Are you using Twitter? Yes right the same micro blogging platform where you can share your updates and in recent times which has become a source of controversy for some Indian politicians.

Although Twitter has its own search service, which can be accessed here, the good news is now you can search, what is happening on twitter as well as archives.
In this way you can get a feel of what people are taking about on Twitter, as well as you can also search what they were talking about further back in time.

How can I search Twitter from Google?

1. Do search on Google for any topic.
2. Now Click “Show Options”
3. Now select “Updates”

Now you have two options to select, first one is latest (which shows latest updates which happened within few minutes) and second one is anytime (which shows archives)

This shows how powerful and important twitter is becoming these days.

Google Twitter Follow Finder

Google Labs is where Google hides innovations not considered ready for prime time. Google Follow Finder is one such service. It analyzes public social graph information (following and follower lists) on Twitter to find people you might want to follow.

Just enter the twitter user name of a twitterer/tweep you admire and Google will give a list of tweeps you might like, as well as a list of people with followers similar to yours.

Google says:

“The lists in Google Follow Finder are generated using public following and follower lists on Twitter. For example, if you follow CNN and the New York Times on Twitter, and most people who follow CNN and the New York Times also tend to follow TIME, we’ll suggest TIME as a Tweep you might like.’ The list of  Tweeps with similar followers’ is simply a list of accounts with similar follower lists to yours.

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Google officially announced that they are incorporating website speed as one of the factors in their search ranking algorithms. Site speed is a measure of website response time to a web request.

So if your website or blog is really bulky having a lot of flash, images and scripts and it takes too long to respond on a web request, its time to worry.

However site speed alone will not affect the search engine rankings in a broader way as there are many more factors.

According to Matt Cutts,

“Less than 1% of search queries will change as a result of incorporating site speed into our ranking. That means that even fewer search results are affected, since the average search query is returning 10 or so search results on each page.

So please don’t worry that the effect of this change will be huge. In fact, I believe the official blog post mentioned that ‘We launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing.’

The fact that not too many people noticed the change is another reason not to stress out disproportionately over this change.”

Now the question arises how to speed up my website, below are some points which you can use to improve your website speed.

1. Choose a good hosting provider: Your website hosting provider must be good and reliable. Actually in shared hosting there are thousands of website hosted on same server and if the CPU and server capabilities are low it will certainly affect the loading speed of your website. Dedicated hosting is always better, but if you’re unable to afford it at this point of time, at least choose a good host.
2. Use very less flash elements on your website
3. Use less images and if you are using large images, load them in parts, it will boost overall website speed.
4. External JavaScript code files must be combined in one file, it will help page load faster.
5. Combine all external CSS files and compress them
6. Use website tracking codes and other JavaScript which needs to connect external servers to load, in the footer of the page.

These are some of the suggestions which can help your webpages load faster.

Do you have any more suggestions which can help improving website speed, share it with us here

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According to comScore Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, Google is the leader in US search market. In a search release it states that Americans conducted 14.5 billion core searches in February 2010, with Google Sites accounting for 65.5 percent search market share.

The share of top 5 search engines is as follows: (Total US searches performed in home, work and university locations)

• Google Sites – 65.5%
• Yahoo! Sites – 16.8%
• Microsoft Sites – 11.5%
• Ask Network – 3.7%
• AOL LLC – 2.5%

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There is good news for all of those who have Google toolbar installed in their web browsers, and I know all of you have it.

All SEOs, SEMs and Internet marketers install Google toolbar in their browsers mainly for checking Page Rank, Google Cache of pages and backwards link. More functions include Google search, Skype Casts, Gmail, Articles search, Page Rank, Translate, Auto fill and lots more.

Now Google has also added Share button in their toolbar using which you can easily bookmark and share resources (web page articles, videos, music etc) with different bookmarking and social media websites.

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Finally Google PR updating Cycle Started on 2 April 2010. It seems that this time Google gad been generous in giving away Page Rank.

3 of my website went from PR 4 to PR 5, many of them from PR 0 to PR.

This blog RituRajMishra.com has gained a Page Rank of 2 without any specific work done.

How your sites have done in this PR update, share with us by posting in comments.

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The social networking website Orkut owned and operated by the search giant is proving to be a source of worry after a court in Brazil fined Google for not blocking pages which contained dirty jokes on Orkut.

The court in Rondonia fined Google $2700 for each day that the pages remained up and ordered the company to stop similar material being posted.

Google’s argument that the company does not have sufficient technology and staff to police Orkut rejected by the court stating that the company has already implemented such curbs on its pages in China.

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China’s state-run Xinhua news agency in a signed commentary accused Google for breaking promised. It said that while entering in the Chinese market and before starting business, the search giant has promised to filter harmful and objectionable content but now suddenly they want to break their promise and criticizing the country for worsening of the investment environment.

On the other hand Google co-founder Sergey Brin has urged the US administration to make the censorship row between China and the Internet giant a “high priority”, in an interview published on Wednesday.

Google said it would no longer filter results on China based Google.cn and was redirecting mainland Chinese users to an uncensored site in Hong Kong effectively closing down the mainland site.

Updates:

China portal takes over two services:

Popular Chinese web portal Tianya.cn said it is taking over operation of two services developed and formerly operated with Google after the search giant took a risky stand against China’s strict internet censorship rules by moving its search engine offshore.

Hong Kong tycoon’s internet firm cuts ties

The internet firm owned by Hong Kong’s richest man, Li Ka-shing, severed ties with Google’s search services, sparking concerns that other companies may pull away too. Hong Kong-listed TOM Online said it would adhere to China’s laws.

Censorship still on for some customers

Google Inc is still censoring search content for some of its customers in China. The decision to provide censored searches was made to honor contracts with current business partners, and Google will continue to meet those commitments, it said.

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I recently received an email from Google Adsense as a publisher which informs that it has applied the functionality in the network in which Google certified third party ad networks can directly compete with AdWords publisher to show their ads on Google Content Network.

Below is the original email:

“Hi,

We have launched a new capability in AdSense allowing Google-certified ad networks compete directly within AdSense, which means that advertisers from these third-party networks will be able to compete with AdWords advertisers to show on the Google Content Network.

These new capabilities will automatically be enabled for your account, and you’ll see a new section in your Ad Review Center where you can allow or block specific ad networks or all networks except AdWords. Please note that we’ll gradually be adding new ad networks to AdSense accounts over the next few months, so you won’t see any immediate impact on your ads or your earnings.

To ensure the quality of the ads that appear on AdSense publisher websites, Google will certify all participating ad networks for adherence to our standards for user privacy, ad quality, and speed. Some participating ad networks use targeting methods similar to Google’s interest-based advertising to show more relevant ads to users on the sites they visit. These ad networks won’t be permitted to collect data from your site for the purpose of subsequent interest-based advertising, but we’ll allow networks that comply with user privacy guidelines to show ads using these tools. Publishers can opt out of user interest targeting from these ad networks, and Google has changed our requirements for third-party ad serving to reflect this.

We are currently only accepting ads from Google-certified ad networks in North America and Europe, but we will make this feature available to ad networks in additional parts of the world in the future.”

So how is it going to profit Adsense Publishers like us?

1. Larger number of inventory
2. More Number of Ads availability
3. Better eCPM and ROI
4. More Command over ads flexibility

And much more… these are the predictions and the original effect will be visible in coming months:

Want to know more visit these links

1. AdSense Help Center: https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=13522
2. 2. Official AdSense Blog: http://adsense.blogspot.com/2010/03/google-certified-ad-networks-now.html

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China made it clear – Either Follow our Rules or Pack your Baggage from the country

Chinese Minister of industry and information technology Li Yizhong made it clear to Google that if they want to continue their business in the country, they would have to follow their rules and regard the wills of Chinese internet users.

Google has always been opposing the censorship which china enforce, following which it is threatening to leave the country for a very long time.

Now when the county made it clear that they are ready to live without Google, now the decision has to be made by the search giant whether to heed the demands of the government or leave their flourishing business in china.

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As we all know search engines are always looking for fresh and unique content all over the web and the main source for them for new content are blogs. This is the reason Blogging platforms like wordpress has always been apple’s eye for search engines.

By the way today topic is “How much time it takes for Google to cache and rank a web page”

For the purpose I have done an experiment and I want to share the results with you all.

I have a health related blog, providing information on skin care. So let’s begin how it all happened.

1. Chosen a two word phrase keyword, which roughly gets 4200 searches a month and has a competition of 1883000 in Google and 15150 while searching with quotes.

2. Wrote an article of 550 words and posted on my blog.

3. Submitted the link to digg.com

After 5 minutes when I checked, I saw that the article was cached by Google. Then I checked the ranking of the post for the keyword and I was amazed to see that the articles was ranking on number 7 on the first page and the digg.com listing was ranking on number 4.

I knew that this was just a temporary ranking and it will come down. So next day I have done around 25 Social Bookmarking of the blog post and again checked the ranking few hours later, the articles was ranking on number 24 (on the third page). After that I have left it as it is and now after a week the blog post have gained a stable ranking on the second page of Google on number 14.

I have decided to do some blog comments for it and then observe its effect on ranking.

I will update you all with the results.

Do you all have done any such experiments, if yes please share with us all.

Do not forget to follow me on twitter for updates.

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