Today Canadians are celebrating the 144th birthday of Canada. I wish everybody a very happy Canada Day!

Newly married British royal couple, Prince William and Kate Middleton who arrived in Canada yesterday, took part in the Canada Day celebration. Prince William also addressed Canada Day crowd in Ottawa.

Why does Google hate Canada Day?

I don’t know the answer to this question. But, it is now clear that Google has grown the dislike of Canada Day, for some unspecified reasons. I have two good reasons to believe that Google hates the day.

Reason 1 – Google Doodles stopped recognizing the day since 2007

Until 2008, Google used to design it’s Google Doodle (Google Logo) to honor Canada Day. Starting 2001 Google had started displaying the Canada Day logo on every July 1. But, it stopped the practice abruptly in 2008. The Cannucks weren’t happy on the Google decision.

Reason 2 – Today, on July 1 of 2011, when I checked the “Canadian Version” of Google News, there were no news mentioning Canada Day! What a surprise?

Yes, Google doesn’t write news, but it is surprising no newspaper Google syndicate talk about the country’s birthday.

Do you know of any particular reason Google might be upset of the Canada Day? Or, is there no Canada Day in Google calendar?

It is not easy to label something ‘Content Farms’ to the companies that have huge presence in the web. Yes, many produce large amounts of inexpensive, search-engine-optimized content usually of very low value to the readers. These sites were mutually beneficial to Google and ‘content farm’ sites in terms of ad revenues. Now, Google has taken steps to de-rank such sites.

The SEO pundits have been suggesting webmasters to use such sites to increase their search visibility. Some of the popular such sites like EzineArticles, Hubpages, wisegeek, Associated Content (Yahoo’s), Suite101, Mahalo, Flixya and other such sites.

One of the most surprised (and vocal) was the publisher of CultOfMac website,  Leander Kahney. He claims, ‘We can go toe-to-toe with any other tech news site out there.’

Another popular ‘content farm’ site, Demand Media’s eHow, however seems to have benefited from the steps Google has taken. Three other sites of Demand Media, namely Trails, Livestrong, and AnswerBag, were however affected by the Google algorithm change.

In response the EzineArticles CEO Chris Knight says:

Continue Reading »
Google search – Content Farm – Losers and Winners

Google’s head of Webspam team., Matt Cutts’s blog is full of Bing and Google search pages, comparing what Microsoft has stolen from the Google search results. Google has accused Bing of shoplifting the Google search. Microsoft says, it is using user data gathered from the Bing Toolbar and IE8 Suggested Sites feature. Google does teh same thing – collect who-knows-what data with Google Toolbar and/or Chrome. Even an ex Google engineer says that Google does the same as what Bing is being accused of by Google.

I thought, others follow the leaders. And, leaders don’t care. It is only when the leader gets a feeling that he/she can’t keep the pace… will turn around and start telling the followers to do something other than following him/her.

In the similar manner, as long as Google has its innovative muscles it wouldn’t care what others copy. That was the reason it was giving away almost everything for free. At least, I thought it was like that until it started resisting others like, blocking Facebook access Gmail contact.

I might be completely wrong, and the change in behavior might be because of Larry Page taking over the rein. Kara in allthingsd thinks Google’s Bing attitude defines Larry Page. I hope, it is nothing more than the "drive and aggression" of Bill Gates within Larry as told by Kara.

If that is not so, may be, Page should let Eric Schmidt run the company and get back to work on his PageRank.

Google has named its co-founder Larry Page the new chief executive officer (CEO)  to replace Eric Schmidt. Eric won’t be leaving Google, at least not now, and will work as the executive chairman.

PageRank, the backbone algorithm of Google search is named after Larry Page.

A flimsy business card, printed in bubble jet printer, back in 1998 (source), might come handy now, as Page takes the responsibility of CEO of Google, again.

In the last sixteen months (since August 2009) the internet search giant, Google, has managed to acquire two companies in average totaling at least 32 companies (publicly announced). The second half of 2009 was the time when the economy was having its toll on business and, it was also the time when Google decided it to start the buying spree. According to a report from San Jose Mercury News daily, Google has spent over two billion dollars on small startups and larger established social networking, gaming, mobile advertising, travel, video, and music related companies.  It is speculated that the aggressive buying spree of Google could draw attention of antitrust watchdogs.

Most of the popular services in Google including Blogger, Google Maps, Android and YouTube were based on technology and manpower Google acquired by acquisitions. Google also prides itself in retaining two-thirds of the startup founders who joined Google through acquisitions.

Google has announced an event to be held in San Francisco for December 7th, with a promise of "exciting news about Chrome."

It is expected that a netbook running Google’s Chrome OS might be unveiled on the December 7 event. Egadadget reports that the Atom-powered laptop will not be the final product and will not be marketed. It is also told that, only be around 65,000 units will be produced and distributed among Google’s closest "friends and family".

Crome OS is is told to be still in beta stage and is not ready for public release yet. It is expected that Google will unveil an App store for the cloud-based OS soon. It is worthwhile to note that Google has updated its browser, Chrome 8, yesterday.

Latest rumor in the tech world is that email with @facebook.com is going to be the next big thing in email communication. The email system coupled with Facebook’s popular photo and events programs can prove to be a serious rival to Google’s Gmail.

Rumor of a secret project, officially known as Project Titan, has been going around since February and it would not be a surprise on the release of the service also known as ‘Gmail killer’.

In another news, Facebook has acquired the domain fb.com. The domain registered to American Farm Bureau was sold to an undisclosed buyer in September. The whois query of fb.com shows that the domain was updated on 12-Nov-2010 and the name servers are located at facebook.com. It is likely that Facebook might use the domain for email or shortening urls in Facebook postings.

Continue Reading »
Will Facebook’s ‘Gmail Killer’ be @fb.com

In an attempt to retain it’s work force and lure more talents, Google Inc has announced 10% raise to its 23,000 employees. Google has faced increasing number of it’s talents leaving for better paid jobs in startup companies. Reversing the trend of being considered Silicon Valley’s hottest job destination, Google has seen Facebook and other Internet firms poaching its staff.

Start-ups companies and private companies like Facebook can recruit much easily as they are yet go public. They can also lure workers with pre-IPO stock. It is found that such companies offer an average annual salaries of $120,000 for engineers.

Previously it was Google in the poaching end – grabbing workers from Yahoo and Microsoft. Now, with its pace of growth slowing, growing firms are snatching the Google workforce. It is not that Google has stopped hiring. Google added some 3,600 people last year alone. Google’s latest pay raise indicates that the management believes in retaining employees than hiring new employees.

Continue Reading »
Google’s 10 percent raise – an attempt to retain employees

It’s official, Google thinks, Facebook is a virtual black hole!

A black hole, is a star or planet that has shrunken such that it has an infinite mass and virtually nothing, even light, escapes its gravitational field. Google thinks the same holds true for Facebook because it can’t crawl the personal data held in the social network.

The fact that more an more people are embracing Facebook for their social presence (and, ignore Google’s Buzz!) is the biggest source of headache of the search giant these days. Facebook is challenging the biggest obsession of Google – hoarding every data in the world. When more than 500 million users lock their information in Facebook, Google is sure to get mad! After all, Google is the undisputed emperor of the internet, winning every battle with its ‘data might’.

Highlighting an intensifying rivalry with Facebook, Google Inc has started blocking Facebook from grabbing information about Google users’ social and professional contacts in Gmail.

Earlier, Google CEO Eric Schmidt had expressed Google’s interest in getting access to Facebook users’ contact lists.

Microsoft has launched its web version of Office and e-mail to compete with Google’s similar offering, Google Apps.

Google Apps includes online word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation and costs $50 per year for business customer. Microsoft’s basic service will cost slightly more at $72 a year.

The new service will replace Microsoft’s previous similar offerings with various names like Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), Office Live Small Business, and Live@edu. The basic version of Office 365 includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint for collaboration, Exchange for e-mail, and Lync for communications.

Microsoft Office is far much better in terms of what it can do but it’s Microsoft’s way to enter the field a bit late and offer the service slow. It took seconds to open Google’s Docs but Office 365 is taking ages to open. I know, it is a new service, still in Beta, and they should be changing stuffs and polishing things – but, I was never a fan of Microsoft websites when speed is concerned.