Google SearchWiki

Stuff to Blog About and More: Google SearchWiki: "Google recently released SearchWiki.
SearchWiki is a way for you to customize search by re-ranking, deleting, adding, and commenting on search results.

Google says that they now let users reshuffle results so their favorite Web sites get top billing and disliked destinations get discarded the next time they enter the same request.

Users can now tailor Google search results to best meet their needs. They can also write notes attached to a particular site and remove results that they don't feel belong.

Color coordinate with Electronics & Accessories at


SearchWiki is available to signed-in Google users. Goolge will store your changes in your Google Account. If you are wondering if you are signed in, you can always check by noting if your username appears in the upper right-hand side of the page. The changes you make only affect your own searches.



Google says that these changes won't affect Google's closely guarded formulas for ranking Web sites. Google processes more than 60 percent of the search requests made around the world.

Google Android Phone

Google Android is making it's debut to the public today thanks to the folks at T-Mobil.
The first cell-phone based on Google's Android platform went on sale .

T-Mobile USA began offering the G1, made by Taiwan's High-Tech Computer.

What is Android?
According to Google, the Android platform is a software stack for mobile devices including an operating system, middleware and key applications. Developers can create applications for the platform using the Android SDK. Applications are written using the Java programming language and run on Dalvik, a custom virtual machine designed for embedded use, which runs on top of a Linux kernel.

A beta version of the Android SDK is available for download. Along with the Android framework and application libraries, it includes sample projects with source code, a device emulator, and development tools for monitoring and debugging your code and GUI layout.

The Open Handset Alliance, a group of more than 30 technology and mobile companies, developed Android: the first complete, open, and free mobile platform. To help developers get started developing new applications, we're offering the Android Software Development Kit.

About the Phone and Android
Apps without borders

Apps on Android can access core mobile device functionality through standard APIs. Through intents, apps can announce their capabilities for other apps to use. Watch video

Apps can easily embed the web

Apps can easily embed HTML, Javascript, and style sheets. An app can render web content through a WebView. Watch video


Apps are created equal

Any app on the mobile device can be replaced or extended -- even core components such as the dialer or home. Watch video

Apps can run in parallel

Android is a complete multitasking environment where apps can run in parallel. While running in the background, an app can produce notifications to get attention. Watch video


What to like about Android...

Watch video Browser Tricks

Watch video Copy & Paste

Watch video Reader & Photos

Watch video Media & Browser

Do you Knol?

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Google Knol is Google's response to Wikepedia.

With Knol, individuals are able to share their knowledge on subjects. The only stipulation, according to Google, is that you need is an account, a name and a desire to write and we'll take care of the rest.


Google thinks that you might want to use it to complement your blog. Blogs are great for quickly and easily getting your latest writing out to your readers, while knols are better for when you want to write an authoritative article on a single topic.

Except for the different format, you'll get all the things you've come to expect from Blogger in Knol. Like Blogger, Knol has simple web authoring tools that make it easy to collaborate, co-author, and publish. It has community features as well: Your readers will be able to add comments and rate your article, and, if you want, they'll be able to suggest edits that you can then either accept or reject. And, just like in Blogger, you can also choose to include ads from AdSense in your knols to perhaps make a little money.

One other important difference between Knol and Blogger is that Knol encourages you to reveal your true identity. Knols are meant to be authoritative articles, and, therefore, they have a strong focus on authors and their credentials. We feel that this focus will help ensure that authors get credit for their work, make the content more credible.

All in all, we think Knol will be a great new way for you to share what you know, inform people about an issue that is important to you, raise your profile as an expert in your field, and maybe even make some money from ads. Create your Knol right now for free.

Find out more here

New Feature: Posting Gadget for iGoogle

Google recently launched a draft version of the Blogger Posting Gadget for iGoogle. With this gadget, you can write, save, and publish posts to any of your Blogger blogs directly from your iGoogle homepage.


To use it, sign into your Google account. Make sure you’re signed in with the same Google account you use on Blogger in order to start posting.

Currently, the gadget supports the following:

• Editing the HTML of title, body and labels
• A drop-down menu to select from multiple blogs (if you have them)
• The ability to publish a post immediately, or save it back to Blogger as a draft post
  

Tip: If you start writing a post in HTML and decide that you want image uploading or other rich text features, just click “Save Draft.” The gadget will save the post, then give you a link to directly edit the post in Blogger.

Some compatibility notes:

• The Blogger posting gadget will only work in iGoogle, not in other gadget containers, because it requires authenticating with your google.com cookie. We hope to remove this restriction in the future.
• Since this gadget uses the JavaScript Google Data API for Blogger, it does not work in Apple’s Safari browser.
  

This gadget is 100% completed yet. Google released it first on Blogger in Draft to get your feedback. Some of the improvements they’re considering are:

• Availability in all of Blogger’s supported languages
• Auto-completion for labels
• Autosaving of posts
  
• Rich text editing
  

Interested? Try it now:

How to add your site to Google's search results

Inclusion in Google's search results is free and easy. Google says that you don't even need to submit your site to Google because Google is a fully automated search engine that uses software known as "spiders" to crawl the web on a regular basis and find sites to add to their index. They say that the majority of sites listed in their results aren't manually submitted for inclusion, but found and added automatically when our spiders crawl the web.

To determine whether your site is currently included in Google's index, just perform a search for your site's URL. For example, a search for [ site:www.google.com ] returns the following results: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Awww.google.com+

Although Google crawls billions of pages, it's inevitable that some sites will be missed. When our spiders miss a site, it's frequently for one of the following reasons:

• The site isn't well connected through multiple links to other sites on the web.
• The site launched after Google's most recent crawl was completed.
• The design of the site makes it difficult for Google to effectively crawl its content.
• The site was temporarily unavailable when we tried to crawl it or we received an error when we tried to crawl it. You can use Google Webmaster Tools to see if we received errors when trying to crawl your site.

Google says that it's intent is to "represent the content of the internet fairly and accurately". To help make this goal a reality, they offer guidelines as well as tips for building a crawler-friendly site. Following these guidelines should increase your site's chances of showing up in our search results.

Google also recommends creating and submitting a detailed Sitemap of your pages. Sitemaps are an easy way for you to submit all your URLs to the Google index and get detailed reports about the visibility of your pages on Google. With Sitemaps, you can automatically keep us informed of all of your current pages and any updates you make to those pages. Please note that submitting a Sitemap doesn't guarantee that all pages of your site will be crawled or included in our search results.

Google Releases Ratproxy

Google has released for free one of its internal tools used for testing the security of Web-based applications

Ratproxy, released under an Apache 2.0 software license, looks for a variety of coding problems in Web applications, such as errors that could allow a cross-site scripting attack or cause caching problems.

"We decided to make this tool freely available as open source because we feel it will be a valuable contribution to the information security community, helping advance the community's understanding of security challenges associated with contemporary web technologies," wrote Google's Michal Zalewski on a company security blog.

Ratproxy-- released as version 1.51 beta-- is quick and less intrusive than other scanners in that it is passive and does not generate a high volume of attack-simulating traffic when running, Zalewski wrote. Active scanners can cause problems with application performance.

Google has posted an overview of Ratproxy as well as a download link to the source code. Code licensed under the Apache 2.0 license may be incorporated in derivative works, including commercial ones, but the origin of the code must be acknowledged.

The open-sourced ratproxy, a passive web application security assessment tool that Google has been using internally . This utility, developed by Google's information security engineering team, is designed to transparently analyze legitimate, browser-driven interactions with a tested web property and automatically pinpoint, annotate, and prioritize potential flaws or areas of concern.

For more information

Welcome to Google Alerts

I admit. I try to post something new daily. Like many bloggers, there are days when I can post 10 great ideas and there are days when I can't come up with anything to save my life.

Google Alerts to the rescue!
Many bloggers may enhance their topic by doing a search engine search. Well, Google has made life easier for that moment when you have over-searched your key words. They will e-mail you updates to your search query.

Some handy uses of Google Alerts include:

* monitoring a developing news story
* keeping current on a competitor or industry
* getting the latest on a celebrity or event
* keeping tabs on your favorite sports teams

It is as simple as going to the Google Alerts homepage and filling out a form.
Create a Google Alert

Enter the topic you wish to monitor.

Search terms: Type: NewsBlogsWebComprehensiveVideoGroups How often: once a dayas-it-happensonce a week Your email:

Google Alerts are emails automatically sent to you when there are new Google results for your search terms. They offer alerts with results from News, Web, Blogs, Video and Groups.
There are 6 variations of alerts - 'News', 'Web', 'Blogs', 'Comprehensive', 'Video' and 'Groups'.

* A 'News' alert is an email aggregate of the latest news articles that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google News search.
* A 'Web' alert is an email aggregate of the latest web pages that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top twenty results of your Google Web search.
* A 'Blogs' alert is an email aggregate of the latest blog posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google Blog search.
* A 'Comprehensive' alert is an aggregate of the latest results from multiple sources (News, Web and Blogs) into a single email to provide maximum coverage on the topic of your choice.
* A 'Video' alert is an email aggregate of the latest videos that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top ten results of your Google Video search.
* A 'Groups' alert is an email aggregate of new posts that contain the search terms of your choice and appear in the top fifty results of your Google Groups search.


The frequency you select when you set up your alert determines how often we check for new results, not necessarily how often you'll receive alerts.
Google says that many alerts are set up by people who are:

* monitoring a developing news story
* keeping current on a competitor or industry
* tracking medical advances
* getting the latest on a celebrity or sports team
* watching for new videos that match a specific topic


You can create up to 1000 alerts. To create more alerts, you can either delete any existing alerts or request alerts to be sent to a different email address.

Google Earth

Big news out of Google Earth.
You can now tour Disney World in Orland in the comfort of your own home and without the sticky weather and crowds! I am all for that.

Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida has received a 3D makeover in what the company is calling "the largest corporate initiative on Google Earth," according to Disney. Orlando parks featured in Google Earth include the Magic Kingdom, Epcot, Hollywood Studios, and Animal Kingdom.

Google Earth, an interactive 3D mapping program, allows users to create travelogues by embedding photos, videos and commentary about locations they highlight.


Have you toured Google Earth yet?
It's one of those fascinating web rest stops that you think you'll only be at for a minute and you wind up spending a few hours.
Google Earth lets you view satellite imagery, maps, terrain, 3D buildings and even explore galaxies in the Sky from anywhere on Earth. You can explore rich geographical content, save your toured places and share with others.
Google Earth 4.3 (beta) features:

* Photo-realistic buildings from cities around the world
* Dawn to dusk views with the Sunlight feature
* Swoop navigation from outer space to street-level

As for the Disney adventure, about 100,000 shots from eight photographers went into 1,500 three-dimensional images of a variety of structures at Disney World . Disney's Google Earth entry also contains links to blogs and YouTube videos and information on everything from the minimum rider height for certain attractions to menus at different restaurants.


Users of Google's popular 3D globetrotting software can now search for "Disney World" and view three dimensional buildings, rides, and other items of interest from Disney's four theme parks and 22 hotels in the Orlando area.

When you are done touring Disney, take a look at the other views that Google offers. Here are pictures of Rising Sea Level Animation, animates one scary potential effect of climate change, and Football Stadiums of the World.



The basic Google Earth is free to download.
If this is something that you really need for your business, you can try one of their other options with upgrades.

Google Earth Pro | $400

Ideal for an organization, upgrade to Pro to access the ultimate research, presentation, and collaboration tool for location-specific information.

Google Earth Plus | $20
Upgrade to Plus to add GPS device support, faster performance, the ability to import spreadsheets, and higher resolution printing.

Enterprise Solutions

Enterprise solutions are available for on-site deployment of custom Google Earth databases within your business, public agency, or organization.

"Cruise Missile" in Flight