Google Blogoscoped

Tuesday, October 5, 2004

FindForward with Amazon

The FindForward button [FindForward] will now display an Amazon link [FindForward] 50% of the time. I’m doing this to help cover server costs created by carrying the visitors of other sites. Currently, the Amazon button will lead to the Amazon.com best-selling DVDs.

What is the FindForward button? If you include it in your site, it will email you of new backlinks to your pages, and also counts the hits you get. More details at the FindForward Backlinks help page.

BBC Newstracker

BBC launched its Newstracker service which automatically inserts related links from 4,000 news sources into BBC articles. [Thanks Philipp H.]

Yahoo Next

Yahoo! Next is opening its doors to those curious what Yahoo’s up to (a sort of Google Labs). Currently available: the My Yahoo! Search. This personalized search will let registered users save their results, block some of them, share pages, and search through them later on. (If you’ve been to MyJeeves, you’ll about know what to expect.)

Evan Williams Leaves Google

As of this Friday, Evan Williams (co-founder of Blogger) will no longer be working at Google. Evan will take some time off to think about other things, and possibly later on start another company. In his blog Evhead.com he writes:

“Six years is a long time. Or a little. Depending.

For me, it’s a little under 20% of this life on Earth. And it’s the time when I find myself thinking a lot about a particular question: What should I do next?

I’m not sure what the answer to that question is, but I’ve decided it’s something different than I do now. And I need some perspective to answer it.”

Gmail Updates Contacts, Adds Drafts

Gmail has a new “Contacts” page. This makes it more easy to write to (or delete) several people at once.

Another new feature is that you now can save emails as draft.
Also, as I suggested a month ago, Gmail has added grouping features in their options via the “optgroup” HTML-element – or at least that’s what it looks like (the Gmail application makes it hard to view the HTML). Finally, you can now set a forwarding address in the settings (you can also apply forwarding using filters).

Google’s Next Steps (and other Poll Results)

In the recent poll, you could vote what you would like to see next at Google. 28% of all who voted wanted “Better search results, with less spam”, which should show search is still Google’s main business (or it should be). Runner-up with 26% is the wish for Gbrowser, a Mozilla-based Google browser.

The other recent poll (“Where do you work?”) revealed that most people reading along here are indeed programmers (35%), while 7 people said they work at Google.

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