Tag Archives: Google

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YouTube Highlights 3/3/2011

Posted: 03 Mar 2011 02:57 PM PST

This is the latest in our series of YouTube highlights. Every couple of weeks, we bring you regular updates on new product features, interesting programs to watch, and tips you can use to grow your audience on YouTube. Just look for the label “YouTube Highlights” and subscribe to the series. – Ed.

In past weeks, we’ve featured two more YouTube interviews with leaders through the World View program and seen more footage come in from across the Middle East as unrest there continues.

David Cameron and John Boehner on YouTube

In YouTube World View’s second interview, YouTube and Al Jazeera English sat down with British Prime Minister David Cameron. Ten thousand people submitted questions, and in the interview, the Prime Minister shared his thoughts on what should be done in Libya, and talked about increased taxes for banks in the U.K. and Britain’s role in Afghanistan.

And as the budget debate rages on the U.S. Capitol Hill, we asked viewers from across the U.S. and around the world to submit questions to Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH). The final interview will be posted to YouTube on Friday, March 4.

We’ll have another interview in the coming weeks—check YouTube World View for more details soon.

Join us on YouTube for Carnaval in Brazil

An estimated 100 million people travel to Brazil each year to experience Carnaval, the iconic celebration on the streets of Salvador, Bahia. This year, you can join the festivities on the Carnaval YouTube channel via computer or mobile phone. Watch live feeds of Salvador’s multi-day street fest from Thursday, March 3 through Tuesday, March 8. If you’re lucky enough to be there in person, find out how to buy a pass to Google’s street-side camarote (cabin) at the celebration at http://www.youtube.com/carnaval.

February’s “On The Rise” winner

After tens of thousands of votes, D-trix from theDOMINICshow has been named February’s “On The Rise” contest winner. He beat out tornado chasers, graphic artists and pop stars for the honor. When D-trix isn’t spoofing Justin Bieber, he’s dancing or teaching people how to rap. Congratulations!

Making YouTube seven times faster

To help you better enjoy all the great content that’s uploaded to YouTube every minute, we recently increased speed for uploads and playback. Google’s cloud computing capabilities help us process videos in chunks on different machines—making our video-processing seven times faster than in 2008.

Ad Blitz winner

Super Bowl ads are always a big draw of the game. This year, we added Super Bowl spots to the Ad Blitz gallery so you could vote for your favorites. More than 2.7 million votes were cast, and 3.5 million views took place on mobile devices. This year’s winner, Chrysler, was featured on the YouTube masthead for the Saturday following the game.

This week’s trends on YouTube

Here are a few recent highlights from YouTube Trends:

Britney Spears built up anticipation for her latest music video.


Dramatic footage poured in from across the Middle East: Libya, Iran, Algeria and Yemen.


A funny moment from “Family Feud” got “passed around.”


We’ll have another update for you in a couple of weeks. Until then, visit us at the YouTube Blog.

Posted by Serena Satyasai, Marketing Manager, The YouTube Team

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Google Becomes More Social And It’s Hurting Your Business …JeffBulla’s blog


Posted: 01 Mar 2011 01:47 PM PST

 Google Becomes More Social And It’s Hurting Your Business  http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/JeffbullassBlog/~3/ntwQ5-nKbC8/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

Conversations in bars and dinner parties about who is right or wrong are often solved by the smart phone being drawn from the pocket or handbag with a Tweet subsequent mobile search on “Lord Google” with the question being answered from Wikipedia or another website with authority. Problem solved… using a blunt mobile instrument without a fight breaking out at the bar or the tipping of wine into someone’s lap.

The online search industry is embedded in our daily lives with up to 90% of all buying decisions starting with an online search and 89% of all clicks through to a website occurring from websites that appear on the first page of Google.

Google has been with us for over 10 years now (the company started in 1998) and has just announced a continuing evolution of its search algorithms to maintain its relevancy and that includes more integration with social media that has been occurring since 2009, though you may not have noticed. Google has also added other tweaks such as increasing visibility and ranking for content that is more recent and this puts fresh unique content right in the frame and blogs are essential for companies to maintain regular published online content.

If you haven’t taken close notice of Google’s search page recently beyond just looking at your results, just take a look down the left side when you do a Google search and you will notice this refined search banner that has 5 social network elements.

5 Major Social Media Elements In Google Search

Images (which includes social media channels such as Flickr)

Videos (which includes a well known social network YouTube”)

Realtime (this is the feed from Twitter.another social media channel you may have heard of but conveniently renamed by Google)

Discussions (this highlights social channels including forums)

Blogs (another social web platform)

Google’s Latest Announcement

Google has included some significant changes in its latest announcement including

Increasing the priority and prominence of search results from platforms such as Twitter, Flickr and Quora (a new social network kid on the block)

Blending results throughout the page instead of only at the bottom

Adding friends social media interactions into search results

This is done by an annotation system that lets you know when a friend has shared a specific link or search result. If your friend writes a blog about how to create honey, that result will have an annotation that your friend has “shared this,” either via Google or through one of Google’s three major social integrations.

This will produce a massive increase in social results appearance in search with friends results turning up in if they have tweeted a reference to that particular search term. You can also connect your Google account to social networks like Twitter if you choose either publicly or privately as you may not want to reveal that you are a @spongebobsuperfan on Twitter.

Google On How It Works On YouTube

Click here to view the embedded video.

What Are The Implications For Business?

The implication for business from the latest announcement and the continuing refinements is that if you want to increase your chances of appearing high in a Google search, that just pursuing a SEO link strategy is not going to be as successful as in the past.

It is now a necessity and a priority to be participating on the major social media channels or you are reducing your brands chances of “being found online” high up on search results.

If you are not active on social media because you think it’s all hype then you may be damaging your business because Google is making social search a priority and your potential customers will find it increasingly hard to find you when they do their next online search and you can’t be found.

The reality is that social media integration into search is here to stay and you need to learn the rules of the new social web or you will reduce your organisations visibility and no one wants to be invisible unless you are a super hero or a dinosaur.

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Official Google blog

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Happy birthday from 20,000 leagues under the sea

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/MKuf/~3/lBR1vHWlAxg/happy-birthday-from-20000-leagues-under.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

Posted: 07 Feb 2011 09:01 PM PST

It wasn’t very difficult for something to spark my imagination when I was a child—whether it was a pile of leaves or a couch of stackable cushions, just about anything could jump-start my creativity. My first encounter with Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, however, sent my imagination into hyper drive.

I first found the novel while browsing through a random aisle in my local library. The cover was dark, murky and a little worn—but it was the most spectacular thing I’d ever seen. A pair of old-fashioned divers drag their feet over the ocean floor, watching a school of fish drift by. They don’t seem to notice the twisting silhouette of a monster inching toward them.

The cover alone pulled me in, but I didn’t want to spoil all of the possible story lines by actually reading the book. Looking back, I realize that what fascinated me most was the unknown: a creative spark and the imaginative exploration that followed. Since then, I’ve become more familiar with his work and still believe that exploration is the essence of Verne’s novels. His stories pull the readers into a world filled with infinite potential—be it in the clouds, on land or under the sea.

Today’s doodle, celebrating Verne’s 183rd birthday, tries to capture that sense of adventure and exploration. Using CSS3 (and with help from our resident tech wizards Marcin Wichary and Kris Hom), the doodle enables anyone to navigate the Nautilus down (nearly) 20,000 leagues with the simple pull of a lever. And for those using devices with built-in accelerometers and the latest versions of Google Chrome or Firefox, it’s even simpler—just tilt your device in the direction you want to explore and the Nautilus will follow.

So voyage below (and above) the waves to see what you can discover… just make sure to keep an eye out for the giant squid.

Posted by Jennifer Hom, Google Doodler

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Official Google blog


It’s become a welcome tradition: Today is the fourth annual Data Privacy Day. Dozens of countries have been celebrating with events throughout the week to inform and educate us all about our personal data rights and protections.

This is the first year I’ve marked this day as director of privacy across both engineering and product management at Google. I’ve chosen to spend the day in Washington, D.C., where there’s a been a lot of robust and productive discussion lately. People from Congress, the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Commerce, and industry and consumer groups have been contributing to these important conversations about how to best protect people’s data, and we’re happy to be participating too. I’m doing my part by bringing my geek sensibilities into a public discussion that we’re hosting today. In fact, that’s what we’re calling it: “The Technology of Privacy: When Geeks Meet Wonks.” I’ll be joined on the panel by technologists from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Federal Trade Commission and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. If you can’t attend in person, don’t worry—we’ll be uploading a video of the event later in the day on our Public Policy blog and you’ll also be able to see it on the Google Privacy Channel on YouTube.

On this Data Privacy Day, a major focus for Google is on creating ways for people to manage and protect their data. We’ve built tools like the Google Dashboard, the Ads Preferences Manager and encrypted search, and we’re always working on further ideas for providing transparency, control and security to empower our users. For example, earlier this week we launched an extension for Chrome users called Keep My Opt-Outs, which enables you to opt out permanently from ad tracking cookies. And pretty soon we’ll be extending the availability of 2-step verification, an advanced account security solution that is now helping protect more than 1,000 new accounts a day from common problems like phishing and password compromise. Right now it’s available to Google Apps Accounts; we’ll be offering it to all users in the next few weeks.

Data Privacy Day 2011 reminds us that as industry and society are busy moving forward, we face new challenges that together we can tackle through conversation and innovation. We’re eager to be part of the solution.

Posted by Alma Whitten, Director of Privacy, Product and Engineering

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Official Google blog …


A year of the new DoubleClick Ad Exchange: improving large publishers’ returns

With 2011 now underway, we thought it was the perfect time to revisit a big topic from 2010, the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, and take a fresh look at its contribution to the display advertising ecosystem. And we have some new findings to share: a recent analysis that we’ve undertaken shows just how significantly the Exchange is improving advertising revenues for major web publishers.

We unveiled the new Ad Exchange in late 2009 in North America and Europe, as an open, real-time auction marketplace for display ad space—i.e., the image-based, interactive or video ad formats you see on most sites. The Exchange brings together ad networks, agency trading desks and demand side platforms on one side, and major online publishers on the other, to buy and sell display ad space in real time, allowing advertisers to reach the right ad to the right consumer at the right time and enabling publishers to connect with the advertisers most interested in what they’re offering. Our goal was to grow the overall display advertising pie, so that publishers could benefit from higher ad revenues that fund their investments in the online content and services that we all read and use every day.

With a full year under our belt, we’re happy to see that the Ad Exchange has proven itself so useful for so many participants. As of today, there are hundreds of premium publishers making ad space available, in addition to the many niche publishers that participate in Ad Exchange through the AdSense program. The number of transactions that occur every day has tripled. And the Ad Exchange is now becoming available in new countries.

To see how what kind of effect the growth of the Exchange was having on its participants, we undertook an analysis that quantified the Exchange’s impact on participating publishers’ bottom lines. Today, we’re publishing a white paper that shows that when publishers make ad space available in the Ad Exchange, and the Exchange wins the auction, publishers generate, on average, 188% more revenue compared with indirect sales to ad networks and other third-party buyers. Over millions of impressions, this can make a huge difference to publishers’ advertising revenues, which is great for the web as a whole.

This 188% increase is a result of two key trends that we’re seeing:

Demand for publishers’ inventory is increasing as more AdWords and Google Display Network advertisers start running display campaigns, get great results and invest further. For example, display advertising spend among Google’s largest 1,000 advertisers increased 75% in the past year. Agency trading desks and new third-party technology providers are also running more display ads through the Ad Exchange. And real-time bidding—which enables advertisers to tailor their bids and ads in real time to buy the ad space they value the most—continues to be a major draw, now accounting for 56% of buyers’ spend.

We’re seeing publishers increasingly leverage the Ad Exchange’s “dynamic allocation” to sell their inventory. Via dynamic allocation, the Exchange compares—in real time—the value of the highest-paying ad in the Ad Exchange with any ads from other sources (such as ad network deals) and chooses the highest paying one. The Ad Exchange only serves ads when it can offer a higher price for ad space. Of course, publishers are in complete control of which networks they allow to bid, what ads can appear on their sites and which ad space they make available. 

Our goal is to make the Ad Exchange a complete solution for major publishers to maximize their ad revenue across thousands of buyers, networks and agencies. We also want to put publishers even more firmly in control of what types of ads appear on their site, enabling them to build and protect their brand, and find new advertising opportunities.

2010 was a huge growth year for the Ad Exchange, and the increased volume has made it a more vibrant ecosystem for buyers and sellers. We’ll continue our work to ensure that the Ad Exchange delivers ever-improving returns and controls for publishers, so that more participants can benefit from the huge growth taking place in display advertising in 2011 and beyond.