Google has launched Ad Sitelinks for all AdWords campaigns. The feature was made available late last year for advertisers’ top performing ads, but is now available via a one-line format for all campaigns.

Google says advertisers who have used the format in the past have experienced big gains, and have boosted clickthrough rates by over 30% (on average).

“When a user’s query matches a keyword in your Ad Sitelinks-enabled campaign, Google will automatically determine if your ad qualifies to show Ad Sitelinks and whether to show the two-line or the one-line format based on the quality of that ad,” says Dan Friedman of Google’s Inside AdWords Crew. “Ads that currently qualify for the two-line format will not be affected by the addition of the new one-line format.”

“You should keep in mind that Ad Sitelinks is a campaign-level extension, so the links you create should be relevant to any ad in that campaign,” Friedman adds.

Advertisers can set up ad sitelinks for their campaigns by finding the option in the Campaign Settings tab in their AdWords accounts. It’s listed as “Show additional links to my site” in the “Ad Extensions” section.

It is the reception problems that seem to be getting the most attention. This may be due to Apple’s response to the issue. Engadget provides this official statement from the company:

Gripping any mobile phone will result in some attenuation of its antenna performance, with certain places being worse than others depending on the placement of the antennas. This is a fact of life for every wireless phone. If you ever experience this on your iPhone 4, avoid gripping it in the lower left corner in a way that covers both sides of the black strip in the metal band, or simply use one of many available cases.

There have also been complaints about a bug preventing the iPhone 4 from using visual voicemail. “Whenever we went into Phone and clicked on the Voicemail button, instead of going to the Apple Visual Voicemail, it instead placed a call to Voicemail. So basically, it wasn’t working right at all,” writes Alex at RustyBrick, adding, “”The trick is, on most new iPhones, you have to receive a voicemail (or two) before the iPhone will launch the prompt that asks you for your ATT voicemail PIN number.”

Regardless of complaints and minor inconveniences, the iPhone has had no problem selling so far. Some calculations put sales at 1.5 million for the first day. A Piper Jaffray analyst says 77% of the sales were upgrades.

Bing is making changes of its own. It’s been a very big week for the search engine (or “decision engine”) if you will. It’s up to you to decide if any of these changes will have a direct effect on you, but some of them may attract more users in general, and if nothing else, that gives you even more of a reason to give Bing a fair amount of your focus.

Bing has made some design changes and added a bunch of new features. For starters, the quick tabs have moved from the left pane to the just below the search box.

“Secondly, you will see a new design aesthetic applied to Bing,” says Bing Corporate VP Brian MacDonald. “We have tried to bring you an experience grounded in clear readable typography that helps you find your way and organize information. With the new design the rich content in Bing really stands out from pages that are clean, light, open and fast. Result pages are not presented in a one-size-fits-all-layout – instead, Bing results pages are richly and visually organized, making the whole search experience feel dynamic and alive.”

Bing has launched some new entertainment features for music, games, TV, and movies. In addition to an entertainment hub at bing.com/entertainment, users can now find richer search results in these categories.

“76 percent of people use search to help find and navigate their entertainment options online, but only 10 percent say they have a trusted place to go,” says Bing Senior VP Yusuf Mehdi. “So we see a great opportunity to help customers make important entertainment decisions — from deciding what movie to buy or see, which TV shows to watch online or on your TV, what music to listen to, how to find and safely play your favorite casual games – Bing is making a first step today to help make entertainment on the web easy and fun, so you spend less time searching for entertainment and more time doing the stuff you love.”

Bing is now putting lyrics to songs on the search results page, as well as full length streaming of over 5 million songs (in partnership with Microsoft’s Zune branch). Users can stream any of these songs once at their full length. After that, the song will allow for a 30-second preview. Of course users are given the option to buy songs from Zune, iTunes, or Amazon.

Bing is now providing info on over 35,000 games, including reviews, cheats, and walkthroughs. In addition to that, Bing is offering about 100 games that can be played right from Bing.

“Just Search, Click. Play . So you can now search for your favorite casual game, and with one click, be playing the game,” says Mehdi. “This is cool for a couple of reasons. First, it’s easy. Second, hosting the games inline means you can be sure they are actually games and not malware. Finally, the Microsoft Games team included some fun social features that allow you to actually invite friends from your social network to play with you right from the game.”

Bing is now offering thousands of episodes from over 1,500 shows (including some HD). They also provide guide information.

Bing has also enhanced its search experience around categories like autos, finance, and movies, and health is reportedly getting an overhaul as well.

Bing has posted a closer look at some more new features including Bing News, Bing Finance, Combined Flight Answers, Auto Suggest, and Visual Search here, and here’s even more specifically on Finance. Here’s a closer look at new Shopping features.

Bing is also available as a default search option on the new iPhone, and Microsoft has been heavily encouraging users to switch to it. That could be another factor in increased Bing usage. Here are some more reasons the future looks bright for Bing.

A post on the Official Google Blog shared all of the relevant details.  Interestingly, the post was written by Evan Roseman, a software engineer, rather than Peter Fleischer, Google’s global privacy counsel, or perhaps Marissa Mayer or even Eric Schmidt.

Still, Roseman explained, “When you search on https://www.google.com, an encrypted connection is created between your browser and Google.  This secured channel helps protect your search terms and your search results pages from being intercepted by a third party on your network.  The service includes a modified logo to help indicate that you’re searching using SSL and that you may encounter a somewhat different Google search experience . . .”

Later, Roseman added, “Today’s release comes with a ‘beta’ label for a few reasons.  First, it currently covers only the core Google web search product.  To help avoid misunderstanding, when you search using SSL, you won’t see links to offerings like Image Search and Maps that, for the most part, don’t support SSL at this time.  Also, since SSL connections require additional time to set up the encryption between your browser and the remote web server, your experience with search over SSL might be slightly slower than your regular Google search experience.”

It seems possible that this development will leave Bing and Yahoo looking unsafe to some users.  Let us know in the comments section what you make of the encrypted search option, and perhaps (since Google probably won’t share much data) some polls and surveys can sort out other people’s opinions next week.

In fact, AdMob really hasn’t come up a whole lot in the discussions that I’ve been witness to. But that hasn’t stopped Google from talking about various mobile ad formats its offers. A portion of a lengthy keynote delivered Thursday morning was devoted to this.

Google VP, Engineering, Vic Gundotra had the following to say (paraphrased):

It turns out we know a little bit about advertising. This year is Google’s tenth anniversary of providing ad solutions. We’ve learned a few things. if you want a healthy ecoystem, you need advertisers and we have hundreds of thousands of them. we’re not new at this game…

He reminded everybody that Google has Doubleclick, AdWords, AdSense, and Analytics. He then revealed some new expandable ad formats for mobile. More info about Google’s mobile ad formats can be found here. Google is expanding its click-to-call ads to mobile content and apps as well. More on this here.

Gundotra said in a Q&A that the company is being careful about ads so they span both apps and mobile sites.

When it comes down to it, mobile ads mean money for developers. More importantly, they mean motivation to innovate with mobile apps, which of course is critical to Android’s success.

Apart from monetizing the apps themselves, mobile ads can greatly contribute to the discoverability of mobile apps themselves.

Jill Whalen of HighRankings tells us about how this new data can help site owners. “In the past, I haven’t found the data in Webmaster Tools all that helpful other than the occasional finding of a crawl error,” she says. “Some of the information they provide isn’t quite accurate, such as when they say that certain Meta descriptions are duplicates when they actually aren’t. These inaccuracies cause people to wonder what they’re doing wrong and in some cases they even panic or waste time ‘fixing’ things that were not broken in the first place, just because they believe everything that comes out of Google.”

“This new data–assuming it’s accurate–provides a new layer of information beyond that which we can typically get elsewhere,” Whalen continues. “As far as I know, there’s no other way to know the actual number of times an organic listing in Google is shown to people for a given keyword phrase. That’s pretty interesting and important information!” “Where I see some real value, however, would be in conversion optimization–trying to increase the clickthroughs for your existing organic listings. Just knowing what your clickthrough conversion rate actually is, is a whole new set of data that we never had before.”

Another industry veteran, Aaron Wall of SEOBook, tells me, “For years Google has provided some mystery meat data of marginal value and so I typically have not recommended registering with their webmaster tools. But this is the first tool they have offered which flips that recommendation on its head, as these stats give you new insights into how you are doing in search – data that is not easy to get anywhere else.” He’s got an interesting post up about it himself.

How Accurate is the Data?

Google’s addition of the new data has been met with a great deal of enthusiasm. Comments on Google’s announcement are overwhelmingly positive. That’s not to say, however, that there isn’t some amount of skepticism.

“As I said, this data will be very useful if it is indeed accurate. There’s been some Twitter buzz from other SEOs whose data doesn’t match up with their Google Analytics,” says Whalen. “For our High Rankings website, the clickthroughs for any given keyword phrase didn’t exactly match what my Google Analytics showed for the same keyword phrases, but it was fairly close. For instance, my top two Google organic keyword phrases showed 3,020 and 1,193 visits when using Google Analytics. Via Webmaster Tools, the same keyword phrases show 2900 and 1300, respectively. That’s pretty close. Perhaps they’re sort of just rounding off (in a strange kind of way!).  Other phrases had similar differences in the numbers.”

Regardless of how precise the information is, webmasters have some new numbers to sink their teeth into, and assuming that many more share similar views to Whalen’s this might make Webmaster Tools a great deal more useful to a lot of site owners. In fact, a lot more site owners may soon be using Webmaster Tools for the first time. Google also just announced a new deal that will insert Google Services for Websites into the latest version of the Plesk Panel, which is said to be used by millions of site owners. Webmaster Tools is part of that Services for Websites package.

Original Article: Google has acquired video monetization platform Episodic, according to an announcement from Episodic.

“The Episodic team will join Google and continue its work to bring a great video experience to the Web, mobile phones and IPTV devices,” Episodic Co-founders Noam Lovinsky and Matias Cudich say. “There will be no interruption in service for existing Episodic customers.”

“At Episodic, we have always felt that these are the very early days of online video and that there is far more growth to be had. To put it in perspective, our industry is barely 15 years old. We’ve just received our learner’s permit, we still can’t drive without adult supervision and we’re certainly not old enough to buy a drink…legally,” they continue. “From our earliest discussions with Google, it was clear that the teams shared this belief and together we obviously see huge potential in online video. Our product visions were also complimentary and together we will continue to produce innovative video technology for our customers and their viewers.” Episodic comes with six functional areas: video content management, content ingest and encoding, adaptive bitrate playback, monetization through advertising and credit card transaction, audience measurement and analytics, and syndication.

Terms of the acquisition are unknown at this point. We have a request out for more information from Google. We’ll update when we find out more.

Among other things:

“Maybe some small site, you might only find a chance to crawl its pages once a week, but if that site is blogging like every 20 minutes, boom , you hit the submit button, and the search engines can find out about it,” explained Cutts.

“Now the tension is that more spammers would use this as well, so you can’t just say, ‘I’m gonna index everything that everybody pushes to me.’ So finding the right balance there is tricky, but the potential is really, really exciting,” he said.

“You can definitely imagine the reputable blogs getting very fast updates – the ones that we think are trustworthy, and then over time, maybe ramping that up, so that more and more people have the ability to do…just like, instant indexing,” he says.

And here we see another way Google may end up looking at the trust factor, with regards to ranking.

Can We Learn from How Google Does Real-Time Search?

Liz Gannes at GigaOm recapped a few things Google senior product manager Dylan Casey said at SMX last month:

Casey said perhaps the most complex project in real time is to determine when to trigger the appearance of real-time results in search results. “We have huge internal debates on: Is this a good answer to this question, or are we just creating a tool for low-quality content?” he said.

Casey spent some effort justifying Google paying to include Twitter’s real-time firehose of tweets, saying it was an intensive technical integration on both sides, and that tweets are a fundamentally different form of communication due to the restrictions of their form. For example, Google has developed a ‘complex system’ for removing users’ public tweets that are later deleted or marked private.

Earlier this year, Amit Singhal, who has led development of real-time search at Google talked about how Google ranks tweets. According to him, Google ranks tweets by followers to an extent, but it’s not just about how many followers you get. It’s about how reputable those followers are.

Singhal likens the system to the well-known Google system of link popularity. Getting good links from reputable sources helps your content in Google, so having followers with that same kind of authority theoretically helps your tweets rank in Google’s real-time search.

“One user following another in social media is analogous to one page linking to another on the Web. Both are a form of recommendation,” Singhal says. “As high-quality pages link to another page on the Web, the quality of the linked-to page goes up. Likewise, in social media, as established users follow another user, the quality of the followed user goes up as well.”

Now Google’s current real-time search product is separate from the whole PubSubHubbub-based system that isn’t in place yet, but Matt’s comments about blogs being trustworthy, indicates to me that trust is going to be key in being able to push content to Google’s index in real-time. So, I wonder if a similar strategy to how Google ranks its current real-time and Twitter results will be employed in determining this kind of trust.

Does This Mean If You’re Not Trusted You Won’t Get Indexed?

“PuSH wouldn’t likely replace crawling, in fact a crawl would be needed to discover PuSH feeds to subscribe to, but the real-time format would be used to augment Google’s existing index,” says Marshall Kirkpatrick, who spoke in a session on the real-time web at SXSW, which also included Google’s Brett Slatkin, one of the guys responsible for PuSH (he’s in the following video explaining the technology in simple terms).

Lots of sites out there already have PuSH technology in place. For example, WordPress and Typepad blogs have the ability to “PuSH” their content. That’s a lot of content itself. A lot of user-generated content, and that means the potential for spam is huge, which is why the trust factor is so important.

If PuSh is to be heavily utilized by the search engines, and you want your content indexed as quickly as possible, you’re going to want to do what you can to build community trust and a solid reputation. One more reason to engage in meticulous online reputation management, put out great content, and engage with the community.

Demand Media evidently gets more traffic than the digital properties of ESPN, Time, or Disney. They claim to have more videos on YouTube than anybody. This isn’t spammy content though. It’s content created based on what people are looking for, or what a combination of Demand’s algorithms and staff determine people are looking for based on extensive data analysis.

An audience member referred to a video she came across that was simply not the type of quality Demand Media wants its content to be known for. Rosenblatt acknowledges that there may be some of this out there, simply because the company began with a different model, but they are working to eliminate this, and only implement content that has gone through the company’s exhaustive editorial process.

One huge misconception that Rosenblatt went out of his way to clear up is that of Demand Media’s content being taken as news. He doesn’t see what Demand Media is doing as journalism. Journalism is news, and this isn’t news, he says. It’s stuff that makes you laugh, solves your problems, etc. “Only the journalists call us journalists.”

A great deal of the criticism that has been aimed at Demand Media is based around the notion that the company is somehow taking advantage of Google’s algorithms, to get its content placed higher than other sources (isn’t this what SEO/SEM is all about anyway?). Rosenblatt basically made the point that if Google doesn’t think it’s good enough content to be there, than it won’t be there.  To change an algorithm to not give an answer just doesn’t make sense, he says.

“If people aren’t looking for it on search, we’re not there,” he added. Demand properties like eHow often appear in search results for queries about how to do things. Well, that’s exactly the kind of content that appears on eHow, and the mantra of the industry has always been “content is king” right? Demand simply wants to wear that crown, and make money doing it.

“We are driven by an economic model,” Rosenblatt said. The company is focused on “evergreen, longtail, commercial content.” They’re focused on stuff they will make money from.

Rosenblatt says a lot of people think their content is auto-generated. “That’s just wrong,” he says. One criticism that Rosenblatt does think is fair, is that some of the company’s content “could feel mechanical.” In other words, some may lack creativity. “We need to learn, and we’re trying to,” he says. A lack of creativity does not necessarily mean a lack of accuracy, though, and through Demand’s editorial process, there is a lot of fact checking going on. At least that is the impression Rosenblatt gave.

He says they have different models for different categories. With something especially important to the world, like health, he says they make sure professionals are writing the articles. With health, fact checking would also go to doctors. If you are searching for information on Google about effects of chemotherapy, and you are met with an article written by an expert on the subject, with facts checked by doctors, is there really anything wrong with that? Would you rather get a Wikipedia entry? Remember, we’re not talking “news” here. We’re talking information, and in other cases entertainment.

Demand media does use some Google ads, as iEntry CEO and WebProNews publisher Rich Ord pointed out in an article a while back. He wrote:

The problem as I see it is that while Google is highly ranking the content of these mass production publishers it also has a financial incentive to do so. Almost all content farms use Google Adwords for their revenue. So while Google on the one hand encourages publishers to make content for their readers and not just for search ranking, it is in partnership with sites that do just that.

I guess if you can make content for the purpose of ranking in searches … but make it targeted, unique and not horrible, then you might find that Google well reward you quite well.

The issue of Google’s own practices with regards to this are really a separate issue from Demand Media’s practices. As far as Rosenblatt is concerned, they’re just producing the content that people want, and will find that through either search or discovery. And they’re making a killing doing it.

Matthew Delorey, 26, of New Bedford, Massachusetts, is charged with one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and one count of wire fraud. If convicted, he faces a maximum sentence on each count of 20 years in prison and a maximum fine of $250,000.

Delorey ran a now shuttered website called Massmodz.com which sold cable modems which were hacked and reconfigured to allow them to be used for free, untraceable access to the Internet.

Delorey, through his website sold two hacked modems to an undercover FBI agent posing as a customer.

Delorey marketed his hacked modems in a Craigslist post advertising “Massmodz Free Internet- Get free untraceable Internet.” He also appeared in instructional videos he posted on YouTube, including videos entitled Massmodz.com How to Get Free Internet Free Cable Internet Comcast or any Cable ISP – 100% works”; “Massmodz.com How to bypass Comcast registration page with premod cable modem SB5100, SB 5101″; “Massmodz.com Cable Modem Hack Cable Modem Mod”; and “Massmodz.com How to get back online Comcast new secure area with cable modem premod, Comcast ready.”