Smaaz’s Blog

Google’s Gmail is now open for public beta!

Google has decided to open its EMail service “Gmail” to the public today. After more then 2 years of invitation based beta testing, Google finally placed a Sign up link on the Gmail homepage.

2 comments February 7th, 2007

Live Search SOAP API 1.0 Released

The Live.com team has released the first version of the Live Search SOAP API today. A lot of new features have been added to this release since the beta version. Here are the most important improvements:

• Search Results - increased from the first 250 to the first 1,000. And added a flag to disable host collapsing (the suppression of more than two results from a top-level URL) to facilitate the development of accurate paging algorithms.
• Search Tags - enhanced to return results as a comma-delimited list or as an array of name/value pairs. Results can also be filtered by the Search Tag name.
• Local Search - no longer do you need to specify lat & lon for location, you can now city names and zip codes, just like in the web UI. We’ve also added local data support for the following markets: en-AU, en-CA, en-GB, en-US, es-US, fr-CA, fr-FR, and it-IT.
• PhoneBook Results -  now sort by distance and relevance

A more detailed overview can be found at the Microsoft Developer Network.

Add comment February 7th, 2007

New Link Reporting Tools at Webmaster Central

Today, Google has added a new feature to the Webmaster Central that enables to view a much larger sample of links to a website, than the existing “link:” operator. This data is much more comprehensive and can be classified, filtered, and downloaded. As an example, a  search for “link:www.smaaz.com” at Google.com returns only 58 results, while the Link Overview at Webmaster Central shows more then 1,100 links. You can find more on the new Link Reporting Tools at the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog.

1 comment February 6th, 2007

Yahoo’s New Ad Ranking System Is Live

Yahoo’s new ad ranking model, called Panama, was rolled out in the U.S. today. The main feature of Panama is, that Ads in search results will be ranked by both bid amount and ad quality. This change, which will impact all advertisers, is designed to allow you to focus less on competitive bidding and more on the quality of your ads. By improving the quality of your ads and making them more relevant to users, you may be rewarded with a better ranking and reduced cost for your ads.

Panama will determine an ad’s quality by:

• Historical performance - the ad’s click-through rate relative to its position in search results.
   
• Expected performance - determined by various relevance factors considered by Yahoo!’s ranking algorithms, relative to other ads displayed at the same time.

I think, this is a very important step for Yahoo!, to catch up with Google’s Adword program.

Add comment February 5th, 2007

Google Announced Fiscal Year 2006 Results

Google today announced the financial results for fiscal year ended December 31, 2006. Here are the most interesting numbers:

Revenues - Google reported revenues of $3.21 billion for the quarter ended December 31, 2006, representing a 67% increase over fourth quarter 2005 revenues of $1.92 billion and a 19% increase over third quarter 2006 revenues of $2.69 billion. Google reports its revenues, consistent with GAAP, on a gross basis without deducting traffic acquisition costs, or TAC.

TAC - Traffic Acquisition Costs, the portion of revenues shared with Google’s partners, increased to $976 million in the fourth quarter of 2006. This compares to TAC of $825 million in the third quarter. TAC as a percentage of advertising revenues was 31% in both the fourth quarter and the third quarter.

Operating Expenses - Operating expenses, other than cost of revenues, were $862 million in the fourth quarter. These operating expenses included $493 million in payroll-related and facilities expenses.

Cash - As of December 31, 2006, cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities were $11.2 billion.

Employees - On a worldwide basis, Google employed 10,674 full-time employees as of December 31, 2006, up from 9,378 full time employees as of September 30, 2006.

The complete report can be found at the Google Investor Relations page.

Add comment February 1st, 2007