You can give your search engine a name and description. You can also enter a list of keyword that will be used to tune your search engine results. You can also set specific sites to search, so only those sites defined are searched. Here’s a bit from the Google Blog:
We’re thrilled to tell you that the search for your own search engine is over. Today we are launching the Google Custom Search Engine. As you might imagine, it’s a simple and straightforward product to use and understand. In a matter of minutes you can create a search engine that reflects your knowledge and interests; looks and feels like your own; and, if you choose, you can make money from the traffic you receive through Google’s AdSense program. You can even invite your friends and trusted community members to add to and help build your search engine.
RealClimate has already built this new service into their website. So, head over there if you want to see the thing in action. That site actually worked with Google previous to the launch of Google Custom Search Engine so they could get a nice demonstration put together by the launch day.
If you use Ultimate Tag Warrior, as I do, you can get archive pages based off tags. For example, my wordpress tag page shows all posts tagged with “wordpress”. Simple enough.
Now, the Google Sitemaps plugin generates a sitemap of your site for submission to Google Sitemaps. The plugin will include categories, individual posts, static pages, and archives in the sitemap file it creates. However, it leaves out tag archives. This is simply due to the fact that the Google Sitemaps plugin author probably doesn’t use Ultimate Tag Warrior.
There’s some good information contained within tag archive pages, so we should probably be letting google know about them. We basically need to make the Google Sitemaps plugin recognize and make use of the tag archives. To do this, we need the Google Sitemaps – UltimateTagWarrior Tag Addon, a plugin for WordPress. Here’s the plugin description:
This plugin is a WordPress 2.0.4 plugin that automatically adds the UltimateTagWarrior tags onto the end of the google sitemap XML file as produced by the Google Sitemap plugin.
The plugin does exactly that, and nothing more. It simply generates a sitemap for your tag pages and appends that data to the end of the sitemap file created by the Google Sitemaps plugin. That’s all that’s required to include your tag pages in your sitemap file for sending to Google.
Please note that the Google Sitemaps – UltimateTagWarrior Tag Addon plugin requires version 2.0.4 of WordPress. Hopefully the author will update the plugin to support the upcoming WordPress 2.0.5.
Google has apparently added an MP3 playing feature to Gmail. So, if someone emails you an mp3 as an attachment, the little google player will come up to allow you to play the sound right from Gmail. Very neat.
You can also embed this player in your website so your visitors can listen to an audio clip right from any page. The embedded player at Gmail calls this URL to play the attached MP3:
http://mail.google.com/mail/html/audio.swf?audioUrl=MP3_URL
Joel Comm has created a pretty neat AdSense game. Basically, it’s a game focused on making money with your website through AdSense.
I thought it would be fun to put together an online game focused on making money with AdSense, and I’m pleased to invite you to come and try out The AdSense Game now!
Be sure to follow the instructions so you can get the hang of it quickly. Realize that it is just a simulation and not real life. It’s there for fun, but you may learn a thing or two along the way!
Joel has a post on his blog about the game in which he gives a few useful links to those who enjoy playing the AdSense game.
Looks like it could be pretty fun, but I think I’ll stick with the real AdSense “game”, this site. The AdSense game is comparable to games like Lemonade Tycoon and Rollercoaster Tycoon.
A rigorous technical analysis by Google engineers has found fundamental flaws in the work of several click fraud consultants – flaws that help explain why widely quoted estimates of the size of the click fraud problem are exaggerated. We would like to share this research so that advertisers can be aware of these problems and so these consultants can use the information to improve their services.
You can download the entire PDF here. It’s 17 pages and is about 165KB. The post at the Inside Adwords blog is pretty lengthy, so go read the details. The analysis done by Google included a case study on 3 of the major click fraud firms: AdWatcher, ClickFacts, and Click Forensics. Google is worried that advertisers may be making changes to their campaigns based on inaccurate data provided by these third party firms. Which could adversely affect the performance of their online marketing campaigns. Boo!!
