The Google Webmaster Central Blog has a post about best practices to follow when moving your site from one domain to another without losing your Google rankings. Here are the main points: Test your processes by moving only one directory or subdomain first. Check to see whether those pages are appearing in Google's search results before moving your entire site. Don't just redirect all pages from your old site to the home page of your new site.

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,

On April 2nd, CNSNews reported that Indonesian authorities asked YouTube to take down the movie Fitna by Geert Wilders. Google's YouTube rejected this, arguing YouTube allows people "to express themselves and to communicate with a global audience." They said: <<The diversity of the world in which we live - spanning the vast dimensions of ethnicity, religion, nationality, language, political opinion, gender, and sexual orientation,

SanderQD in the forum started an interesting thread: show off your Google App Engine apps *. If you created something at appspot.com, please add your pointer and a description of the program. If you have a link to the source to share for others to take a look and learn, even better. [Thanks SanderQD!] *Also see the App Engine homepage .

A couple of iGoogle gadgets are now shareable , Google announced. This is similar to functionality already available in Google Docs, where you can also collaborate with others on documents if you want to. A list of all shareable gadgets - like sticky notes, or crossword puzzles - can be found in the Google Directory. As a gadget developer,

Anthony Klan at The Australian writes : <<Google Australia is expected within months to launch an application that will publish highly detailed, street-level photos of much of Australia, in a move that has drawn strong criticism from privacy advocates. Google's picture-snapping cars have been cruising Australia's suburbs since late last year, with pictures of thousands of homes expected to be uploaded to the internet with Street View's launch.

The deep web is a term referring to all the kinds of pages that are live on the web, but not indexed in search engines for some reason or other. For instance, traditionally search engines mostly follow links in HTML, but from what we know they don't understand JavaScript )yet( or submit forms. Now Google announced that they have started to experiment with submitting forms for some "high quality sites" by entering words picked from the site into the form's text boxes,

One thing that iGoogle doesn't currently allow you to do is move your tabs around to change the order of them. A quick Google search returns hundreds of pages where iGoogle users are asking how to do this. Until this feature is officially added, here's how you can do it yourself... Yesterday, Google added a feature to iGoogle which allows you to export and import your settings.

The Google Maps Street View feature has now been added as a tab to Google's 3D Warehouse, in case the model includes geo information. The Warehouse directory offers 3D models for Google SketchUp users and for integration into Google Earth. )These days, any other site can integrate Street View too, via the API .( Frank Taylor of the Google Earth Blog , who sent this in, says "this new tab is an excellent example of Google using their own tools in a smart way".

Google Maps China has put up a mini site showing the location of the Olympic torch that's currently being carried over the globe in preparation for the China Olympics. The mini site also links to Google Image search, mobile search, Google Earth, language tools, and coverage over at China's CCTV. When you click on the torch icon on the map an info box pops up with pictures*, videos from CCTV coverage, text, and related links.

Google.cn has a new feature for image searching : categories. The categories listed on the homepage roughly translate to life style, female celebrities, male celebrities, film & TV series, and games & manga . Click on any of them, and you'll be presented with a tabbed result view showing image thumbnails as well as further search queries. For instance, the sub-categories for life style are cars, fashion, gadgets, home & living, food , and collectibles .

Google half-way cancelled their SOAP API a while ago, but they now* offer a parametrized URL that returns a JSON data set . Google says this REST approach is useful for "Flash developers, and those developers that have a need to access the AJAX Search API from other Non-Javascript environments." This may be even simpler to use than the SOAP API, though I wonder how long )and how well( it's going to be working. Here's an example query: ajax.googleapis.

Just two days after the release, Google removed their main sample application for the new Google App Engine. HuddleChat.com is now showing the following message: <<Hi, a couple of our colleagues wrote Huddle Chat in their spare time as a sample application for other developers to demonstrate the power and flexibility of Google App Engine. We've heard some complaints from the developer community about it and because of that we've decided to take it down.

A nice URL: google.is/microsoft . )This is neither an easter egg nor reason for conspiracy theories though: ".is" is just the domain for Iceland, and it maps to URLs Google made accessible globally... like the "microsoft" one, which is an MS-specific search engine Google created years ago. E.g. google.is/unclesam or google.com/microsoft works just the same.( [Thanks Iwan U., Ionut , TomHTML , George R. and Colin!] [By Philipp Lenssen | Origin: Google.Is.Microsoft?

There's big and seemingly good news for web developers: Google released the Google App Engine . This invite-only service - you'll be added to a waitlist if you sign up now - aims to bring the benefits of the Google infrastructure to all developers. It's somewhat similar in spirit to Amazon's "Elastic Compute Cloud" efforts; instead of managing your own servers and worrying about scaling, upgrading and traffic spikes, Google says with the App Engine,

Citing "people familiar with the matter," Kevin J. Delaney at the Wall Street Journal writes: <<Yahoo Inc. is close to announcing that it plans to carry search advertising from Google Inc. as part of a test that could lead to a broader partnership )...( The short-term test, involving a very limited percentage of Yahoo's Web search queries, is designed for the two sides to evaluate the revenue potential of a broader search ad outsourcing arrangement.