Google Ads in Google News

Google has introduced ads to the results of search queries on Google News aimed at turning the news aggregation site into a money-making venture. This means that when one a query is entered into the Google News search box, one will see text ads alongside your News search results. These ads would only currently appear on Google News search-results pages in the United States.

Josh Cohen, a business project manager at Google, announced the change on Wednesday. "In recent months we've been experimenting with a variety of different formats. We've always said that we'd unveil these changes when we could offer a good experience for our users, publishers and advertisers alike," Cohen said.

Google News aggregates headlines from more than 4,500 English-language news sources around the world and provides links to articles on their websites. These articles are selected by computers that evaluate how often and on what sites a story appears online.

"I presume that Google gets paid per click for action on those ad offerings. But I doubt that they have any particular plans to share that with the people whose news they're aggregating," said Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst at the Poynter Institute.

Kelly McBride, another Poynter faculty member, said "it's always been obvious that Google didn't develop Google News as a public service - they intended to make money off it. I'm ok with Google News making money," she said.

The introduction of ads to Google News search could prove to be controversial. One has to wait to see its results.

Search Giant Google does a mistake

If you did some Google searches between 9:30 a.m. EST and 10:25 a.m. EST, you might have got this message - “This site may harm your computer” - along with your search results. Computer users doing Google searches during a nearly one-hour period Saturday morning were greeted with disturbing but erroneous messages that every site turned up in the results might be harmful.

Google has blamed the mistake on human error and apologized for any inconvenience caused to users and site owners whose pages were incorrectly labeled.

The glitch occurred between 9:30 a.m. EST and 10:25 a.m. EST, Google Inc. said in an explanation on its company blog. Anyone who did a Google search during that time likely saw a message "This site may harm your computer" accompanying every search result.

Google said it routinely flags any search results with that message if the site is known to install malicious software in the background or otherwise surreptitiously, a practice aimed at protecting its users.

Saturday's error happened when Google erroneously applied one of its periodic list updates in such a way that the warning would apply to all URLs, the company said in a statement.

The glitch was caught by on-call staff and the file was quickly fixed, Google said. Since the updates are applied in a staggered and rolling fashion, the errors began appearing at 9:27 a.m. EST and disappeared no later than 10:25 a.m. EST, with the duration for any particular user approximately 40 minutes, it said.

Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience, said "We will carefully investigate this incident and put more robust file checks in to prevent it from happening again”.

Google scans websites to identify sites that may be dangerous to users. When it finds such sites, Google issues warnings in the search results. This morning, they inadvertently added these warnings to nearly all websites, causing user confusion.

… for more and updated info you may visit Google Official Blog

Google Search through SMS

The Internet Search Giant, Google has made it possible to search the Internet on your mobile phone even if it is not web enabled. Google has introduced this service with all the major GSM and CDMA operators in India.

The usage of the service is very simple. The user just sends a normal text SMS to 9-77-33-00000. You could be searching anything like cricket scores, stock updates, Indian Railways train schedules, PNR status, horoscopes, movie show-times etc. The search engine will fetch the data and send you an SMS. The service also acts as yellow pages and runs applications like the calculator and currency converter. Local search is one of the main utilities.

“No longer do you need to remember complicated strings to put before your query, you can search as if you are searching on Google web search – we will do all the hard work to understand your query and give you the best results on SMS”, a spokesperson for Google India affirms.

Here is how users can use this service:-
To receive latest cricket score, just type cri or cricket or cricket India and send it to 9773300000.
For PNR enquiries in Indian Railways, send the PNR number.
Likewise stock quotes from BSE can be received by sending “company name quote”, for example “Tata Steel stocks”.
To know horoscope just sms your Sunsign.
Similarly, weather info can be found by sending “weather city”, eg “Weather Kolkata”.
Also available are calculations and conversions. Like “65000 INR in USD”, “13 Kg in Pound”, “Population of Delhi”, “Current GDP of India”, etc.

The cost of the service will be normal SMS charges.