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Google is normally very secretive about its data centers. They recently posted a new video on its enterprise blog that gives a glimpse into the inner workings of its facilities. The video emphasizes security and environmental best practices. Some highlights from the video: Google builds its own customer servers. Google uses its own custom, stripped down version of Linux. It uses only a minimum set of packages. The facilities are … [Read more...]
Americans spent more time socializing on Facebook than searching with Google for the first time in August, and Yahoo edged out the search giant in monthly traffic, according to recent data from marketing research firm comScore. Users spent 41.1 billion minutes on Facebook in August, 39.8 billion minutes on Google, and 37.7 billion on Yahoo. Yahoo beat out Google in monthly traffic, with 179 million unique visitors to Google's 178.8 million. … [Read more...]
Google knows a lot about you and me. In an effort to become more transparent to users about how it collects information and to allow individuals to modify that information, Google has created the Google Dashboard. The Dashboard provides, in a central location, a place where users of Google services can see which Google services they use, change how they use them, and find out what information Google collects about their usage habits. This new … [Read more...]
Google has launched a new service through its Google Labs called Fast Flip, a visual version of Google News. Fast Flip is a visual browser of online publications, designed to give you a quick snapshot of what’s being blogged and talked about at many major news sources. Current sources include Esquire, BBC News, New York Times, TechCrunch, and Salon.com, in addition to about 35 other magazine, news, and general information sites that receive … [Read more...]
It can be tedious to manage multiple phone numbers—office phone, home phone, mobile phone, and any other numbers. Google's new Google Voice service can help. Google purchased GrandCentral Communications two years ago. That service has now been renamed Google Voice. For the last two years, only people who had a GrandCentral account were able to use the service. Google recently purchased over 1 million phone numbers and allowed a limited … [Read more...]
Google provides many tools that can help you understand Web searches. Google Insights provides you with all kinds of information about any keyword/phrase in which you are interested. You'll find out how searches for that keyword/phrase peak and ebb over time, where geographically that search is most popular, and what other keyword/phrases are used to conduct similar searches. For example, at the time of this writing, we tested the tool using … [Read more...]
One way to maximize your Web site’s visibility on Google is to understand what words people use to search for information. That’s just what the Google Trends tool does. It shows you the most popular searches on Google in any given hour, plus a list of related news articles and blog posts that support the rise and fall of the traffic surges. If any of them affects your business, you'll see it first here and will be able to react faster. You … [Read more...]
