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In 2006 it was a pirate. Halloween party-goers donned eye patches, tricornes, and the Jolly Roger, inspired by favorite seafarer Captain Jack Sparrow. And last year the search was on for a lot of blond wigs and microphones à la teen pop idol Hannah Montana.

Halloween being one of our favorite holidays, we couldn’t wait to see what the hot getups of 2008 would be. Using Insight for Search we tracked the fastest rising searches related to Halloween costumes for this year’s ghoulish festivities.

Here are some of the “costume”-related queries (in the U.S.) that have seen the most growth for 2008 — don’t be surprised when you run into some of these outfits roaming the streets on All Hallows’ Eve.

If you’re like me, you found your inspiration in the past 24 hours. However, it looks like others are more serious — according to this Google Trends graph, searches for costumes have been increasing since July.

Around Google, we’ve been planning our outfits for months as well. Not even rain could stop us from showing off our fiendish finery at this year’s Googleween in Mountain View. And have a scary-happy Googleween yourself!

Posted by Jordan Newman, Google Blog Team

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What are you going to be for Halloween?

It’s all Hallow’s Eve! Tonight the streets will be teeming with ghosts, fairies, and superheroes (along with a few presidential candidate look-alikes, we imagine).

To get you in the Halloween spirit, consider these ways to celebrate with AdSense:

- wear a witch’s hat while viewing your AdSense reports
- perform some optimization magic on your ad units
- change your ad unit color palette to orange and black*
- create an ad placement that highlights your spookiest (or, okay, most prominent) ad units to advertisers
- eat candy corn, then use your AdSense payments to cover the dental work

Over here at the Mountain View campus, we’re keeping it festive, too.

Happy Halloween from the AdSense Team!

*This color scheme, while eerie and appropriate today, may not be very effective the other 364 days of the year.

Posted by Julie Beckmann on behalf of the AdSense Team

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Get in the spirit with AdSense

This week, our Trondheim-based Google Alerts team launched support for feeds, a highly requested feature you can use to receive alerts via the feed reader of your choice. (Of course, we think the best places to view your updates are iGoogle and Google Reader.) Until now, alerts have been delivered via email only, but those days are over. Now your News, Web, Blog, Video, and Groups alerts are more easily accessible than ever.

Once you sign in to Google Alerts and create an alert, you can opt for feed delivery by clicking ‘Edit’ next to your alert on the ‘Manage Your Alerts’ page and changing your ‘Deliver to’ selection from ‘Email’ to ‘Feed’ (click on the image to see larger).

Two other notable improvements to Google Alerts are that we’ve made them faster (especially News alerts) and are now including — where possible — images in News alerts. It’s a busy time in Trondheim these days, so stay tuned for more changes to Google Alerts in the coming months.

Have feedback or a feature request? Send your thoughts our way.

Posted by Jaime Forman-Lau, Online Operations

Feed me! Google Alerts not just for email anymore

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Learn Internet Marketing Through Video

Still unsure of who to vote for? These two tools may help you decide.

Glassbooth.org has created a great tool to help you see if your beliefs are those of the candidate you are voting for. After rating issues that are important to you, it will generate a short quiz for you to take. The results show you which candidate you are more aligned with and it gives you explanations to the politicians stands.

Anther helpful tool has been created by The Political Compass. This is a little more demanding of time, but still worth looking at and seeing with who you align thoughts with.

Both of these will 100% make you think about your vote on November 4th. No matter who you vote for, just make sure you vote!

See more here:
Are You Voting For The Right Person?

Thinking about heading to ad:tech next week? The conference is being held in NYC from November 3^rd- 6^th at the Hilton on the Avenue of the Americas, and the Share Results team will be there. Only 3 sleeps left!

The NYC show is just the latest installment of the 11 shows ad:tech holds in seven countries around the world each year. With more than ten years under its belt, ad:tech has continually provided us media, marketing, and technology professionals with the tools and techniques we need to succeed in our ever-changing digital world.

A few examples of the innovative sessions covered in NYC include topics on brand management and emerging platforms such as video and mobile marketing. Some of the all-star speakers lined up include Nike, Kraft Foods, CNN, NYTimes.com, MTV and more.

While the sessions are highly informative, it’s the networking opportunities that are often the biggest incentive for attending ad:tech. If you are based in NYC, you should seriously consider coming down to the event. Individual exhibit hall passes are only $125.

If you’re heading to the conference and would like to meet up with Louis, Daniel and myself, just send an email to info@shareresults.com with a time when you’ll be available. We’ll be onsite Monday – Wednesday.

Go here to read the rest:

(Note: Click on the first result in each of the search results pages linked to throughout the post to see this feature in action.)

A scanner is a wonderful tool. Every day, people all over the world post scanned documents online — everything from official government reports to obscure academic papers. These files usually contain images of text, rather than the text themselves.But all of these documents have one thing in common: someone somewhere thought they were they were valuable enough to share with the world.

In the past, scanned documents were rarely included in search results as we couldn’t be sure of their content. We had occasional clues from references to the document– so you might get a search result with a title but no snippet highlighting your query. Today, that changes. We are now able to perform OCR on any scanned documents that we find stored in Adobe’s PDF format. This Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology lets us convert a picture (of a thousand words) into a thousand words — words that can be searched and indexed, so that these valuable documents are more easily found. This is a small but important step forward in our mission of making all the world’s information accessible and useful.

While we’ve indexed documents saved as PDFs for some time now, scanned documents are a lot more difficult for a computer to read. Scanning is the reverse of printing. Printing turns digital words into text on paper, while scanning makes a digital picture of the physical paper (and text) so you can store and view it on a computer. The scanned picture of the text is not quite the same as the original digital words, however — it is a picture of the printed words. Often you can see telltale signs: the ring of a coffee cup, ink smudges, or even fold creases in the pages.

To people reading these documents, the distinction between words and pictures of words makes little difference, but for a computer the picture is almost unintelligible. Consider a circle. Should it be read it as a zero, the letter ‘O’, just a circle, or the ring from my coffee cup? People learn to answer this kind of question very quickly, but for the computer it is a painstaking and error-prone process.

To see our new system at work, click on these search queries. Note the document excerpt in the search results, along with the full text presented after the ‘View as HTML’ link:

[repairing aluminum wiring]
[spin lock performance]
[Mumps and Severe Neutropenia]
[Steady success in a volatile world]

Posted by Evin Levey, Product Manager

Continued here:
A picture of a thousand words?

Just something I’ve been thinking about lately and thought I would share.

One thing you eventually have to accept (or not) in affiliate marketing is that you most likely are not going to be everything. Some people are awesome programmers. Some are awesome designers. Some are awesome at Adwords. Some are awesome at media buying and bizdev. You have to realize your few strengths and let it ride. Or even better, use your strengths and hire out what your weaknesses are. I’ll go into detail about myself…

So it’s taken me 2 years to realize this, but I’m probably not going to be a programmer at the moment. I always thought I was decent at getting traffic and design, but I really wanted to be an awesome programmer like some guys I know. Eventually I realized that it just didn’t make sense to dedicate my time programming when I could be using my strengths to make more money.

Instead of trying to learn how to program a sweet automated tracking system that could do WHATEVER I wanted it to do, my job is to do some simple split testing and find out what’s profitable. I’ll use the Google Website Optimizer to split test a few landing pages…find the best one. I’ll track to the keyword level which is super easy…delete bad keywords. I’ll make a simple script to rotate offers and find the highest converting one…stick with that. Once I find what’s basically the most profitable, then I do what I’m best at – getting more traffic. So instead of trying to learn how to program and optimize and increase my margins, I keep my margins and work on making more profit by getting a lot more traffic in any way I can.

Now in comes my faithful employee. We’re actually pretty even on a design and coding level, so I can trust him to design me landing pages and banners. I was slow at design anyways so BOOM – I know have a lot more time to get more traffic. Uploading banners and creating ads is simple enough, just time consuming so BOOM – he does that and it frees up a lot more time for me to research different ways to get traffic.

In the 2 years I’ve been in the game, I’ve learned some very valuable information about affiliate marketing; but I’ve also learned very valuable information about myself. I’m good at getting traffic, and I’m good at managing things. I need to play to those strengths and right now work on getting more traffic to my offers and having Matt set them up. The next step is hiring a sweet programmer to come work for me too, I’ll probably try and snag one out of college this summer. It’ll step things up a notch if I do do that, as 3 people in 1 small office is kind of a lot so I’ll probably have to get an office.

Just some food for thought : play to your strengths boys and girls and make dat money.

Read more from the original source:
Playing to Your Strengths

If you’ve been following our various blog posts at all in the past several weeks, you’ll know that one of Share Results’ newest merchants is GoNannies. The beauty about this merchant is that they fit directly into our popular family category and are great for affiliates who already have content sites or blogs, or run a PPC campaign in this vertical.

We decided to ask the folks over at GoNannies (Carol Francis and Monta Fleming) some questions that affiliates have been dying to know about their affiliate program, and all the benefits that come with promoting. Here are six quick questions with Carol and Monta of GoNannies.

1. Tell us a little about GoNannies and how you differ from your competitors. How did you start your business and why did you decide to launch an affiliate program?
GoNannies is an online service that helps families find household help efficiently and affordably. We offer the largest number of domestic personnel types including nannies, sitters, housekeepers, senior care, personal assistants, personal chefs, doulas and more. In the pursuit of finding a nanny for her own use, President & Founder, Monta Fleming was frustrated with overly priced and unsuccessful nanny agencies, as well as not-so-reliable online services. Monta combined her own 17 years of IT and Management expertise with the need she had to find reliable childcare into a company founded on family values, integrity, reliability, and trust. GoNannies offers comprehensive background check services, never compromising our families’ safety with unreliable database only background checks offered by other competitors.

GoNannies launched our affiliate program because we saw a great opportunity to expose our popular services to an even larger audience.

2. It may appear to members of affiliate marketing that with the state of the economy, perhaps nanny services are not as high in demand. Do you find that there is less demand for nannies because of the economy? What are the various services that you offer?
Fortunately, nannies are still very much in demand because families will always need childcare. Additionally, GoNannies is a low cost alternative to traditional, high-cost placement agencies, so in a depressed economy, ours is the type of service that will often see increases when money is more scarce. Also, GoNannies is unique in that we offer a free nanny share program, which is a creative affordable solution in this challenging economy that allows families to locate other families in their area interested in sharing a nanny, cutting nanny costs into a fraction of what they would pay otherwise. And lastly, our services are far more extensive then nannies, also offering senior care, housekeepers, sitters, personal assistants, personal chefs, and more.

3.Background checks are key elements to hiring nannies and elder care professionals. What are some ways affiliates can promote this type of service in their campaigns?
Background checks are certainly very instrumental in finding the right care. That’s why GoNannies not only provides access to free background checks, but also offers supplemental background check services so that families can be as thorough as they need to be in their hiring process. To better help affiliates promote our background check services, we are in the process of designing new creative which will nicely promote our free background check offerings, as well exclusive affiliate discounts.

4. We wrote a blog post a while back about parents’ needs for nannies in the US and the methods used to find them. It’s interesting to see that various geographical regions seem to have more of a demand than others. What geographical trends are you seeing occur with GoNannies?
We definitely see a trend of high demand in major metropolitan areas.

5. Affiliates are always interested in the benefits of joining an affiliate program. What are the perks of joining GoNannies? Who is your ideal affiliate you would love to see promote your services?
GoNannies offers a very competitive affiliate program. We offer the largest payout amount in our industry for our Membership services and even offer additional payout opportunities through the background check services we offer. Additionally, we offer services in a larger geographical region, including both the U.S. and Canada. While Affiliates who offer some level of either family or female directed site content can be naturally outfitted to succeed in our Affiliate program, Affiliates who are effectively able to target to our niche audience within a larger general population can also be quite successful.

6. What can affiliates expect to see from GoNannies for the holiday season and eventually the new year? Are there any special tools and resources affiliates can look forward to in your program?
GoNannies will continue to be very supportive of our affiliates. We have a dedicated affiliate manager whose priority is to facilitate our affiliate’s success. We will continue to offer exclusive discounts and incentives for our affiliates. New resources to look forward to include widgets that we believe will be very successful for promoting our services.

For additional information about GoNannies, have a look at their co-branded merchant page via http://www.shareresults.com/local_affiliate_desc.php?mid=13964. Feel free to also send us any questions you may have to info [at] shareresults [dot] com.

Credit:
Everything Affiliates need to know about GoNannies

The reliability of cloud computing has been a hot topic recently, partly because glitches in the cloud don’t happen behind closed doors as with traditional on-premises solutions for businesses. Instead, when a small number of cloud computing users have problems, it makes headlines. As with most things at Google, we are fanatical about measuring the availability of Gmail, and we thought it best to simply share our reliability metrics, which we measure as average uptime per user based on server-side error rates. We think this reliability metric lets you do a true side-by-side comparison with other solutions.

We measure every server request for every user, every moment of every day. Any millisecond delay is logged. Over the last year, Gmail has been available more than 99.9 percent of the time — for everyone, both consumers and business users. The vast majority of people using Gmail have seen few issues, experienced no downtime, and have continued to have a great Gmail experience, with exception of an outage in August 2008. If you average all these data together, including the August outage, across the entire Gmail service, there has been an aggregate 10-15 minutes of downtime per month over the last year of providing the service. That 10-15 minutes per month average represents small delays of a couple of seconds here and there. A very small number of people have unfortunately been subject to some disruption of service that affected them for a few minutes or a few hours. For those users, we are very sorry. And for Google Apps Premier Edition customers, we have extended service level agreement credits to them.

So how does greater than 99.9 percent reliability compare to more conventional approaches for business email? We asked some experts. Naturally, the normal caveats apply for on-premises solutions, since each individual business environment will vary, depending on server reliability, staff response time, and actual maintenance schedules for each application.

According to the research firm Radicati Group, companies with on-premises email solutions averaged from 30 to 60 minutes of unscheduled downtime and an additional 36 to 90 minutes of planned downtime per month.¹

Looking just at the unplanned outages that catch IT staffs by surprise, these results suggest Gmail is twice as reliable as a Novell GroupWise solution, and four times more reliable than a Microsoft Exchange-based solution that companies must maintain themselves. And higher reliability translates to higher employee productivity. Gmail’s reliability jumps to more than four times as reliable as a GroupWise solution and 10 times more reliable than an Exchange-based solution if you factor in the planned outages inherent in on-premises messaging platforms. But this isn’t the only way Google Apps helps businesses do more with their resources. Compared to the costs of Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus or Novell GroupWise — including software licensing, server expenses and the labor associated with deploying, maintaining and upgrading them on a regular basis — Google Apps leaves companies with much more time and money to focus on their real business.

We are now extending what we’ve learned from Gmail to the other applications in Google Apps.

Today, we’re announcing that we will extend the 99.9 percent service level agreement we offer Premier Edition customers on Gmail to Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, and Google Talk. We have been delivering high levels of reliability across all these products, so it makes sense to extend our guarantees to them.

More than 1 million businesses have selected Google Apps to run their business, and tens of millions of people use Gmail every day. With this type of adoption, a disruption of any size — even a minor one affecting fewer than 0.003% of Google Apps Premier Edition users, like the one a few weeks ago — attracts a disproportional amount of attention. We’ve made a series of commitments to improve our communications with customers during any outages, and we have an unwavering commitment to make all issues visible and transparent through our open user groups.

Google is one of the 1 million businesses that run on Google Apps, and any service interruption affects our users and our business; our engineers are also some of our most demanding customers. We understand the importance of delivering on the cloud’s promise of greater security, reliability and capability at lower cost. We are hugely thankful to our customers who drive us to become better every day.

1. The Radicati Group, 2008. “Corporate IT Survey – Messaging & Collaboration, 2008-2009″

Posted by Matthew Glotzbach, Product Management Director, Google Enterprise

More here:
What we learned from 1 million businesses in the cloud

It was exactly two years ago at the EDUCAUSE conference that we first announced our free Google Apps offering for educational institutions. We’ve kept pretty busy in that time, working closely with thousands of schools to reach 2.5 million students, staff, and faculty actively using Google Apps on campuses across the globe. As part of this mission, we also recently drove our eco-friendly bus (think bio-fuel and solar panels) to universities across the country to hear directly from people using Google Apps. Here’s what some of them had to say:

One thing hasn’t changed in the last two years: Google Apps still offers academic institutions, from neighborhood schools to international universities, free integrated solutions for email, calendaring, and online document and site sharing. We’re glad to be back at EDUCAUSE this week in Orlando to reminisce about how far technology in education has come since 2006, and to look forward toward even more possibilities for innovation.

If you’re involved in education, check out Google Apps to see if it can help make your school a more effective learning community. And if you’re a student, visit the newly launched Google for Students Blog to find Google-related information relevant to you.

Posted by Miriam Schneider, Associate Product Marketing Manager

View original here:
The latest on Google Apps for Education

The AdSensePro team would like to cordially invite you to the opening of our new English AdSense Help Forum.

We hope that by now you’ve found the AdSense Help Forum to be the best place to ask questions and share tips with other AdSense publishers. We’ve been listening to your feedback about forum features you’d like to see, and we’re excited to announce that we’re moving the English Forum from Google Groups to a brand new platform. (For those who participate in the Forum in another language: rest assured that our engineers are working on making this new platform available in additional languages, although we don’t have a set date at this time.)

As of today, we’ve closed up shop and moved the English Forum next door to the AdSense Help Center. We’ve been jealous of the Help Center for a while now. Its innovative interface, clear categories, and snazzy search powered by CSE left us feeling like the odd man out.

Now we’ve almost got it all. We have the look and feel of the Help Center with the same CSE to search across the Forum, the Help Center, and the blog. We have the same categories as the Help Center, so you can easily transition from one category to the another. We even have some extra things we hope you’ll really like: a system of levels to reward your contributions to the Forum, and profiles where you can put a picture next to your name. You can subscribe to the Forum (or to individual discussions) by RSS feed. You can post a question and receive your answer by email. You can even vote on which response best answers the question and mark a best answer to a question you asked.

We hope you’ll come take a look, and we hope you’ll stay a while, sign into your Google Account, and ask and answer questions.

Posted by the AdSensePro Team – AdSense Help Forum Support

You’re invited to the new AdSense Help Forum

(Cross-posted from the Google Mobile Blog)

With the U.S. elections less than a week away, voting drives are ramping up. Political parties and non-partisan groups alike are sending out volunteers to encourage citizens to vote on November 4. To make sure these volunteers have the same voter info tools available to them on their phone as on their computer, we’ve now launched a mobile voting locator tool on m.google.com/elections. (Click here to send this to your phone.)

Now, volunteers can type in the home address of any registered voter and find his or her voting location, whether they’re in an office making phone calls, working from a booth set up outdoors, or going door to door. While on the go, they can use Google Maps for mobile to find their next address or display directions to voting locations.

Of course, between talking to potential voters, volunteers can check out the Elections section in Google News for mobile for the latest updates (go here on your phone), or just search for a nearby coffee shop to stay warm.

Posted by Steve Kanefsky and Jerry Morrison, Google Mobile engineers

See the original post:
Voting tools for volunteers on the go

If you’ve been paying even passing attention to the 2008 election, you know that without a doubt this is the most documented election in history. On YouTube, average citizens have posted millions of videos chronicling their experiences and opinions about the 2008 election. Never before has the campaign trail been sliced, diced, clipped, mashed-up, and exposed in so many ways — and never before have voters been the ones in control of the content.

The YouTube team is shining a spotlight on election documentation with the Video Your Vote program. In partnership with PBS, we’re asking you to submit videos of your voting experiences to the Video Your Vote channel. The idea is simple: we want this to be the most transparent election day in history, so that the world can see — through the eyes of voters — just how the election transpired.

This is important because not only will there be more people voting in this election than ever before, but there undoubtedly will be bumps along the way: long lines, broken machines, confusion over the registration process, and even voter intimidation and fraud are all unfortunate election realities. Video can help document where problems occur in a more compelling and concrete way than other media. By documenting your voting experience, you can help make this a more transparent election.

On the Video Your Vote channel, PBS’s program The News Hour with Jim Lehrer is providing educational information about voting in America, with a particular nod to election reform issues. You can also learn what the laws of your state say (or don’t say) about bringing a video camera to the polls (in most states, it’s okay to document your own experience respectfully). Learn more in this call-out video that correspondent Judy Woodruff made (it’s on the YouTube homepage):

With hundreds of thousands of voters casting their ballots before Election Day, we’re already seeing videos coming in. From excitement from first-time voters to videos of long lines at the polling places or touch-screen problems in the field, voters are already documenting their experiences. Join them to video your vote!

Posted by Steve Grove, YouTube News & Politics Team

Read more here:
Video your vote on Election Day

Google recently celebrated its 10th birthday. As we participated in the festivities, we realized that we are coming upon another birthday: In just a few weeks, our very own Google Toolbar will be turning 8 years old. To celebrate, we wanted to take a few moments to reflect on its evolution over the past few years and how we’ve tried to make the web a better place for the hundreds of millions of people who use Toolbar.

Back in 1999, the Internet was a very different place. At that time, you had to fight annoying pop-up ads that would randomly appear as you navigated from one page to another. You had to fill in endless forms with your personal information in order to create accounts for websites you wanted to use. And when you wanted to find information on your airline’s luggage policy, you spent more time finding the right search terms to get you there than actually packing for your trip. The Toolbar team was formed to develop tools to make your web experience better, so we created features like pop-up blocker and AutoFill. We also built a dynamic search box that automatically guesses what you’re typing and offers search suggestions in real time (click on the image to see larger).

Over the years, we’ve been proud to see several of the features we’ve pioneered integrated into web browsers as well as other websites. We’re encouraged by this progress, but this doesn’t mean that our mission is complete. We’re still working hard to make the time you spend on the web more enjoyable and productive. On that note, we’d like to announce our latest release of Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer, now launching out of beta and available in 40 languages.

Here are just a few things you can do with this latest version:
- Add gadgets to your Toolbar to bring content from your favorite websites closer to you
- Synchronize your settings online to access your Toolbar from wherever you are
- Create multiple profiles in AutoFill to keep your business and personal information separate

To learn more about the different features, visit us at toolbar.google.com/features. We’d also love to hear your feature ideas and other Toolbar feedback, so send us a quick note with your thoughts.

Posted by Albert Bodenhamer and Jenny Zhang, Software Engineers, Google Toolbar

Here is the original:
Eight candles for Google Toolbar