“The changes in the search volume of a given sector on google.com may provide useful economic insight,” Google says. “We have created 23 indexes that track the major economic sectors, such as retail, auto and unemployment. Each index value is baselined at 1.0 on January 1, 2004 and is calculated and displayed on the Google Finance charts as a 7-day moving average. You can easily compare actual stocks and market indexes to these Google Trends on the charts.”

The trends the feature tracks include:

- Advertising and Marketing
- Air Travel
- Auto Buyers
- Auto Financing
- Automotive
- Banking and Personal Finance
- Business
- Computers and Electronics
- Construction
- Credit and Lending
- Durable Goods
- Finance and Insurance
- Furniture
- Industries
- Investments
- Jobs
- Luxury Goods
- Mortgage
- Real Estate
- Rental
- Retail Trade
- Travel
- Unemployment

Google shares an example of the Luxuries Index, which tracks queries like [jewelry], [rings], [diamond], [ring], [jewelers], [tiffany], etc.

Data from the indexes are available for download, letting users utilize it in their own models. More information about the indexes can be found here. The Domestic Trends feature comes as the result of research from Google’s Chief Economist Hal Varian, who explains his methodology here.

Now however, you can just bring up your list (like pictured below) and click all of the names of people you want to send your message to. As you can see, there is also a search box so you can search you contacts (although, if you’re typing their name in the search box, you might as well just type it in the “To:” form.

Gmail users who use contact groups will see that their groups appear in a drop-down menu in the contact chooser. You can select these to send messages to pre-created groups this way.

Google notes that the contact chooser should be especially helpful to users who use Gmail in Chinese, Japanese, or Korean, since these users are unable to use the auto-complete feature doesn’t work like it does for other languages.

This is just the latest in Gmail’s ongoing and frequent addition of features. They’ve recently added the ability to email a task list and to import old mail and contacts into Gmail also.

Unfortunately, not many details about these enhancements were given away, but Google says AdSense publishers will not have to update their AdSense accounts or ad code. Changes will be applied automatically.

“Our machines are very good at the matching process, but there are still a few cases where their definition of relevance differs from our human definition of relevance,” says AdSense Product Manager Woojin Kim. “In these few cases, the system might end up serving ads that don’t seem immediately relevant to users. We understand that increased ad relevance contributes to a positive experience for users, publishers, and advertisers, so we’re continuously working on ways to improve the relevance and quality of ads that appear on your sites.”

The changes will not affect how other types of ads are matched to your sites. Placement-targeted ads that advertisers bid on to appear specifically on your page, for example, will continue to appear.

These relevancy-determining changes are not the only thing the AdSense team has been up to. This week, they announced that they have tweaked the default fonts for different ad formats, in order to trigger better performance. Category filtering was also announced for AdSense for Feeds.

It also looks like another part of AOL’s relationship with Google is set to end, since an SEC filing stated, “[W]e have agreed to use Google’s algorithmic search and sponsored links on an exclusive basis in the United States through December 19, 2010. Upon expiration of this agreement, there can be no assurance that the agreement will be renewed, or, if the agreement is renewed, that we would receive the same or a higher revenue share as we do under the current agreement.”

Anyway, although AOL is now once again a fully owned subsidiary of Time Warner, this development clears the way for Time Warner to spin off the brand.

Time Warner’s stock is down about 0.25 percent so far this morning, which puts it only a little bit behind the Dow and the Nasdaq.

source: www.webpronews.com/topnews

Google has two favorite pages listed – the AdWords page and the iGoogle page. Both of them have been around longer. iGoogle came on the scene last month it looks like, and the AdWords page has been around for quite some time. It doesn’t look like Fans of the Official Google Facebook Page will be getting access to much more than Official Google Blog posts, but that could certainly change in the future.

Google seems to have been more interested in communicating via Twitter in the past. A while back the company launched a slew of Google accounts for various products, and have acquired piles of followers on those.

Google launching a Facebook Page certainly makes considering the enormous popularity of the social network. What makes less sense is why they have just now gotten around to launching it. To be honest, I’ve never noticed that they were lacking one.

I’ve always considered Google to be one of the premier examples of a company that knows how to do corporate blogging. I regularly read most of their blogs for announcements, and most are frequently updated and their directory of blogs does a fantastic job of keeping interested parties informed of what is happening throughout various parts of the company.

It looks like they’ve got some work to do on the corporate social media use front though. On the other hand, they’re Google. It’s not like they have to worry about word of mouth too much.

source: www.webpronews.com/topnews/