Search Engine Optimizer Aaron Wall put up an extensive, multi-angled analysis of the worth of a top Google ranking . [Thanks Aaron! Disclosure: Aaron advertised his SEO Book here about a couple of years ago.] [By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: The Value of a Google #1 Ranking | Comments ] [Advertisement] Want to advertise here? Your ad will show in the blog and feed.

Google boss Eric Schmidt was interviewed by Maria Bartiromo of CNBC . Some excerpts from the longer transcript: On innovation and the next big thing << Eric Schmidt: I've always thought that the scariest piece of innovation is knowledge understanding and language translation. I don't understand how it works, but to watch a computer - literally watch it - read something in English, dissect what it's about,

A couple of days ago I received the first couple of copies of Google Apps Hacks * from O'Reilly and today, the book is fully live on Amazon, too! It's very exciting for me, as this book project was spanning around a year, with about half of that in preparation, and the other half in writing of the book ) in Google Docs (. Google Apps Hacks features tips and tricks evolving around not search but the "Google office" consisting of such programs as Gmail, Google documents,

Google in the US is currently promoting a new "artist themes" section for iGoogle via a special logo and text below the search box. IGoogle is the name of Google's personalized homepage, and as it allows skinning with special background graphics and so on, this directory offers works by artists like Jeff Koons, Coldplay, Robert Mankoff, Dolce & Gabbana, Akira Isogawa, Anne Geddes and more who Google says collaborated with them.

Google is planning to map not only the sky and land masses )Google Mars, Moon, Earth, Google Maps and so on(, but - according to a report by News.com - also aims to map the oceans : <<The company has assembled an advisory group of oceanography experts, and in December invited researchers from institutions around the world to the Mountain View, Calif., Googleplex. There, they discussed plans for creating a 3D oceanographic map, according to sources familiar with the matter.

Google Docs received a couple of updates . For instance, you can now create custom views onto your documents by saving advanced searches, which will then be displayed in the folder pane under a "Saved searches" label*. To save a search, click "Show search options" in Google Docs and perform a search; afterwards, click on "Save this search" and give the search a custom name.

On a Monday, the 28th of April 2003, this blog saw its first post. So happy birthday! Like then, today I'm sitting in an internet cafe on vacation )back then in Malaysia, but now in the Netherlands(. That first post, by the way, was not about Google, but just consisted of a couple of pointers to movie trailers. However, preceding the blog post there were a couple of Google and search-related articles at the technology section of www.outer-court.com )consequently,

Google recently revived their domain information onebox. Enter e.g. whois google.com to find a special link referring you to domain info from domaintools.com. But, as Beussery.com found out, DomainTools is selling ads on their site which use a non-"nofollowed" anchor link wrapped around image ads , with the link pointing to e.g. a vpslink.com sub-page and the alt text reading e.g. "Cheap VPS Hosting". And this may well be against Google's own webmaster guidelines,

Many Chinese are currently reportedly angered at France for an attack against a wheelchair-bound Olympic torch bearer that took place in France, as well as Paris awarding honorary citizenship to the current Dalai Lama of the Tibetan Buddhists... so some people in China wanted to boycott French hypermarket chain Carrefour. And now, a search for 家乐福 )Carrefour( in Google.cn does not show any of the 6+ million results it shows in Google.com - instead,

Google researchers at a web conference in Beijing announced they work on some kind of PageRank specifically aimed at images . Called VisualRank, the technology was so far only applied to a smaller test set of images, as apparently applying it to all images Google indexed would be too computing-intensive )even arguably the world's largest super-computer can't do everything imaginable yet(. According to the New York Times yesterday,

Popular Mechanics interviewed Udi Manber , a Google vice president of engineering responsible for "core search," as Google says. Udi argues search and ranking results is "about getting lots of signals and putting them all together," adding that signals from people are the best signals. "Our goal is very simple," Udi says, "We want to return to the user the answer that they need." Asked about Google's separation of organic result and ads on result pages,

It looks like Google is preparing to bring their panorama photos as part of Google Maps to Europe. Above photo was taken by DNAKiller in Milan, who posted it along with other photos in the forum saying, "This morning, on my motorbike ... What a strange car, seemes like a google one ... and it was!" The icon on the car is the same as Google Street View icon. TomHTML comments on another photo set from Rome, saying that the license plate is Italian too. At the moment,

Google Video redesigned their US homepage again; above, you can see the past designs of Google Video that led to the current one. The service started out as a video-free search service for stills and captions from TV, then became a video storage & sales site, and since last year, is a meta video search engine. The latest design recommends a couple of "hot videos," which play in a left-side player if you click on them.

Google News added a quotes feature, they announced . Search for a name of a person, say Marissa Mayer , and above the news results you may find a gray speech bubble box showing a quote and its source. Click on the linked name below the speech bubble, and you'll be dropped to a page listing numerous of such speech bubbles containing quotes )including the ability to search through the quotes(.

The Dolores Labs offer to help you get Amazon's Mechanical Turk work for your needs, and they set up a couple of interesting crowd intelligence experiments on their blog . )One of their experiments reminded of the CHI image sorting I discussed here before we had Mechanical Turk; another of their experiments used my Cover Browser as image source, a nice surprise!( Mechanical Turk, as you may know, is Amazon's structured,

Someone who claims to have worked as a software engineer for the Google AdWords Report Center wrote a blog post detailing why he quit Google . The post mentions a great many benefits and joys of working at Google, but then also goes into problems like agile start-up mentality vs big company settings. Digital Hobbit also writes about the problems of perhaps being assigned to a task you're not excited about,

ComScore released an overview of search engine usage in Russia . According to the study, which excludes traffic from internet cafes and mobile phones as well as users below the age of 15, Yandex is the leading search property with 47.4% of the share of searches, "Google sites" are second at 31.2%, and Rambler Media is third at 9.7%.

Google hosts what might be the world's biggest supercomputer owned by a single company*; rather than a single machine, it's a dispersed network made of smaller machines, though. Now Pingdom )a neat paid service that can alert you when your site is down( put together a map of Google data centers based on approximate information from the unofficial Google Data Center FAQ . Pingdom writes, "If you include data centers that are under construction,

Orkut released a mobile version of their homepage at m.orkut.com )you can view it on the desktop too(, as the Inside Orkut blog reports. Contained within the mobile site is a reduced version of the default Orkut, including features like Scraps, Updates from friends, an alphabetic list of your friends, your profile and more. In other recent Orkut news, AFP reports that Brazilian authorities ordered Google to hand over 3,

The Firefox extension Stylish allows you to easily load homemade stylesheets in your browser, to be applied to specific websites. These custom stylesheets are then able to change a couple of colors or font sizes... or deliver a full-featured redesign of an application. One such complete redesign is offered for Gmail by Globex Designs. Called Gmail Redesigned *, it reformats the whole display into a darker, more beveled design,