"Make pages for users, not for search engines," the Google Webmaster Guidelines say.Yet the top result in a search for German computer store Atelco - atelco a40 bochum - includes the potentially revealing word "GoggleBot" in the URL. Currently, Google indexed around 723,000 pages on Atelco's site which include the string "_gogglebot_21_". Clicking on the page will cause a redirect to another address. Stefan, who sent this in and blogged about it ,

InThemes.com is a directory for skins you can apply onto Google's personalized homepage. Google themselves have an iGoogle themes directory , but Sterling, who sent this in, says he created this as a theme developer who was "frustrated with the many shortcomings of Google's own theme directory,

Harry sent in a screenshot of what seems to be a new Google "onebox" he stumbled upon: direct code snippets. A onebox is a special Google result* that usually polls information from another Google search service, in this case, perhaps Google Code Search. On the other hand, it may also be possible that Harry is seeing something done by a browser extension, though that may not be very likely; I asked Harry and will add a follow-up in either case. [Thanks Harry !

A polemic movie critical of the Islam got removed from LiveLeak after the makers of the video hosting site apparently got threatened. "This is a sad day for freedom of speech on the net but we have to place the safety and well being of our staff above all else," the site announced. The short film, called Fitna and created by Dutch politician Geert Wilders, was showing a Muhammad drawing which circulated before,

Wired's Betsy Schiffman compiled a list of ex-Google employees doing their own start-ups now or joining companies... which may or may not become Google competition. From Vanessa Fox to Kevin Fox, Biz Stone to Evan Williams, Jess Lee and others. An "attack against the mother ship," as Henry Blodget called it. Then again, we might find that some of these spaceships may become assimilated, after all - i.e., Google buying those start-ups that turn out to be successful.

Google China has a new homepage, as the screenshot illustrates, showing more discoverable icons similar to other Google homepages in Asia. However, I don't know if this new one is the default for Chinese users at google.cn )where I don't see it(, or if Chinese users need to visit google.cn/webhp?hl=zh-CN )where it seems to be active all around the world(. An official Chinese Google blog post seems to suggest it's live for all in China.

Omnisio lets you paste in the URL of a YouTube video )among other video sites( and then crop the time slider to a specific part. You can then add more videos if you want, and publish the result to show to others - without even registering at the site, a cool approach. The site is fairly straightforward to use and all in all well done, albeit the editor interface is unnecessarily confusing*, and there seems to be a bit of a lack of available effects )like fade in/ fade out,

Google has this bit in their terms of service : <<You may not use the Services [defined as "Google's products, software, services and web sites"] and may not accept the Terms if ... you are not of legal age to form a binding contract with Google>> The oddity of this has been pointed out before : many states in the US require that you be 18 year or more to form a binding contract... hence Google does not allow many kids and teens to use their services! Now,

Street View data )those detailed panorama photos available for some US cities( is now also available as part of the Google Maps API*. The samples utilizing the GStreetviewPanorama object look interesting; for instance, you can embed an animated street view rotation in your blog, or )as the screenshot to the right shows( offer driving directions accompanied by panorama views . [Via Bret Taylor -> Google Maps API blog .

Bug Labs seems to have a very promising concept. The company allows you to order different hardware modules, like a camera, a screen, a touch sensitive device )some still in development( and so on. Then, you can stick these modules onto the base gadget, and via a Java-based programming environment, add your own functionality to the device. For instance,

Several of you have received spam in Google Calendar . That's right - an event, automatically added to the calendar, which contains a description starting with the usual scammy lines like "Dear Beloved, I am Mrs Katarzyna Stanislava ... I am married to Mr.Fred Chec who worked with Kuwait Embassy in the Netherlands for nine years before he died ..." etc. To prevent this from happening )and at the risk of angering Mrs Katarzyna Stanislava( you need to follow these steps,

YouTube now shows you some statistics for your videos. You can find this feature )called "YouTube Insight"( by logging in to your My Videos page , and then clicking the "About this video" buttons. As the official Google blog explains, uploaders can see "how often their videos are viewed in different geographic regions, as well as how popular they are relative to all videos in that market over a given period of time." I don't have any popular videos to test this,

Some have started to spot video ads on search result pages )Google pre-announced this a while ago(, like in a search for phone . I can't see it yet, but Google Operating System and Digital Inspiration have more. Ionut explains: <<Google uses plusboxes to show that there's a video ad that complements the text and labels them with messages like: "watch commercial", "watch demonstration", "watch testimonial".

The Google Docs document editor has a new menu )see video (, similar to the one spotted in a Google employee's presentation before. Instead of the tabs, the menu is now more traditional, along the lines of what people know from their typical desktop applications from years ago.

TechCrunch and Barrons.com report that Google has recommended a no vote against a proposed anti-censorship, as well as a human rights, shareholder proposal. The proposal titled Internet Censorship suggests Google should institute policies including the following minimum standards: <<1( Data that can identify individual users should not be hosted in Internet restricting countries, where political speech can be treated as a crime by the legal system.

Google Japan put up a special logo today. Franta Hejl sent this in and says )HTML'ified(: "The logo probably celebrates some anniversary of some very old Japanese computer which used logic units called parametrons )discovered by a Japanese(. It contains a customized parametron schema ... and the 'box' on the right is probably the computer..." The Googlified blog has a Google logo category where you can see the many other recent special doodles.

Private Facebook photos were exposed to the public through a simple URL edit, Associated Press and ReadWriteWeb report. The hole is now apparently closed. Similar cases have appeared before on other sites with photo hosting and sharing, like MySpace and SmugMug. Furthermore, as we found out, with a little workaround anyone can see what we understand is intended to be an employee-only Google network. Once in that network, you can then also view e.g.

The last time the Yahoo homepage saw a major overhaul was in May 2006. Now, another redesign moves the logo from the left side back into the middle again )Martin in the comments notes this was already rolled out for some time in UK/ Ireland(. Those looking for a more uncluttered homepage however still need to go to search.yahoo.com or google.com . Below is a bit of visual history of Yahoo's various layouts from the 1990s to today*.

You can use Google Trends , a tool to measure search query popularity over time, to measure internet memes . [Hat tip to Kevin Fox and Julian Missig at Friendfeed for the idea.

Google recently started to automatically adjust the search box when you enter longer queries. This won't happen as you type, but once you're on a search result page and you entered a longer query before, the box length is expanded up to a certain point*. Dealing with user input in such ways seems to be a good pattern. For instance, when you enter a longer comment in the originally one-row input box over at Friendfeed.com, it will instantly expand to a multi-row textarea.