Month: January 2010

New Launch: Click-To-Call Phone Numbers In Google Mobile Ads

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Google Mobile Blog has announced the launch of new feature in Google mobile ads (ads under Google mobile search results).

Phone numbers that come in the web search results under the mobile version of Google search are now made clickable.This means that you can directly contact the local business people that you are interested via a phone call directly from Google search results.

Click to call phone numbers in Mobile ads

This feature now makes sense because Google search results are now “Location based” .What it means is that suppose if you are interested in contacting a restaurant that has several branches, you will only see the phone number of the branch that is most nearer to you from the data based on your location (Otherwise,what’s the point in calling the restaurant branch that is in another city ?).

This I would say definitely a nice implementation from the ‘G’ engineers.

If you are an Adwords advertiser for mobile ads and want to include clickable phone number of your business in Google mobile ads, read this post from Adwords blog.

P.S:This feature is cuurently available only in smart phones like iPohone, Andriod etc..

[Read about my post on Google IME which was released yesterday.]

Google Transliteration IME In 14 Languages (Exclusively For Indian Languages)

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Now you can easily type text in your own language in a more simpler fashion using Google Transliteration IME (IME- Input Method Editor).Google has officially launched the Google Transliteration IME in fourteen (14) languages, most of which are Indian languages.

[See the complete list of supported/available languages at the bottom of this post]

From now on, you don’t need softwares like Baraha, Lekhini or Aksharamala to type in your language.

With Google Transliteration IME, the user needs to download a very small piece of software for any if the 14 available languages and this opens up a the language tool bar for the desired language.Great thing about this is that you just need to type letters in English and it’ll automatically translates (or suggests translation) into your preferred language.

You can select the input language from the language tool bar as shown in the screenshot below:

Selecting Telugu from Language Toolbar

Now open any application (ex. notepad) and type in English and you can see the word being translated to your selected language or showing list of possible words with your input.

[Here I have used Telugu as the input language, by downloading Google Transliteration IME for Telugu]

Google Transliteration IME Telugu input Techrena

The same procedure can be followed  for other languages too.

IME edit in Hindi screenshot

[Sorry folks, I know only Hindi and Telugu other than English 🙁 ]

Download Google IME (For Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7 , 32-bit only)

Supported Languages:

Arabic,

Bengali,

Farsi (Persian),

Greek,

Gujarati,

Hindi,

Kannada,

Malayalam,

Marathi,

Nepali,

Punjabi,

Tamil,

Telugu,

Urdu

You can also use bookmarklet to directly type in your language in your web browser, which I’ll cover in a later post.For now, you can read about Transliteration feature in Gmail.

Reader New Feature: Track Changes In A ‘Website Not Offering Feeds’ Using Google Reader

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The Problem:

Your favourite website doesn’t offer updates via feeds.So you can’t follow the latest changes in the site.

The Solution:

1.There is popular Page2RSS, that creates RSS feeds for any webpage whenever there’s an update to the page.

page2RSS screenshot

2.Now Google Reader has also implemented very similar feature that let’s you keep track of the changes in any website as RSS feeds in the reader.

How To Do This?

Open Google Reader and click “Add Subscription” just enter the URL of the website (or webpage) that you want to keep track.Google Reader will automatically generate the feed for it (if it can’t detect any RSS feed).

adding subscription in Google reader

Creating feed for feedless website in Google reader

That’s it, you can now see the changes/ updates of that website in your Google reader feed items.

For some sample feeds generated through this, read this post from Google reader blog.

Using reCAPTCHA In Your Website To Prevent Comment Spamming

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Webmasters should always be conscious about the comments that they get in their sites.Spam comments in any form would affect his own website probably more that what he might have expected and sometimes even may get injected with spam content inside the website domain (read this example).

Webmasters are the responsible for comments on their site and sometimes comments also are considered as the site content.Spammers might leave their site links in the comments which may contain malware or other disgusting content that may be annoying to the typical reader of your site.This is particularly too for blogs.Thankfully, there are plugins like WP-SpamFree (my favourite).

I have come across another possible solution to this comment spamming problem when I came across this post from Google webmaster blog.

Using reCAPTCHA

recaptcha example

CAPTCHA, (short name for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) is a technology that allows us to make sure only humans can post comments or interact with other features of your website.

reCAPTCHA, is a free service owned by Google allows you to use CAPTCHA technology on your site for free.Just signup for reCAPTCHA, get an API key and use this key to setup reCAPTCHA on your site.If you are using WordPress, just install this WordPress CAPTCHA plugin and configure reCAPTCHA for your blog with your API key.

reCAPTCHA Email Protection (Mail hide):

reCAPTCHA also offers “Email Protection” for free.It works this way:

You may have to reveal your email address somewhere on the web and then the spammers through automated programs try to get access to your email and bombard your inbox with loads of spam mails.

When you use reCAPTCHA Email Protection enabled for your email, you email address will be shown fully only to users who enter the code through CAPTCHA, others will see it hidden like this one for example:

john…@example.com

To expand  that email address, users have to go through CAPTCHA that filters automated programs.

Watch:

Google News Launches ‘”Recrawl” Feature To Crawl Publishers Sites More Frequently

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Google has just announced a new “recrawl” feature in Google News that sends Google newsbot to visit the publisher sites more often than ever.

What does this mean?

This means that if a news publisher site publishes a new article in a day and later corrects the article for any mistakes,typos, incorrect references, wrong headline or even if publisher updates the URL, Google news will make sure that it includes the most recent version of the article in its news section.

 

google-bot spider

 

Excerpt from official Google blog post.

From the moment we discover a new article, we’ll keep revisiting it looking for changes. Since we’ve noticed that most changes to articles occur just after they’re published, we revisit articles most frequently in the first day after we’ve found them. In some cases, we’ll even revisit articles we had trouble crawling the first time around. After that, we visit them less often.

The readers will no longer see broken links or outdated headlines, broken links in the news section.Publishers would be greatly benefited by this new move as Google newsbot keeps tracking the article almost live.

That’s a very welcoming change in Google news crawling, it would be more useful for bloggers if Google implements such a feature for blogs.

Find Out Number Of Email Subscribers To Your Site Feeds In FeedBurner

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FeedBurner is the service I use for serving RSS feeds of my blog to our readers as most of the others, FeedBurner being the most popular feed service in town.One feature that I most like in FeedBurner is its ability to offer RSS feeds via Email to those who have subscribed to the site RSS feeds by entering their email address.

FeedBurner keeps sending  your newest posts as emails to the subscribers using your email address as “from” address whenever you add new content to your site.

But how to keep track of the number of users who have subscribed via email to your feeds?

Well, the number that FeedBurner shows in “Subscribers’ list isn’t actually the total no of email subscribers, keep in mind that it also includes those who have subscribed using other RSS readers and news aggregators.

I just dug into this to know how to find the real number of email subscribers of my blog feeds.

Thankfully FeedBurner does show this number but this may not appear to common FeedBurner users like me at first sight.Ok, let me show you where in the world you find this number.

STEPS:

publicize in FeedBurner

  • Click ‘”Email Subscriptions” link under “Services’ menu

Email Subscriptions in Feedburner services

  • Find “Subscription Management” link under this menu

subscription management in FeedBurner

  • Under Subscriber Management section, you can see the “Total Subscribers”.Now this is the number we wanted, this is the actual number of email subscribers of your feeds.

Finding total number of email subscribers

You can also search your subscribers list or you may export your subscribers list as CSV (Comma-Separated Values) file.

export email subscribers list as csv file

If you liked this post and want to follow more posts from our blog, just enter your email address to get updates directly to your mail box.

Enter your email address here:

Delivered by FeedBurner

YouTube To Stream IPL Matches Live From India

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YouTube IPL LogoGoogle India has just struck a nice deal with Indian Premier League (IPL) organizers that would enable to stream the IPL season 3 cricket matches live from it’s video-sharing site YouTube.

Google now holds the exclusive online rights of the IPL matches for two years.All the matches would be broadcasted with a delay of 5 minutes from the original live feed.

The live matches can be watched online from IPL’s YouTube account http://www.youtube.com/ipl.

With around 60 matches to be played, the tournament would be starting from March 12, 2010 and will run till April 25, 2010 in India.

IPL on YouTube March 2010

It’s probably the first time that Google is broadcasting a live sporting event.However IPL fans in USA may just have to stick to other unofficial live streaming sites as they wouldn’t be able to watch this coverage from YouTube.

BTW, the coverage also includes match highlights, interview of the man-of-the match player for that day, all wickets, top sixes of the match,award ceremony, pitch report etc.

Google Webmaster Quiz For Fun

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Google Webmaster central has today announced that it’s going to conduct a fun and educational quiz for the interested webmasters.The quiz consists of 40 basic questions on topics that every single webmaster should know for successful SEO.

Of course, some questions and answers seem funny, ultimately it’s fun answering those questions.

Quiz will be open till Wednesday, January 27 at 5PM PST.Go take the quiz and If you get them right, as kept in as am options for one of those question, Do the Google dance.Answers to the questions in the quiz will be posted in the Webmaster Central blog after Jan 27.What more? if you are the top scorer of the quiz, your username will be posted in the Google Webmaster Central blog post.That’s lot of free publicity !!

Link: Take the Google Webmaster Quiz

Webmaster Quiz Screen shot

Sshh….Don’t reveal the answers at least until Jan 27 !!

What Search Engines Have To Say About Themselves !! [Just For Fun]

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I got the idea of posting this post after seeing a funny picture of Google suggestions for Twitter at this page.I wanted to know what these search engines think about themselves (or at least suggest us), that would the next funniest thing to know.I went ahead using "Search Suggestions’ feature that all the major search engines launched sometime back, and took the screen shots of the major 3 search engines Google, Bing and Yahoo..GBY, the great 🙂

Check out the results yourself..

Google thinks about Google

Bing about Bing

Yahoo about Yahoo

Looks funny, isn’t it 🙂

New Feature in Orkut: Auto-Magic Groups

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Orkut has launched another new feature called “Auto-Magic Groups”.

Auto-Magic Groups automatically suggests friend groups (to filter updates) and suggests labels for them too.Just like friend suggestions that are coming in Orkut off late, you can either accept the suggestions or you may just ignore them.

orkut beta Logo

As you can see in the below screen shot, a link called “edit groups” will appear at the right corner of the ‘Friend updates’ tab.If you click ‘edit groups’ link, it will open all existing groups (that you have created) plus new groups suggested by orkut.You can further customize them from there.

This is what Orkut engineers have to say about this new feature in orkut blog.

This new feature makes it easy to filter your friends’ updates based on relevant groups, right on your orkut homepage, so now you can easily see only the updates from a specific group of people at a time. Try it out by selecting a group from the "groups" drop-down menu on your homepage!

automagic groups in Orkut

This feature I guess initially available to few selected users and will soon be rolled out for all.