Pedro Sttau

I know this is a bit geeky, but the sheer size of everything is overwhelming. Take a look at the cooling systems.

Nothing really new here, except for one statement that really surprised me. Apparently when things started to go downhill in the economy Google pretty much moved the money away from American Financial institutions and moved it to safer external institutions.

When American companies don’t trust their own banks,you know things are bad.

Matt goes through some of the topics that were talked about at Webmasterworld Pubcon in Vegas.

So I was just reading the alleged conversations that went on in a Private Google group where a couple of X Google employees were discussing their experience at Google and what lead them to leave the company.

First and foremost I don’t think that these are not the employees that got the boot recently ao we are talking about supposedly Googlers that decided to leave for themselves.

I must say I was completely thrown back at the level of discontent portrayed al all levels, talk about bitterness…

Now please bare with me because I live in a world where I have to battle for every cent that I make with my company, where food isn’t free and sweets and goodies don’t play a central role in my overall happiness and productivity, but can anyone please explain to me what on earth to they have to complain about?

Imagine waking up every morning knowing that if you arrive 2 hours late at the office no one will really bother you. You get on your hybrid Toyota that was partially paid by your company and arrive at the office for one more day at work at the most striving company on earth. You sit down and all around you are hand picked highly motivated people in the industry that know what they are doing. Sounds horrid.

Just today in the train while returning home after my holydays break I was reading an article on .NET about how Marissa had no plans to leave Google in the near future. Just a couple of hours later I come across a story where supposedly some Googlers overheard Marisa mention that she was leaving Google. This allegedly happened in an office party during the holidays. No idea if this is true or not, but always nice to have some GeekyTabloid drama to spice things up.

I personally don’t really like many of the decisions that have been made at Google in recent times, especially in the user experience department, so this wasn’t exactly bad news. Don’t get me wrong, I am sure that Marisa has been instrumental over the years in the quality assurance and user experience area, but maybe it is time to move on…

Haven’t writen in ages so I decided to back back on track with a little rant.

I just found out that it’s not possible to change our Google Account primary address. That’s right, if for some reason you need to change the email address that you have associated with all your Google Product the only thing that the system will allow you to do is add a secondary email address that you can use to log in to your account.

Now consider this, if for some reason you don’t have access to the primary account anymore, of if you ceased to have control over it, you pretty much just have to suck it in and take it.

Just a quick post about regarding something that will come in handy to many developers that don’t have a lot of experience with Google Maps integration. Bellow is the direct link to Google’s API generator, it’s as simple as placing the URL of the website, and then fetching the key, that simple.

http://code.google.com/apis/maps/signup.html

So as most of you know Google Chrome is out, and I must say, it did not disappoint me at all.The interface is awesome; Google manages to take things to the next level, by not only making the navigation a lot smarter and intuitive, but most importantly a lot faster as well. So not only is the navigation itself faster, but the loading speed is also dramatically quicker then in IE and Firefox.

One thing that I was a bit surprised was that at the moment it’s still not possible to install Google’s Toolbar in Chrome.

I’m still testing the application, so I will get back to you guys on my findings in a later date.

Massive infrastructure near the The Dalles. Pictures are a courtesy of Information Week.

Check out the Full gallery.

Google is watching your every move, don’t you think you can fool the eyes of the Bot! So buying your way to the top, are we? It’s just a matter of time before you get caught. Riiiiiiiiiiight.

A little word of advice to the big G, Begin by sorting out your first page results, and then worry about what Webmasters are up to.

Search for Web Marketing at Google.pt: (The Red arrow is pointing to my companies website whilst the blue arrow is pointing to the site that is “clustering” the results page).

http://www.google.pt/search?hl=pt-PT&rlz=1T4GGLJ_enPT232PT232&q=web+marketing&meta=

Is a simple condition statement too complex for the algorithm to handle?

IF RESULTS page 1 already contains Page A should I display Page A twice? What about three times? Heck, why not go all the way and cluster my own search results page with a single website?? that should be fun!

I don’t have a lot to complain about since my company is leading the SERPS with a single results. But for the love of God, this is becoming ridiculous, to the point where I’m having trouble explaining to my clients that Google is a good reliable system to invest in.

Maybe the Adwords Learning Center could add a new Sales pitch tutorial on how to lead with questions like: “why is that site occupying three slots in the first page? Why should I invest in PPC when I can get 30% of the top page slots with my website?

Please note that I have nothing against the website’s webmaster, I personally know the owner of the company in question and kudos for him for the fantastic results, but it’s impossible to stay quiet when you see one of your top business search queries being handled by Goolgle the way it is. Sort it out!

Now here is a creative way of kicking the crap out of your competition.

So Google’s Brad Fitzpatrick published some notes about how Google is going to develop a system that will aggregate the data from all of the most prominent Social Network sites. Note that we are not talking about an end-user product, meaning that the purpose of this system is to provide a tool that will generate graph data from all of the network sites without having to login seperatly to each account. Sounds a bit confusing right?

That’s the idea! Of course that there is a hidden agenda here, and doesn’t take a rocket scientist to uncover it.

Imagine not having to re-invite your friends every time you register on a new Social Networking platform since this centralized system will aggregate all of this data for you! and what about only needing to login to your Google account to have all of this data at your mercy? Ah the joy of Google contr…I mean simplicty.

Supposedly, Google is negotiating with Facebook and they have shown a lot of enthusiasm.

The goal is not to replace Facebook. In fact, most people I’ve talked to love Facebook, just want a bit more of their already-public data to be more easily accessible, and want to mitigate site owners’ fears about any single data/platform lock-in. Early talks with Facebook about participating in this project have been incredibly promising.

If you have a centralized system that aggregates all of the data in one platform, the natural progression will be that the traffic will divert from the independent data feeders to the centralized system.

For the life of me I cannot understand how any of the Social Networks can find this exciting or promising in any way, unless of course there is plenty going on that we don’t know about.

Very cool presentation my Googler Mark Lesser. He talks about how one should take a step back and try and enjoy the “art of doing nothing” at least once a year.

Something I should deffinately consider doing in the near future.

Seems that Google is taking down the paid video rentals and downloads in a couple of days. This of course means that all of the rented videos will no longer be playable.

An email was sent to the Google Video purchasers informing them that they would be credited a fantastic sum of $2 in their Google Checkout accounts, that’s right bonus and gals, not $0.50, not $1, but a total sum of $2 for your troubles!

For god’s sake, why doesn’t this multi million dollar company just reimburse the money people spent with the videos they rented and were expecting to have access too?

I believe that today was the first day I ever had a real feel of insecurity towards Google as a company and as a brand.

About 7 days ago I took and passed the AdWords Professional Exam, and patiently waited for the exam results to reflect in my Client Center AdWords Pro tab. Three days had gone by and the system still didn’t recognize that I had passed the exam.

Decided to send the AdWords Professional team an email expressing my concern. The next day I got an email from them asking me to send them the Prometric email that attested that I had passed the exam. I promptly sent the required information and finally got a reply almost two days later telling me that regrettably I would have to take the exam again since the ID that I used to take the exam didn’t belong to me but to one of my clients.

Now, please bare with me…I registered to take the exam through the link “Register for the Exam” I believe in the “Client Center Pro Tab”, that redirected me to the Prometrics website.
When I clicked on the registration form the ID field was already filled in, so I assumed the information was correct and took the exam.

What happened was that for some reason it placed one of my clients AdWords ID in the field and allowed me to carry on the registration.

Even if in theory it was my mistake, because I should rechecked the information before submitting the form, why would I have to pay another 50$ to take an exam that I had already passed just because there was mistake with the account ID in the exam form? Take into account that I have full control over my client’s account, including the email address associated with that account, so I would easily be able to proof that I was the one who took the exam.

This however didn’t help me much, and Google Support promptly congratulated me in passing the exam and told me that regrettably I would have to take it again. Wasn’t that nice?

Decided to give them a call and sort out this nonsense. Surprisingly, or not, there was no Support line to be found. Now, I spend a lot of my own money as well as my client’s on AdWords, and this company isn’t open to helping out when I need them? What if it was a matter that required a fast and urgent intervention, would I have to wait 24 hours for an automated reply from Mr. Googler bot?

I eventually found the Google support line (1.866.246.6453) on the Google SEO Forum and called them.

The employee that attended me was called Ann, and what a difference! I must say I had never experience such a good level os support. She was polite, listen to what I had to say, but best of all, she was Human! Didn’t interact with me in “Bot mode”, and make me feel like I was actually a client.

All I can say is that 8 hours later my problem has been resolved.