Google Wallet: App that will make Payment via your Cellphone

Recently Web Giant Google has introduced Google Wallet, a mobile application that can tap, save and pay by your mobile phone and NFC (near field communication).

You can now use your phone as wallet. Main aim behind this application is to overpass the gap between offline and online shopping. This application will help in improving shopping experience for both businesses and customers. Anyone can directly shop and pay from mobile phone and also save some money. On the other hands businesses get enough time to offer coupons and loyalty offers to their customers.

You can store your coupons, credit cards, loyalty offers, gift offers etc with this application. You can also earn points and redeem coupons with your phone.

Read what Google have mentioned about this application:

"Google Wallet is an Android app that makes your phone your wallet. It stores virtual versions of your existing plastic cards on your phone. Simply tap your phone to pay and redeem offers using near field communication, or NFC."

Definitely this application will give a start to mobile shopping and Google will do much more in future to make it more convenient and excited.

Visit http://www.google.com/wallet to know more about this exciting mobile app.

Algorithm Change Launched: Google’s Fight with Spam Starts

Today the head of Google’s Webspam team, Matt Cutts has announced a new algorithm change for Google. It will help in detecting and reducing web spam from Google’s Search Results. All websites which have low original content or copied content will be affected by this change. They can see a major change in their site rankings in search results.

Cutts mentioned this algo change was approved at weekly quality launch meeting happened on last Thursday and launched this week.

Cutts has announced it on his blog and also posted it at Hacker News. According to his blog “slightly over 2% of queries change in some way, but less than half a percent of search results change enough that someone might really notice. The net effect is that searchers are more likely to see the sites that wrote the original content rather than a site that scraped or copied the original site’s content.”

Cutts said they have re-designed a new document-level classifier, which will easily detect spammy & repeated words. This is the start of Google’s fight towards increasing web spam.

Google Shows Competitor Links For YouTube Videos

Google has started displaying links to various search engines and video sites in its search results. But these links will be displayed just for music-related searches.

Try searching “Green Day” in Google, you will see the three video results from YouTube. Each YouTube Video will now include additional links for that video on other sites on web; they can be video sites or search engines.

In the below example, you can see results for Metacafe, MySpace and Dailymotion.

On January 14, 2011 Google has announced about better video results for music related searches. According to Official Google Blog, Google scans entire video content on the web and then its algorithm ranks the better sources of each video. Google has grouped results of same song instead of repeated results.

So, now you can choose among various video sites to see your favorite song.

Google Maps User Interface Changes

Google is experimenting new changes for users in Google Maps. Google is continuously trying with new controls for navigation. Various Map features like white buttons for selecting maps or/and satellite view, drop down list for viewing buzz updates, photos and many other geo-taggable features will go away very soon. They will be replaced with stylish and graphical icons when you hover the mouse over them.

You can see many more features in “more” column. Every option from this “more” button includes some changes & new features added to Google Maps.

Recently, the Google Maps team has announced Google Hotpot activity integration into Google Maps. Google Hotpot is also available as iPhone Application. Maps has also introduced 45° imagery feature, which include high-resolution images of locations near United States. Google will also cover some social space more, as buzz is already integrated.

Browse Google Maps to Find Friends Hotpot Activity

Google Hotpot is a local recommendation engine where you and your friends can discover, rate and review your favorite places.

On January 11, Google has made an announcement that Google Maps home page will now show the hotpot activities.

To see it, just login to your Google Account and visit Google Maps. You will see that the left panel which used to blank formerly; is now showing latest hotpot activities of your friends. It shows how effectively Google is utilizing this space in Google Maps Home Page.

You can also see the friend’s hotpot activities, when you search on Google Places.

But this new feature is in its beta version. You can see some changes along with time. Visit Google Maps today to find the places recommended by your friends.

Google Partners with Edgenet for High Quality Product Data

Google has taken an initiative to show high quality product data, it will help you for finding products offline in local stores. Google has also recently launched a new shopping website named Boutiques.com. You can browse more products with additional improvements in Google Product Search. There are also product listing ads which are open for US advertisers since last November.

In short, there are lot of improvements in Google Product Search and Product Advertising by Google. Now you can get more detailed data through Google’s Partnership with Edgenet.

Edgenet is a leading product content collection company to drive first time offering to manufacturers and suppliers. Edgenet has described its relationship with Google in following words…

“This service delivers complete and correct product information to help consumers find the products they’re looking for on Google.com and Google Product Search…….. Ensuring that shoppers have access to accurate and complete product data will improve the online shopping experience, and help consumers, retailers and suppliers”

This product data quality will ensure product content meets and standards which are set by Google. You can simple check a product page to find more information.

 

This high quality product data has also impacted organic search results on Google. A search result page for Canon digital camera will now look like below.

You can see the product search images in the center of the page while product listing ads are on the right of the page.

I am sure that this improved Product Search will help you in finding your product quickly.

Google Architecture Overview

In this post, I will tell you how the whole Google Search Engine system works.  You can see the complete Google functioning in below figure.

This is a high level Google Architecture; several distributed crawlers are used for downloading web pages from the web. URLserver sends list of urls to the crawlers. Then crawler fetches the web pages and sends them to the storeserver. Then the storeserver compresses the fetched web pages and stores them in a repository. Each web page has a associated id number which is called docID. docID is assigned when any url is parsed from a web page. The indexer part reads the repository, uncompresses and parses the documents. The documents are converted into hits (i.e. set of word occurrences).  The indexer then distributes these hits into various set of barrels.

The indexer parses all the links in web pages and stores important information in an anchors file. The file contains all information regarding a link.

The URLresolver takes data from anchors file & convert relative urls into absolute urls, then turn them into docIDs. URLresolver also generates links database, which is used to calculate page rank of all documents.

The sorter takes barrelts data and resorts them by wordID and create an inverted index.

The sorter generates list of wordIDs and offsets into an inverted index. A program called DumpLexicon takes this list together with the lexicon produced by the indexer and generates a new lexicon to be used by the searcher. The searcher is run by a web server and uses the lexicon built by DumpLexicon together with the inverted index and the PageRanks to answer queries.

Referred by: The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine

Holiday Update for Google Webmaster Tools

Google has announced new updates for Google Webmaster Tool. It was declared at Google Webmaster Central Blog on Dec 10. This update includes new modifications in “Links to your site” and “Search queries” features.

“Search Queries” Feature Update
Based on user feedback, Google has made some changes to its “Search Queries” section. User can now see the “Search Queries” data for individual pages of site. Now, when user visit “Top Queries” tab, he will find a new Tab named “Top Pages”. This “Top Pages” tab will provide impressions, clicks, CTR and position data for all the top pages of user’s website who are performing good on Google search results.

To see the queries along with their impressions and clicks, user can simply click on the individual page.

 User can also click on the specific query to see the detailed data.

A pie chart is also added for visual representation of the proportions of search type, traffic and its location.

“Links to your site” Feature Update
Google has introduced an “Intermediate Link” concept in which, if there is a link to user’s site that links to URL1 which further redirects to URL2. Then the link from URL1 to URL2 will be shown as an intermediate link. User can also see new “Download all links” option for all tables of “links to your site” feature.

Google is continuously upgrading its tools for providing better data to us. Hope you are pleased with that. Happy Holidays :)

Google eBookstore – An initiative to find great books online

Google Books was launched in 2004, and now we have new Google eBookstore.

On Dec 6, 2010 Google has introduced Google eBookstore for improved access to great and informational books. You can search more that 3 million eBooks from variety of devices including netbooks, laptops, tablets and smartphones. You can store, buy and read books in an organized manner just like you get systematic messages in Gmail.

You can search for the ebook at Google eBookstore and buy from any independent bookseller or any member of American Booksellers Association. You can either buy an ebook or can choose where to buy printed book.

Along with Google eBookstore, Google Books search will also available to all users.

New Google Earth 6 with more Reality

Yesterday, Google has released its latest version of Google Earth. Now you are able to explore your favorite place, plan a holiday trip and find your home with the help of more real tools.

Google Earth 6 has introduced two new features
1st Integrated Street View
2nd 3D Trees

Below is an overview of this new Google Earth.



Google has also improved historical image views that you can easily feel. For more information you can read Google’s LatLong blog.

Now Four Results from Same Domain - Google' Petits Fours

Recently Google has made a change to show more search results from a same domain. Google has made this change for certain type of queries. It will help you in getting improved search quality and speed.

Formerly, you can see a maximum of two results from the same domain. But from now you can see up to 4 results from the same domain (Google' Petits Fours).

Fox example if you search for net4india on Google, you will find 4 results including one main result and 3 other single line snippets for additional results.

Google will show these results only if it finds a site more relevant to the search query. It will allow you to directly browse the pages in which you are interested.