Michael Arrington from TechCrunch.com in The Washington Post:
2008 may be the year that Google’s innocence ends, as media and governments start to cast a less forgiving eye at the behavior of the company that controls60% of the search market and perhaps as much as half of all online advertising revenue.
In 2007 the Federal Trade Commission opened an antitrust investigation into Google’s $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick. The deal was eventually approved, although the EU took a lot longer to give their stamp of approval (The EU in general isn’t a fan of Google).
This year, though, things might not go so well. Politicians are lining up to question Google’s recent search marketing deal with Yahoo. The deal was clearly structured to try to slide past regulators, but it isn’t clear that this time Google will get a pass.
Other questions are being raised as well - such as why Firefox continues to default search to Google on clean installs, instead of offering users a choice right up front. Microsoft is forced to offer users a choice when they install Internet Explorer. Given the longstanding financial ties between Google and Firefox, perhaps the same choice should be presented there as well.
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There’s no getting past the fact that Google has out-competed everyone in the search game, and is justly collecting the economic rewards of that effort. But society loves to tear down their heroes just as quickly as they supported them as underdogs.
This may be the year that things change for the ten-year-old Google. Their days of innocence may be over - perhaps Yahoo, or Firefox, are the apples that they should not have bitten into.
Does Gmail need to advertise in order to get people using it? Some Russians certainly think so. But they do come out with interesting and funny ads in video format for Gmail. The video promotional clip doesn’t rely on computer generated special effect, and simply depends on human to present the familiar Gmail user interface in real, and large scale.
The video was created and produced by Saatchi Moscow for Google to attract more Russian people on GMail, and is finalist in Idea Festival 2008. The producer is very creative in able to present all features of Gmail in the created model. Probably not an easy task.
Whenever a web browser is used to connect to a remote web server it includes a User Agent string that contains details about browser and operating system. This tweak allows you to add or remove additional information from this string.
Changing user agent string is needed when online security is a concern or to bypass web services access restriction for certain type of web browser.
For example, Adobe Reader download site will display different download page according to the web browser that visiting the site, limit or auto pick up Adobe Reader version for the OS type in the user agent string, force Adobe Updater to manage Adobe Reader download progress. So, by changing the user agent string, one can directly download any Adobe Reader version of any platforms or languages with Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox, without using the Adobe Updater or Opera web browser!
Another use for changing the user agent data is the ability to read restricted websites and forums. Some websites & forums will not allow you to read their content without registering first. This requirement gets really annoying and frustrating when you go through it over and over again. But you might or might have not noticed is that these pages are being cached by search engines, because they’re specially designed to allow access to specific search engine’s bots. So, all we have to do is get that page to think that you’re a bot and you do that by changing your user agent. Here’s how you do it:
Mozilla Firefox:
For people using Firefox, changing their user agent is very simple. All you have to do is download and install User Agent Switcher add-on. Then you can simply add different user agents and switch between them directly from the browser.
Internet Explore:
Internet Explorer 6 SP2 on Windows 2000 and IE 7 for Windows XP:
Create theVersion key of REG_SZ type (string type) or edit it if it already exists. Give it one of the following values: Firefox/2.0.0.4for Firfox , "Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)", without the quotes for Google Bot.
IE7 in Windows Vista
Copy Paste the following code into Vista’s command prompt:
%windir%\System32\cmd.exe /k %windir%\System32\reg.exe ADD "HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\5.0\User Agent" /v Version /d "insert user agent here" /f
To revert back to original user agent string value:
%windir%\System32\cmd.exe /k %windir%\System32\reg.exe DELETE "HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\5.0\User Agent" /v Version /f
Note:Some services may not work correctly by changing your user agent, such as Windows update.
Opera 9.21:
Typeopera:configin the Opera address bar and press ENTER,
TypeSpoof UserAgent IDin the text-box next to Show All
Change the Spoof User Agent ID to any one of these supported user agent string:
1 = Opera (default user agent string of Opera) 2 = Mozilla 3 = Internet Explorer 4 = Mozilla, Opera not mentioned 5 = Internet Explorer, Opera not mentioned
Save the change made before exit and restart Opera 9.21
Google webmaster tools, is a service provided by Google to give webmasters more information about Google Bot’s behavior towards their website/blogs, how they rank up within the search engine and alert them about the errors that faces the crawler when trying to crawl their pages.
Webmaster Tool requires each user to verify his ownership to each website added to his account.
Google offer two methods of verification:
1-Adding a meta tag to the source of your index page.
2-Uploading an html page to website’s root, with a specific name provided by Google.
Any Wordpress.com user will quickly realize that WP.com does not allow editing source files, or uploading any pages to your blog.
What do you do? How do you verify your blog?
The answer is very simple:
1-Open your Webmaster Tools Dashboard.
2-Select the Wordpress.com blog and click on the Verify option.
3-In the verification list, chose the “Upload an HTML file”, You’ll be asked to upload a page with specific name (ex: googlee09df14b32e62ffc.html) copy the file name.
4-Open your Wordpress.com Blog Dashboard and click the Write button.
5-Select the Page option to create a new page.
6-In the title paste the file name you copied in step 3.
7-Go back to your Webmaster Tools Dashboard again and try to verify your blog again….TATA
Darko on June 17th, 2008
Michael Arrington from TechCrunch.com in The Washington Post:
Google webmaster tools, is a service provided by Google to give webmasters more information about Google Bot’s behavior towards their website/blogs, how they rank up within the search engine and alert them about the errors that faces the crawler when trying to crawl their pages.
