Google Blogoscoped

Monday, December 11, 2006

Trigger Google News Archive Results

Interesting! Ionut found a way to trigger the Google News Archive onebox at the bottom of web search results... just enter a year, or a year range. E.g. I entered international business machines 1933-1945 and this results in three different articles on that company from that time, as well as a link to the Google News Archive site itself (again, restricted to that date range).

2% of Invalid Clicks are Click Fraud?

Google says the click-fraud rate for their ads is 2% of invalid clicks (so an ever lower percentage in relation to all clicks), Marketing Pilgrim reports. However, why should we trust Google with this number? When I say that people lie to me 0.1% of the time, where do I get my numbers from? I only caught them lying to me 0.1% of the time, so the actual number is likely to be much higher. Similarly, when Google say invalid clicks are on average “in the single digits, quarter over quarter” (that’s Marketing Pilgrim quoting Google’s business product manager for trust and safety, Shuman Ghosemajumder), then they’re surely talking about invalid clicks they happened to detect. While some invalid clicks may be relatively easy to define, in particular the non-fraudulent ones (like accidentally clicking on an ad twice or something), others may not be. Never trust a statistic unless you’ve made it up yourself...
[Via Digg.]

A Google Translation Error?

What the...?! When you go to your personalized Google homepage (with English settings), then click on Preferences and check say “Arabic” and “Bulgarian”, you’ll get a strange option below the search box which reads, “Clear with periodic rain later” and “Search Arabic Rain, snow in the evening Bulgarian pages”. Gee, thanks Google, I’ll get back to you when I need to search some rain... (let’s hope this isn’t Google’s new award-winning translation technology at work). [Thanks Tim Finnegan!]

Google’s Lorraine Twohill at Le Web 3 (Video)

Luc van Braekel is attending Le Web 3 conference in Paris, and today shot a video of Google’s marketing director for Europe/ Middle East/ Africa, Lorraine Twohill, who talks a bit about the evolution of the web and Google’s role in it. [Thanks Luc!]

Search Engine’s Ms. Dewey’s Soft-porn Past

Ms. Dewey is the face of Microsoft’s annoying talking search engine, but as opposed to search engine avatar Mr. Jeeves, this actress – Janina Gavankar – has a real life history... which included starring nude in such c-movies as Cup of My Blood (Celebrity Movie Archive has previews and downloads, but the site is NSFW).
[Via Matt Cutts/ Valleywag, the latter also NSFW. Image from Celebrity Movie Archive.]

Google Speaker

TomHTML asks... what’s this? The image is titled “project prize” and shows a dark blue speaker with the Google logo printed on it. I ordered lots of stuff from the Google Store before but this wasn’t among it (and searching for “Google Speaker” returns this page.) [Thanks TomHTML!]

Also see more “google"-tagged photos on Flickr.

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