Nexus 7 on Google's homepage

Photo from Google Play

Today, Google did an unanticipated (and also weird) move and placed a Nexus 7 ad on his homepage. Putting such an overt advertise on Google's homepage is a really rare action. Obviously, Google is proud of his new Nexus and will not lose any chances to bring more attention to it. 

Nexus 7 with its great hardware and impressive design is a turning point for Google. A point that Google can use to change the rules of the game. This market is so tempting that even Apple couldn't resist and want to introduce a 7 inch tablet at the end of summer. In the other hand, Amazon is trying to take back the market by the new Kindle Fire. This game is going to be very hot!

Anyway, if you check Google's homepage today, you can see this advertisement.

Nexus 7 advertisement on Google's homepage.

The new algorithm works fine!

It seems Google's new page ranking algorithm, Google Panda, released in February 2011, is working great! Many of my friends and peoples I know, running illegal download sites and blogs, faced a similar problem: their links drop rapidly in Google's search results and pass even page 5; while last year at these times, their links had stuck to Google's first page. That's really fun! (I'm not an evil friend, but I can's stop laughing! :D)

Matt Cutts's published post.

Today, Matt Cutts, head of the Google’s Webspam team, published a new post in his personal blog to answer this important question: "Why a site's PageRank goes down?". In this post, Mr. Cutts mentions an important aspect of the new algorithm: it's sensitiveness to paid links that pass PageRank.

The story begins when a newspaper emails Mr Cutts and asks him "why their  PageRank has dropped from 7 to 3"! Here is Mr Cutts's answer:
(I have shortened links to make the quote looks better)

Hi, the usual reason why a site’s PageRank drops by 30-50% like this is because the site violates our quality guidelines by selling links that pass PageRank. Here’s our documentation on that: http://goo.gl/CeRUp and here’s a video I made about this common case: http://goo.gl/P1iXx (it’s about 1:30 into the video). 

http://goo.gl/Z8xOx is a good recent article about paid reviews. In Google’s world, we take paid links that pass PageRank as seriously as Amazon would take paid reviews without disclosure or as your newspaper would treat a reporter who was paid to link to a website in an article without disclosing the payment.

In particular, earlier this year on [website] we saw links labeled as sponsored that passed PageRank, such as a link like [example link]. That’s a clear violation of Google’s quality guidelines, and it’s the reason that [website]‘s PageRank as well as our trust in the website has declined.

In fact, we received a outside spam report about your site. The spam report passed on an email from a link seller offering to sell links on multiple pages on [website] based on their PageRank. Some pages mentioned in that email continue to have unusual links to this day. For example [example url] has a section labeled “PARTNER LINKS” which links to [linkbuyer].

So my advice would be to investigate how paid links that pass PageRank ended up on [website]: who put them there, are any still up, and to investigate whether someone at the [newspaper] received money to post paid links that pass PageRank without disclosing that payment, e.g. using ambiguous labeling such as “Partner links.” That’s definitely where I would dig.

After that investigation is complete and any paid links that pass PageRank are removed, the site’s webmaster can do a reconsideration request using Google’s free webmaster tools console at google.com/webmasters. I would include as much detail as you can about what you found out about the paid links. That will help us assess how things look going forward.

Sincerely,

Matt

I would like to share this useful advice with you. It has great points for webmasters and bloggers. That's all!

Google goes Blue!

Google Search's favicon has been changed. This new favicon is a lowercase "g" on a blue rectangle (instead the old four color one). Google did not announced this change officially but it seems they are going to unify the official Google logo in all platforms (include Chrome OS and Chrome browser, Android and iOS). Previously  Google Search logo on Chrome OS and Chrome Browser and Google Search app for Android and iOS had been changed to this new blue icon.

Anyway, I think the new icon/favicon is pretty amazing and inspiring. Its blue color is   beautiful and relaxing; however seeing a blue favicon on the tab bar is a bit odd.

If you can not see the new favicon, maybe clearing the cache comes in handy in some cases; if not, you should wait a bit longer!

The London 2012 Ceremony by Google

 UPDATE-8/12/2012  The closing ceremony's time has been changed to 4:00pm ET (12:30am IRST).
----
During London 2012 Olympic games, I was following results by searching "london2012" on Google. I think among Google, Bing and Yahoo, Google shows the result in the best format. Anyway, today I noticed that tomorrow is the Olympics closing ceremony. So I decided to search for the time of the ceremony. As I didn't know the exact phrase for this event, I googled "London 2012 ending ceremony" and Google suggested "London 2012 Closing Ceremony" that seems to be the correct phrase.

Then I pressed the space button and when I was wavering between typing "time" or "date", Google suggested immediately with "Time", "Date" and "Tickets". I chose "time" and then Google answered (beside the common results):

The Closing Ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games is on Sunday, August 12, 2012, at 3:00pm CT.

Amazing! That's why I love Google!

Google shows the London 2012 closing ceremony time separately, as you can see above the search results.

But to converting time of the ceremony to my homeland time (Iran), I just needed to use another search engine: the wonderful WolframAlpha! I used this input value: "3:pm CT to IRST" and the result was: "8:19:21 pm IRDT  |  Saturday, August 11, 2012". Tada!

Converting time zones by WolframAlpha.

Sometimes sticking just to one tool/thing/engine is not a pretty good idea and may even lead you to worse results. So, always seek different ways and try diffident tools, but do not lose your concentrate. That's the point!

LINKS Google WolframAlpha