GMail is obviously not GMail!

You’re probably asking yourself why you care, and why I’m stating something that could be obvious?

Well, because to a LOT of people, it’s NOT obvious.

In fact, to any normal techie, it’s a head-slapping problem. Non-techie visitors to THIS site, which in my mind looks NOTHING LIKE GMAIL, are STILL trying to log into GMail using the search box. They’ve just searched for something like “GMail Login Page” and land on this website. Then, without thinking, try and log into GMail here.

I’ve got quite a few search results in my site stats with email addresses.

That sounds dumb, right. Now, imagine how many usernames and passwords gmail.co.za is getting?

I REALLY hope they’re responsible, and don’t decide to use that information for evil!

By the way, for those readers who are wondering, the correct address is www.gmail.com

How YOU can help!

Link to this article, spread the word, or something like that.

Yes, it sounds selfish, but so many times I feel like I am really glad that I am the owner of a specific website, because I could defraud a LOT of people out of a LOT of money if I were evil.

But I’m not, and I hope you’re not either.

I decided to try out creating a “Google Reader Application” by making use of the “Chromeless Chrome” functionality.

In the images (click on them for a larger look) you will see the 4 basic steps to creating the Chrome-less application:

1 – The initial web site (Google Reader) in a basic/standard Google Chrome browser. You can see it’s still in the normal browser chrome because of the tabs and URL bar, etc.

2 – Click on the “page” icon to the right of the URL bar and click on “Create application Shortctuts…”

3 – You will then have a couple of prompts to answer and you can save your shortcut to the desktop. You can see that Google Chrome has chosen the Favicon as the “application icon”.

4 – In this last screenshot you can see what the Google Reader app will look like, now that it doesn’t have the usual “browser chrome”. (See my previous article about Google Chrome for more info on that).

And, we now have a “Google Reader Application“, especially since we don’t really need an internet connection if you’ve enabled Google Gears for this site.

Welcome, Google Chrome. (the link is live, go download Google Chrome)

Some Cool Features in Google Chrome

The developers of Chrome have really gone all out on the performance of this browser, especially with regards to JavaScript. Which is a GREAT thing, considering Google’s biggest apps use AJAX/JavaScript heavily.

One of the things I’m looking forward to seeing is the “Task Manager“. This window shows which tabs (and therefore, which sites) are causing the most CPU usage and memory usage. FireFox 3 really improved it’s memory handling, but every now and again, when I have about 15 tabs open (which I often do, while I’m writing this I have 9 open) FireFox hangs when opening GMail and Google Reader…

Here’s a screenshot of the Google Chrome Task Manager at work (click the image for a full-sized version):

The world has really been “raving” about IE8′s “porn mode“, which Microsoft have officially named “InPrivate”. While browsing in this mode your session will be undetectable (theoretically), and no trace of that session will be left on your computer. Google Chrome seems to have a similar feature, except you can select a specific tab that will browse without leaving any trace of it’s session on your computer. Great stuff if you’re reading personal ads while on your work’s computer.

Tabs and the way we use them have also completely changed. They’ve been inverted so they appear at the top of the browser, but that’s not just a UI change. You can now drag tabs between browser windows, and all of their history goes along with it. Effectively, each tab is it’s own browser (with it’s own URL bar, named “The OmniBox“), so it doesn’t matter where it sits…

Talking about the OmniBox, personally it looks like Mozilla’s Ubiquity has some similarities, being able to search and translate and complete your bookmarks…

Chrome without Chrome

The “Chrome” of a browser is the actual window with the toolbar, the URL bar, the bookmarks/links area.

Google Chrome looks like it now allows you to “create a GMail application”, in that it removes the browser chrome, so that you only see GMail’s website. This means that you hopefully won’t realise you’re using GMail inside a browser.

And, with the speed of the JavaScript rendering engine (and broadband), hopefully it won’t feel like you’re on the internet as well.

Of course, what about if you CAN’T connect to the internet? Well, there’s always Google Gears, which is built into the browser. Now, we only need GMail to support Google Gears. (If you’re looking for an example of the benefits of Google Gears, read my article “WordPress 2.6 and Google Gears“).

Here’s a pic of an example with Google Reader (so that I didn’t have to go blanking out all my email addresses for a GMail example). Click for a full-size version of the image:

(All these features are obviously available for any website, not just GMail).

The Usual Suspects

And, of course, along with the 2 cool features above, there seem to be some other more expected features, like “Autocomplete in your address bar”, funky favourites, and built in functionality that you needed extensions in FireFox to do.

Interesting Notes about the Development

You could probably just read all this from the comic (linked to below), but here are a few things that stood out.

The testing of the browser took place on millions of websites. But, probably not only the little lame homepages that would obviously look good (or look bad?). Because Google caches so many web pages while crawling the internet, AND, because they rank web pages, they know which ones have more chances of being visited, and they have easy access to them. So they were able to run automatic (and manual) tests against MILLIONS of sites.

The JavaScript Virtual Machine is supposedly SUPER FAST! Of course, that means browsing your mail in GMail and reading my blog in Google Reader just got a whole lot faster.

References

So, to see other people’s opinions on this, go visit Philipp Lenssen’s “Google Blogoscoped” blog.

You can also read Google’s official announcement.

Or, read the comic from Google with more info about Google Chrome: Google Chrome Comic (or download the PDF version – which doesn’t seem to work, oh well).

And, I’m eagerly awaiting Matt Cutts’ post with more info for advanced users (which I would consider myself ). He’s apparently been using the browser for a while now, so he should definitely know his stuff.

Final Thoughts

I guess it’s a good thing that Google and Mozilla signed their ad deal recently, renewing the deal until 2011, because with Google’s brand behind them, this will DEFINITELY give FireFox and hopefully Internet Explorer a run for their money.

It all benefits us, because the more competition, the more we’ll get from the browsers while trying to be won over…

Speaking of competition, I can’t wait for a Mobile Google Chrome. All I can say is, when that comes out, Opera Mobile and Opera Mini (which I love) better watch out…

Saving of GMail Bookmarks

A couple of weeks ago, GMail upgraded their application to allow the bookmarking of the different areas of the application, such as:

- Your Inbox: http://mail.google.com/mail/#inbox
- Sent Mail: http://mail.google.com/mail/#sent

and, of course, the most important of all:

Unread Mail in your Inbox: http://mail.google.com/mail/#search/is%3Aunread+in%3Ainbox

The unread mail shortcut is generated by doing a search in GMail with the following query:

is:unread in:inbox

Creating a FireFox Keyword Shortcut

Now, to create the FireFox shortcut of GMail shortcuts (that’s supposed to sound GRAND!), bookmark the search results. Or, drag the link above to your bookmarks toolbar. You can save it anywhere you like, as long as you can find it again.

Then do the following:

- right-click on the bookmark
- click “Properties”
- type in the letters “gu” in the “Keyword” field

What you’ve just done is created a “URL” for FireFox.

It’s easy to test. Just try the following:

- Close your GMail tab (or close FireFox and start it up again)
- open a new, empty tab
- type the letters “gu” (without quotes) in your address bar
- press enter

You should be taken to your unread mail in your GMail inbox.

You can obviously choose any letters you like, including single letters. Just test the letters beforehand to see if they’re already in use.

FireFox Power User

And to bring you into the FireFox Power Users group, try this little keyboard combination:

[CTRL]-T
[CTRL]-L
gu
[ENTER]

What it does is:

- Opens a new tab
- puts the cursor in the Address bar
- type in your shortcut and press enter

How easy was that?

I just thought I would share my excitement about this with you. You see, since around the beginning of June my AdSense earnings have at least doubled. There could be a number of factors at play here, but the coincidence is great. And, I know a lot of people are complaining about their adsense earning dropping.

So, take a look at these graphs.

AdSense Earnings Graph

If you can’t see it properly, the beginning of June is around the 3rd date from the right at the bottom. Of course, this might not show much other than an increase in clicks (which didn’t really go up). So let’s take a look at the eCPM.

AdSense Page eCPM Graph

It doesn’t seem to be as drastic, but there’s a definite (and more consistent) increase.

Do you think this has anything to do with Google removing the AdSense arbitragers? I do…

This is probably not exciting.

But it’s something I’ve been looking for for a while, and here it is…

The route this piece of info took to get here was quite convoluted:

Danny Sullivan spoke about it on the Daily SearchCast…
… because Barry Schwartz wrote about it at Search Engine Land – “Easy Way To Turn Off Google Personalized Results“…
… because Aaron Wall wrote about it on his blog at SEOBook.com – “How to Turn Google Personalized Search Results Off Without Logging Out”

Anyway, after following the breadcrumb trail to ensure everybody got their credit, I decided to make the bookmarklet that I’ve always needed:

GdePWS

Sounds pretty dramatic, doesn’t it. At the very least, it sounds Dutch. It stands for “Google de-Personalise Web Search”.

To use it, just drag the link onto your FireFox bookmarks toolbar. Then, once you’ve performed a search in Google, if you’d like to see what the results look like without Google dishing out personalised search results, just click the link. It will perform the search again, only with the “&pws=0″ parameter appended to the end.

Let me know what you think.

From the site:

A 30 minute recap of the day’s news about search engines and search marketing, featuring search expert and analyst Danny Sullivan summarizing stories and sharing off-the-cuff remarks about what happened and what may come. Tune-in and keep informed on the latest from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Windows Live Search, AOL, Ask.com and other search engines.

I listen to it on the way to work every day if I can, and it makes sitting in the traffic feel productive. So you definitely have to subscribe. And, because I KNOW you’ll love it, go Digg It!

Anyway, in the episode dated April 18th 2007, Danny spoke about the supposed coming of the Google Phone which you can read about here: Gphone? The Google Phone Timeline

He also let us know what he thinks the Google Phone Ringtone would sound like, as well as ringtones for Yahoo and Microsoft. I thought they were hilarious, so I decided to use this fantastic post on using Windows Movie Maker to create ringtones to extract these ringtones for your use (or plain old amusement).

So, without further ado, here are the ringtones courtesy of Danny Sullivan and the Daily Searchcast, available in both MP3 and WMA (for those of us with Windows Mobile Phones):

Google-Ringtone-1.mp3
Google-Ringtone-1.wma

Google-Ringtone-2.mp3
Google-Ringtone-2.wma

Google-Ringtone-3.mp3
Google-Ringtone-3.wma

Yahoo-Ringtone.mp3
Yahoo-Ringtone.wma

Microsoft-Ringtone.mp3
Microsoft-Ringtone.wma

Here’s an excerpt from the Official Google Blog’s announcement:

Today, we’re pleased to announce the launch of Web History, a new feature for Google Account users that makes it easy to view and search across the pages you’ve visited. If you remember seeing something online, you’ll be able to find it faster and from any computer with Web History. Web History lets you look back in time, revisit the sites you’ve browsed, and search over the full text of pages you’ve seen. It’s your slice of the web, at your fingertips.

How does Web History work? All you need is a Google Account and the Google Toolbar with PageRank enabled. The Toolbar, as part of your browser, helps us associate the pages you visit with your Google Account.

The key thing to notice is that, with the Google Toolbar installed, Google will monitor every webpage you visit, storing those URLs for you. We all know that Google could use this information to help “better their results”, but this is not the point right now.

I’m just counting the hours until Graywolf puts up a post about how bad this is.

What would make enabling this a clincher for me? (Please see the update at the bottom)

How about being able to set up a Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) specifically for this that would automatically add your search history to the CSE. Then, if you need to find that little piece of info on some page you viewed in the last month, you can search for it. It wouldn’t be like using the default “Web History” dashboard, as this just seems to list the pages you’ve viewed, not the contents of those pages (obviously). So being able to search JUST the sites you’ve visited (even better, just the pages) would be ideal.

Personally, I don’t think it can be that hard to do, as there’s already an RSS feed listing the pages you’ve viewed.

UPDATE:

Before we go on, let me tell you the moral of the following story: Don’t just read the “press release”, read the Product Page as well.

Ok, here’s another excerpt from the actual “Web History” welcome page:

Search the full text of pages you’ve visited. Web History allows you to search across the web pages, images, videos and news stories you’ve viewed.

So, it looks like they do this already. Google obviously hires PHDs for a reason.

This is what my optimization report says this month:

April 2007 Optimization Report

Dear Publisher,

Here is your optimization report for the month of April. After an automatic review of your sites, we think you might be able to improve your monetization using the following tips:

You may be filtering ads that monetize well on your site.
How can I fix this? Dismiss this tip.

We hope these tips are helpful, and encourage you to experiment using different layouts and formats–no two sites monetize the same way!

Sincerely,
Google Adsense

This is in relation to the URLs I have in my Competitive Ad Filter.

A quick recap

The competitive ad filter allows you to enter URLs for sites that you don’t want advertising on your site. For example, let’s say you run a site that talks about golf, and you notice that you’re starting to get a lot of ads from a “VW Golf” car advertiser (unlikely, but possible). This isn’t really relevant to your site, so you’d like to block this advertiser from your site. To do this, you’d log into your AdSense account, click on “AdSense Setup” and then “Competitive Ad Filter”. At the bottom under “AdSense for Content“, you would enter the URL for the advertiser that you want to block in the “AdSense for Content filters” box. For example, if you notice that the “VW Golf” advertiser’s URL is www.vw.com, you could enter “vw.com” into the box, and it will block all ads that point to this site…

Decreasing Profit

But, remember that it’s not only you that makes money when a visitor clicks on an ad. Google is taking a nice slice of that pie as well. So, it’s in their best interest to show the ads that will generate the highest income. So, blocking a specific advertiser might mean that Google will have to display a lower-paying AdSense ad on your site.

Blocking MFA sites

Ok, fair enough. I might be blocking ads that will have a higher CPC than the ads I currently have showing. The problem is, on the sites where I’m showing AdSense, I’m not really blocking competitors, but rather blocking sites that I don’t want visitors going to, such as MFA sites.

MFA stands for “Made For AdSense“, and these are sites that generally don’t supply any information, but show a LOT of AdSense ads, in the hope that the visitor will click an ad to find more info… And, most of the MFA sites that I’m blocking are using a technique called “AdSense Arbitrage” which is where they will pay perhaps 3c a click to get the visitor to their site, and receive (hopefully) 10c or higher when a visitor clicks an ad on their site. You can find a bit more info on this subject here: “AdSense Arbitrage: Tips, Tricks & Secrets”

The Dilemma

Now, because Google is suggesting that I might be able to increase my profit by unblocking some of these sites without telling me which ones, I have to decide whether to send my visitors to MFA sites. I would decide not to unblock them, except that, according to this thread on WebMasterWorld, people think they are seeing that Google is punishing them for having a lot of “blocked” sites.

It could just be that the genuine advertisers are using all their skills to optimize their ads, and thereby be allowed to bid a LOT lower for their ads. With Google’s “Landing Page Quality Algorithm“, or “Quality Score“, advertisers with quality content on their landing page (and site) will be able to pay a lower cost per click. So publishers (like me) will have to suffer a little to ensure that their visitors who click on the ads will be taken to quality sites.

Is this a price you’re willing to pay?

Well, it looks to me as if those days are gone. Google is no longer the sexy co-star in movies these days.

I watched “Because I said so” with Diane Keaton the other night and Diane’s character needed to find a dating website. Up came THE UGLIEST looking search engine I have ever seen and it definitely was NOT Google.

And that’s not the only time. 2 days later I watched the TV series “Dexter”, and he did a search using a search engine I’ve never seen. It had a cleaner interface, but it still wasn’t Google.

I wonder if we’re going to stop seeing the Apple logo on all the laptops in movies now?