Press releases are boring, but the about section from the end (or the boilerplate) could tell you a lot about a company. Here are some excerpts from Google's press releases over the years.

1999:

-"Google is dedicated to providing the best search experience on the web. Google has its own search destination site at http://google.com. Google also offers co-branded solutions for information content providers. Google was founded in September 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, building on three years of research as computer science Ph.D. candidates at Stanford University. Traffic has been growing at a rate of 50% per month since Google's inception, fueled only by word of mouth."

1999-2000:

-"Google was founded in 1998 by Stanford University Ph.D. candidates Larry Page and Sergey Brin to create a new generation of powerful, scalable search engine products to improve the user experience of searching the web. Based on three years of advanced research in computer science, Google is dedicated to providing the best user search experience by delivering a powerful, yet simple-to-use format for finding the most relevant answers to search queries."

2000:

-"Google exists to provide the world's best Internet search experience. Google accomplishes this for millions of users daily by delivering a powerful, fast, and easy way to find the most relevant information available. Google's technological innovations have powered the company to numerous awards, including a 2000 Webby and People's Voice Award For Best Technical Achievement; Best Search Engine on the Internet from Yahoo! Internet Life; Top Ten Best Cybertech of 1999 by TIME magazine; Technical Excellence Award from PC Magazine; and Best Search Engine by The Net."

2001-2002:

-"With the largest index of websites available on the World Wide Web and the industry's most advanced search technology, Google Inc. delivers the fastest and easiest way to find relevant information on the Internet. (...) A growing number of companies worldwide, including Yahoo! and its international properties, Sony Corporation and its global affiliates, Netscape, and Cisco Systems, rely on Google to power search on their websites."

(at some point in) 2004:

-"Google is a global technology leader focused on improving the way people connect with information. Google's innovations in web search and advertising have made its website a top Internet destination and its brand one of the most recognized in the world. Google maintains the world's largest online index of websites and other content, and Google makes this information freely available to anyone with an Internet connection. Google's automated search technology helps people obtain nearly instant access to relevant information from its vast online index."

2003-now:

-"Google's innovative search technologies connect millions of people around the world with information every day. Founded in 1998 by Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google today is a top web property in all major global markets. Google's targeted advertising program provides businesses of all sizes with measurable results, while enhancing the overall web experience for users. Google is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia."

2006 (April Fool's Day edition):

-"Google's innovative search technologies connect millions of people around the world with information every second of every minute of every hour of every day. Founded in 1998 by Stanford Ph.D. wannabes Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google today is a top web property in all major global markets and a very large number of minor ones. Google's targeted advertising program provides businesses of all sizes with measurable results, while enhancing the overall web experience for those users who haven't tuned out of online commerce altogether. Most Google lava lamps and bean bag chairs are located in Silicon Valley, though numerous such lamps and chairs can also be found in offices throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia."

Trying to provide the best search engine and to improve the way people connect with information, Google became a great brand and a top web property thanks to the word of the mouth, the important awards received and the collaboration with Yahoo, Netscape and other companies. Independent of platform, browser or language, Google conquered the world by being fast, easy to use and friendly.

Here are some definitions for Google from 1999:

Larry Page: "Google fills a real void in the Internet precisely because we have a manic passion for pure, unadulterated search."

Sergey Brin: "Google strives to get Internet users to the information they want as quickly and efficiently as possible, and that's all we do. We've engendered such strong loyalty because Google provides the purest and most powerful search experience on the web."

If you wanted to enjoy all the features of the new Blogger, but also have your own domain, now you can. Follow these instructions: buy a domain, create a CNAME record for your domain and select "switch to custom domains" in your blog's settings.

Google will continue to host your posts and pictures, so you don't need to buy a hosting service. The old .blogspot.com address will redirect to your new domain. This way, you'll keep your visitors and the beloved search engine rankings.

There's also the option of using FTP publishing, but you need to pay for hosting, and you'll also miss features like: dynamic serving, managing layouts using drag-and-drop. The advantage is that you have more control.

Although Blogger is not yet a part of Google Apps for Your Domain, it will certainly be included.

Omar Al Zabir, co-founder of Pageflakes, describes in detail how you can build a personalized homepage similar to Google IG using ASP.NET AJAX and .NET 3.0 Framework.

"Among [the popular AJAX start pages], Google IG is the simplest one. The one I have built here is something between real Google IG and Pageflakes in terms of Ajax and client side richness. Google IG is mostly web 1.0 style postback model and it's not really that much of Ajax. For example, you see it postback on switching page, adding new modules, changing widget properties etc. But the one I have built here is a lot more Ajax providing rich client side experience close to what you see in Pageflakes."

The result is DropThings, a site that mimics Google's Personalized Homepage, but has a much worse performance.

Google started to add last month tips that promote services like Blogger, Google Calendar and Picasa. This form of undisclosed advertising generated a lot of buzz and now the tips are gone. The tips were also too frequent and almost annoying, because they appeared at the top of the search results pages for every query that contained: "blog", "calendar", "photo sharing" - and that includes: "yahoo calendar", "bloglines".

It's nice to see that Google is receptive and understands that practices common for others are not consistent with Google's philosophy. And in case Google needs to be reminded about their principles, here's an excerpt from a page titled "Why we sell advertising, not search results":

In a world where everything seems to be for sale, why can't advertisers buy better position in our search results? The answer is simple. We believe you should be able to trust what you find using Google. It may seem odd for a search engine to speak about the integrity of its results. But like a news organization, we believe we have an obligation to present information as objectively as possible. That's why we don't bias our search results based on what people are willing to pay. (...)

And while we believe relevant ads can be as useful as actual search results, we don't want anyone to be confused about which is which. (...) Some online services don't believe the distinction between search results and advertising is all that important. We do.

One of the last posts from 2006 was about Performancing acquisition: an important part of a start-up focused on helping bloggers has been bought by a company with a very bad reputation. Well, the deal is now off. "After much discussion, we've decided that the deal proposed by PayPerPost just isn't right for us or our community," says Nick Wilson from Performancing.


But the good news don't stop here: Performancing Metrics will become open-source, their Firefox editor for blogs will have a new identity: ScribeFire. Unfortunately, this also means that Performancing Metrics ends here, at least until it finds a developer community to adopt it.

On a brighter note, FeedBurner has just launched a stats package for blogs (based on BlogBeat) and Google should also relaunch Measure Map.

GMobileSync is a free software for Pocket PCs and smartphones running Windows Mobile 5.0, that synchronizes Google Calendar with PocketOutlook. The software doesn't require Outlook on your desktop.

Some features:

* Choose a range of days to sync based on today's date

* Remove all Google Calendar events from PocketOutlook without deleting any manually entered events

* Automatically exit GMobileSync when synchronization is complete

* Supports recurring events.

In the current version (1.2), changes made in PocketOutlook aren't added to Google Calendar, but this should be fixed in GMobileSync 1.3, that will be released next Monday.

{ Thank you, Tijir. }

PodZinger, the search engine that uses speech recognition to search inside audios and videos, added support for YouTube videos.

"Now besides simply searching on the metadata of the video files, you can search for terms that are actually mentioned inside the audio, allowing for a greater likelihood you will find relevant material. We're also automatically organizing the videos into channels based on the actual content of the video. Today you can narrow your search within entertainment, sports, and anime. And we'll continue to add more," promises PodZinger Blog.

A search for "youtube" on PodZinger shows 286,132, so we can assume that's the number of searchable videos. Unfortunately, you can't go directly to the section that contains your query, so you'll have to watch the video from the beginning.

I wonder if YouTube doesn't mind that PodZinger processes their videos. Google Video also does this, but only for videos that have captions.

There's a new version of Google Talk: 1.0.0.104. While there's no obvious new feature except for Vista support, it's interesting to look at some additions from the previous versions.

When you invite someone with a non-Gmail address, a new dialog informs you that Google Talk tries to see if that person uses another compatible service, like Gizmo or Earthlink.


Links to Gmail from Google Talk send you to the secured version of Gmail (you'll notice that the URL starts with https).

There are also some new status messages, but they aren't visible yet: "Show who I am chatting with", "Chatty", "talking w/".

Google Search Appliance, a box that indexes documents from a company's intranet and web sites, was updated and the list of the new features includes:

* search clustering (automated grouping of search results by topic)

* mark authoritative sources (similar to the way Custom Search Engines work)

* sitemap generator for company's sites, that can be submitted to Google Webmaster Tools.

* integration with Microsoft SharePoint 2003 and 2007 (the appliance can index SharePoint documents)

While the new version adds features already available for consumers (sitemaps, search bias), it will be interesting to see if Google decides to add clustering to the web search. Other search engines that have this features (like Clusty) don't have extraordinary results, but may help you view the big picture and guide you in refining your query.

If you'd like to have a Google Start Menu, (the unofficial) GUtil for Firefox could help you a little. The extensions adds on your navigation toolbar a big list of Google services. Instead of trying to find the name of the service in the list, you can just type the first letters from the name (typing "r" opens Google Reader).

The list is customizable, and might be a good way to open a certain Google site, instead of going to another page that contains the list.