Google Search blog

The Google Books Library Project has gotten approval from the University of California to scan millions of their books. So far, Google has been scanning books from Oxford, Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan, the New York Public Library, and the Library of Congress. Scanning will begin as soon as possible. In response to controversy, Dan Greenstein, U.C. librarian at the California Digital Library, said: “We will work in compliance with the law.”

Not well-known Google specialized search. Google Music Search. Try it and let us know what you think.

Google is now displaying a warning page when a user clicks on a result in an SERP that contains malware. An example of this behavior can be seen by searching for list keygen mirc and clicking on the first result. This change is part of Google’s contribution to anti-spyware project StopBadware. One of the project’s goals is to “become a focal point for developing collaborative, community-minded approaches to stopping badware.”

According to CEO Eric Schmidt, budget dollars won’t be pulled away from Google when competition improves monetization. Here’s why:

there’s a net positive effect of the increasing competition. That will be true until the targetability model that we are all pioneering here hits some natural limit. We’re not anywhere near that limit. I’m sure there is such a limit. But we are nowhere near it. There’s evidence that keyword prices could rise significantly. Budgets are typically under-spent, that people would spend a great deal more money in our advertising model if we had the products and services that could capture and exploit that with the appropriate measures.

He also answered the question of how the economic slowdown may affect Google.

We do have some experience with this, which was after 9/11 in the United States. Again, the Company was much, much smaller, so I don’t know if this is analogous. But a number of us were very concerned that everybody would just stop spending. And during that period, instead of stopping spending, people accelerated their transition to Google, which was, obviously, very positive, but also quite a surprise.

The reason was that when organizations are under stress, they focus on the best economics, because they don’t have as many opportunities, they have to be much more careful. We continue to believe that the Google advertising system is literally the best place to put your sales dollars. In a theoretical global recession such as what you were asking about, I’m sure that we would benefit by the fact that our performance is simply better than the other alternatives.

Two media industry associations announced yesterday that they’re forming an industry-wide group to standardize how click fraud is measured and reported. Member companies so far include Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Ask.com and LookSmart. The announcement indicates the Interactive Advertising Bureau and nonprofit Media Rating Council are forming the Click Measurement Working Group to create a set of Click Measurement Guidelines. It will define exactly what a “click” is and the standard against which the clicks are measured.

The Inside AdSense Team released a special JavaScript code today that you can use to do A/B testing without requiring server-side scripting. This means that anyone can use this code and do testing, no matter what your server configuration. Previously, to ensure that the ad code isn’t modified, publishers were forced to use a scripting language like PHP, ASP, or ColdFusion to achieve this effect. They’ve approved the JavaScript template below, which reotates between the two ad units, showing each 50% of the time. You’re free to modify the AdSense code for use with this specific script for the purposes of A/B testing, according to their policy folks. If you want to test different ad formats, but have the client-side handle it, this is your solution.

Reported by GigaOM.

Microsoft’s Live Spaces initiative is getting a lot of buzz today, and rightfully so. The mass-market offering marries instant messaging, social networking (sort-of), Microsoft gadgets and blogging into what could be Cup-a-noodles of social apps. Techcrunch notes that Microsoft is phasing out the MSN brand, in favor of the “Live.”

This is a very smart move on part of Microsoft. MSN as a brand is tired and needs to be retired. It conjures up images of an also ran brand. Live, however, seems fresh and new. Online user behavior seems to show precisely that. (Windows) Live-branded services are doing much better for Microsoft that those weighed down by the MSN brand. A quick analysis of data on online member communities/destinations collected by Nielsen/Net Ratings (N/NR) shows that.

In US, N/NR says Windows Live had 29.8 million unique visitors, second only to MySpace, which attracted 36 million unique visitors, in the month of June 2006. MSN Spaces wasn’t in the top ten. In other countries Windows Live brand is doing even better. In Brazil, for instance, Windows Live had 7.6 million uniques, while MSN spaces had mere 1.7 million.

The most notable one is Australia, since Live Spaces had been in beta testing in that country, before being made available to users in the US. While it is hard to draw sweeping conclusions, it does seem when it comes to post-PC world, Microsoft is better of retiring its old brands, and usher in the new Live era. (The complete comparisons are after the fold.)

iTWire is reporting that Google has launched a site for developers to host open source projects. The new Google site is a competitor to open source project hosting sites like SourceForge.net. Reports say that Google’s new site offers software storage and debugging facilities. The site is Google Code, and it has several things going for it:

• Innovative use of search, tags, and labels
• Works with IDEs like Eclipse and NetBeans
• Leverages other Google properties like Gmail and Google Groups
• Google’s infrastructure to support massive scaling, as in SourceForge’s 100,000+ projects and over a million users

There have been a few hiccups, of course, but nothing extraordinary.

There’s a new upgrade for Google Talk. It supports:

• file transfers
• a “now playing” feature that changes your status to show what music you’re playingv
• voice mail

The voicemail feature is really slick. They’re stored in your Gmail inbox, and you can download them as MP3s.

Google, of all companies! They’re offering a “Custom Button” feature for the Google Toolbar, but guess what?

It doesn’t work in Firefox!

Custom Buttons Not Available for Your Browser

Unfortunately, we don’t currently have a version of the Google Toolbar for your browser that supports custom buttons.

You can install the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer 6 or later, which supports custom buttons. Download now.

Once you’ve installed the Toolbar, use Internet Explorer to open page where you found the custom button and try installing it again.

Uh, yeah, I’m going to get IE6+ just because you said so. No thanks.