If you produce content of any kind on the internet, chances are that visitors from Google are a relatively high percentage of your total visitors. For this reason it behooves you to be clear on how Google works, even if SEO isn’t your highest priority. A lot of the minutiae on the real inner workings of the most popular search engine are not publicly disclosed; they are also being tweaked constantly. Still, here’s an excellent graphic showing the process, from you creating a piece of content, to how it is indexed in Google, to a searcher doing query which returns a set of organic results (left side) and advertisements(right side and above the organic results). Remember: this will change, and it may not be entirely accurate even now.

Infographic by PPC Blog

Recently it became possible to drag images right into your Gmail message if you were using Chrome, but I just found out today that I could drag an image into an e-mail using Firefox as well. Maybe the rest of the world knows this, but if you haven’t tried it yet it’s a nice little timesaver/incremental improvement.

Google has recently improved Webmaster tools. As I only stumbled across the changes myself I thought it might be useful to note them on Digital Media Minute. I don’t consider myself a ’stats junkie’ but I think a lot of people will find value in the detail that Google now gives you about just how well your site ranks in its index for the keywords that bring you visitors.

If you’re familiar with Webmaster tools you’ll know how you used to be able to see how much traffic you got from Google for a given keyword, relative to your other top keywords. This was expressed as a percentage of your overall search traffic, so you could discover that 4% of all visitors who arrived via Google came from people typing in the term “iPhone applications”. You would also find that longtail variants of the term like ‘cool iPhone apps’, etc. drew a percentage as well, and there was some value in knowing that Google accorded your site some authority to this general subject, of course. Also, I was often surprised what blog posts/queries drew visitors for me (though Analytics does a pretty good job of this in my opinion.) At any rate, knowing the importance of each keyword relative to other keywords on your site is nowhere near as interesting as knowing what Webmaster Tools will now tell you, which is how important a page or pages on your site are for a given search query, relative to the entire Google index, and other details too:

Most people probably realize that in a given month the SERP position of a site’s pages will vary, and that on a given day different Google data centers around the world might rank a page on your site in different positions. I was surprised that even on a given day (presumably due to geography) a page might be in position #2 for a term, all the way to the second page or beyond. Naturally in the course of a month placement for a page varies even more.

It’s fascinating stuff, even if–like me–you don’t obsess over SEO as you are doing posts and articles. If any Digital Media Minute readers have discovered more goodies in this Webmaster Tools redesign, or if you think I have misinterpreted anything in the new format, please let us know in the comments.

We have seen mobile apps that allow you to speak in one language and have the audio translated into another language. Google Goggles aims to give you a quick way to translate text using your phone’s camera.

You just draw a frame around words that you want to translate on that box of cereal in Barcelona, hit the shutter button, then if it is readable by your device you have the option to choose what language into which you need it translated. At the moment it can read English, French, Italian, German and Spanish and translate into ‘many more’ languages. Reading non-Latin characters in Chinese, Hindi and Arabic is coming ‘eventually’. Goggles v1.1 Is capable of other things as well, such as logo and product recognition, as well as doing visual searches via your phone’s photo library.

I have not tried it yet but I would love to. If you have any feedback you like to share with the Digital Media Minute readership, I’m sure we’d love to hear about it in the comments. By the way does anyone else think it’s cool that you can download android apps simply by scanning QR code? How far have we come from having to run down to ye olde electronics store to buy a CD in a box and install it via a physical drive?

Has Google Buzz had its 15 minutes of fame or what? I’m not going to explain how you can avoid showing the entire planet all of your contacts–there are a thousand other sites where you can find that info–but I did find this list of undocumented little tips for Google Buzz interesting: Post from SMS? Buzz-it widget? Geolocation for Buzz? Turning Buzz off? Nice list.

Google’s Thomas R. Stromberg created an easy way to find the speediest DNS servers that are available for your computer. Namebench runs its benchmark using web browser history, tcpdump output, or standardized datasets to give you your recommendation. You can then change your DNS settings to use Google’s Public DNS rather than that of your ISP. It is free and runns on Mac OS X, Windows, and UNIX, and has a simple to follow GUI.

There’s been a lot of talk about how Twitter seems destined to be the inevitable winner in real-time search. Not so fast. Google now offers real-time search functionality, accessible through the ‘Show options’ link at the upper left corner of the results page. Just hit ‘Latest’ under the ‘Any time’ part of the column and watch commentary of the entire internet on whatever you have typed into the search field. Wow, talk about stream of consciousness.
In related news, Eric Schmidt thinks that only people who are doing something wrong have legitimate privacy concerns. Damn, I really want to like these Google guys too.

As basic as images are to the Internet it’s no surprise that Google’s approach to image search, born back in 2001, continues to evolve. Good thing too because it was always pretty slow going, plodding through pages of images results that didn’t really have what you wanted. Recently they added a link to “similar images” beneath some image results which will take you to an entire page of photos of the same place or subject. It’s better, but only incrementally so.

Today Google Labs launched Google Image Swirl, which uses new technology to gather images with common characteristics into groups, with an interesting interface that should greatly reduce the time it takes to find an image if you are looking for something specific. Now this is a leap.

The search will take you to a page of thumbnails as usual, except that you’ll see receding edges of photos underneath the top thumbnail. (The effect reminds me of Apple’s Time Machine interface.) Click on the thumbnail and you’ll be presented with a set or group of related photos or images. Interestingly, by clicking on peripheral images in the group, a whole new group of images will open up. Eventually clicking on an image will take you to the web page upon which the image resides, rather than drilling down further into new groups. I’ve probably made it sound really complicated, but it’s extremely intuitive and fast. It’s much, much faster this way to look through a lot of photos to find something good or exactly what you’re looking for.

Another smart feature is that at any time you can click on an earlier group or the results of your original image search. There is an echo of Google’s Wonder Wheel here. The technology is derived from Google Similar Images and Picassa face recognition that determines or discovers the relationships between all these images and sorts them into groups.

At the moment it only works for about 200,000 queries but it’s a fun taste of what’s to come. It’s experimental, you know the drill, but aside from the rather limited number of queries it can handle right now I found Google Image Swirl to be extremely usable and fairly comprehensive already.

Here’s a nice overview of Google’s new language, Go, by Scott Gilbertson over at Webmonkey. Includes a 1-hr video on Go developer Rob Pike.

From the Chromium blog Google announces that it has an early-stage research project for something they call SPDY (“speedy!”), the purpose of which might be to replace the HTTP protocol.

Techchrunch claims to have heard that Google’s Chrome OS (that would be OS, not Chrome browser) is close to launch.

Programming language improvements. Make the web faster. Build a better OS.

Ultimately Google’s biggest strength might not be any one particular offering, possibly not even its search engine. It has systematized methods to encourage its developers to aggressively innovate while not losing focus on improving the core, revenue-producing businesses. If an enterprise involves itself in as many frontiers as Google does, it does not have to find success in everything that it tries (and it does not). In an environment changing as fast as the internet is today, failure lies in not extending yourself. Try everything, because no one can know where it’s all going.

For years, some naysayers in the investment community disparaged Google for being a one trick pony revenue-wise. Between acquisitions like YouTube, which is now making a profit, and a culture of tech disruption the likes of which can be found nowhere else on the planet including Apple, Google wins by keeping everybody else on their toes. Note how often new Google offerings are not incremental improvements, but instead meta re-imaginings of the current techscape. What comes after HTTP?

With enormous companies the danger is rarely trying something new and failing at it. The danger is not staying ambitious enough. By segmenting its collective efforts so that individuals or small groups are also allowed to pursue interests about which they are passionate, Google may have hit upon a way to weave vibrant small-scale ambition into its enormity.

OK so I was playing around with Google toolbar preferences and realized that there is a much easier way to access lot of Google functionality that I use very regularly, without necessarily having to have Gmail open all the time so that I could hit the links in the upper left corner, or much worse, the ‘more’ pulldown. (Hey, I knew it was possible, I was just busy earning a living and stuff like that.)

Anyway, just in case I’m not the last person in the universe to have done this already:

Assuming you have the Google toolbar already installed, (remember the days before you could put Google toolbar on Firefox?) just go to ‘options’ under the little blue wrench icon, then hit the button tab, then add whatever you need. Google Documents, Maps, Picassa Web Album, Groups and Calendar were inexplicably not on for me by default.

This won’t change the catbox for me or anything, but make enough of these positive incremental changes and I should find myself saving some time, right? Especially as this is a great way to save some of my Google preferences across multiple computers, when I use other machines. (Assuming the toolbar is installed, and that the ‘Access your Google Toolbar Settings everywhere ‘ option is turned on.)