Google Tag Manager

The new tool, Google Tag Manager, aims to simplify the often-complex and time-consuming art of tagging digital content for Websites.

Google wants to be a marketer's best friend online. That's why the search company just created its new Google Tag Manager tool to make it easier and faster for online digital marketers to "tag" content on Websites so it can be connected to online users.

The free Google Tag Manager is now available in English but will also be offered in additional languages in the future, according to an Oct. 1 post on the Google Analytics Blog by Laura Holmes, product manager of Google Tag Manager.

"Tags are tiny bits of website code that can help provide useful insights, but they can also cause challenges," wrote Holmes. "Too many tags can make sites slow and clunky; incorrectly applied tags can distort your measurement; and it can be time-consuming for the IT department or webmaster team to add new tags—leading to lost time, lost data, and lost conversions."

The tool will allow digital marketers to consolidate their website tags with a single snippet of code and manage them all more easily through a Web-based interface. "You can add and update your own tags, with just a few clicks, whenever you want, without bugging the IT folks or rewriting site code," wrote Holmes. "It gives marketers greater flexibility, and lets webmasters focus on other important tasks."

By making it easier for marketers to get these tasks completed, it can have a huge benefit for Google's financial bottom line. An estimate by Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster in January 2012 pegged Google's mobile ad sales alone at about $4 billion in 2012, up substantially from $2.5 billion in 2011.

To get an idea of Google's online ad scale, consider that the $4 billion Google stands to make in mobile ad sales in 2012 would comprise only 9 percent of the company's nearly $40 billion in 2011 ad sales. Yet that $4 billon would also equal Facebook's entire ad revenue sum for 2011.

Among the features of the new Google Tag Manager, according to Holmes:

• Asynchronous tag loading so tags can fire faster without getting in each other's way, and without slowing down the user-visible part of the page.
• Easy-to-use tag templates, so marketers can quickly add tags with Google's web interface, as well as support for custom tags.
• Error-prevention tools including a preview mode, a debug console, and version history to ensure that new tags won’t break a site.
• User permissions and multi-account functionality to make it easy for users to work together successfully.

For Google, tagging tools like this one are very important because advertising revenue is so central to the company's success and growth.

Presently, Facebook remains the market leader in the online display ad market wars, but by 2013, Google is expected to overtake Facebook for online ad market supremacy, according to a prediction from analysis firm eMarketer. 

Facebook closed 2011 with 14 percent of the display ad market on sales of $1.73 million. Google, long a laggard in the U.S. display advertising market, nipped at the leader's heels last year, netting 13.8 percent share on sales of $1.71 million.

The U.S. display advertising market, which includes spending on online video, sponsorship's  rich media and banner advertisements, grew roughly 25 percent to $12.4 billion in 2011. The eMarketer report said it expects Facebook to maintain its lead in 2012, grabbing $2.59 billion in share, compared with $2.54 billion by Google, as the two combine to net 33 percent of the display ad market.

Google will surpass Facebook by grabbing nearly 20 percent of the market in 2013, compared with less than 18 percent for Facebook. Google's U.S. display sales will grow 45.3 percent to $3.68 billion, with Facebook boosting sales 27.6 percent to $3.29 billion for 2013.

Not all ad sales have been successful for Google. In September, the company announced the shuttering of its stand-alone Google TV Ads efforts, which will be merged into other existing business units. The division was launched in 2007 to sell advertisements on traditional television networks for its customers, but failed to gain traction as consumers reduced their consumption of traditional television and moved to watching such content on different kinds of devices.

Power Search With Google

Power Searching with Google

A free course to help you become a better searcher

Knowing how to find answers on Google is an important skill in today’s digital age. Taught by Google’s Search experts, this online class will help you search smarter, so you can find the information you need — even in the most challenging situations.

• www.powersearchingwithgoogle.com
• www.google.com/insidesearch/landing/powersearching.html

What you'll learn

This is an online, community-based course showcasing search techniques and how you can use them to solve real, everyday problems. Dan Russell, a senior research scientist at Google, will cover topics that will help you:

• Find just what you’re looking for, faster
• Get right to the most credible sources
• Solve even the most challenging questions

Another live session of Power Searching with Google begins on September 24!

Register now to complete the course alongside a community of global participants and when the course begins you'll receive:

• Access to community discussion forum
• The opportunity to put your new skills to test with mid and post class assessments
• Support from Google course staff
• An official Power Searching with Google certificate upon completion

How it works

The course begins on September 24 and ends on October 10. Register now and we’ll send you an email when class begins.

• Lessons and activities will be released three times a week and you can complete them at your own pace.
• You’re not alone! We provide plenty of opportunities to connect with our search experts and other Power Searching participants.
• Upon passing the course, we’ll email you a printable certificate so you can show off your Power Searcher status!

The course is composed of six classes:

• How Google works
• Extending what you know
• Advanced techniques
• Finding facts faster
• Checking your facts
• Putting it all together

Access Lesson 1.1 slides here | #powersearchingwithgoogle

Step 1 :

Step 2 :

                After Registering for Power Searching with Google. Stay tuned for more information about the class which will start on September 24.

Schedule :

• Pre-class assessment available 2012-09-24
• Class 1 - Introduction available 2012-09-24
• Class 2 - Interpreting results available 2012-09-26
• Class 3 - Advanced techniques available 2012-09-28
• Mid-class assessment available 2012-09-28, deadline 2012-10-10 11:59pm PT
• Class 4 - Find facts faster available 2012-10-01
• Class 5 - Checking your facts available 2012-10-03
• Class 6 - Putting it all together available 2012-10-05
• Post-class assessment available 2012-10-05, deadline 2012-10-10 11:59pm PT

                                   More details | Press Center | For Educators 

                      Course is available where Google infrastructure is available.

Google Buys Nik to Lure Photographers to Google Plus

Google said on Monday that it had acquired Nik Software, a company that makes tools for editing and sharing photos. It is Google’s latest defensive move against Facebook and part of its strategy to become a photo-sharing hub.

Facebook’s dominance in photo uploading and sharing was strengthened by its acquisition of Instagram, which closed this month. Meanwhile, Google Plus — which also announced on Monday that it had 400 million users, 100 million of them active — has been trying to attract both professional and amateur photographers to Google Plus.

Though Nik, which is based in San Diego with offices in Germany and elsewhere, is outside the Silicon Valley bubble, it has a following among serious photographers. The companies did not disclose the acquisition price, though one person briefed on the deal said it was significant because Nik has more than 100 employees and is 17 years old.

Nik’s most well-known product is Snapseed, a mobile app for editing and sharing photos that Apple  named iPad app of the year in 2011. It has more sophisticated photo editing tools than Instagram, but it is not nearly as popular. Snapseed is available only for Apple devices but will come to Android soon (and probably a lot sooner now that Google owns it). Many of Nik’s other products are aimed at professional photographers.

Facebook says its user upload more than 300 million photos a day, many more than on Google Plus or any other Web site. Google declined to say how many photos its users upload.

But Google Plus does offer special tools for photos. For sharing them, Google Plus’s mobile app automatically uploads cellphone photos to a private folder on Google Plus, so they are backed up and can easily be shared. Users can also upload and download high-resolution photos.

With Nik and other services, Google is trying to differentiate itself from Facebook and other photo-sharing sites with more advanced photo editing. Google, which owns Picasa and Picnik, the online photo editor, has incorporated their high-end tools into Google Plus, including adjusting light and pixel size, sharpening or softening colors and applying filters.

Google seems most interested in Nik’s mobile and online tools and how they can improve Google Plus. Google declined to say whether or when it would discontinue any of Nik’s other products, like desktop software for professional photographers.

“We want to help our users create photos they absolutely love, and in our experience Nik does this better than anyone,” Vic Gundotra, senior vice president at Google in charge of Google Plus, wrote on Google Plus.

Google+ now home to 400 million total users, 100 million active monthly users

Google+ now has 100 million monthly active users and 400 million registered users. Let’s all break out the party favors and host a few hangouts!

But wait just a second. The new figures, revealed by Google’s senior veep of engineering Vic Gundotra in a Google+ update this morning, have me scratching my head.

Google reported in June that its 1-year-old social network had reached 150 million active users. Did Google+ actually lose 50 million monthly active users over the summer? That would not be cause for celebration, now, would it? Let’s also not forget that in April of this year, Google said that Google+ had reached 100 million active users. 

So what gives?

The discrepancy in monthly active users looks to be a semantics problem. From what I’ve been able to decipher, Google sees 100 million people visit plus.google.com or Google+ mobile apps each month. The 150 million number, however, is a catch-all figure that applies to all Google+ activity happening across any of Google’s socially enhanced services such as Gmail, search, and YouTube.

Google+ the social network has 100 million monthly active users. Google+ the social layer has 150 million active users. Get? Got it? Good.

Why would Google report two numbers that essentially sound the same but mean two different things? Well, the 100 million monthly active user stat reported today is an achievement that directly addresses critics’ “ghost town” accusations. In essence, Gundotra proved that people — 100 million each month to be exact — intentionally (not by accident, naysayers!) visit Google+ on desktop or mobile to connect with friends, brands, and celebrities.

Fun With Google Search

What's Michelle Williams's Bacon number, you ask? It's two and no — that's not the number of bacon strips she had to eat this morning; it's the degree of separation between Kevin Bacon and the award-winning actress, aka her Bacon number. Now it's readily available on the Internet, thanks to the Google Knowledge Graph.

The project is part of the search giant's effort to make online discovery more intelligent and informative (plus a bit more fun, we'd say!). To account for something like the Bacon number, Google looks at relationships not just between search terms, but also between real people, places, and events.

Read more about Michelle and the Google Knowledge Graph after the jump.

For example, if you search "Michelle Williams," Google knows that there is not one but two women you may be looking for: the aforementioned leading lady and the underappreciated Destiny's Child songstress. Google now makes it easy to switch between the two and provides more details about their family, background, and the movies or music they've produced — shown right on the search page in widgets powered by the Google Knowledge Graph. Things that you would find on IMDB, Wikipedia, or CIA World Factbook are now built into Google Search as well.

Do you find the Google Knowledge Graph helpful or an unnecessary gimmick?

Compete Report: Google Nexus 7

You’ve probably read that the Google Nexus 7 is the first credible challenger to Apple’s iPad and that it is markedly superior to other 7-inch Android tablets currently in the market. That’s not what I’ve found. Instead, the Nexus 7 is a solid, capable media tablet and a nice, Google-oriented alternative to the Amazon Kindle Fire if you’re looking for such a thing.

To me, reviewer reaction to the Nexus 7 was reminiscent of reviewer reaction to Windows Phone 7.5: Rather than admit that they were wrong about the products’ respective predecessors (Windows Phone 7, of course, and the Kindle Fire and other 7-inch Android tablets like the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus), they just pretend that, finally, magically, this time someone got it right. But that’s not the case at all. There’s nothing wrong with the Nexus 7, nothing at all, assuming you’re OK with this sort of device. But it’s also not demonstrably better than the Kindle Fire or Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus.

It’s newer, of course, and runs a newer Android software version. It has a sharp and slightly higher resolution screen than its predecessors. It gets slightly better battery life. Positives, to be sure. None of them earth shattering.

Nexus 7 home screen, with a mix of Google and Amazon services

On the downside, it’s not much lighter than the other devices. And while its user interface is frankly an awful lot like that of the Galaxy Tab, its usage model—heavy ties to the device maker’s online content services—is an awful lot like that of the Kindle Fire. It is, in other words, a purely evolutionary advance over predecessor devices and exactly what one should expect from a device that’s about a year newer.

It’s really no more complicated than that. Why is everyone acting like this is an Android renaissance?

The big deal with the Nexus 7, of course, isn’t the hardware. It’s the ecosystem support. Google designed the Nexus 7 purely as the hardware endpoint for its Play services, just as Amazon designed the Kindle Fire around its Kindle, Amazon MP3, Amazon Prime Video, and other services. And just as Apple designed the iPad around iTunes. With all of these devices, the expectation is that the hundreds of dollars you spend on the hardware (many, many hundreds of dollars in the iPad’s case, not including the inevitable hundreds of dollars for the apparently necessary on cases, stands, docks, and keyboards) is only the beginning: These devices are really just a vehicle for continually separating you from your hard-earning cash on an ongoing basis. (Or, as Apple, Amazon, and Google would rather I describe it, “on entertainment.”)

So when comparing these devices, there are really only two choices to consider.

Google play store

The first is the size of the device. When Apple released its first iPad, one of my initial concerns was that the device was a bit too big for a consumption device and that a smaller, 7-inch screen would be more ideal. Others disagree, of course, and looking at the pre-Windows RT world of 10 inch tablets today, there is basically the iPad and then nothing else.

But if you prefer to use a smaller, lighter device and have purely entertainment-based goals (reading, movie and TV watching, music, and the like), then a 7-inch tablet is ideal. And at this point your choice comes basically down to the Kindle Fire and Nexus 7, because these are the only two currently on the market that are both excellent and offer lowball, $200 pricing.

The second and perhaps more important consideration is that ecosystem. Google, again, it pushing its Google Play ecosystem. And Amazon is pushing what we’ll call the Kindle ecosystem for simplicity’s sake.

All apps

As a newer device with a faster processor, the Nexus 7 performs faster than the leisurely Kindle Fire.

The nicest thing about the Nexus 7, perhaps, is that you can mix and match some Amazon services in there in addition to the Google stuff. You can’t add Amazon’s video services, but songs (Amazon MP3), eBooks (Kindle, but not including periodicals), and apps are all available if you want them. But that still leaves you stuck with Google’s lackluster video selection. But there’s always Netflix (when you’re online).

Overall, the Nexus 7 is a credible 7-inch media tablet that is on par with the Amazon Kindle Fire and other Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus. It offers some minor advantages related to screen resolution and battery life (hey, it’s newer) and some more important advantages related to performance, all of which will soon be wiped out by 2012-era tablets from Amazon, Samsung and others. Since Apple doesn’t (yet?) offer a 7-inch tablet, it’s pointless to compare this device to an iPad; you either want a 10-inch device or you don’t. You’re either all too willing to spend a lot of money on a tablet or you’re not.

Thinking about buying the Nexus 7? Here’s my advice: Buy into an ecosystem—Play, iTunes, or Kindle—not a particular device, since the devices are getting cheaper and cheaper and will be updated continuously. Or buy into two—Play/Kindle, for example, or iTunes/Kindle—and reap the benefits of the best of each. I prefer that latter approach, and believe that Amazon’s Kindle eBooks, in particularly, are a far better choice than the similar services from Google or Apple.

If you decide to go the Android route (or iOS), and the 7-inch route (over 10-inch devices), the Nexus 7 is a great choice, letting you mix and match ecosystems for apps (Google Play/Amazon Appstore), TV shows and movies (Google Play/Netflix/others), music (Google Play/Amazon MP3), and books (Google Play/Amazon Kindle). In that sense, it’s a best of both worlds device, and one that costs just $200, or $250 for a 16 GB version. That’s tough deal to ignore.

Google buys Sparrow for 'new Gmail project

Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) struck again on Friday, buying popular iPhone and Macintosh e-mail app Sparrow. But Google has no interest in the company itself.

A spokeswoman for the search giant said Google will keep Sparrow up and running, and it will continue to support the application. But the company doesn't plan to offer any significant Sparrow updates in the future.

In their new roles at Google, Sparrow's five employees will work on "new projects" for Gmail.

If Sparrow's team has any hard feelings about ending work on its creation, it didn't say so.

The company has worked to enhance the "mailing experience," Sparrow CEO Dom Leca wrote in a blog post. "Now we're joining the Gmail team to accomplish a bigger vision -- one that we think we can better achieve with Google."

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The Verge cited sources that said the purchase price was "under $25 million."

It's a familiar story, and one that isn't a great omen for Sparrow's future.

Google last month acquired social advertising service Meebo for a reported $100 million. Google said it would shift all Meebo employees to its Google+ social network.

In 2010, Google bought social search company Aardvark for $50 million. The Aardvark employees were shifted to development of Google+. Google never updated the application, and it shut down Aardvark in September 2011.

The most famous example was Google's 2005 purchase of location-based service Dodgeball. The company's founders quit in 2007 after Google failed to support the service.

"The whole experience was incredibly frustrating for us -- especially as we couldn't convince them that Dodgeball was worth engineering resources, leaving us to watch as other startups got to innovate in the mobile + social space," wrote founder Dennis Crowley on Flickr.

Crowley landed on his feet, though. He founded a new location-based company with another playground-themed name you may have heard of: Foursquare.

But Google isn't the only one guilty of these "aqui-hires."

Acrylic Software announced Friday it was acquired by Facebook. Dustin MacDonald, founder of the Vancouver-based company behind apps like Pulp and Wallet, wrote that though the team is set to move to Silicon Valley, "our products and services have not been acquired."

This is just the latest in a string of hires and shutdowns. Earlier this month, Facebook acquired the talent behind startup Spool. The same day it announced the acquisition, the company released a blog post, titled "Spool has shut down - stay tuned for more." 

I'm on Google Plus

Hanson Dodge Creative Presents

Uploaded Jul/20/2011 ♫

▼

┼

Spinning circles like they're rims Customizin 

They be addin me so fast it's hipnotizin

Join a hangout add some Sparks .. Got a Buzz

Now I'm feeling so fly, I'm on G+

I'm on G+, I'm on G+

Now I'm feeling so fly, I'm on G+

Gimme that pl-plus, one-one

Gimme that in invite-vite

I' ve been waitin awhile, tryin to get my free trail

Heard it from my homies, the app is still in BETA

I got my invite yesterday, don't be a Google hater

Hell yeah, 

Drag and drop, yeah

Drag and drop

Find a friend to a circle, I be droppin' like it's hot 

Drag and droppin' like it's hot,

drag and droppin like it's hot

Find a friend to a circle, I be droppin' like it's hot 

Spinning circles like they're rims Customizin 

They be addin me so fast it's hipnotizin

Join a hangout add some Sparks .. Got a Buzz

Now I'm feeling so fly, I'm on G+

I'm on G+, I'm on G+

Now I'm feeling so fly, I'm on G+

Tired of hiding my pics, from my Facebook cliques

My mom friended me, so I keep it PG

Now I can share whatever, straight up from my 'Droid

My boss doesn't even see it, and I aint paranoid

Hell yeah, 

Drag and drop, yeah

Drag and drop

Find a friend to a circle, I be droppin' like it's hot 

Drag and droppin' like it's hot,

drag and droppin like it's hot

Find a friend to a circle, I be droppin' like it's hot 

Spinning circles like they're rims Customizin 

They be addin me so fast it's hipnotizin

Join a hangout add some Sparks .. Got a Buzz

Now I'm feeling so fly, I'm on G+

I'm on G+, I'm on G+

Now I'm feeling so fly, I'm on G+

Google Anthem

Make you hit that plus one.

make you hit that plus one

make you hit that plus one

Hell yeah, make you hit that plus one,

make you hit that plus one,

hit that-hit that plus one

Spinning circles like they're rims Customizin 

They be addin me so fast it's hipnotizin

Join a hangout add some Sparks .. Got a Buzz

Now I'm feeling so fly, I'm on G+

I'm on G+, I'm on G+

Now I'm feeling so fly, I'm on G+....♫

Geotagging: how local bloggers can help us escape 'Starbucks Street'

Augmented reality, wearable computing and mobile search are exciting new technologies. But where will the data come from to illuminate your Google Glasses or the AR layer on your phone? No one wants to stare out at an augmented street full of Starbucks with bland corporate tunnel vision – but Google at present ignores the geotags of independent content that would locate it precisely for augmented reality and mobile search. So what's going on and is Google about to make an important shift?

Augmented reality in the Google Glass or mobile phone context overlays information from a web page or blog post about a place on to the screen in front of you. The AR app on your phone or in your glasses knows where you are and it has to know what the content it overlays into your vision is about. But where does it get geo-tagged content from? Mobile search is at the heart of this. A search for a cafe on mobile will turn up cafes Google finds near you and your phone. Then you can look at the cafe's own website and follow a map to get there.

But what if the cafe has lousy food hygiene scores, or locals know that there is a much better one 50 metres further away that maybe doesn't have a website? You won't find that on the cafe's own website, nor in Yelp, Zagat nor Google+ Local. You need independent local blogs and tweets to turn up that sort of useful local intelligence.

A local blogger can help people trying to find local information by tagging posts with the specific place to which the post relates using a geotag. In most blogging platforms, this is as simple as clicking a map before you publish a post, upon which the latitude and longitude of your post is burned into the HTML. When another computer – such as a search engine – scans the page, it will associate the location with the post. This should be a huge boon to mobile search by helping people who seek place-specific local stuff to find a wide range of independent local information, not just corporate content from a directory run by a search engine.

Bing and Yahoo both use location attributes somehow in search, but with the greatest respect (and putting Facebook to one side), Google is where it's at for mobile search. Google, however, has historically chosen to ignore geotags from third-party content. Even if you have created your blog on Google's own Blogger and geotagged it there, Google still ignores your geotag when delivering search results. Even Google's otherwise excellent blog on geo-things ëLat Long' doesn't seem to geotag its posts.

Google relies heavily on Google's giant gazetteer Google Places, which recently morphed into "Google+ Local" (and which until Monday was overseen by Marissa Mayer). It isn't easy to correct or enter new information other than anodyne reviews using Google-owned Zagat into Google+ Places - you pretty well have to be a company or a public authority with some physical ownership of the place in question.

This isn't great - no one wants the future of search and AR to be solely about bland corporate blah that you get in a gazetteer or directory. For the best experience, we need mobile search and AR to seek out third-party, independent content about places and put it alongside the corporate stuff. With Google Glass on the horizon and other augmented reality products already here on mobile phones, geotagging becomes even more important. No one wants to put on some Google glasses and only see a "Starbucks street" of branded chain stores and Google Zagatreviews.

Google's position is a longstanding one, set in 2009 and restated in 2012 on the Google Webmaster Central blog in 2012:

"Note that we do not use locational meta tags (like "geo.position" or "distribution") or HTML attributes for geotargeting. While these may be useful in other regards, we've found that they are generally not reliable enough to use for geotargeting."

I've been doing some work on public service content in AR lately and have asked Google about its position in an email dialogue with the London office, setting out a discussion in the terms above. There are now signs that this may be about to change (although this will depend on how you interpret the Kremlinology). Google says:

"As we've mentioned in the Webmaster Central blog, currently we don't use locational meta tags as a signal for geographic relevance in web search. We generally don't comment on future plans, but keep an eye on the Webmaster blog and the Lat Long blog."

This is a good sign. The big platforms should learn to trust geotags by bloggers, just as the loyal audiences bloggers attract trust their content. Apple too would do well to start off on the right foot with its new mapping product, rather than just relying on Yelp. I wouldn't suggest for a moment that Google should trust every geotagl it could simply start by recognising the ones in its own blogging platform (Blogger) and other established platforms such as wordpress.com, and then extend the circle to blogs more generally, and maybe even encourage local newspapers to geotag.

If Google were to take a step in the right direction, it could set off a virtuous cycle where people add geotags to their web information because they can see the value being returned when they do a search on a mobile device, which increases the utility of mobile search, thus further increasing the value to the people who geotag in the first place. The people who use mobile search win all around, and the future of mobile search and augmented reality moves from the narrow tunnel vision of "Starbucks Street" to show a more diverse and vivid side to our communities

Via William Perrin

Google Plus 'Share' Link Added To Google Search Results

Don't look now but Google+ may not be dead on arrival after all

Quietly, it has attracted some 150m active monthly users and Google's social network scored higher than Facebook in the annual American Customer Satisfaction .

On the brand side of things, Google continues to push forward in trying to build an attractive ecosystem. The latest example of that: a new set of Page Management APIs are coming soon.

Google's strategy with Google+ is no secret: the search giant wants to make its social network the 'social glue' for all of its properties, the largest of which, of course, is its search engine.

Google Search Result 

Google’s Product Manager Sean Liu announced on Google+ later this afternoon that this is now official. He wrote:


Starting today, we’re rolling out a new experiment to show a Share link in Google search in place of the +1 button, making it easier for you to share a great website with your friends. Now when you click the Share link next to a result, you can add a comment about why you found it useful. You can then choose if you want to share it publicly or just to your Circles and it will post to your Google+ stream, making it easier for you to share directly from the search results page. This will appear for those searching in English.