Pinterest users do seem to convert and spend more when they do. However, Pinterest users are converting at lower rates than through other social channels like Facebook or Twitter.

Pinterest’s popularity is undeniable. Earlier this year, TechCrunch reported on exclusive comScore data showing that Pinterest had hit 11.7 million unique monthly U.S. visitors in January. This made it the fastest ever website to surpass the 10 million mark. This week, though, a ReadWriteWeb post suggests it’s a great tool for marketers in a traffic-only revenue model, but no so good for those actually selling online.

Citing a web services company with clients from a variety of industries using Pinterest, RWW cautions readers that the jury isn’t it just yet on Pinterest. Despite 20 to 80 percent increases in referral traffic to client sites in food-related niches, Cathy Tibbles of DWSP Website Services told RWW, “…we have yet to see any measurable increase in sales. One logical conclusion is that Pinterest is drawing a certain crowd – a window-shopping crowd.”

Pinterest Isn’t Driving Sales? Why Blanket Statements Are Dangerous

Then, under the confusing headline “Pinterest Isn’t Responsible for Sales”, RWW went on to reveal that online home goods store Wayfair has reported that Pinterest referrals result in a 65 percent increase in order amount, compared to the average site order.

The truth, as with many things online marketing-related, lies somewhere in the middle. Pinterest clearly is responsible for sales, for some. In February, I interviewed Steve Gerenscer from Steam Driven Media, a company that has been using Pinterest for their clients’ marketing needs almost since its inception.

Gerenscer shared a number of client stories, including one of a fitness site that had 73,000 unique visits from Pinterest in 20 days, 95 percent of which were new visits. The mobile Pinterest site drove an additional 6,324 visits.

He noted that they were converting at about 1 percent, which was lower than their conversion from other channels. The sheer volume more than made up for the lower rate, though, he explained. Gerenscer also shared the average conversion rate from Pinterest traffic to jewelry sites: 4 to 5 percent.

Another marketer, Jeffrey Zwelling from Convertro, writes in VentureBeat that his company has seen social media revenue for e-commerce sites from Pinterest increase from 1.2 percent in Q2 2011 to its present high of 17.4 percent. In fact, Pinterest is quickly gaining on Facebook as a driver of converting traffic, he said.

So what can we learn from these seemingly conflicting reports and a new infographic or 10 on Pinterest marketing each week? There are valuable user insights surfacing that can help marketers convert lookers to buyers.

1. Majority of Pinterest Users Fall In $25-75k Income Range

Though the Modea infographic calls out that 28.1 percent of Pinterest users are well off and bringing in more than $100,000 per year, the majority make between $25,000 and $75,000. Erin Ledbetter from Ignite Social Media Blog highlighted this and a number of other user insights in her recent post, The Marketers Guide to People Who Pin.

The post highlights a number of helpful data points (e.g., only 25 percent of Pinterest users have a bachelor’s degree or higher; Pinterest users are more likely to live in midwest states in the U.S.). However, Ledbetter offers in-depth looks into three types of Pinners: Boomers & Boomerangs, Babies & Bliss, and Families Matter Most. For each, there are tips to identify the type of pinner, what types of pins may interest them, and what their boards may look like.

2. Many Online Shoppers Buy Items They’ve Seen on Image-Sharing Sites; More Do Not

Thirty-two percent of online shoppers have made a purchase after seeing an item on Pinterest or similar image-sharing sites, according to a recent BizRate survey covered in Internet Retailer. However, 37 percent saw something they wanted to buy, but did not.

Why not? There could be as much intelligence in the reasons consumers don’t buy as in studying those who do. How easy is it to navigate the e-commerce site? Where are you losing people in the purchasing process? Any site drawing a substantial amount of traffic from Pinterest but losing out in the closing process should consider an audit of their e-commerce site and shopping cart to test usability.

3. Pinterest Traffic Less Likely to Purchase But Spend 70 Percent More

Earlier in this post, we referenced Wayfair and their success in Pinterest marketing. A comparison of their average order value from a Pinterest referral to those across all non-social channels, including search, is even more impressive. Though less likely to purchase, those who do spend 70 percent more when coming from Pinterest.

“Visual imagery drives inspiration, it’s what makes you want to buy it,” Wayfair CEO Niraj Shah told Mashable. “We sell things [on our sites] in the same way.”

4. Users Most Likely 25-44, Spend More Time on Pinterest Than Facebook or Twitter

An infographic from Modea shares a number of user insights compiled from sources such as comScore and Shareaholic. The top age ranges for Pinterest users are 25-34 and 35-44 percent, with the average user spending 15.8 minutes on the site. This is topped only by YouTube, where users stay onsite 16.4 minutes, on average.

5. Cooking, Home Decorating, Crafting Top User Interests

More than 70 percent of Pinterest users surveyed said cooking inspiration and recipes were their number one interest on the site, according to a March PriceGrabber survey. They set out to learn more about the people who frequent Pinterest by surveying 4,851 U.S. online shoppers in early March 2012.

Home decorating, crafting, fashion, entertainment, and gardening were other top interests for Pinterest users. User demographics skew heavily toward women favoring the site, with only 31.8 percent men.

No Magic Pinterest Formula, Though Experience of Others Can Cut the Learning Curve

As with any other social channel (or Internet marketing channel in general), there is no magic formula for success on Pinterest. However, there are lessons to be learned from those already in the space experimenting.

Arnie Kuenn from Vertical Measures recently hosted marketers Mat Siltala, Janet Thaeler, Kaila Strong, and yours truly in a Google Hangout to talk Pinterest marketing tips and tricks for success in this most visual platform.

source from: searchenginewatch

Years ago, there were relatively few campaign settings. Nowadays, though, there are a seemingly endless number of options, and not all of them are readily apparent in the AdWords interface. Here are two hidden settings that might trip you up.

Advanced Location Options

You’re probably aware that you can target your AdWords campaigns by location: at the country, state, city, metro, or ZIP code level. Recently, though, Google made a slight tweak to location targeting that can affect results both positively and negatively. It’s called Advanced Location Options and it’s important.

Instead of geo-targeting strictly by the searcher’s location, the default setting in AdWords is now “People in, searching for, or viewing pages about your targeted location.”

On the surface, this makes a lot of sense. Let’s say you’re advertising entry-level homes for sale in Albany. You might run a campaign geo-targeted to Albany, with the hopes of reaching first-time home buyers who already live in the area. But wouldn’t it be great to also reach those who don’t live in Albany, but might want to relocate there? The default setting permits this, by serving ads outside of your geo-targeted location of Albany, to people searching for things like “homes for sale in Albany, NY.”

But this setting can also work against you, especially if you’re trying to get granular with your campaigns. In AdWords, not only can you target geographically, you can also exclude locations.

The default for excluded locations is “People in, searching for, or viewing pages about your excluded location.” It’s basically the same as location targeting, and on the surface, it sounds good. If you want to reach buyers in the continental U.S., but not Alaska and Hawaii (perhaps because you don’t ship there), then you’ll want to target the entire U.S. and exclude those states.

Sounds good, right? It does, but it fails in execution.

I recently set up two campaigns for a local advertiser: one targeted to Cincinnati, Ohio; and one targeted to the entire U.S. but excluding Cincinnati. I wanted to have a different message for local searches than I did for searches outside the local area that were still relevant. I left the default location settings turned on.

What ended up happening was that both campaigns were getting 99 percent of their traffic from Cincinnati – defeating the purpose of having two campaigns! I was able to stop this by targeting my U.S.-minus-Cincinnati campaign to “people in my targeted location” only, and by setting exclusions to “people in my excluded location” only.

If you’re running location-targeted campaigns, it’s a good idea to run a geographic report, either from your web analytics or from AdWords, to make sure ads are serving in the locations you intended. You’ll find the geographic report in the Dimensions tab in AdWords.

Schedule: Start Date, End Date, Ad Scheduling

In the traditional marketing world, ad scheduling is a given. Ads are “flighted” in broadcast media, meaning they run for a stated and limited date range. Ads also usually run during specified times of day: for example, an advertiser may request prime time on TV, or drive time in radio.

There’s a reason for this: Advertisers want to reach their target market when they are using the media. In PPC, though, most advertisers use the “always-on” philosophy. This makes sense, because search ads don’t show until someone types in a keyword. It’s demand-based advertising, which nearly eliminates the need for flighting.

But that doesn’t mean ads should never be scheduled. AdWords makes it easy, by offering advertisers the option of setting start and end dates for campaigns, as well as scheduling ads to appear during specific times of day or days of the week.

While these settings don’t apply to every single campaign, they come in very handy at times. An obvious situation is a limited time special. Sure, you could just change the ad copy in your ongoing campaigns to reflect the special, and then change it again when it’s over. But who wants to spend that kind of time?

Using start and end dates, you can set up the specials at your convenience, and they’ll shut off automatically. What could be easier?

Ad scheduling is another often-overlooked feature. In ecommerce, it’s not unusual to see conversion rates decrease during overnight hours. If you find you’re getting low-quality leads or conversions overnight, with ad scheduling you can set your campaign to turn off ads from midnight to 4 a.m.

Problem is, midnight in New York isn’t the same as midnight in Los Angeles. Do you really want your ads shutting off at 9 p.m. PST? Or if you’re targeting multiple countries, say the U.S. and the UK, do you want your ads to still be turned off at 9 a.m. GMT? In both of these instances, you’d probably be better off creating distinct campaigns for each time zone, so that ads off from midnight to 4 a.m. local time.

Keep these settings in mind as you’re creating your next new AdWords campaign. It could mean the difference between mediocre results and amazing results!

source from: searchenginewatch

The deal was announced on the Color blog, where Bill Nguyen, CEO of Color Labs, explained how the deal came about. It started out as a fascination with cutting-edge film technology. From the blog post:

About nine months ago, I discovered RED http://www.red.com a professional digital camera used by filmmakers including Peter Jackson and James Cameron. RED is all about 4K and beyond. That’s nerd speak for what’s after HD. RED introduced another revolutionary idea: it eliminates the distinction between video and photography. Simply pick single frames from the video as perfect photographs. Videos and stills can be the same. Vogue Magazine is using RED in this way. If it’s good enough for them, it’s perfect for me.

Nguyen set about trying to implement similar functionality with a mobile app, but quickly realized he would have to compromise on his vision. Due to 3G networks not being fast enough to support his new vision, Color made the decision to disable audio for Live broadcasts using the Color app. This brought up the video quality and the performance of the app, and the company resigned itself to waiting for the U.S. wireless network infrastructure to improve. The deal with Verizon went down at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, where Nguyen met with Verizon:

Then something amazing happened in January at CES. We had an opportunity to meet Kristi and Rob from Verizon. In a matter of minutes, I realized that Verizon’s 4G network and their influence on smartphone design would accelerate our plan by light years. We created a partnership to integrate Color into smartphones to take advantage of the “metal” or hardware not just software for encoding the HQ video. We could use their amazing, pervasive 4G network to deliver LIVE video directly from smartphones to the entire world.

The only question left is why Verizon subscribers are the only ones to get such a privilege. AT&T’s 4G speeds are better on average. That makes me think that there is something more to this deal than an idealistic vision for the future. Sarah Kessler at Mashable is quoting Nguyen as saying that Verizon is doing processing and computation on its network, rather than having the app do it. That explains a bit of why the deal was made, but still not why Verizon is willing to do this for the startup.

source from: webpronews

Google recently purchased Motorola Mobilityfor $12.5 billion in what a lot of analysts saw as a means for Google to go after Microsoft in retaliation for the shady business practices Microsoft has been guilty of for years. On April 24th, Microsoft was found to be at fault of violating 4 out of the 5 patent violations that was filed against them.

If Microsoft doesn’t settle, and Google ends up winning, here is what’s at stake:

-Billions of dollars in money paid from Microsoft to Motorola and eventually, Google.

-The ability for other companies, like Qualcomm to control fees for patents they licenses.

-The ability for Microsoft to import Xbox into the U.S. from factories in Asia.

-Perhaps, ultimately, the ability for Android device makers to use Android without having to pay Microsoft royalties or be sued by the software giant.

source from: webpronews

This year’s roster of 15 was drawn from 1300 applicants from 12 different schools, from public policy, economics, computer science, engineering, law and science and technology departments. Below is the full list:

Derek Attig, University of Illinois, ALA Washington
Justin Kaufman, George Washington University, Public Knowledge
Lassana Magassa, University of Washington, New America Foundation
Daniel Lieberman, George Washington University, Future of Music Coalition
Anjney Midha, Stanford University, Technology Policy Institute
Yana Welinder, Harvard University, Electronic Frontier Foundation
Jonathan Miller, Georgetown University, Center for Democracy & Technology
Michael Corliss, University of Illinois, TechFreedom
Kieran Bergmann, University of Ottawa, Citizen Lab
Sumitra Nair, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Center for Political Studies
Andrew Blanco, Stanford University, Creative Commons
Brenda Villanueva, University of Maryland, National Hispanic Media Coalition
Brian Picone, Brown University, Competitive Enterprise Institute
Laurie Birbilas, McGill University, Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic
Leonard Hyman, University of Southern California, Internet Education Foundation

The group with spend 10 weeks this summer with the various host organizations of the internship, working on policy regarding free expression, privacy, security, and intellectual property – all of which are facets of Google’s membership in the Global Network Initiative.

source from: webpronews

To this end, the new TV & Movies app has a recommendation engine with a 5-star ratings system similar to the one Netflix uses. When users log into the updated app for the first time, they will be asked to login and rate a series of movies and TV shows. These ratings will most likely be combined with the new “favorites” system that allows users to mark movies, TV show, and even entire channels as a “favorite.” I have all the confidence in the world that Google can make a good recommendation algorithm, but they will have to work hard to know their users as well asNetflix does.

I’m a bit disappointed that Google TV hasn’t taken off. The ideas were there, but the execution and product launch were botched. For one thing, Google didn’t get enough developers on board for enough compelling apps to be available on the platform. Also, it failed to kowtow for permission to the powers-that-be in entertainment, and Google TV users ended up blocked from much of its promised content. Still, technology finds a way (hackers gonna hack) and the Google TV is still with us. It looks, from the screenshots Google has provided, that the platform is finally ready to compete with Roku and Apple.

source from: webpronews

Search Engine, Browser and Device Stats

One tool I come back to again and again isStatsCounter – there’s data on the market shares of search engines, browser versions, computer, and mobile hardware and operating systems here for most countries. Whilst it’s always sensible to compare two sources of this data, this is always where I start.

Google Insights and Trends

It always seems confusing that there are two Google tools showing search trends – Insights andTrends with the later linking to the other with the text; “Explore advanced features with Google Insights for Search”. I keep expecting Trends to be closed down, but it soldiers on.

Both offer a quick way to view search trends over time by country run comparisons. Trends will also show data for 5 URLs, if they have received enough traffic to register. As well as analysing seasonality, they can be used to look at cause and effect (e.g., recession and unemployment searches rising as concerns about the economy grew in 2008 in the UK, prompting an increase in insomnia searches).

Google Ad Planner

Google’s DoubleClick Ad Planner show visitor levels and demographic data for sites drawn from visits to them using data from Google’s own servers, a partnership with comScore and XYZ. It’s perfect for profiling individual sites or, when planning a display campaign, drilling down by country, age group, interest etc. and finding a list of sites that fit your target audiences – and then filtering down to those that are in the Google Display Network and can be targeted using AdWords. It’s a useful tool for benchmarking against competitors, too.

Google Keyword Tools

Everybody should already know this one – it’s the pre-eminent source of keyword data. Data can be viewed at a national level, with mobile search volumes split off separately. Login for the ability to download to CSV, or to add them directly to AdWords.

Less well known are the Placement and Contextual tools available from this URL. The placement tool will, based on keywords, URLs, a category or combination of these, suggest sites within the Google Display Network to place ads on. The contextual tool will, based on the keywords you input, suggest further keywords to add to GDN campaigns.

Yandex and Baidu Keyword Tools

Remember the power of Yandex and Badiu in Russia and China, with 63 and 78 percent market share respectively. Yandex’s keyword tool covers Russia, the rest of the CIS and international traffic, showing the keywords you enter and related keywords with “Display” volumes.

Baidu has a keyword tool that only PPC advertisers can access, but they also offer an open trends and keyword tool called Baidu Index and there’s a good explanation of it in English, and a list of other Chinese tools on the ChineseSEOShifu blog.

SEOBook Keyword Tools

A Swiss Army Knife of free keyword tools – one to clean up keyword lists copied off webpages or from other sources by removing numbers, punctuation and words you don’t want (e.g. “free”); another tool to generate all the variations of two lists of words and one to generatetypos/misspellings of keywords.

Microsoft Advertising Intelligence for Excel

A free Excel Plugin that brings in keyword data including volumes, additional keywords and other data from MSN AdCentre.

Ubersuggest

Find more keywords using Google Autocomplete and other sources. It’s a quick way of understanding the universe of searches around word or phrase to find negative or positive keywords.

Google Preview Tool

Is that ad running OK in Slovakia? Who’s bidding on your brand on mobiles in Mexico? TheGoogle Ad Preview tool allows you to view PPC and SEO results as if located in a specific country on a fresh computer with no cookie or login based personalisation. Essential for checking campaigns are live, reviewing competitor copy and the search landscapes outside your current location. It offers the ability to view ads based on a local area too, by entering a town or region.

YouTube Keyword Tool

YouTube is the dominant video search engine – and evolving as a fully-fledged entertainment hub with the obvious short-form video uploads alongside professional content from broadcasters and brands. Advertising opportunities here are detailed on their own micro site and Promoted Videos are shown next to video search results and managed through AdWords. The keyword tool will let you see what volume of searches are being made for specified keywords each month.

YouTube Trends Dashboard

An often over-looked tool that shows, per county, what videos are trending in a specific country by gender and age group – ideal for spotting content to advertise against, and knowing what’s “hot” on YouTube – or if you’re really doing well, watching your own videos trend. There’s a trends blogtoo.

source from: searchenginewatch

Brin’s comments were made from his Google+ profile, and were in reaction to what he called “distorted” secondary coverage of comments he made earlier this week, in which he seemed to indicate that governments, Apple, and Facebook all pose threats to an “open” Internet.

While castigating censorious regimes, Brin also warned Western democracies faced making similar mistakes if they continue to pursue a war against online piracy.

“Countries such as the US have come close to adopting very similar [web filtering] techniques in order to combat piracy and other vices. I believe these efforts have been misguided and dangerous,” he wrote.

Brin also stressed that his original comments in promoting an open web were not intended as an attack on the walled gardens of Apple and Facebook.

“I have much admiration for two of the companies we discussed – Apple and Facebook. I have always admired Apple’s products,” he explained. ”Likewise, Facebook has helped to connect hundreds of millions of people, has been a key tool for political expression and has been instrumental to the Arab Spring.”

He continued: “Regardless of how you feel about digital ecosystems or about Google, please do not take the free and open internet for granted from government intervention. To the extent that free flow of information threatens the powerful, those in power will seek to suppress it.”

source from: searchenginewatch

uch of the discussion in the SEO community of late has been related to Google’s efforts to “level the playing field” for mom and pops vs. those with bigger marketing budgets, and comments to this effect made by Matt Cutts at SXSW recently. He indicated that Google is working on things that would make it so people who “over-optmize” their sites don’t necessarily rank better than others who didn’t worry about SEO, but have great content.

Are black hat SEO tactics worth the risk? Tell us what you think.

To a great extent, Google has been working on these kinds of things for a long time. The Panda update was certainly designed to make content quality matter more, but Google also regularly gives tips about how to optimize your site better and releases lists of algorithmic changes, which practically beg webmasters to try and exploit them. Google, of course doesn’t take this stance, but when they release the signals, people pay attention, and try to play to them. Why wouldn’t they?

Google knows this, of course, which is why they won’t release their entire list of signals, let alone talk about how much weight certain signals have compared to others, although if you pay close enough attention, you’ll sometimes catch hints at this too.

You might say Google sends mixed signals to webmasters. Danny Sullivan asks if Google’s over-optimization penalty is its “jump the shark” moment. He makes the case that it’s more about PR for Google to indicate they’re actively working on making results more relevant.

The whole de-indexing of paid blog/link networks plays to the whole making over-optimization matter less concept, but based on Google’s webmaster guidelines, it seems like doing so would have always fit into the company’s policy.

When you play the black hat, or even gray hat game, you’re taking a big risk of being dealt a damaging penalty. Google didn’t even hesitate to penalize its own site for violating guidelines (at least after they were called out on it), which may have even cost Chrome some browser market share.

Going white hat after playing it at a darker shade in the past isn’t necessarily going to help your rankings either though, as one blogger indicated in a recent post at SEOBullshit:

I did paid links, paid reviews, and never, ever did any shit like “cloaking”, “spam”, or “stuffing.” Hence, the “grey” hat campaign type. I had awesome content. I had a crawlable site. It was perfect in every way. I used paid links and reviews to scream at GoogleBot, “Hey, notice me! I’m right here! I have killer content and reputable sites link to it.” The results were great. The money. Terrific. I left the competition scratching their heads since my site was HTTPS, it was hard to reverse engineer as most link-finding tools couldn’t really find my backlinks.

However, the stress of running a grey-hat campaign eventually wears on you and you long for the peace of a white hat campaign. So, I hatched a plan to wean my site from grey and pray that the results weren’t too bad. I expected a 15-25% drop in SERPS and traffic which I could then recover by getting a big relevant, content piece linked up to the pages where I removed the TLA’s.

Fucking failure. Total and monstrous failure.

He continues on saying his total traffic drop was -72.5%.

Every time Google makes big adjustments to its algorithm, sites pay the price. Sometimes that price is deserved, and sometimes it’s not. I find that often, people tend to think they didn’t deserve to lose their rankings. Even with the latest Panda refresh, we had sites telling us about ranking declines.

The intro of a recent Entrepreneur article sums up the conundrum of the small business perfectly: “As a small business owner using the web to reach customers, you’ve surely been implementing search engine optimization tactics to make sure your site turns up high in web searches. But just when you might feel like you’re starting to get the hang of this SEO thing, it appears that search giant Google might start penalizing websites that are over-optimized.”

We understand that there are plenty of white hat SEO tactics that Google not only is OK with, but encourages. However, most people simply don’t know what SEO even is. Matt Cutts himself shared results this week from a survey he conducted, finding only one in five people in the U.S. have even heard of SEO.

It’s not surprising that sites would be tempted to go for the darker hat techniques. But as Google continues on this new (same) path of leveling the playing field, however, it may be more playing with fire than ever. And once you start, engaging in SEO’s dark arts, you may have a hard time returning to the lighter side, should you ever choose to do so.

source from: webpronews

Here’s a recap of all the April Fools’ Day fun from this year.

Google 8-Bit Maps for NES

Like Google Maps? Still have your dusty old Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in the back of your closet or up in your attic? Then you’re in luck.

Google is finally adding support for the classic video game system with the launch of 8-bit maps, touting “low-res graphics, simple and intuitive controls, and a timeless soundtrack.” You can explore the world and find landmarks, including:

The White House and Washington Monument

Mount Rushmore in South Dakota

The Statue of Liberty in New York City

St. Louis Arch in Missouri

Hollywood sign in Los Angeles, California

Space Needle in Seattle, Washington

Area 51

Eiffel Tower in Paris, France

Louvre Museum in Paris, France

Taj Mahal in Agra, India

Leaning Tower of Pisa in Italy

Roman Colosseum

Sphinx & Great Pyramids in Giza, Egypt

Chichen Itza, Mexico

Easter Island

Parthenon in Athens, Greece

Kremlin in Moscow, Russia

Great Buddha of Kamakura, Japan

Nazca Lines in Nasca, Peru

(Seen any other cool 8-bit Google Maps landmarks? Leave a note in the comments!)

This video offers a full walk-through and preview. The “trial version” is available at Google Maps in Quest Mode:

Chrome Multitask Mode

Cursing because you only have one cursor? Say hello to the ambinavigation revolution known as Chrome Multitask Mode.

Thanks to Google’s unending need for speed, you can surf the web with both hands by using more than one mouse on the same computer. Or, surf with your friends or loved ones at the same time.

Here’s where you can try out Multitask Mode. Here’s a video explaining it:

All of YouTube Put on a DVD

YouTube joined in with an April Fools’ Day hoax of its own. In a post on the YouTube Blog, Chet Flanagan, director of DVD product management, asked, “Loved a video so much that liking it, favoriting it, sharing it and even subscribing to the channel wasn’t enough? Just had to hold it in your grasp and never ever let it go?” He added, “We know the feeling, so today we’re making The YouTube Collection available for you in a new holdable version: DVD. A direct result of your feedback and demand, The YouTube Collection is a first of its kind offering in web video.”

Here’s a video outlining the details.

Google Racing: Self-Driving NASCAR Race Cars

For those who enjoy spending Sunday afternoons watching cars speed around a track at 200 miles per hour but don’t like all that crashing, now there’s a Google racing team. Partnering with NASCAR, Google’s fleet of autonomous vehicle will duel against carbon-based life forms.

“I hope that today’s announcement of Google Racing will mark another step along this path, and spur innovations that improve the daily lives of people all over the world,” wrote Google co-founder Sergey Brin. “Or at the very least offer us a few cool new thrills on hot weekend afternoons.”

Note that the car number is 10^100 (known as a googol in mathematics – the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes) and the car slogan is “I’m steering lucky”, a play on Google’s long-time “I’m feeling lucky” search option that brings searchers to the No. 1 result rather than showing an entire search engine results page.

Gmail Tap

Google has revealed its futuristic binary language made up of dots and dashes for Android and iOS users on the go: Gmail Tap, which reduces 26 keys to 2.

Gmail also introduced multi-email, allowing power users to double their productivity by typing multiple emails at once, predictive text mode, and optional audio feedback.

Google Street Roo View

To provide panoramic pictures of the Australian outback, Google has announced Google Street Roo. The search giant plans to equip more than 1,000 kangaroos with 360-degree cameras powered by solar panels stitched into custom-made “roo jackets” to capture images as they hop around during daylight hours. The goal is to capture images of 98 percent of the area within three years.

We’re all holding our breath to find out whether any kangaroos will file privacy complaints with the Australian government.

Click-to-Teleport

Phone calls and website visits are so old-fashioned. Now when people click on a search ad, Google will teleport through time and space – directly to a business location.

For advertisers, Google says you should:

• Optimize for closest location: Least disorienting for visitors, and helps you maintain a local feeling.
• Optimize for conversions: Teleports visitors to locations where your customers are most likely to convert.
• Rotate evenly: Teleports visitor to a random business location and helpful for avoiding overcrowded business locations.

Good news for advertisers: offline sales have increased by a whopping 3,600 percent. Bad news for users and businesses: while Click-to-Teleport is in beta, there is no “teleport back home” option.

Google Really Advanced Search

Sometimes Advanced Search isn’t enough. Now if you need to search with new options, GoogleReally Advanced Search has you covered for the following:

• Rhyming slang for
• This exact word or phrase, whose sum of unicode code points is a mersenne prime
• Font
• Content that is true
• will have been modified
• Embarrassing grammatical faux pas
• Looping midi music in the genre of

Not enough? You can also “tickle a unicorn”; “download our ranking code so you can run Google at home”; and “search by odor”.

Fittingly, clicking on any of those, or the blue Advanced Search button will take you to the search results page for “april fools”.

Control the Weather!

Says Google: “Don’t like the weather? Now you can change it in your region by selecting from the dropdown to change precipitation and setting your own temperature.”

Choose the temperature along with whatever weather conditions (e.g., sunny, foggy, windy, rain, thunderstorm). Then click the “Update weather” button. Google explains that it will take 45 minutes to update and you must agree to be responsible for the weather (if you’re too afraid, you can click “Dismiss”)!

Note: We’ll be updating this post throughout the day if/when more spoofs are uncovered. If you spot any other funny pranks from Google, other search engines, social networks, or tech companies, let us know in the comments! Also let us know what you think of this year’s edition of jokes.

Google April Fools’ Day Hoaxes History: 2000-2011

In 2000, Google asked users to “project a mental image of what you want to find” while staring at the MentalPlex circle. When we clicked (or visualized clicking) within the MentalPlex circle, we got an error message that said, “Error 01: Brainwaves received in analog. Please re-think in digital.”

In 2002, Google revealed the technology behind its great results – PigeonRank – which used low cost pigeon clusters (PCs) to compute the relative value of web pages. Google explained, “Those pages receiving the most pecks are returned at the top of the user’s results page with the other results displayed in pecking order.”

In 2004, the Google Copernicus Center announced it was interviewing candidates for engineering positions at a lunar hosting and research center, which was opening late in the spring of 2007.

In 2005, the company announced Google Gulp (BETA) with Auto-Drink (LIMITED RELEASE), a line of “smart drinks” designed to maximize your surfing efficiency by making you more intelligent, and less thirsty.

In 2006, the company announced Google Romance, a place where you can post all types of romantic information and, using Google’s Soulmate Search, get back search results that could, in theory, include the love of your life.

In 2007, the company announced the launch of Google TiSP (BETA) . The Toilet Internet Service Provider (TiSP) project was a self-installed, ad-supported online service that was offered entirely free to any consumer with a WiFi-capable PC and a toilet connected to a local municipal sewage system.

In 2008, Google announced Project Virgle, a joint project with the Virgin Group to establish a permanent human settlement on Mars. The announcement included videos on projectvirgle’s channel on YouTube.

Also that year, YouTube participated in Google’s April Fools’ Day tradition for the first time. All featured videos on YouTube’s linked to “Rick Astley – Never Gonna Give You Up,” causing all users of the website who clicked on featured videos to be Rickrolled.

In 2009, Google announced CADIE, the world’s first Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity. She immediately assumed control of the company and its products and services.

That year, YouTube gave some users a look at a new “viewing experience” when they selected a video within the “recommended for you” section. This new interface caused the whole layout including the video you were watching to flip upside down.

In 2010, Google announced it was changing its name to Topeka, after that city changed its name to Google the previous month.

At the same time, YouTube unveiled a new quality setting, TEXTp. According to a notice underneath videos, viewing a video with this quality setting enabled allowed YouTube to save one US dollar ($1) per second on bandwidth costs.

In 2011, Google rolled out Comic Sans as its default font across all Google products (one of many pranks). YouTube celebrated its 100th anniversary last year. In honor of this milestone, the video site’s homepage was a reproduction of how users might have viewed it in 1911. It also featured the “Top 5 Viral Pictures of 1911.”

Search Engine Watch also learned about the Bamboo Update, to restore websites rankings fromGoogle’s Panda update.

source from: searchenginewatch