Latest Google happenings : Natural Search Blog

Latest Google happenings

Google’s estimated numbers of search results per query aren’t to be trusted? Hmm… kinda looks that way. Certainly Yahoo’s numbers appear to more believable from this little study.
Google releases an API for Google AdWords - an Application Programming Interface for manipulating your AdWords account programatically without having to do screen scraping. Way cool!
Google unveils new “nofollow” link tag. Yahoo and MSN follow suit. I’m dubious that this is going to do anything to squelch comment spamming, but I thank Google (and Yahoo! and MSN) for giving us website owners better control when we link to sites that we don’t want to share the “search engine juice” with.
Google more than triples its word limit on search queries to 32 words. Good work Google! The 10 word limit was one of my pet peeves. Now I can finally run queries that have a pile of site: operators all separated by ORs. Now please Google will you let me further refine link: queries with additional operators? (Yahoo! and MSN support the use of other operators with link:)
Google launches Google Referral program, an affiliate program that pays $20 per referred AdWords customer. Sounds kinda cool, but I can’t imagine I’ll make nearly the cash I make as an AdSense publisher…
Source code released into the public domain for getting the PageRank of a page automatically in PHP. Not that the Toolbar Server can really be trusted anymore to serve up anything resembling the actual PageRank score used by Google’s ranking algorithm…
Google loses another trademark lawsuit in France relating to selling AdWords ads against trademarked terms. Ouch, that smarts!
Google earnings for 4th Quarter 2004 top $1 billion. Makes me sorry I don’t own Google stock…
How To Destroy Google With $100 Million? - a flawed idea, but it does make one think…