This week Google released the latest version of the AdWords API (v2009) to all advertisers after releasing it to a limited group back in June. The new version offers users some new features, and Google says it comes with greater speed at a lower cost.

"Because it offers nearly all of the campaign management functionality you’re used to from the AdWords API, along with a new rate sheet representing lower costs, now is a great time to start developing for v2009," says John Fitzpatrick of Google’s AdWords API Team.

Documentation for the new version of the API can be found here. There is also a sandbox available where developers can experiment and test. The sandbox does not charge for API units. Users just need access to a Google Account username and password. Best practices for the sandbox can be found here.

Google has extended the length of time that they’ll support both this version and the previous version, v13. The company has done so because the changes between the two versions are so significant. Google intends to retire v13 early next year, but will announce exact dates in the coming months.

"In anticipation of retiring v13, we strongly encourage you to begin development for v2009 as soon as possible," Fitzpatrick tells developers. "We’re still working on making v2009 better, so this is also a great opportunity to provide us your early feedback."

Over the next several months, Google will be releasing more functionality for v2009, such as asynchronous calls, partial failure acceptance, keyword optimization tools, and reporting.

People who don’t really believe that Google wants to make the world’s information "universally accessible and useful" will, going forward, have a more difficult time arguing their point.  Yesterday, Creative Commons announced that it’s received a $500,000 gift from Anne Wojcicki and Sergey Brin.

Wojcicki is the cofounder of 23andMe and Brin’s wife.  And Brin, of course, is the cofounder and president of Google.  One interesting question is exactly whose checkbook the donation issued from; a post on the Creative Commons blog always puts Wojcicki’s name first when naming the pair.

A relevant point is that Fortune pegged Brin’s net worth at $12 billion in mid-March.

But anyway, Melissa Reeder, a development manager at Creative Commons, responded to their donation by writing, "We are delighted that the couple recognizes the importance of Creative Commons and has decided to invest in our work to support sharing, collaboration, and the spread of knowledge and creativity."

Reeder then continued, "This gift – made in addition to the financial support that Google offers CC annually – will be used to support Creative Commons generally, with a focus on developing our Science Commons project, which Wojcicki and Brin are particularly excited about."

UK site Connected Internet this week found that BT Yahoo, which is an online portal for BT Broadband users, and is run by Yahoo, is using Google Search now, rather than Yahoo search, which has been in place.

The move is obviously a bit strange, considering that Microsoft and Yahoo have a famous search/advertising deal in the works, which would see Yahoo Search in general being replaced by Microsoft’s own Bing technology (with Yahoo still running the front-end). So why would this ISP-based Yahoo offering go Google?

According to Connected Internet, BT owns 35% of the broadband provider market share in the UK. "Unlike in the US where Microsoft and Yahoo have respectable shares of the search market, the situation in the UK is very different with Google totally dominating the UK search market with over 90% of the market," says Connected Internet’s Everton Blair.

"By replacing Yahoo’s search engine, BT are hoping that overall search usage will increase by providing users easy access to the #1 service in the UK," adds Blair.

It will be interesting to see if Microsoft steps in on this situation, and other possible situations like it. Om Malik at GigaOm notes that Yahoo is also powering Verizon and AT&T in the US and Rogers in Canada.

On BT Yahoo, Yahoo is reportedly still running image and video search.

Google is talking about how online ads can boost in-store sales at a couple of its different blogs today. The first one looks at the relationship between POS (point of sale) and O2S (online to store).

"Online To Store research is transforming retail today based on the ability to test digital marketing during a specified period of time and measure exactly what happens to sales not only online through eCommerce, but possibly more importantly- in-store in the test markets," says Jay Bowden of the Google Retail Team. "Test and control has never led to greater clarity of online efficacy."

"This is the Holy Grail of advertising and marketing funding if you think about it," he adds. "You have read on this blog before about Google partnering with Retailers to learn exactly what a dollar spent online can do for in-store sales, well now a number of the tests have been completed and the results are in! Online advertising drives in-store sales!"

The other post from Google looks at a recent study from comScore, which shows that online advertising is on par with television advertising in growing retail sales of consumer packaged goods brands. Over 12 weeks, online ad campaigns with an average reach of 40% of their target segment successfully grew retail sales of the advertised brands by an average of 9%. It was only 8% for tv ad campaigns over 12 months.

"In 2008, Google commissioned a study with Harris Interactive among three CPG brands to compare the brand building effectiveness between traditional TV and online platforms," says Google on the CPG Blog. "Effectiveness was equated to impact and engagement."

"Identical traditional TV ads were shown on three distinct platforms: 1) on TV, 2) on a computer screen replicating a YouTube video environment, and on a computer screen replicating a click-to-play video embedded in content," Google explains. "The Harris Interactive results showed that :30 commercials on YouTube and embedded video ads performed at parity with TV. All three were on par with the ability to communicate key messages about the brand, strengthen likeability, and drive purchase intent."

The research discussed above is positive news for online advertising in general. In fact, it makes helps make the case for unification of offline and online advertising efforts.

Google now has a video chat application that can be used from your iGoogle home page. This is just the latest feature Google has added to its ever-growing list of products/features that make it more like a giant social network.

"We have had video chat in Gmail for a little while now, but the nice thing about video chat in iGoogle is that you can video chat with friends who don’t have gmail accounts, all you need is a Google account," says Google software engineer Robin Schriebman. "One less thing to worry about when you want to stay in touch."

iGoogle users who wish to video chat with friends, need simply: 

- Download the voice and video chat plug-in, quit all open browser windows, and install the plug-in.

- Sign in to chat.

- Select the contact you want to call. If they have a camera icon next to their name, you can make a voice or video call; just click ‘Actions’ and ‘Start video chat.’

If they don’t have a camera icon, it means they don’t have the app installed, but you can send them an invitation to download it. Cameraless friends can still participate in voice chat through the app and have a conversation where only one side is in video.

"Since sometimes reading ‘lol’ doesn’t deliver the same punch as actually hearing your friend laugh at your jokes, you can now use voice and video capabilities in chat," says Google. "You can have an actual conversation with someone (seriously, out loud), or even chat face to face over video."

System requirements for the app are Windows XP or later or Intel Mac OS X 10.4 or later.

We all know that social media is "where it’s at" these days. People are spending more and more of their time on social networking sites. Many are checking their Facebook pages and Twitter accounts before even checking their email (or even getting out of bed in some cases).

Real-time search, while still in its infancy (if not in utero), is on the rise, and people are searching for up-to-the-minute, what’s happening right-now results for many of their every day queries. Real-time search isn’t a replacement for Google, its a compliment. That’s why Google knows it needs to gravitate in its direction and offer as fresh of results as possible, particularly when relevant.

Google already has a "sorted by date" feature (under "recent results") in its list of search options that users can use to customize their search experience. The jury is still out on how frequently these search options are and will be used, but that option’s there, and chances are that it will get better at indexing fresh content. Chances are also that more and more people will realize that option is available. It hasn’t been around that long yet.

People aren’t just searching on Google and the traditional search engines. They’re searching on social networks too. You know about Twitter’s real-time search, and Facebook recently rolled it out too. Facebook also acquired FriendFeed, which utilizes pretty much every other social network out there.

I’ve already written about why social media is only going to become more important to search, but it’s not just about search. It’s about the way people obtain, absorb, and relay information. They’re doing it on Twitter. They’re doing it on Facebook. They’re doing it on MySpace, and they’re doing it on plenty of other networks (and believe it or not, they’re still doing it through email too).

These are the reasons your content should be as shareable as possible. If you want more people to see it, word of mouth is just as important as search. Social media is the word of mouth of the web.

Include buttons and icons that make your content easy to share on social networks. "Post to Facebook," "Retweet," "Digg," etc. are all buttons that can put your content a click away from going viral. Obviously the content has to be up to par for this to work.

This can work in your favor on down the road as well as the present. Even if an article is a month or a year old, if it is still relevant, someone may happen across it and tweet it or share it some other way. This will not only place your content within the streams of that person’s followers/friends, but also on the radar of any related real-time searches taking place.

Real-time search isn’t just about what’s happening right now. It’s also about what people are talking about right now. It’s up to you to provide content that people will still be talking about later. Giving easy access to sharing features will only ease the way.

How important to you think real-time search is to the future of online marketing? Share your thoughts.

Google has added a bookmark sync feature to its Chrome browser. Essentially, this lets users sync their bookmarks between their Chrome browser on different machines.

"This new feature makes it easy to keep the same set of bookmarks on all your machines, and stores them alongside your Google Docs for easy web access," says Google’s Tim Steele.

To use the bookmark sync feature in Chrome, launch Chrome with the –enable-sync command-line flag. After you set up sync from the Tools menu, Chrome will upload and store your bookmarks to your Google account.

When a user wants to change or add a bookmark, the changes will be stored in the cloud and synced on all of the machines being used where the bookmark sync feature is activated.

Mozilla has a similar feature in its Weave product, which allows users of the Firefox browser to sync their preferences on multiple machines. Last month, they announced a new version of it.

This week, Mozilla has shared more details about what they’re working on to improve Weave. These include improvements in performance, usability, bugs, and things beyond just syncing. More details about that here.

Google is updating the default font faces associated with specific AdSense ad formats. The decision to do so is based on findings that different fonts perform better with different formats.

"In the same way that you regularly try out changes to your AdSense ads to increase your earnings, we’re also constantly looking for new ways to help you earn more," explains Arlene Lee of Google’s Inside AdSense Team. "We’ve been analyzing the performance of the three available font faces (Arial, Verdana, and Times New Roman), and have found that each font performs best in different ad formats due to factors like character width."

The changes will only apply to ad units that have "AdSense Default" selected as the font face, and are in languages that have Latin-based characters like: 

- Croatian
- Czech
- Danish
- Dutch
- English (US and UK)
- Finnish
- French
- German
- Hungarian
- Indonesian
- Italian
- Norwegian
- Polish
- Portuguese
- Romanian
- Slovak
- Spanish
- Swedish
- Turkish

AdSense ad units are mostly set to Arial as the default, but a few are in  the Verdana font. The new defaults Google is launching include the following:

Arial: 728×90, 336×280, 120×600, 120×240

Verdana: 300×250, 160×600, 468×60, 250×250, 234×60, 125×125, 180×150

Times New Roman: 200×200

While Google is changing the defaults, the company still encourages users to experiment with fonts on their own. There is no reason why other fonts might work better for your own ads.

Fans of Street View may not get a lot of work done today.  Google’s seen fit to release images covering three new countries, and pictures documenting some special points of interest within America’s borders have become available, as well.

Switzerland, Taiwan, and Portual are the three main attractions (as you probably gathered from this piece’s title).  Interesting and even stunning views are available of each, with the image below showing off Grindelwald, Switzerland.

As for the odds and ends, Stephen Chau, a product manager, explained in a post on the LatLong Blog, "We took our Street View cars for spins around two race tracks in California: Thunderhill Raceway Park and Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca."

Chau then continued, "We’ve also used our Street View Trike, the new bicycle-based system, to gather imagery at San Diego State University and LEGOLAND California.  We’ve included a little surprise at LEGOLAND, which we hope you will enjoy!"  (That surprise – possible spoiler alert! – may or may not be the Lego Pegman.)

So there’s plenty of stuff to keep Street View fans busy.  And since it had been a while since the last time Google released any fresh Street View imagery, this morning’s update should prove especially welcome.

Employees should be more careful than ever about what sort of work-related information they post online.  A new report indicates that companies are growing increasingly aware of inappropriate sharing, with many incidents resulting in someone getting fired.

Proofpoint found that businesses have definitely become wary about blogs.  An official statement claimed that, during the past year, "17 percent disciplined an employee for violating blog or message board policies, while nearly nine percent reported terminating an employee for such a violation (both increases from 2008, 11 percent and six percent, respectively)."

It seems that firms are aware of YouTube and Facebook, as well.  The report indicated that eight percent of corporations (each) got rid of people for violating policies pertaining to multimedia sites and social networks.

Finally, if employees figured they were safe using the relative newcomer, Twitter, they should think again.  Proofpoint reported that 13 percent of U.S. companies investigated "exposure incidents" involving Twitter and Twitter-like services.

You might interpret this as evidence that people should learn to keep their mouths shut (and/or fingers still).  A more charitable view is that perhaps social media sites should make their privacy notices and options more visible.  Regardless, it looks like social media is starting to have a significant impact in the workplace.

Google has introduced a set of new ad templates for its Display Ad Builder tool. The templates, which Google refers to as "elegant" reside in the "general" category.

"These templates have ready-made buttons and backgrounds that give each ad a cohesive look and feel," says Dan Friedman of Google’s Inside AdWords Crew. "More specifically, the backgrounds use subtle gradients and the new buttons have unique shapes, icons and color treatments. The goal of these ads is to make it as easy as possible to create high-quality ads in a matter of seconds without having to use complex graphics software."

With some of the new templates, advertisers need only upload their product image and write some text, and the template pretty much takes care of itself. For the design-impaired, it’s a good way to easily create a decent looking ad.

In addition, most of them seem to cater to "clickiness," meaning they make it easy for a call to action to inspire a click.

To use the templates, just click Display Ad Builder on the Create an Ad page in AdWords. Google Display Ads features over 90 different templates. Google offers a display ads tutorial here.

One aspect of search that doesn’t get discussed often enough is image search. It’s such a huge part of search and the daily habits of web surfers all over the world, it’s amazing how little attention is actually paid to it when it comes to marketing and optimization.

Some Image Search Stats to Chew On

Google Director of Product Management R.J. Pittman dropped some facts at SES. 300 million digital photos are taken every day. 100 billion images are taken per year. There were half a trillion images in circulation by 2009. That’s the past up to the present. Do you think it’s going to slow down? Pittman says there were 800 million camera phones sold last year, and there may be more images online than web pages.

On Google there are hundreds of millions of image searches every day. Eric Enge, President of Stone Temple Consulting says that image search makes up about 5.7% of all Google searches. "We estimate that up to 15% of all search is image related," he says.

Why Image Search is So Important

If the above information wasn’t enough to convince you of the importance of image search, consider this. When images appear in blended search results (such as Google’s universal search), the images affect what is clicked on the results page. Enge says an eye tracking study proved this, but it makes perfect sense if you think about it. The image is obviously going to catch your eye, regardless if it’s the top result or the 5th.

Todd Schwartz, Group Product Manager for Bing says that engagement is quite high when it comes to image search. Consumers looking for images also end up visiting a lot of web pages. In many cases, images can simply speed up the decision process on the consumer’s part. You can see why this would be effective in eCommerce. "When users are expecting images in a search session it actually increases the speed of a searchers task," says Schwartz. "Images simply speed decision making." He would know. Bing <i>is</i> the "decision engine."

Tips for ranking in Image Search

In a post about ranking in "five other Google engines," I cited some tips from Search Engine Journal’s Dev Basu, who recommended the following for image SEO:

- Add images to your Google Local Business profile
- Enable Google Image Labeler in your Google Webmaster Tools account.
- Add images to local business citation sources.
- Add images to blog posts or news articles for syndication in Google news.

Here is some additional info from Google:

Schwartz says for Bing, you should name the images properly and upload product categories for eCommerce images.

Enge suggested some even more basic tried and true SEO tactics that should still be applied. Include alt attributes in <img source> tags. Name files appropriately, and consider the nearby text, overall page context, links, title tags, etc. This stuff is all good, but you should know that the way search engines are handling images is evolving.

How the Search Engines Handle Images

Pittman says it’s no longer just about looking at tags and stuff, at least at Google. "We now use computer vision and search to find similar images, object recognition, and facial recognition," he says. "We look at everything such as exposure data to help determine the quality of an image. If your image quality is low your photos will not rank as high. If you make only a thumbnail of an image it won’t rank as well as a larger image of the same subject." (Emphasis added.)

Back in June, Google released a fascinating research paper that looked at building a web-scale landmark-recognition engine. The goal is to get computers to recognize landmarks (for example, the Eiffel Tower, the Lincoln Memorial, or the example Google shares – the Acropolis). This is no easy task when the engine has to rely on images of the landmarks, which are incredibly varied by angle, lighting, photo quality, etc.

This was just a research paper, and not a Google product, but one can only imagine where this research will lead with regards to how Google handles image searches.

The image filters that search engines use are worth paying attention to. If you’re trying to sell products especially, it could help to consider where you want your images to rank. Google lets users search images by size, type (face, photo, clip art, line drawing), and color (full color, black and white, specific color).

Bing lets users browse results by size, layout, color, style, and people. That is in addition to the query-specific options you get.

As far as regular web searches, Bing and Google both present a number of options for users to refine their searches. Bing of course has the explore window, which for many queries, provides multiple categories. Google has its search options. Images are included in that.

Just like with any content, there is always concern that stolen material will rank higher than the original source. Pitman was asked about this at SES with regards to images. He said that image search ranking is largely dependant on how often that image is clicked on for the search query being done. He says Google is trying to combat "hotlink spam."

Social Media and Images

Social media accounts for a huge amount of the pictures on the web. Not only do you have sites like Flickr and Picasa, but there are so many people uploading so many photos to Facebook and MySpace, not to mention apps like TwitPic for Twitter.

Believe it or not, real-time search plays a vital role in image search, just as in regular search. People want up-to-the-minute information, and that often comes in the form of images. Some real-time search engines are expanding how they handle media like images and video.

Perhaps the more significant part of this equation is the reputation management factor. Real-time search helps in this regard, when you’re trying to protect your reputation, but good old-fashioned Google searches are vital too.

"Think about the pictures that your employees are putting up on social sites," says Liana Evans, Director of Social Media at Serengeti Communications. "Images can hurt your business reputation."

Social media has a direct relationship with search rankings too. Read up on that here .

Conclusion

There are a lot of things to consider when it comes to images on the web. A couple other things that we didn’t really touch on are SafeSearch filters and Creative Commons licensing. These are things you should explore further if you think they will affect you. There is plenty of info out there about both.

One other thing I’d like to mention is that Google’s Insights for Search analytical tool now includes image search data. This could be a very useful tool for anyone looking to improve their performance in image search.

Are you ready for the future of search marketing? It’s going to creep up on you if you are not. In fact, it’s already creeping. How long have you spent worrying about keywords? Is that all you worry about? Hopefully not, because there’s a lot more to successful online marketing than that, even search marketing.

This is the basic plot of a keynote speech delivered by Charlene Li, co-author of the book Groundswell, and Founder of Altimeter Group, at the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose.

The big picture is largely about social media and interaction. This is nothing new right? You’ve had social media marketing talk rammed down your throat for a while now, but that’s separate from search engine marketing right? Well, yes and no. Social media may play a bigger role in search engine rankings that you realize, and that could even become truer in the future, and probably will.

Here’s the thing. Searchers want relevant results. It’s all about relevancy. That’s all the search engines strive for, and that’s what users want. As Li says, "There is a new type of relevance called engagement." People must be at the center of your search strategy. Not keywords.

There’s a reason that real-time search is such a hot topic. Some think it’s just a buzzword, but it’s more than that. It’s an ever-growing element into what people want to know.

Now we’re not talking about real-time search taking over traditional search. Right now is not always more relevant than something from three years ago. In many cases, it is more relevant though. User intent might be considered the holy grail.

There’s a reason Google is working toward updating its algorithm to incorporate a faster indexing speed. People want freshness. That’s why Twitter has become such a hot source of buzz that seemingly all radio and television programs cling to these days. It’s up to the minute info about what people are saying.

Facebook is doing it now too, and Li mentioned the importance of this in her keynote as well. One very important thing to keep in mind is that outside search engines aren’t indexing the information that can be found in Facebook updates. Facebook is huge now, by the way – way bigger than Twitter. We’re talking up there in Googleland in terms of users.

Social is an important element of search. We still have to look at it as a thing of the future though, because we are still so early in the evolution of the social web. The major search engines are still trying to make sense of it all. Li noted that the real time web presents many challenges to search engines, because how do you place value on things like retweets, @replies, short URLs, etc? There are a lot of new elements to consider.

Now think about search engine advertising. Li asked, "What if search engines augmented my search ads based on knowing who I am?" Think about data like influence, and number of friends. The number of influential friends could influence search results and search engine ad targeting.

The web has largely become a very social environment, and will continue to become even more so. This is why marketers should focus on people rather than keywords. If you want an example of how this plays directly into Google results already, Li mentioned how the YouTube video called " United Breaks Guitars " ranks number 4 in Google when you search for "united". United doesn’t own that keyword anymore, because people have lifted this video up.

The synopsis of Li’s book reads, "Right now, your customers are writing about you products on blogs and recutting you commercials on YouTube. They’re defining you on Wikipedia and ganging up on you on social networking sites like Facebook. These are the elements of a social phenomenon."

Well, it’s the truth. You’ve got to engage out there. There are watchers, sharers, commenters, content producers, and curators. Focus on the sharers and the watchers. Focus on people and relationships, and listen to customers. 

Li says you should also get you back end data in order. By this, she means having a single place where people can sign in to your site, and integrate off-site behavior and data. Figure out the value of specific visitors. Integrating social into your site is a good way to do this.

"Prepare to tap into ‘chain of intent,’" she says. "Google now combines chains of searches to determine intent." (Emphasis added.)

Know that customers can take their social networks anywhere with them at this point. Thanks to all kinds of tools from the networks themselves, as well as browser plug-ins, etc. people always have their social functions a click away. You’re going to have to accept this and realize that you have less control over your brand than ever. That’s why you need to deepen relationships and get engaged. It’s even important than ever for search.

Update: Hear what Matt Cutts has to say about Caffeine in this exclusive interview with WebProNews:

More WebProNews Videos

Original Article: Google may have a huge lead over its competitors in terms of market share, but the search giant isn’t resting on its laurels.  A next-generation infrastructure codenamed "Caffeine" has been unveiled, and it’s already available for individuals to test.

Fair warning: don’t expect Caffeine to introduce natural language recognition, search results from Twitter, or anything else too fancy.  Matt Cutts cautioned, "The Caffeine update isn’t about making some UI changes here or there.  Currently, even power users won’t notice much of a difference at all.  This update is primarily under the hood: we’re rewriting the foundation of some of our infrastructure."

Still, he continued, "[S]ome of the search results do change, so we wanted to open up a preview so that power searchers and web developers could give us feedback."

Head over to http://www2.sandbox.google.com if you intend to take Cutts and Google up on their invitation.  Keep an eye on characteristics including accuracy, comprehensiveness, and – perhaps especially – indexing speed.  Then, if you’ve got anything constructive to say, use the "Dissatisfied?  Help us improve" link at the bottom of the page and include the term "Caffeine" in your response.

Initial impressions have, as you can see below, been mostly positive.

Caffeine is likely to hit the mainstream in the near future.  Cutts referred to this sneak peek as "a preview of how the search results will change over the next few weeks and months."