Simon Gelfand

Google Insights for Search has launched today. Well, Google dudes did it again. Taking data based on the Google Trends product, and giving it the twist marketers really need, Google just launched a very interesting service called Google Insights for Search.

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Thanks for the news OC

First broken by Barry Schwartz (thanks to friendfeed.com updates).

Google trends was long a great place to find keywords trends overtime, they have now opened up for websites also, a great way to compare against your competition.

Here are the trends for two of my websites, they are similar to the trends you would see in compete.com. but they are worldwide. (articlesbase in blue, reader in red)

Very nice competitive analysis, thanks Google!

I just noticed that Google updated their favicon, they basically have taken the second ‘g’ from their logo and turned it in to the new favicon.

I personally liked the old one better, Google has also failed to make in transparent…. It would advise just dropping the shadow and it would look way better.

Just in comparison here is my own Bukisa favicon:

In the second Yahoo/Microsoft/Google post of the day, I just read over at Techcrunch that Yahoo plans to test out Google AdSense on there search result pages.

According to Yahoo’s statement - “Yahoo!’s board of directors is exploring strategic alternatives to maximize stockholder value, including exploration of potential commercial business arrangements.”

At first Yahoo will deliver relevant Google ads alongside Yahoo!’s own search results.

The test is expected to last up to two weeks and will be limited to no more than 3% of Yahoo! search queries.

Does this also mean that Yahoo is giving up on there own Yahoo Search Marketing PPC system Panama?

Do they feel Google has a larger advertising base and maybe in the long run could actually earn more revenue? Without having to have the overhead of the staff and technology to operate their own service?

Only time will tell …

I was playing with Google Analytics over the weekend and noticed the new feature (currently in Beta) added to the timeline report.

It is now possible to view the graph as days, weeks or months.

This comes in handy when viewing larger junks of data to see the overall progress of your site.

Here is a screenshot of the new feature:

Lately I have found myself playing around with the new GA code and filters and stumbled upon this great documentation (on Google Code) they have on the advanced features of Google Analytics.

Check it out here:
http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/index.html

I recently discovered new additions to Google Sitemaps. Eager to explore the new features on one of my sites I came across some interesting information.

Below is a graph displaying the activity of Googlebot’s average page crawl rate covering a 90 day period.

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