Google conducted a joint test with Levi’s and found that paid search ads raised consumer awareness of the Levi’s brand, regardless of whether or not they were clicked. In the test, 53% of "in-market" consumers named Levi’s when asked which brand of jeans came to mind when a Levi’s search ad was in the top sponsored position.

That seems pretty likely anyway, but only 30% named Levi’s when there was no Levi’s search ad on the page. You can’t deny that 23% is a pretty significant increase.

"Better yet, when Levi’s ‘non-customers’ (people who hadn’t bought Levi’s jeans in the past 6 months) were asked the same question, 45% named Levi’s when the ad was in the top sponsored position, versus 23% who named Levi’s when there was no ad in the search results," says Sara Kleinberg of Google’s Retail team.

"With search being central to the consumer shopping cycle, search should be part of your strategy to not only drives sales, but also build your brand awareness as consumers are considering what gifts to buy for the holidays," says Kleinberg.

An interesting article from Mike Shaw of comScore earlier this week talked about the dwindling importance of the click, and how the view-through impact of online display ads can have the same impact on sales as what has traditionally been ascribed to TV ads.

Perhaps the view-through metric is should not only inspire thoughts of display advertising. Search ads are technically displayed too.

Related Articles:

> Google Gives Advertisers More Tracking Options

> More "Ads by Google" Across the Web

It’s a good bet that mailmen (and/or mail servers) are still delivering huge numbers of applications and resumes to Google.  A very large survey has confirmed that university students regard the search giant as the world’s most attractive employer.

Universum contacted almost 120,000 students from Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Russia, Spain, the UK, and the US regarding which companies they’d most like to work for.  The result: Google won in both the business and engineering categories.

Not many of the other corporations we usually cover made either list; you’ll find PricewaterhouseCoopers, Goldman Sachs, and Ernst & Young on the one side, and IBM, BMW, and Intel on the other.  But Microsoft scored quite well, at least, coming in at number three on the business side of things and number two in terms of the engineering rankings.

So both Google and Microsoft will probably continue to employ people of the highest caliber for the foreseeable future.  It just looks like Google might maintain a bit of an edge, perhaps getting kids who are in the top 0.5 percent of their class instead of the more pedestrian top 1.0 percent or so.

Hat tip goes to Barry Schwartz.

> Matt Cutts Extends Offer To Yahoo Engineers

> Google Aims To Make Finding Music Easier

> Google Launches Social Search Experiment

Last month, Google introduced Sidewiki, a feature of the Google Toolbar that allows users to comment on any page on the web. The comments could only be viewed by others who have the toolbar and the feature installed. That was until now.

Google has now introduced a Sidewiki bookmarklet that can be used to read and write Sidewiki entries with Google Chrome, Safari, and other browsers. The bookmarklet is just a shortcut that goes in the bookmarks bar of you browser, and when you click it, it opens up a window showing Sidewiki entries for whatever page you’re on.

When using Sidewiki, an expandable window can be viewed on the left-hand side of the webpage. When expanded, you can see the comments that have been written or contribute your own.

Upon introducing Sidewiki, Google said it uses "multiple signals" based on the "quality of the entry," what they know about the author, and other user-contributed signals like voting and flagging. They say they want to only keep the most relevant entries appearing in the sidebar. Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan says Google gave him a few other factors like:

- Use of sophisticated language
- User’s reputation
- User’s history

Users’ Google Profiles are said to play a direct role in whether or not comments appear. Google ranks profiles in a PageRank-like manor, so the higher you profile is ranked, the more likely your comments are able to appear.

Related Articles:

> Google Turning the Web Into an Exclusive Social Network?

> Integration – The Key to Google as a Social Network

> Want to Get Your Google Profile Verified?

Google began rolling out its new music search feature late yesterday. The feature enables search results with links to audio previews of songs provided by MySpace (which just acquired iLike) or Lala, when a user searches for music-related queries like the name of a song, artist, or album. The results also include links to purchase full songs.

Google says it is always looking for ways to reduce the "time to result," or the length of time it takes a user to actually find what they are looking for. Since Google gets millions of search queries about music each day, they figured this feature would be a good way to reduce that in many cases. "If you’re searching for music, ‘time to result’ is really ‘time to music,’" Google says.

Google takes a step further by providing results based on specific lyrics. "Many times, though, you don’t know the name of the song or the artist who sings it," the company says. "Maybe you remember only the chorus — or maybe you remember who sang it, but you forgot the exact name of the song. If you’ve ever heard a catchy song in a car or cafe, but just can’t figure out the name of the song, you’ll know what I’m talking about. This search feature also helps you find many of those songs by entering a search containing a line or two of lyrics."

Google has also partnered with Pandora, imeem and Rhapsody to include links to their sites where you can discover music related to your queries as well.

Yahoo took Google’s announcement as an opportunity to bring up what it has been doing with music search itself. "We have found that nearly 6 percent of all Yahoo! searches are music-related," says Larry Cornett, Vice President, Consumer Products, Yahoo Search. "Given the massive number of things people search for, we think it is pretty significant."

"We’ve made it easier to find music videos, artist information, and play full length songs from within the search results page," he adds. "This is just one of the many ways Yahoo! is enhancing the search experience for music lovers. With Search Assist, Search Monkey, and Yahoo! Shortcuts, you can discover even more relevant information about your favorite artist. Wonder what U2 is up to these days? Search for U2 and you’ll see images and videos, and hear full-length songs all in one place."

Since the overwhelming majority of searchers are using Google, finding music looks like it will be much more convenient now. Not everybody can access Google’s feature yet, but they should be able to sometime today. Do you have it yet? What do you think? Share your thoughts.

Related Articles: 

> MySpace Introduces New Music Features

> Google Phone and Music Service Both on the Way?

> MySpace Music Goes Down Under

Rumor has it that a new Google Music service will launch today, and the excitement is almost palpable as the announcement window provided by normal business hours narrows.  Or not.  Anyway, Hitwise took a look at Google’s relationship with music sites.

As you might expect, Google’s a significant provider of traffic to music sites.  Heather Dougherty wrote, "Google was the top referral website to the Music category accounting for nearly 30% of the total traffic to the category last week, 5x more than 2nd ranked Yahoo! Search and 6.3x more than MySpace."

If Google tries to take away what it’s given, things could get interesting, then.  A number of sites stand to lose a lot of traffic, chief among them Wikipedia, Yahoo Music, and MySpace.  Facebook and MTV Music make Hitwise’s top ten list, too.

Still, in the grand scheme of things, Google’s music service may not mean a ton to the search giant.  Dougherty found, "Last week, Google sent 1.48% of their total visits to the Music category and of those visits," so it’s not like half or more of Google users are dying to hear more about bands.

We’ll see what happens if/when the launch occurs.

Related Articles:

> Google Phone And Music Service Both On The Way?

> Facebook, MySpace May Share Content

> MySpace Introduces New Music Features

Back in August, Google gave AdSense publishers more control over what ads appear on their sites by launching an upgrading the category fitlering feature and extending the feature’s beta to the US and the UK.

So in essence, if you don’t want certain kinds of sites showing up in ads on your site, you could block them. Google shows how the different ad categories contribute to your income, so you can take that into consideration.

Today Google announced that it will be providing users with more ad filtering options. Soon, the option for 3 more filter categories will be added for a total of 8 different categories. These will be coming in the next few weeks.

"To get started with category filtering, sign in to AdSense and visit the Ad Review Center, located under the AdSense Setup tab," says Google’s Arlene Lee. "You can choose from the listed categories, which include religion, politics, and dating, and your selections will be applied to ads in English no matter how they’re targeted."

"Please keep in mind that filtering ad categories may affect your AdSense revenue — we recommend first reviewing the percentages displayed in your account to understand the amount of revenue you may be blocking," she reminds users.

Google says its continuing to work on additional filtering capabilities as well, but does not get into specifics. They are of course encouraging feedback.

According to a post on Google’s Webmaster Central blog, Google is now discovering web sites by automatically scanning RSS and Atom feeds. This new process will help Google more quickly identify web pages and will allow users to find new content in search results as soon as it goes live. While not exactly “real-time,” using feeds to identify updates to websites is an arguably faster method than than the traditional crawling techniques Google has used in the past. And Google may get even faster in the near future – the post also notes that the company may soon explore using mechanisms like the real-time protocol PubSubHubbub to identify updated items going forward.

Sponsor

The blog post doesn’t say whether or not RSS and Atom discovery is displacing traditional web crawling for sites that are feed-enabled, but it’s likely that, if given the choice, Google will opt for the faster method if available. As Vanessa Fox notes on the SearchEngineLand blog, since it’s unknown at this time whether Google is using the feeds in place of traditional web crawling, it may make sense to use full feeds rather than partial ones in order to get your content indexed faster by Google’s search engine.

Real-Time Web Crawling in the Future?

Although only briefly mentioned in the post, Google hinted that they may be begin looking into other mechanisms such as PubSubHubbub, an open protocol that provides near-instant notifications of change updates. No further details were provided beyond the one sentence, but the announcement clearly shows that Google has seen the writing on the wall and knows that the real-time web is the future. This is one trend the company isn’t planning to ignore.

The real-time web, heavily influenced by the speed of Twitter and other other rapid-fire social networking updates, has created a desire among internet users for faster access to information. This desire has, in turn, led to the creation of new real-time protocols such as the above mentioned PubSubHubbub and its counterpart RSSCloud. If Google began to use these technologies for scanning the web, their search results wouldn’t just be updated faster – they would be updated in real-time. That means information would become available in the search results listings as soon as it was published to the web.

That, of course, would lead to a whole new series of challenges for the search engine – most notably, how to rank the real-time results? Given that Google’s search algorithm has been built on top of the concept of PageRank, a way to determine the relevance of a website by what other sites link to it, ranking search results that are so fresh that there is an absence of links could prove a difficult feat. However, Google is already doing this to some extent now. Over time, the PageRank algorithm has evolved and can now reward sites with fresher, more fitting content and rank them higher than sites with more links on some occasions. And if anyone can figure out the proper algorithm for mixing in real-time content and ranking it appropriately along with static pages, it’s got to be Google. In fact, we’ll probably soon see exactly how they plan on addressing this issue, when they incorporate Twitter search results into their index, as announced last week.

…But Until Then, Google Delivering Faster, Fresher Results Instead

Although the PubSubHubbub mention may have been the most exiting part of the announcement, real-time search results aren’t here just yet. In the meantime, we have to just be content with sped up results instead. The post advises website owners who are blocking Google’s search bot software known as Googlebot from crawling their RSS/Atom feeds to unblock it via their robots.txt file. If unsure, webmasters can test their feed URLs with the robots.txt tester in Google Webmaster Tools, as the post recommends.

Discuss

Yesterday we looked at how Google Wave (a new product that is part email, part IM, part something entirely new) is being used as an educational tool. In this post we explore if and how Wave is being used by the artistic community. This topic was suggested by Cory Huff, a commenter on the first post, who noted: "I’ve been looking for artists to Wave with, as I think artistic collaboration has some possibilities."

We discovered that there is excitement about the potential for artistic collaboration using Wave. However the level of actual collaboration activity is still very low. Here’s what we found…

Sponsor

Wave & The Arts

We saw in yesterday’s post that Wave is being used by educators mostly as a real-time collaborative note-taking tool. For artists, there is similar potential to use Wave as a collaborative creative tool. Cory Huff suggested a real time painting app that allows visual artists to work together on a new project, or an event planning tool for Art events.

Right now, there doesn’t appear to be much artistic activity on Wave. The closest we could find was a public wave called ‘Artists Wave,’ created by Fernando Fonseca and others. That wave lists some videos, pictures and music works – which at least shows off Wave’s multimedia features. However there was little evidence of collaboration, for example more than one person creating a new piece of art.

Wave & Filmmaking

There was more activity in Wave around filmmaking. Jonathan Poritsky wrote a post back in June outlining his thoughts on how Wave could streamline the movie-making process – specifically, post production workflows. He’s now made put that post into a wave called ‘Google Wave for Filmmakers: Wave Edition.’

The following chart depicts how Poritsky conceptually sees Wave being used in filmmaking. In a nutshell, all of the participants in the filmmaking process would use Wave to collaborate. In Poritsky’s words, "every job and step passes through the wave."

Poritsky admits that "not all of this is possible yet," because it requires faster computers and network technology to process such large video files in real-time. However he says that "the basic precepts of digital editing could actually be done over a network today."

Ultimately Poritsky is bullish on using Wave in filmmaking because "cinema is a collaborative art form." He cites the huge credits list at the end of every movie as proof of that.

Santuary: Short Film Using Wave

An early example of a filmmaking wave is a short film called Sanctuary. Their wave is entitled ‘Sanctuary – remixable film – dev wave.’

Santuary is a “re-mixable Science fiction film” directed by Michela Ledwidge. It’s been in production for a number of years, due to budget issues. The film is currently in post-production and Ledwidge is attempting to use Wave to assist with that process.

Wave has a couple of geeky features that may be used by the Sanctuary team. One is ‘gadgets,’ which are add-ons similar to the mini web applications you can install in your Firefox browser. Sanctuary is looking for two gadgets: a Shot tracker UI

and a "Production lingo translator."

Another feature of Wave is ‘robots.’ These are automated participants on a wave. A robot, according to Google, "can read the contents of a wave in which it participates, modify the wave’s contents, add or remove participants, and create new blips and new waves." Santuary is looking for the following two robots: an "AI character bot" and a "trac notifications integration" (to show different shots from the movie).

As of now, the Santuary wave doesn’t have much collaboration around the actual film in it – but this may change if the desired gadgets and robots get developed and deployed.

Conclusion

It’s clearly early days for the artistic community in Wave. There’s a fair bit of discussion on possible uses for Wave, mostly around collaborating on artistic projects. But not much actual collaboration on projects happening yet.

Filmmaking appears to be the most likely to gain traction in the short-medium term. So we’ll check back on progress in 6-12 months.

Discuss

The French Government’s public finance department will switch 130,000 desktop PC’s to Mozilla’s email and calendar applications. Mozilla’s Thunderbird email service, Lightning Calendar and an open-source groupware will replace IBM Lotus Notes and Microsoft Office.

The move signals how more government agencies from around the world are dropping enterprise accounts with major vendors to cut down on costs and get better license agreements.They are turning to open-source providers and companies like Google that can offer email and services such as Google Docs.

Sponsor

01net, a French IT news site, originally broke the news about the Mozilla win. The decision to go with Mozilla came after the Directorate General of Public Finance (DGPF).merged with the Directorate General of Taxes (DGI) and the Directorate General of Public Accountancy (DGCP). Each has their own email and licenses fro Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook.

The merger provided the opportunity to save money and better manage the licenses.

OBM is the other player in this story.Linagora makes the open-source groupware that will be used by DGPF.The tax authority is one of several French agencies using OBM. More than 600,000 French employees use the application.

The French Government’s decision to go open-source follows the city of Los Angeles decision this week to adopt Google Apps over Microsoft. Again, the win has almost everything to do with cost. The city will pay $7.25 million for the service.

About 30,000 city employees will use Gmail and have access to Google Docs.

Discuss

Almost every TV channel offers some programming on the Web these days. Epix, a new premium movie channel that will launch this weekend, goes a step further. If you are a Verizon FiOS subscriber, you will be able to watch the same movies that Epix shows on TV on the channel’s Internet site. Epix is a joint venture between Viacom, MGM Studios and Lionsgate. If you are not a FiOS subscriber, you can still take a peek at the service. You can request a three-day pass here or read on for instructions on how to claim a 30-day pass.

Sponsor

While only FiOS subscribers can currently access the programming on Epix’s site, the channel’s chief digital officer Emil Rensing today told us that the company is actively pursuing deals with other Internet and cable providers as well. The company, though, isn’t ready to make any announcements about these partnerships, yet.

We got a chance to test the web site over the last week and the site, which will feature an exclusive Madonna concert to celebrate the launch this weekend, feels very similar to Hulu – just with a different kind of content. It’s completely Flash-based, so users won’t have to install any new plugins to use the service. This, Emil Rensing stressed when we talked to him today, was done on purpose to make the user experience frictionless.

The quality of the videos on the site, which scales up to 720p HD depending on your connection’s speed, is exceptionally good. A user needs to have at least a 500kbps connection, though this shouldn’t be an issue for FiOS subscribers who are watching at home.

The site currently features about 300 movies, including relatively recent releases like Iron Man and the latest Indiana Jones movie. Rensing told us that he expects to be able to offer over 3000 movies by the end of next year. Because of Epix’s close connection to various movie studies, the site will be able to feature movies about 9 months after their theatrical release. Most premium channels like HBO have to wait about a year before they can show a movie.

More Than Just Movies: Extras & Sharing

If Epix was only a premium movie channel on the web, it would be interesting in its own right. The site, however, also offers a number of interesting additional features.

Epix, for example, features DVD-like extras like interviews and behind-the-scenes specials for almost every movie. Right now, most of these are produced by the studios, but Epix will add more original programming over time.

Another feature is the sites ‘watch with a friend’ functionality. This allows users to watch a movie together with up to 5 friends, no matter if they are FiOS subscribers or not. The host remains in full control over the video playback and can start and stop the video at any time. As Rensing told us, Epix wants to recreate the feeling of inviting your friends over to your house, so it doesn’t care if your friends subscribe to the same channels you do.

Get Your Invites (Even if You Don’t Have FiOS)

If you are interested in giving Epix a try, you can request an invite for a three-day pass here. These will be distributed on a first come, first serve basis. Epix also provided us with 180 30-day VIP passes. If you want to claim one of these, you have to follow these instructions:

• follow @epixHD on Twitter
• tweet “@epixHD Experience Epix #readwriteweb”

Discuss

At today’s Unite Conference, game dev platform provider Unity Technologies announced it will be releasing the latest build of its Unity Platform and making a previous version available at the low, low price of free.

All platforms allow developers to create games for PCs, Macs, Nintendo Wiis, and iPhones. The free version, formerly known as Unity Indie, was previously priced at $199. Broke and/or stingy devs are welcomed to download the platform here. The pro version of Unity’s platform will continue to sell for around $1,500.

Sponsor

The Unity platform is used in games such as EA’s Tiger Woods PGA Tour Online, LEGO’s Tthe Quest for R2D2, and Cartoon Network’s FusionFall. Since the company’s release of an iPhone game dev platform earlier this year, more than 325 games have been built with the Unity engine. These games include Zombieville USA, one of the top 10 best-selling iPhone games.

In a statement released today, CEO David Helgason said, “With the explosive growth in new platforms and performance improvement in our Unity suite of products, we believe that there are no technical hurdles remaining for high quality interactive content everywhere.

“Now we are removing financial hurdles as well. Unity is mature enough and easy enough to use that it can be the entry point for those developers taking their first steps with the technology.”

With the 2.6 release of the platform, Unity provides full support for external versioning tools such as Subversion, Perforce, or any other version control system. Unity has also added Visual Studio integration and can automatically sync a VS project to source code so all scripts are in the solution and IntelliSense is configured.

Discuss

Google announced that it is testing a new AdWords feature called AdWords Comparison Ads. These are ads that let users compare multiple offers from the same advertiser that are relevant to the user.

Google says the feature is part of its continuing effort to make ads more relevant and useful to users and help advertisers reach the people who are most interested in their products and services.

"AdWords uses a host of targeting and relevancy signals to determine the best ads for each query. However, sometimes a user’s query doesn’t provide enough information for us to confidently predict what they want," explains Dan Friedman of Google’s Inside AdWords Crew. "Take, for example, users who search for "mortgage." Do they want a new home loan or a refinance? Do they want a fixed rate or an adjustable rate loan? Comparison Ads improves the ad experience on Google.com by letting users specify exactly what they are looking for and helping them quickly compare relevant offers side by side."

If a user clicks a promotion, they are taken to a page with more detailed, sponsored results. There they can choose from the offers listed on the page or refine their search further. If a user finds an offer they like, they can call the advertiser or request a quote.

"If a user requests a quote, Google automatically anonymizes the user’s phone number and sends you a unique code that you can use to contact the user," says Friedman. "You only pay if a user calls the phone number on your offer or fills out a form to request a quote."

Google cites speed, transparency, and privacy as the key points of focus with Comparison ads. They show targeted offers in less than a second, they only show real products (meaning no teaser rates, baits or switch offers), and they won’t send advertisers any user information.

Related Articles:

> Google Launches Latest Version of AdWords API

> More "Ads by Google" Across the Web

> Google Gives Local Businesses New Way to Advertise

The experimental feature that Marissa Mayer announced last week is becoming available today for everyone to try.  Google Social Search promises to help users "find more relevant public content from your broader social circle."

The premise is simple: people value their acquaintances’ content more than that of random strangers.  So Google Social Search brings content from your social circle to the forefront, perhaps showing a friend’s or coworker’s take on a restaurant rather than (or in addition to) whatever the local newspaper reviewer had to say.

On the Official Google Blog, Maureen Heymans and Murali Viswanathan explained, "The way we do it is by building a social circle of your friends and contacts using the connections linked from your public Google profile, such as the people you’re following on Twitter or FriendFeed. . . .  If you use Gmail, we’ll also include your chat buddies and contacts in your friends, family, and coworkers groups.  And if you use Google Reader, we’ll include some websites from your subscriptions as part of your social search results.

Want to see who got part of the hundreds of billions of dollars in Recovery.gov funds near you? Now you can point your iPhone 3Gs or Android phone in any direction and see the closest recipients, thanks to the publication of the official data set onto the Layar Augmented Reality platform. Sunlight Labs published the marked-up information and the results are fascinating.

This may be the most accessible way to view this information yet. I must confess, I am surprised to see that an auto shop and a Bible college in my neighborhood received a lot more money than the technical college, eco-car company and Native American youth program down the road. Fire up Layar on your phone, search for “Sunlight” and you can see the effects of the funding program on your own neighborhood. This is the kind of thing that standardized data makes possible.

Sponsor

As Sunlight explains: “Layar is an application that overlays your view of the real world with waypoints representing your favorite coffee place, the movie theatre you’re trying to find, or in this case, where some of that $787 billion from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is going.”

Fortunately, the Recovery funding information was published by the Federal government in KML format – making it easy for 3rd parties like Sunlight to mash it up with services like Layar. I wish there was an option in the interface to Google the name of the recipient, not just look up its location. Right now there’s no information made immediately available beyond name, sum and address.

Sunlight was deeply critical of the initial release of data by the federal government this Summer. This is a great example of what kinds of things they and other groups can do when they get their hands on data.

So how does funding in your neighborhood look?

Discuss