news on our new Google Sites blog.

Apr

18

Google Overtakes ITV in Advertising revenue

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From the BBC

Over the last three years I’ve made frequent visits to Google’s London offices opposite Victoria Station - and every time I go back the search firm seems to have filled more space. This week the funky offices and the free canteen were sparsely populated but only because just about the whole London workforce had gone off on the annual Google ski trip.

And what are most of the eager young Googlers doing? Selling advertising or talking to Britain’s biggest brands about how they can move more of their marketing budget online. Because it’s easy to forget that as well as being an extraordinarily innovative firm, Google is also rapidly becoming Britain’s biggest advertising business. The latest figures - released on Thursday evening - show how rapidly it is growing in the UK, earning $803 million( about £407m) in the first three months of 2008, about 40% up on a year ago.

Let’s put that into context. Last year, ITV’s net advertising revenue was £1.5 billion. So, even if you just multiply Google’s earnings by four and assume no further growth this year, Britain’s biggest commercial television business - the original “licence to print money” - is about to be overtaken by an American upstart which only arrived in the UK in 2001. You could not ask for a starker example of the threat to traditional media from the online world.

Marc Mendoza - whose media buying agency is putting a lot of its clients’ budgets online - tells me that Google now has about 80% of the UK online advertising market. It turns out he’s referring to search, where Google has crushed all opposition, and of course there are other forms of online marketing. Still, the latest figures I’ve seen put total UK online ad spending at around £2.8 billion last year, of which Google had nearly half. That’s a stunning share, and with the acquisition of DoubleClick now completed, Google looks set to be bigger in display too. The compnay’s founders were also sounding very bullish in their results conference call about their prospects in the mobile advertising market.

So who’s got a problem with this? Microsoft, obviously - that’s why it is determined to win its battle for Yahoo. With an infinitesimal share of online advertising, it is paranoid that the Google business model has more of a future. But here in the UK, the internet service providers are desperate to shore up their wafer-thin subscription revenues with some advertising cash. That’s why they’re looking seriously at Phorm’s web tracking software which promises to serve up targeted ads. At an open meeting this week Phorm’s chief executive was hammering home the message that there needed to be an alternative to Google.

All those young Googlers in their multi-coloured Victoria offices signed up to an edgy, radical business which was admired - even loved - by the rest of the industry. Now, though, Google has grown into the biggest kid on the block, and is eating everyone else’s lunch. I don’t think there’s going to be much love flowing its way from now on.

Apr

16

Google Earth gets an update, UK left out again

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Sorry we’ve not blogged for while, it has been absoloute crazy here at creativesuit. With deadlines to meet, new staff to train, and our own website is getting a massive makeover, Hopefully we will have something to show you sometime in May.

Anyway, whats been happening in the world of search?

Well Google Earth has been updated, we love google earth at creativesuit, even my dad loves google earth, half the UK are still waiting too see any sought of decent resolution that our American friends get.

Have a read about it over on the Google Blog, or i have cut and pasted it below to save you wrists

On the Google Earth team, we’re big fans of Earth Day, so much so that we couldn’t hold out until it arrives next week to release our latest labor of love: Google Earth 4.3. With this version, we have completely rethought how you might interact with the 3D world. We’ve redesigned the navigation to make it much easier to fly from the heavens down to the streets of your town. And with all of the great user-created buildings in the 3D Warehouse, we wanted to make it easy for you to get right up close to see the rich detail.

Here’s a sample of what you’ll find in this release:

New navigation - We’ve improved the zoom control so you can swoop down from outer space to street level in a single seamless motion. And with the addition of the “look” joystick, you can look up at buildings or across a mountain range.

More, faster 3D buildings - It’s more fun to navigate through a lot of new 3D content. Besides adding thousands of buildings contributed by people around the world, we’ve added dozens of photo-textured cities and towns in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Street View - The popular Google Maps feature makes its Google Earth debut.

Sunlight feature - Never seen the sunrise over the Alps? Now you can.

New languages - There are 12 new languages, including Danish, English (UK), Spanish (Latin American), Finnish, Hebrew, Indonesian, Norwegian, Portuguese (PT), Romanian, Swedish, Thai, and Turkish.

Check out the Lat Long blog for all the details, or head over to our website at earth.google.com. And stay tuned for more details about Earth Day coming soon.

Apr

1

Googles April Fool

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From the official Google Blog, Happy April Fools Day

In my life, I’ve had a lot of exciting adventures and launched a lot of ambitious business ventures. I’m delighted today to announce Virgle, Inc., a joint venture between the Virgin Group and Google which qualifies on both counts.

Virgle’s goal is simple: the establishment of a permanent human settlement on Mars. Larry Page, Sergey Brin and I feel strongly that contemporary technology is sufficiently advanced to make such an effort both successful and economical, and that it’s high time that humanity moved beyond Earth and began our great, long journey to explore the stars and establish our first lasting foothold on another world.

In the years to come, we’ll be sending up a series of spaceships carrying (along with the supplies and tools needed to build the new colony) what eventually will be hundreds of Mars colonists, or Virgle Pioneers — myself among them. If you think you might want join us (or invest in or otherwise assist this vast venture), I hope you’ll read more here about how Virgle will work, what our brave Pioneers can expect and what the future holds for what just might be the most ambitious adventure in mankind’s long and storied history.

See you on the north side of Kasei Valles!

Mar

12

Welcome to Google Town

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When they hear the telltale sirens of a fire truck bursting out of the station in Nanaimo, the locals don’t need to look out of the window or tune in to newscasts to find out where the action is. Instead, they can simply log on to Google Maps or Google Earth and track the firefighters in real time as they tear down the streets of this Vancouver Island port community. The Google-enabling of Nanaimo’s fire service, launched just weeks ago, is the latest venture in a British Columbia town that has been dubbed the capital of Google Earth.

“With Nanaimo, they have mapped nearly every conceivable thing using Google Earth and Google Maps,” Michael Jones, Google Earth’s chief technology officer, said last August at a conference in Vancouver. “Their citizens have more information about their city than the people of San Francisco.”

Beating San Francisco in the e-stakes is a big deal for an old coal mining city of only around 78,000 people, nestled about an hour north of Victoria. What Nanaimo lacks for in size, it has tried to make up in sheer volume of raw electronic data.

The city’s planning department has, over the past five years, steadily fed Google a wealth of information about its buildings, property lines, utilities and streets. The result is earth.nanaimo.ca, a clearinghouse of city data viewed through the robust and freely available Google Earth 3D mapping program. The site sorts and maps every business, from restaurants to car dealers, while a click of the mouse brings up the lot size for every property in the city, including the building permit number and zoning history. Homeowners can use the facility to find out specific information about their garbage collection schedule, while the city’s 150-year-old downtown core is rendered in 3D and dotted with 360-degree panoramas.

“We actually gave them our base map, and we were probably the first municipality to give them that data,” says Per Kristensen, Nanaimo’s chief technology officer. “Over time, that has just continued to increase.” Nanaimo is betting that embracing Google, the ubiquitous search engine that has become the starting point for most internet searches, will be good for tourism.

“The real benefit is on the economic development and economic activity side,” said Kristensen “The more information people have, the more they see about Nanaimo.”

The tourism potential has caught the eye of the British Columbia government, which is pushing hard to draw in visitors in advance of hosting the 2010 Winter Olympics. Its biggest city, Vancouver, has now linked its transit system into Google Maps. And the regional government is set to become the first Canadian province to hand Google its public database, giving the technology company access to a list of parks, forestry titles, bridges, power lines, topography and mineral, coal and gas reserves for more than 94% of British Columbia’s 357,000 square miles of rocky mountains and picturesque coast. Agriculture Minister Pat Bell called the Google partnership a “very big win-win for everyone.”

But what does all this internet mapping and graphing mean for the people who actually live in this Google-ized community?

In theory, it could improve their lives by providing more information about the urban environment in which they live. The Google fire service allows people to avoid accident sites by tuning electronic devices to automatic updates from the city’s RSS news feed, says fire captain Dean Ford. Eventually, Nanaimo plans to equip its grass-cutting machines with GPS devices, so residents piqued by the apparent shabbiness of a particular park or grass verge can use Google to find out when last it was groomed by the city’s gardening staff. And the city’s cemeteries will soon be mapped to allow internet users to find out who is buried in each plot, says Kristensen. A new multimillion-dollar conference center, opening in June, will have 72 wireless access points to allow out-of-towners to use their laptops to navigate the Google Earth version of the city.

Good for tourists, perhaps, and a real live test-bed for the company’s ambitions to Google-ize far larger metropolises. But the reality in Nanaimo is that many locals are entirely unaware of the new electronic pathways for navigating their city. “I think it’s pretty cool we’re the Google Earth capital of the world,” said Jakob Brzovic, 25, who works in a local electronics retail store. “I just wish somebody would have told me.”

“For people who live out of town, it would be a great resource and tool,” he added. “But, to be fair, if you’ve been living here your whole life like I have, you don’t need to use Google Maps. You just use your brain.”

Lifted from the mighty Time magazine

Mar

6

new advanced search from Google

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Google has reorganized and simplified their advanced search options page (it might not be visible for all users just yet, but it is for me), hiding a number of less-used features in an additional menu at the bottom.

Here’s how the new page looks now:

And here’s the hidden bit below:

The changes aren’t drastic (as far as I can tell, everything from the old page is also present now), but the new page indeed looks cleaner than the last one.