Google announced they improved their handing of Flash files in search results ; they say they now have a better ability "to index textual content in SWF files of all kinds," including buttons, gadgets and so on. Google were already able to find and read Flash files to some extent, but now, to quote them )my emphasis(: <<We've developed an algorithm that explores Flash files in the same way that a person would, by clicking buttons, entering input, and so on.

Google just announced they are ending their AdSense referrals program. In the past - and until August 2008 when this will officially stop - AdSense referrals allowed you as a webmaster to include links from different kinds of products; health, real estate, shopping, computers, travel, Google-suggested products like Firefox or the Google Pack download, and many more. When a user to your site bought something via that link, you'd get a commission of the sale.

Seero.com allows users to mash and sync videos with a Google map. One user mapped a car chase scene from the movie Bullitt with Steve McQueen: to the left you'll see the video, and to the right the related San Francisco locations. )If you're wondering why there's no jet fighters or transforming robots in this car chase, note the movie's from 1968.( [Via Boing Boing .

This video has over 2.7 million views on YouTube. And over 23.000 comments. It's by YouTube sensation Fred, 14-year old Lucas Cruikshank's fictional 6-year old with "anger management issues", as his channel explains - and this is by far not his most popular video. Some other of his videos, done in a high-pitched voice, fast cuts, and about lots of teen problems, are titled "Fred Gets Bullied", "Fred Loses His Meds", "Fred Goes to the Dentist",

The New York Times reports Google will be teaming up with the creator of the US cartoon series "Family Guy" to distribute short original episodes of a show called "Seth MacFarlane's Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy."* The first news of this came in last year already. Instead of creating a new microsite where people can view these episodes, in this model the new cartoons will be shown in AdSense spots, those automated Google ads third-party webmasters include on their sites.

The Chinese Google Rebang site - a listing of hot searches as well as a general info directory - provides a new research tool for prospective university students in China. The tool is called Gaokao Zhuanti , which can be roughly translated to "Special Subject: College Entrance Examinations." I asked native speaker Aaron Liang from Canada to provide more background info about this, and he says: <<When the high school students in China graduate,

Tonight, Spain will be playing against Germany in the European foot)as-in-soccer(ball championships final. For this special event - people in Europe are often found partying on the streets when their team wins - Google launched a logo doodle contest a while ago, and today presents the winner on the homepage of Google homepages of Switzerland, Austria and Germany . The logo was selected from 3,800 competitors and received over 300,000 votes, Google says,

Embedded comments, and star ratings Google's Blogger has a couple of new features available at the special Blogger Draft site. Among these changes are: Star ratings : Let your visitors vote from one to five stars. You will then be able to see the average rating for a particular post. You can find this feature at your Layouts page; click Edit at your Blog Posts element, and check the Show Star Ratings box. The ability to put the comments form embedded below the post.

A couple of minutes ago an interesting attempt to phish for Google account credentials made it to my inbox. It had me blink my eyes because while I suspected phishing there were some things with this one that had me check twice to see how it's done, as things looked quite official on the surface. As you may know, phishing emails are sent out by abusers to make the recipient in some way reply with their password or click through to enter their password,

Google used to pride themselves about how word-of-mouth spread popularity of their search engine, and to this day they're doing remarkably little traditional advertising. However, after their ad campaign in Russia now another ad campaign in China has been spotted. Xujie in the forum posted photos from a DWGoogle.cn article , with one pic shown above which includes Google's super-short "g.cn" domain.

)Yes, for the record it's a joke !( [By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Grassroots Movement to Elect... | Comments ] [Advertisement] Google books at eBay : background info on Google, AdWords, AdSense, Blogger and more.

Drake Bennett at The Boston Globe has a long article about how Google managed to remain "fundamentally likable" , as he says, while today being "a behemoth, with more than 15,000 employees and a market value as big as Coca-Cola and Boeing combined". He mentions concerns that even provided Google sticks to its privacy policy and handles the sensitive information we feed it sensibly indeed, "government might compel it to turn over search information.

The New York Times says that Google News, Google's semi-automated mainstream and blog news indexing service, is experiencing slow growth : <<... traffic growth is sluggish. With 11.4 million users in May, Google News ranked No. 8 among news sites, far behind Yahoo News, which was No. 1 with 35.8 million visitors, according to Nielsen Online. Its growth rate of 10 percent over the last two years is far slower than those of most other large news Web sites.

Reuters today writes: <<Google Inc was named on Monday in a trade secrets lawsuit alleging that the company's business software unit copied a tiny start-up's tool for moving customers off of Microsoft software onto Google's. LimitNone LLC filed a complaint in an Illinois circuit court alleging that Google at first began promoting the smaller firm's tool for migrating Microsoft Outlook customers to Gmail, then copied the idea and went into competition with it.

Google just went live with Map Maker , a program that makes certain regions around the world - like Jamaica, Iceland, Bahamas, Grenada and more - editable by everyone )everyone with a Google account, that is(. "Map Maker allows you and your peers to add, edit and moderate most features you see on maps including roads, lakes, parks, points of interest, businesses, cities and localities," Google writes in their blog post .

Google Japan* launched a microsite titled One Green Project to help prevent global warming, and promote some ways of using Google's tools like iGoogle. The page seems to contain tips for reducing CO 2 emissions. Can anyone who speaks Japanese explain more? [Via the Google Japan blog . The screenshot shows a bug I'm seeing on Google Maps.] *I'm not sure if this is also rolled out for other countries?

Worth1000 started a little photoshopping contest to show what things would look like if Google ruled the world )arguably, they already rule quite a bit of it, at least online(. I like the One Google dollar bill... [Via Google Watch Blog . Image by Hbales.

You can now enter a domain into Google Trends and switch to the Websites tab to get traffic information. Use a comma between domains to see comparative stats, as in mashable.com, techcrunch.com . Note Google's guess of the daily unique visitors only works for some websites, and you also won't get absolute numbers. Google on their help page explains: <<Trends for Websites combines information from a variety of sources, such as aggregated Google search data,

This is the story of Russell, whose AdWords campaigns fell prey to a phishing scam. Russell advertises one of his websites )WorldLabel.com( using AdWords, Google's program that will launch advertisements on search results and third-party websites using AdSense. Russell is not a large-scale advertiser, so he only had a single campaign set up, he tells me. Seemingly out of the blue, Russell one day noticed how a lot of odd,

When you search Google for gay , you will see special rainbow colors next to the AdWords ads to the right side. Rainbow colors are a globally recognized gay symbol and there's Pride Week coming up. On a related note, Google also sometimes dresses up AdWords for holidays , and they've also had their own wagons at gay parades before. Within Google, gay employees call themselves " gayglers ." [Thanks Michelle L.!