John Hesch

Search blogs? Use Google Blog Search.

Google recently released a new instant messenger service called Google Talk. I’m surprised to see Google, or anyone for that matter, attempt to break into the already established and mature IM services. With AIM, MSN, Yahoo and ICQ, I don’t see a lot of people giving up their favorite IM’s for a new one. It does look like Google Talk supports standards-based communication clients so Trillian, Gaim, and others will be able to add Google Talk to their service.

I have heard that Google wants to get into the VOIP market and Google Talk does offer voice chat, so maybe this is Google’s introduction to chat leading up to offering a SKYPE alternative.

Requirements for Google Talk:

1. Win2K or XP
2. Gmail account
3. English

If you’re an LDS Google Adsense publisher you’ve probably seen ads on your site that are not ideal for you as a publisher. I have developed quite a list of websites that I don’t want advertising on my sites. I probably wouldn’t care that much about anti-mormon ads but I get some strongly worded emails from my KZION listeners about these ads, so I try to keep the anti stuff from appearing.

If you log into your Adsense account and select AdSense for Content and then Competitive Ad Filter, you can add the URL’s of websites you want banned from appearing on your sites. Here is a text file with the list of sites I have collected over the past several years. You’re welcome to use it if you wish.

Here’s a GreaseMonkey script that will prevent accidental clicks on your own AdSense ads. I’ve clicked on my own ads by accident before which in doing so could get me kicked off the program.

Ever want to see where the cell phone towers are located near you? Cell Phone Tower Search uses Google Maps to provide a graphical interface to see towers in your area.

This is a fun little Google Logo Maker by Logogle.

As I mentioned yesterday, Google has released the Google Toolbar for Firefox. The only thing I don’t like about it is the PageRank is displayed in the form of a bar graph rather than a number. You can place the mouse over the graph and get the PageRank number, but I would prefer to have the option to display either the bar graph or a number.

I also like the quick links to search my Gmail account and my desktop.

Tomorrow (Thursday) Google will release Google Toolbar For Firefox which will include everything available now for IE users.

Google will also be releasing two new Firefox extensions:

• Google Suggest: Will allow you to utilize Google Suggest directly from the toolbar. So, as you enter your query into the toolbar, you’ll see suggested search terms.
• Google Send To Phone: Will allow you to quickly send the text from any web page to a mobile phone as a text message. The service is free but make sure to check with your mobile phone provider to determine the charges (if any) to receive text messages.

Found via SearchEngineWatch

Google released Personalized Search today.

Personalized Search is an improvement to Google search that orders your search results based on what you’ve searched for in the past. You may not notice much difference at first, but as you build up your search history, your personalized search results will continue to improve.

I wonder how this will change SEO tactics? The way I understand this is search results are going to be different for individual users. A particular search by one user may show different results than another user. If I’m ranked number one for a particular keyword for one user I may not be number one for another user, right?

It appears that Google just updated their PageRanks.

This page went from a PageRank of 3 to a PageRank of 4 and BloggingPro went from a 5 to a 6. Also my Planet Search finally got an initial PageRank of 4 and Planet LDS went from 3 to 4.

Google Boosts Free Storage in Web E-Mail Battle

Google Inc., which took the first shot in the free e-mail storage battle with the release of its Gmail product last year, said on Thursday it is doubling free storage to 2 gigabytes shortly after Yahoo Inc. matched its original offer.

Wow, fine by me.

Google has now added weather to their massive list of accomplishments. To see weather conditions and a four-day forecast for a particular U.S. location, type “weather,” followed by the location. Usually a city name will be enough, but you may also want to include a state or zipcode. For example, to see St. George, Utah weather, you could search for “weather St. George, UT” or “weather St. George 84770.”

If you try this you will notice that St. George will be in the low 70′s by Monday.

From Google Weblog:

Cheat Sheet for using Google.

Did you know that you can skin Gmail with a Custom Stylesheet? Well, you can with Firefox, the proper extension and some css. Check this out.

Go to Google and type movie: your city, state. So for example, for movies playing in St. George I would enter movie: St. George, UT and Google would return movie lists and showtimes for Saint George, UT. Very cool and quick!

You can also enter movie: name of movie for a list of movie reviews, or movie: actor name for a list of the movies that actor has been in with reviews.

Thanks Inside Google.