Google Tutor

24 Hours In The Google Economy (Infographic)

Brian Wallace — Thu, 25 Oct 2012 21:02:49 +0000

There is no doubt that Google is the undisputed leader when it comes to search advertising. In fact, Google generated a tremendous $10.8 billion in advertising revenues in Q3 2012, despite their “disappointing” earnings announcement last Friday.

So what does this mean for Google and it’s advertisers? Well, according to Larry Kim, who conducted the analysis which you will see in the infographic below, the trends we’re seeing in the Google economy create a win-win for both AdWords advertisers and Google. He also says that a larger available inventory of impressions, combined with lower CPC, means that PPC advertisers are now literally able to get more customers for less money.

This infographic, courtesy of Wordstream, provides a detailed look at the Google economy.

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Can Facebook Beat Google? (Infographic)

Brian Wallace — Wed, 23 May 2012 15:27:38 +0000

Now that the long awaited Facebook IPO is behind us, we can take some time to dig a bit into a comparison where Facebook actually makes its money: advertising. While still a growing company trying to find its footing, Facebook has a tremendous reach and marketers are able to slice through demographic data to find very specific tribes of people’s interests.

Consider, though, that Google’s been at this game for quite some time now. Google’s ad formats, re-targeting, and display network are much more mature products than Facebook’s attempts to date.

So who will be the winner? Google for now but ultimately still a bit early to declare a winner. This infographic, courtesy of Wordstream, provides a good analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of both Internet superpowers.

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Google Launches Knowledge Graph, a Significant Change in SERPs

Abhijeet Mukherjee — Tue, 22 May 2012 14:00:35 +0000

Google has been drawing a lot of flak in the past few months for cluttering its search result pages (SERPs) with results from Google+ and also for not being able to provide quality results on the first page of the results which is where the best results should be. Google was never silent and it kept rolling out all kinds of updates and algorithm changes.

If you remember, sometime back I wrote an article on Google’s upcoming search changes which hinted that Google would be providing more information and direct answers on its SERPs. Google has now announced that change officially and it’s called Knowledge Graph.

First things first, the change currently applies to search queries that are about things, people and places, which in Google’s words could be “landmarks, celebrities, cities, sports teams, buildings, geographical features, movies, celestial objects, works of art and more.” As you see in the screenshot above, Google will try to figure out the exact person, thing or place you want to know about and displays more information about that on its sidebar.

Google will also display summaries on the sidebar that instantly inform about important facts. The suggestions of similar searches are included in the summaries too.

Overall, as the name ‘Knowledge Graph’ suggests, the change intends to present a deeper insight into a search query, other than just presenting the links to other websites which is what Google had been doing all these years. So Google has finally made its move to a ‘knowledge engine’ from a search engine, and it’ll be interesting to see where it goes from here. What do you say?

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Google Docs Gets a New Research Tool

Abhijeet Mukherjee — Wed, 16 May 2012 14:00:25 +0000

If you are creating a report or composing a document on a particular topic using Google Docs, chances are that you switch to Google search often in the search of material like images, blog posts and quotes. Google Docs has now introduced a new Research tool that’ll aid you in fetching these material without the need to leave Google Docs’ interface.

The Research Tool appears in the form of a sidebar whenever you open a new document in Google Docs. It can also be accessed via the Tool menu in the nav bar.

There’s a Google search bar right on top that gives you 3 search options:

Everything
Images
Quotes

When you hover the mouse pointer over any search result, it shows 3 options: Preview, Insert Link and Cite, each of these being self-explanatory.

The following screenshot shows how it quickly pulls up the web page in a concise format when you click on the preview link.

Overall, a helpful tool for Google Docs users.

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Gmail Gets Better Google+ Notifications

Abhijeet Mukherjee — Tue, 15 May 2012 14:00:47 +0000

Google+, like all other social networks, has a system of sending notification emails depending on the kinds of activity notifications you’ve opted to receive. By default you get all kinds of notifications and you may customize them in your Google+ settings. Now, Gmail is a Google product too and you know how Google has been trying to integrate other Google products with Google+ in the recent past.

So, Google took another step in that direction few days ago by changing the way you receive Google+ notifications in Gmail thereby making it dynamic and integrating it deeply with Gmail.

After this change is rolled out to your Gmail account, you can comment on a Google+ update from right inside your Gmail. That means you do not need to click through the link and go to Google+ to participate in the discussion. All the other comments on that status also appear in real-time in your Gmail. So the discussion can happen across Gmail and Google+ without the need to switch between those services.

If you are on mobile, you can now just reply to a Google+ update and it’ll appear as a comment on your Google+ stream, as you can see in the screenshot below. And this is possible from these mail clients apart from Gmail.

A lot of tech commentary on this topic has centered around blaming Google for allowing Google+ to infiltrate people’s Gmail accounts. While I am not a fan of the way Google has integrated Google+ in its search results, I think here it’d be unfair to blame Google for this particular change because it is only modifying the way Google+ notifications are received in Gmail and one can always disable the notifications if he doesn’t want them.

What do you say?

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ScanURL Does a Comprehensive Security Scan for a URL

Abhijeet Mukherjee — Mon, 14 May 2012 14:00:03 +0000

If you have been our subscriber for a long time and generally read all our articles then you’d probably remember this post on Google Safe Browsing Tool where we talked about how this tool by Google helps you check whether a web page has malware or any suspicious content.

The post caught the attention of a developer named Jake and he decided to create an online service where one could not only check the status of a page with Google’s Safe Browsing tool but also with other popular link trust evaluation tools out there like PhishTank and Web of Trust (WOT). The tool is called ScanURL.

All you need to do is enter the web page link which you want to check in the box on the tool’s homepage and click on check this URL. The tool will instantly pull the Google Safe Browsing data using Google’s API and also look it up on PhishTank and WOT, and provide the details.

The tool also provides links to other online reporting and scanning services in case you want to go deeper with your investigation.

Overall, the intent of this tool is to bring all such link checking services under one roof to make it easy for the end user. I say this tool’s worth bookmarking. You probably won’t need it every day but when you do, it can save you the time you’d spend on checking out individual scanning services.

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Google Drive Arrives, Google Docs is Now a Part Of It

Abhijeet Mukherjee — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 13:55:54 +0000

The day has come. Yesterday, Google unveiled the long awaited Google Drive. Rumors had been doing the rounds since I don’t know how long and even Google acknowledged that in their official blog post which they started with “Introducing Google Drive… yes, really.”

First things first, Google Drive is not instantly available to every one at the moment. You’ll find a ‘Notify me’ button like I did on their page and they’ll email you when your Drive is ready. I’ve been waiting eagerly since yesterday but haven’t received the notification yet. That doesn’t mean I can’t tell you its features though. So, here we go.

The most important thing you need to know is that Google Docs is now Google Drive. The interface is similar and Google Docs is integrated fully with its interface. The service is accessible on desktops, laptops, mobiles and tablets. Everything stays in sync in real-time just like other cloud backup services out there.

An interesting thing about Google Drive is the ease of collaboration. Integration of Google Docs means you can collaborate on documents and files in real-time just like you used to do in Google Docs.

As you probably would have guessed, you’d be able to directly share photos from Google Drive on Google+.

All the popular file formats can be viewed on Google Driver. It has a powerful file viewer integrated into it.

Google Drive can connect to the popular software out there so that sending files to it is smooth and easy.

Other than the above features, an important use of Google Drive will be sharing large files through Gmail. You can now upload the files to Google Drive and email them through Gmail and they no longer need to conform to that 25 MB file size. This should come in as a big relief for veteran Gmail users who often share files via Gmail using the attachment route.

So, did you get a chance to try Google Drive? How is it?

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Gmail Now Gives More Information About Emails It Marks As Spam

Abhijeet Mukherjee — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 05:16:28 +0000

Gmail’s brilliant spam filter has always been a prime jewel in its throne, and has garnered a lot of praise since it came into being (though lately it has drawn some flak for its inability to be as accurate in marking spam mails as spam, as it used to be).

While Gmails’ spam filter is still regarded as the best among web based email services, it isn’t infallible. A lot of times users are curious as to why Gmail marked a particular email as spam. Keeping that in mind Gmail has introduced a new feature that gives more details about a spam mail and why Gmail considered it as spam in the first place.

For example, in the screenshot below you can see that Gmail is being specific and mentioning that the email might contain a virus or a malicious link.

Sometimes, a message from a specific user who has emailed you earlier might end up in spam. It is usually if you’ve previously marked a message by that user as spam.

Gmail also tells you if it has marked a message as spam because it’s similar to other spam messages.

Overall, it’s a good thing to have though I am not sure how useful this would be for the average Gmail user. All a Gmail user wants is that the spam messages end up in spam and not the ones that should not be there. It works like that most of the time but there’s still some path to be covered to attain 100% accuracy on that front.

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Google’s Upcoming Search Changes – The Real Deal or Just a PR Play?

Abhijeet Mukherjee — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 03:14:43 +0000

A few days ago, the Wall Street Journal ran a story titled Google Gives Search a Refresh. Considering that it talks about the dominant search engine in the world doing an overhaul of its system, the story picked up pace in no time and spread like wildfire.

The article talked about Google’s push of semantic search into its algorithm where in the search engine will try to directly answer a user’s query first before showing it a list of results from around the web. Here’s a quick quote from the story:

Over the next few months, Google’s search engine will begin spitting out more than a list of blue Web links. It will also present more facts and direct answers to queries at the top of the search-results page.

Now, our readers would agree that Google kinda does that already. And this is what Danny Sullivan argued in his lengthy rebuttal to WSJ’s post. He mentioned Google products like Google Squared which continue to survive and Google’s current direct answer capabilities, and went on to say that this is nothing but a PR play by Google to restore user confidence in its brand which has been dented by some of the recent events, or I should say recent product introductions.

Sarah Perez over at TechCrunch agrees with Sullivan that Google wants to shift attention from the negative publicity it got (and continues to get) from stuff like Search Plus Your World, and Google Search is always changing so this isn’t a very big news.

Business Insider says Google thinks Bing is right and hence it’s taking this route.

So, what do you think? Is this announcement of “big change” just a PR play like most of the tech community thinks, or is there more than meets the eye?

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Google Revamps the Crawl Errors Section of Webmaster Tools

Abhijeet Mukherjee — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 13:33:57 +0000

Google Webmaster Tools is a great tool that provides a good bit of insight into how Google is crawling one’s site and how a webmaster can improve things that’ll make his site more appealing to Google’s spiders. It includes various sections dedicated to different aspects of site optimization, and one of the important sections is Crawl Errors.

The Crawl Errors section shows you the errors Google is encountering while crawling your site. It could be pages not found, pages that end up throwing 404 errors, unreachable destinations on the site etc. Google recently revamped this section making it much more attractive visually and feature wise.

The section is now divided into two main parts: Site Errors and URL Errors. The Site Errors section shows you errors related to DNS, server connectivity and the robots.txt file.

The URL Errors section is more important because it shows the 404s and the URLs that deny access to Google. Of course, you would know the ones which you have deliberately hidden from Google’s eyes but if there are certain unintended blocks that show up in the list, you can always take action to fix them.

As you click and browse your way into this new Crawl Errors interface, you’ll find that Google has taken care to remove clutter while overhauling the interface to include new stuff. Everything appears neatly categorized and you don’t waste time searching for a specific error.

Another very important feature that has been introduced with this new interface is the ability to mark errors as “fixed” meaning you are telling Google that you have fixed the error on the site and there is no need to show it in webmaster tools.

Overall, this is a welcome change for website owners and this makes the Webmaster Tools much more useful for all kinds of webmasters.

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Collaborate in Real-time With the Google Docs App For Android

Abhijeet Mukherjee — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 14:00:56 +0000

There’s no doubt about the fact that Google Docs for Android is a great app with a nice interface and cool features. We talked about it last year when it introduced OCR and better editing features.

However, being a mobile app, it is kind of destined to lag behind its desktop counterpart. The mobile platform, be it iOS or Android, has its limitations and hence not every app can offer all the features that it clubs with its corresponding desktop tool. With Google Docs for Android too there were such caveats, one of them being unavailability of real-time collaboration and editing which was a prime jewel in the desktop, or rather, online tool’s arsenal. Well, not anymore.

A week ago the Google Docs team introduced this feature in the Google Docs for Android app. This means users can now collaborate on the go in real-time, clearly seeing what the other person is writing while editing the document.

You can now easily add collaborators on a document that you are viewing on your portable Android device.

As you see in the screenshot below, different people are editing the same document and their text has different colors along with their name popping on top of it as they write the sentence. All this on your Android phone or tablet.

Apart from adding real-time collaboration, the interface of the Google Docs app was also updated and features like ability to pinch and zoom into a document were added.

So if you’ve been using Google Docs on your Android and did not know that these features existed, it’s time to give them a shot.

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10 Cool Google Wallpapers to Spice Up Your Desktop

Abhijeet Mukherjee — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 15:30:22 +0000

There are some who don’t bother much with their wallpapers, and then there are some who keep searching for cool, new wallpapers to spice up their desktop with, and ensure that their interests are subtly reflected in the wallpaper donning their desktop.

If you are one of the latter, then today is your day. We’ve decided to showcase 10 cool Google wallpapers from the umpteen number of them available on the web. Assuming you are a Google fan (you are a reader of this blog, right?), we are sure you’ll be more than happy to put one or more of these wallpapers on your desktop and show off your love for Google to everyone who peeks into your desktop.

Here we go! (click on the images to go to the site from where you can download it and put it on)

So, which one’s your favorite?

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Chrome For Android Finally Sees the Light of the Day

Abhijeet Mukherjee — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 12:00:03 +0000

One of the pet peeves about Android that its veteran users have had since its early days is its default browser. Its lack of features have prompted Android users to switch to better alternatives like Dolphin. But that may soon be a thing of past because Google has finally introduced the Android counterpart of its popular web browser. Yes, Chrome For Android has hit the stands.

Firstly, Chrome for Android is in beta and currently works only on ICS (Android 4.0) and that means most of the Android users around the world cannot try it. Paris Lemon calls it the browser for the 1% and it’s true for now but eventually the other 99% is going to be using ICS so I think it’s a welcome move by Google.

I don’t have Android ICS so I couldn’t get my hands on this new browser but from what I’ve been reading about it on other tech blogs, I can say that it’s a killer. Techcrunch says it’s fantastic, Paris Lemon in his post that I talked about earlier mostly praised its features and Ars Technica says it’s a big step forward.

Chrome for Android certainly brings some amazing features like bookmarks and tab sync which means that you can have exactly the same open tabs on your Chrome on Android as you have it on the desktop. It all stays in sync!

Android tablets will also have Chrome now but the interface is slightly different. Read more about this new browser and its features on the official blog.

So, what do you say? Are you more likely to buy a new Android handset now considering that you could use this awesome browser on it?

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Grad School to Google: How Larry and Sergey Became Billionaires

Brian Wallace — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 14:58:17 +0000

This exceptional infographic not only knocks it out of the park graphically but the story keeps you interested and entertained. It is the story of Google creators, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The infographic shows you how they went from Stanford to billionaires, over the course of 16 years.

(Select Image to Begin)

Created by Online PhD

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Where Did Google Make Their Money In 2011?

Brian Wallace — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 15:58:22 +0000

The Google numbers are in, and the empire went from 32.2 billion to 37.9 billion since the beginning of last year. The latest infographic on the subject shows us just where Google made it’s money and which keywords were the most popular.

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