Internet Marketing and eCommerce Expert – Nigel Burke's Blog

Many people may not have noticed this but Google has changed their homepage.

It’s not until you are told of the change that you would realize it.

Go to http://google.com but do not move your mouse. Only the search box and logo are visible. Once you move your mouse, the rest of the details appear.

This is just one of many changes Google has made that is not visible to the general Internet population. By writing and researching for this blog, I read about nearly every change.

Many of these changes are advanced and meaningless to users but as an Internet marketing expert like myself, they are important.

Your Internet marketing consultant should be aware of all the changes Google, Yahoo and Bing do so your website ranks at the top for your targetted keywords and stays at the top!

Google has introduced a new tool that allows you to check the speed of your website and improve the speed.

This is one of Google’s ways to give back to the Internet community by educating developers and designers to make better websites. This in turn is supposed to make the web a better place.

Tutorials
The site has some great tutorials and you can visit them here – Tutorials. Some example tutorials are -

• Use compression to make the web faster

• Capturing and analyzing browser paint events using Page Speed Activity

• Compressing your JavaScript with Closure Compiler

• CSS: Using every declaration just once

• How gzip compression works

• HTTP caching

• Improving website performance with Page Speed

• Make the mobile web faster

Participation
You can participate in discussions about making the web faster here – Share and discuss

Useful Tools
There are some fantastic tools the Google lists here. You can access the tools page here – Try useful tools. Some examples are -

• Page Speed
• Closure Compiler
• Closure Tools
• Cuzillion
• Xdebug
• AOL Page Test
• IBM Page Detailer
• Microsoft VRTA
• MySpace Performance Tracker
• Yahoo! YSlow

I highly recommend you check out the educational tutorials and test some of the tools they have made available and listing on the site.

Google has introduced a new feature to their online map service: Real estate listings. That’s right! You can now have your property listed on Google Maps for free. This service is shaking the online real estate portals.

You can use this feature here – Google Maps and click on Real Estate.

Realestate.com.au and Domain.com.au are angry
News Corp who owns 60% of realestate.com.au and Fairfax Media owns domain.com.au are very upset. They are big spenders of advertising on Google and have now been shot down by Google by providing free real estate listings.

They are now re-evaluating the millions of dollars they spend with Google.

Simon Baker, the former boss at realestate.com.au said “Google was moving from a search engine to a portal what is now serving up the end data itself.

What’s Next?
It seems that Google is putting it’s finger into everything these days. Will these moves help Google become more popular or is it going to hurt Google in the longterm?

Have your say below ..

Google Wave is a highly anticipated tool by many people. It’s an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave is similar to an email which people can discuss and work together on multiple document types.

The file types include normal documents, videos, photos, maps and more.

How is it different to an email?
Imagine an email where it could be edited like a conversation by a number of invited people. Unlike emails that are bounced around to a number of people with different sets of replies, a Google Wave would allow one page that has everyone’s contributions and accessible by any computer.

It’s a live document where all participants can watch and interact together. We can all relate to miscommunication with emails with information all over the place.

But will a Google Wave resolve this problem?
I think having all the information at a central point where everyone can see the same information is definitely on the right track. Collaboration is a very important function because many of us are working with people that are in multiple locations across the world.

Group Projects
We all remember what it was like doing group assignments at school or university. The students do their part of a group assignment and submit it to the organizer of the group. People end up writing the wrong content, there is duplicate content, people write conflicting points, the list goes on.

I believe that if Google Wave works for students, it would work well for businesses.

Conclusion
I can see many uses for the new Google Wave application but only see the live document being useful. It does not sound revolutionary to me. Google is hyping this up a lot and there is a lot of talk about it on the Internet.

They are encouraging developers to build applications that use the Wave framework. Maybe some developers will be able to provide more applications that will help us work in an online world.

Click here to find out more about Google Wave.

Today, Google has released another search facility. This search is called Social Search because it searches people that make up your social search. It uses data from Google profile, Twitter, FriendFeed and other contacts in Google. It may even include Facebook and other social data in the future.

Here is Google’s definition of it

Google Social Search is an experimental feature that helps you find relevant public web content from people in your social circle, when you’re signed in to your Google Account. For example, search for [ restaurants ], and restaurant reviews by your friends and other contacts may appear more prominently in your results. Join the Social Search experiment at http://www.google.com/experimental

Here’s a demostration of the Social Search

How Google Social Search Works