Google has created a site designed specifically for web people like us! Google Webmaster Central offers a range of tools that allow you to gain more knowledge and information about how Google is crawling your websites.
Googler Matt Cutts offers lots of great SEO tips on his blog. The fact that he works for Google is a pretty good indication that his advice is solid. His latest post titled - Writing useful articles that readers will love - is fantastic advice and he uses his own personal experience to prove his points!
Writely is an online word processor that was recently purchased by Google. On acquisition, Google immediately closed registration for new users but now they have opened the online application to everyone!
Having used Writely, I have found it to be extremely useful in collaborative document editing. You can import Word documents, and save to PDF, OpenOffice, Rich Text Format and zip which makes this tool very versatile. Writely autosaves your work every 10 seconds and allows you to also store your work online.
Google Analytics Blog reports Google Analytics is open to everyone. The service was up until now open only by invite, but this restriction has been lifted and anybody with a website can now use this excellent hosted service for tracking web traffic on their sites. It’s also worth noting that Google Analytics is also free!
The Mapping Revolution: How Google Earth Is Changing Science explains how biologists, epidemiologists and disaster control experts are discovering Google Earth as a powerful tool in their work. In the CMS that we provide to our clients, each record can have GIS data stored along with it. We’ve recently started transforming this GIS data to Google Earth’s KML format and our clients are loving the way it allows them to visualize their data geographically.
A year ago I posted my method for uploading images from Picasa to Flickr. My solution was pretty simple, but if you’re looking for a more technical solution for uploading images from Picasa to Flickr, you might want to check out this Python solution fo Using Picasa to upload to Flickr. The technique does involve some pretty advanced computer expertise (installing a programming language and running scripts) but the solution works very well! It also has the advantage of allowing you to upload your original images as opposed to my solution where the images are resized by Gmail.
Google employee Matt Cutts offers some SEO advice on URL canonicalization. Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are more than one choice. Home pages are a good example where http://somesite.com/ and http://somesite.com/index.htm are the same pages. Google uses canonicalization when it spiders your sites and attempts to make the best guess at the best URL. However Matt makes a few suggestion on how you can help Google make the best choice!
This is a bit older but interesting nonetheless. Niall Kennedy discovered that Google is about to release a Google Reader API. This is interesting in the fact that you can build your own RSS reader using Google’s API as the backed for your application. Niall has quite a few examples on how to use this API.
Map hacking/creation has become a very easy task that anyone with a little bit of JavaScript and HTML knowledge can do. If you’re looking for a good place to start XML.com has a great introductory tutorial on Hacking Maps with the Google Maps API.
Download Squad has a nice round-up of A bunch of blogs from the Googleplex. So if you’re looking for official news from the search giant, this might be a good place to start!
