- Google services now available at your hosting control panel
- The 2010 tax season story, as told by Google search
- Google Follow Finder: Find some sweet tweeps
- More love for our multilingual Toolbar users
Posted: 15 Apr 2010 07:31 AM PDT Last year, we announced the program that enabled hosting companies to integrate Google services into their platforms for easy access to their customers. Several hosting companies have adopted the program since then, and thousands of websites have benefited from configuring services like AdSense, Custom Search and Webmaster Tools. Today, we've taken an additional step to improve access to these tools. Parallels, a leading provider of control panel software for hosting companies, has integrated Google Services for Websites into Parallels Plesk Panel, used by millions of website owners globally to manage their sites.  Any hosting provider using Plesk 9.5 can now enable Google Services for Websites for their customers. Website owners generate more traffic to their websites by optimizing them using Webmaster Tools. They can engage their users with inline Web Elements, including maps, news, videos and conversations. Custom Search and Site Search provide Google-quality search on their websites for better user retention. AdSense helps website owners monetize their sites with relevant advertising. And besides providing these valuable services to millions of customers, hosting companies can also generate additional revenues through referral programs. More information is on the Google Services for Websites page. If you are a hoster using Plesk, please contact Parallels for more information.     |
Posted: 15 Apr 2010 06:00 AM PDT Today, April 15, is the due date for federal tax returns in the U.S. Now that everyone's submitted their taxes in on time (we hope!) we wanted to take a look back at the last few months and tell the story of this year's tax season through Google search. Spoiler alert — we're starting our tax season search story at the end. As the filing deadline has approached over the last few days and weeks, we've seen a flurry of search interest about taxes and tax related topics. Compared to search volume from the final week of the 2009 tax season, we've seen significant increases in searches for terms like [file taxes] and [tax filing extension]. As of late last week, searches for [file taxes] had increased by 16% from last year. This spike in search interest leading up to April 15 prolongs a pattern of search trends that we've seen for the last several years; from 2006 to 2009, searches for [file taxes] rose an average of more than 51% between April 8 and April 15.  Perhaps less expected than this final peak is the sizable spike in search volume that we see several months before April 15, around the time that W-2 forms become available. This occurs in early February and, as you can see below, there's a noticeable increase in searches such as [get W2 form] that are related to the beginning of the tax-filing. In general, tax season search trends look pretty similar each year, but if we dive deeper, there are lots of mini-trends to explore, often triggered by unforeseen and/or unique world events. For example, we saw a flurry of search interest following the passage of the healthcare reform bill in March. The sharp increase in searches for terms like [taxes healthcare] and [healthcare tax increase] likely reflected curiosity about the implications of the new law on tax filings. We saw a similar trend following the tragic earthquake in Haiti. The outpouring of support for victims in Haiti generated increased interest in the details of charitable donations as they related to taxes; searches queries like [haiti donation tax] were noticeably high in January. Unfortunately, the implications of heightened unemployment levels were also top of mind this year, and we saw an interest in the effects of joblessness on tax payments and tax filing. Queries like [unemployed taxes] and [unemployment tax refund] were noticeably elevated compared to 2009 search volume, in particular around the season's first spike.  Hopefully, we've shed some light on what your fellow taxpayers were interested in over the course of tax season and, via search trends, provided a sense of the different types of events that might affect taxes and tax filing. Until next year!    |
Posted: 14 Apr 2010 01:46 PM PDT This morning we announced a replay feature in real-time search that helps you search the public archive of updates from Twitter. Now, we have more Twitter news from today's Chirp Conference. We've just released a new experimental service in Google Labs called Google Follow Finder to help you expand your Twitter network. With Google Follow Finder, simply enter your Twitter account name and you'll see a list of people you might be interested in following. You can also get interesting suggestions by entering other Twitter user names. Here's what it looks like:  If you see someone you want to follow, just click "Follow on Twitter," log in, and they'll be added to your following list in Twitter. This integration is based on Twitter's new @anywhere frameworks, which make it easy for any site to add Twitter functionality. We're using the frameworks to provide dynamic information about Twitter accounts and one-click following. The lists in Google Follow Finder are generated using public following and follower lists on Twitter. For example, if you follow CNN and the New York Times on Twitter, and most people who follow CNN and the New York Times also tend to follow TIME, we'll suggest TIME as a "Tweep you might like." The list of "Tweeps with similar followers" is simply a list of accounts with similar follower lists to yours. We hope you find some sweet tweeps.    |
Posted: 14 Apr 2010 09:28 AM PDT (Cross-posted from the Google Translate Blog) Entire page translations are great if you have little knowledge of a given language. However, if you're a multi-lingual user who just needs certain words translated, hovering is a lot quicker than searching word-by-word on Google Translate. Here is an example of the word "vitesse" (speed) translated from French to German:  The new Word Translator feature is available for Internet Explorer and Firefox. And if you use Google Chrome, automatic page translation is already built in, and we're working to build more Translate features. We hope this helps you browse pages in non-native languages faster, regardless of your language proficiency. Install the latest Toolbar version and give it a try!    |
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