I pretty much remember when talks about Google launching its own store for web apps started circulating before.  But Google remained mum about it until now.  The Google Apps Marketplace has been launched and is now open for business.So what’s this all about really?  According to the Official Google Blog, the Google Apps Marketplace is a new online store for…

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Google Opens Apps Marketplace for Business

I know it’s a long shot. I can’t compete with Topeka and have the town selectmen rename our little town Google. I really can’t offer Google much in the way of enticement to bring their broadband experiment out to the sticks of rural New England. But I nominated the two towns that form [...]

Garett Rogers reported Tuesday on the launch of the Google Apps Marketplace. Over on ZDNet Education, I had mused about the educational implications of the upcoming “App Store” for Google Apps, given our heavy use of the Apps for Education product.
Well now it’s here and I have to admit that I’m excited. [...]

Google tonight launched what they are calling the Google Apps Marketplace — a great way to build integrate and sell applications to the same users that are currently using Google Apps.
It will be interesting to see what route developers decide to take as far as monetizing their apps. Is it going to [...]

While we normally don’t comment on market share fluctuations that occur in places other than America, some recent changes in the UK may bear mentioning.  According to the AT Internet Institute, Google’s share of the search market slipped by 1.6 percent between January and February.

That’s a significant amount.  Indeed, as the slightly upsized figure below shows (sorry for any blurriness), if Ask and AOL had suffered similar losses, they’d have been wiped out, hitting zero.

Of course, that didn’t happen.  Instead, both Yahoo and Bing benefited from Google’s dip.  Yahoo gained a not-bad 0.6 percent, and Bing increased its share by an even-better 0.7 percent.

Google’s still in an extremely dominant position, but given that Microsoft’s about to spend $2 billion on Bing commercials in the UK, these changes are noteworthy.  Microsoft might not be throwing its money away, as some people have speculated; there’s now the possibility that it could extend or accelerate this growth trend.

We’ll be sure to write again about the UK search market next month if anything out of the ordinary happens.  In the meantime, it should be interesting to see how those Bing commercials are received.

It looks like Google may be ready to wade into another controversial censorship vs. availability of services situation.  A high-ranking corporate representative has welcomed the U.S. Treasury’s decision to allow the exportation of online communications tools to Cuba, Iran, and Sudan.

According to Frank Jordans, Bob Boorstin, Director of Corporate and Policy Communications at Google, said during a human rights meeting in Geneva, "This is a great accomplishment.  We are hopeful this will help people like yourselves in this room and activists all over the world take a small step down what is certainly a long road ahead."

What’s more, Boorstin indicated that Google isn’t going to just sit on the sidelines, wishing everyone well.  Boorstin reportedly "said the Web search company would now be able to offer some of its other products in those countries," including Google Earth, Google Talk, and Picasa.

This is an interesting turn of events, considering that China recently threatened to leave China over free speech issues.  If Google follows through on Boorstin’s remarks, the search giant’s sure to face fresh questions over whether it’s more interested in profits than human rights.

We’ll of course report on any further developments as they occur.

How many of you use Google’s translation tools? They’re built into Google Docs, Gmail, and the Google translate website. With support for 52 languages, the tools are incredibly powerful in an increasingly flat world.
While only human translators can really capture the nuance and connotation of human speech, Google translate is the premier online tool [...]

By and large, Google Maps is great, providing well-plotted directions and up-to-date contact information on demand and free of charge.  But slight inaccuracies persist, and to fix this problem, Google will now allow people to reposition markers using Street View instead of just maps and satellite images.

Perhaps this sounds familiar: you type an address into Google Maps, switch to Street View, and find yourself staring at a Wal-Mart instead of an Italian restaurant.  Then you spend five minutes clicking up and down a street to locate the correct spot.  Frustrating, right?

Now there’s an easy fix.  A post on the LatLong Blog suggested, "When you find a place that is in a wrong location, click on the marker and get an infowindow open as what you did before. . . .  Click on the ‘edit’ link, and then click the ‘Move marker’ link in the updated infowindow."

After that, "You’ll see two jumping markers in the map and the Street View image appear, which means both of them can be dragged.  When you drag the marker on the map to a new position, the marker inside the panorama will be updated correspondingly, and vice versa."

This should greatly increase the accuracy of Street View as people tie markers to establishments’ entrances.  And that’ll benefit users in addition to any businesses that might otherwise lose potential customers due to poor directions.

Welcome to another edition of ‘7 Days of Search and Social’ – so, how are we now? Last week was a pretty busy one out in the trenches, especially considering that SMX was on (generally slows the blogging world). I do suggest looking into today’s top story as it’s one that seems to have slipped by the radar… interesting stuff.…

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Weekly Search & Social News: 03/09/2010

Google has launched two new experiments in Webmaster Tools Labs. These are "Fetch as Googlebot-Mobile" and "Create your Sidewiki page owner entry."

"After we launched Fetch as Googlebot, many users with mobile-specific sites asked if we could provide the ability to fetch their pages as Googlebot-Mobile. We thought it was a great idea, and added it as an option to our Fetch as Googlebot feature. We have two mobile options: cHTML (primarily used for Japanese sites), and XHTML/WML," says Webmaster Tools Product Manager Sagar Kamdar.

"After Sidewiki launched webmasters kept asking, ‘How can I put a Sidewiki page owner entry on all pages of my site quickly?’ With the feature that we’re introducing today, you can now create these page owner entries directly within Webmaster Tools for any site you own," says Kamdar.

Google’s Webmaster Tools Labs launched last October. Other tools within it include the original "Fetch as Googlebot" and "Malware details," which provides snippets of code that exist on pages deemed to be malicious by Google.

Investment banking and securities firm Goldman Sachs is more or less giving up on Google’s Nexus One.  A note Goldman Sachs published this week indicates that it’s cut its 2010 sales forecast by a whopping 71.4 percent.

As reported by the Wall Street Journal, the note stated, "We previously estimated that Google might sell 3.5 mn Nexus One units in 2010."  Now, after seeing some data from Flurry, "We forecast that Google sells 1.0 mn Nexus One units in FY2010 . . ."

Goldman Sachs doesn’t have much confidence that Google will be more successful in the future, either.  The firm believes Google will sell additional devices as it "rolls out a second Nexus handset, markets it more aggressively, and makes it available offline," but nothing like 3.5 million was mentioned.

Instead, Goldman Sachs predicted "that Google sells 2 mn handsets per year in 2011 and future years."

This is fairly bad news for the search giant, given that the Nexus One was supposed to make so much of a splash.  The online-only sales model and lack of advertising may have been meant to save Google huge amounts of money, too.

The Wall Street Journal has the Blogosphere abuzz with rumors of Google testing a new set-top box with Dish Network, which would allow people to search television and online video content like YouTube. Google has given the usual "we don’t comment on rumor or speculation" statement on the subject.

According to the WSJ, only a small number of Google employees and their families are testing the box, which runs on Google software (Android is implied), and lets users create personalized lineups of shows. The testing has reportedly been going on since last year. Aside from these things, the details are sketchy at best, which can only mean one thing: let the wild speculation commence.

Assuming that this service ever comes to fruition, it could open up a lot of new opportunities for Google to dominate or at least heavily compete in areas in which it isn’t dominating already. Rather than doing too much speculation myself, allow me to just list some questions and open this up for discussion:

- What if Google gets exclusive deals with Dish Network as well as other major satellite and cable providers? Google TV Ads already has deals in place to provide ads on close to a hundred cable networks.

- What if Google makes more deals to boost its movie rental selection on YouTube? How big of a player would that make YouTube in the movie rental space? This will be something to keep an eye on with or without this box as Internet-ready TVs permeate the mainstream.

- Will Yahoo and Bing be looking at opportunities like the Google/Dish Network box? Are they already?

- What would widespread integration of web search and television mean for TV advertising?

In the not-too-distant future, we may start to really see TV advertising getting more targeted, which has long been the medium’s biggest downfall. People often record shows simply so they don’t have to watch the commercials. What if the ads were targeted at the individuals watching the TV? What if they were relevant? Search advertising paved the way for this kind of relevancy, and may just be a key to the future of TV advertising in a world where viewers want their programming on demand.

There I go off on that speculation. This all sounds good in theory, but a lot of puzzle pieces have to fall in place, and a lot of stars have to align for this to become a reality. Deals must be made, and money must be spent. That’s not to say the concept is far-fetched.

Consider that advertisers are finding online to be a better option than even the super bowl in some cases. This past Super Bowl, Pepsi skipped a TV spot for the first time in 23 years. TV is going to have to adapt.

Tell us what you think.

A topic that has been discussed extensively by some people in the SEO community is the notion that having a W3C compliant web site is either critical to SEO or it’s not.  Most recently, Edward Lewis and I debated back and forth on Twitter, with Edward holding firm to his long-standing position that compliance is necessary…

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W3C Validation for SEO – Myth and Reality

Recently the company I worked for made a big decision to rebrand and with it came the dreaded domain name change. We are also having a new website being built so another SEO favourite URL’s. This article will share my leanings from my sleepless nights and epic amount of research into making sure it didn’t go…

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Migrating to a New Domain and URL Structure – My Learnings