October 31st, 2011 | by Stephanie Taylor | published in Google Open Source, Uncategorized
We’ve been busy compiling some more cool statistics from this year’s 7th iteration of the Google Summer of Code program: enjoy! This year we had a total of 595 different universities participating in the program, 160 of which were new to the progr…
October 31st, 2011 | by Inside AdWords crew | published in Google Adwords, Uncategorized, Youtube
If you use TrueView video ads or interested in video advertising, we invite you to check out the Agency blog where we just posted some news and recent stats on this new suite of cost-per-view video ads. To learn more about the TrueView family of ad for…
October 31st, 2011 | by Inside AdSense Team | published in Google Adsense
It’s no secret that I watch a lot of video ads. It’s one of the perks (or pains!) of working in the video advertising business. And yet, I was surprised to see that my younger cousins were gathered around a laptop showing each other their favorite …
October 31st, 2011 | by Inside AdWords crew | published in Google Adwords, Uncategorized
Today, many businesses are using location targeting in their online ad campaigns to reach the right customers and improve campaign performance. Online agency iProspect, for example, uses location targeting to focus on top performing geographic areas fo…
October 31st, 2011 | by aidanchopra | published in Google SketchUp
Lots of you entered the SketchUp Halloween Challenge, and the results are impressive. In no particular order, here are our favorite entries:Haunted HousesHaunted Chapel by Sebastian Sosnowski of Wrocław, PolandSketchUp and Twilight Render | Model | Mo…
October 31st, 2011 | by A Googler | published in Google Blog
When I was a little kid, Halloween seemed like the most grown-up holiday of all. For one thrilling night of the year, I got to stay up late trick-or-treating, watch scary movies with my friends, and wield sharp and pointy objects (safety first, of cour…
October 28th, 2011 | by Stephanie Taylor | published in Google Open Source, Uncategorized
Mobile testing has come a long way since the days when testing mobile web applications was mostly manual and took days to complete. Selenium WebDriver is a browser automation tool that provides an elegant way of testing web applications. WebDriver make…
October 28th, 2011 | by Unknown | published in Google News
By Jayakumar Hoskere, Software Engineer
When a big story breaks, there are often over a thousand articles written about the news event. At Google News, we work hard to surface the most relevant and interesting content to you — so you can spend less time sorting through thousands of articles, and more time consuming news from a range of diverse perspectives. For instance, since introducing expandable stories, we have added additional labels to call out special types of articles in many editions. These labels are designed to highlight different content types on Google News, and show you stories that complement and expand upon standard news reporting. The four labels we recently launched include:
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Live Updating: A live-updating article, such as a liveblog.
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Featured: An article a publisher has told us is standout.
- Fact-check: An article providing fact-check content about the story.
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Your Preferred source: An article from a source that you preferred.
Evaluating a story from different angles often provides a sharper perspective. That is why we also now highlight special types of articles in many Google News search results. Your search results will not only show recent articles, but also those from diverse perspectives that relate to a given query.
We also recently added the Translate button to non-English international stories in expandable story boxes in the U.S edition, giving you the ability to read pieces from all over the world — even if you don’t speak the language.
We hope you find these changes useful as we continue to develop opportunities for you to find more interesting and valuable content.
October 28th, 2011 | by AdWords API Team | published in Google Adwords API
Reporting has changed significantly with v201109. We’d like to take this opportunity to discuss how to download reports for lots of clients simultaneously. To download reports for a large number of client accounts, we recommend requesting the download of these reports simultaneously.
We recommend requesting no more than 10 reports concurrently and to use one thread for each concurrent download. If for some reason the report download fails, we recommend you retry after a short wait. The length of the wait should increase with the number of times the request has been tried (known as Exponential Backoff). This backoff algorithm helps prevent making too many requests to the server in a short period of time.
You should check the specific reason the download failed and only retry if it was a transient error (such as exceeding the rate limit) instead of retrying if the report definition XML was invalid. The HTTP Status of the response provides useful information:
- HTTP Status 500 indicates there is a transient server side issue and the request can be retried after a delay. We retrying no more than 5 times for any given report.
- HTTP Status 400 indicates there was a problem with the request (or the report itself) and retrying will not help.
- HTTP Status 200 means the report download was successful.
With v201109 you should use Ad Hoc reports to download new reports. With this new feature, there is no need for stored ReportDefinitions. The XML describing a Report Definition is sent directly with report download. A developer token is required, but the API call accrues no costs (report downloads are now free!).
Another benefit of downloading reports in this fashion is you get data more quickly than with legacy cross-client reports. As soon as a report download succeeds, you can start processing the data by putting it into a database or performing further logic on the results.
We hope this discussion of best practices will help you with writing report download code in the future. We’ve published a reference implementation showing how to do this in java here. If you have any questions about downloading reports, you can ask us on the forum.
Kevin Winter, AdWords API Team
October 28th, 2011 | by Google Students | published in Google Student Blog, Uncategorized
Cross-posted from the Google Nonprofits BlogWe’re pleased to announce the winners of the NGO Impact Award, a new award that recognizes Google Online Marketing Challenge student teams that made an outstanding difference to their nonprofit partners via…
A prima ballerina vs. some very angry birds: this year’s Halloween search trends
October 28th, 2011 | by A Googler | published in Google Blog
The pumpkins are carved, the spiderwebs are hanging,
Kids and their pets are door-to-door banging,
Witches on their brooms and owls on their perches,
Let’s take a look at some Halloween searches.
Halloween searches are some of our favorite trends to…
October 28th, 2011 | by Google Students | published in Google Student Blog, Uncategorized
Introduction: We wrap up the “My Summer @ Google” series with a post from Kalyne, a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania who attended BOLD Immersion in New York City this summer.Take a second to do a Google search for the BOLD Immersion Prog…
October 28th, 2011 | by Jay Garg | published in Google Apps, Google Enterprise
Posted by Jim Ambras, Founder and CEO of JobFloEditor’s note: Today’s guest blogger is Jim Ambras, founder and CEO of JobFlo (previously NotchUp). JobFlo helps small to medium-sized businesses recruit top talent through its free social-media recrui…
October 28th, 2011 | by Phil Mui | published in Google Analytics, Uncategorized
Increasingly users are discovering great content, products and links through social referrals such as +1 button endorsements, comments, likes, and shares. Earlier this year we introduced Social Plugin Analytics to help you analyze how users engage with…
October 28th, 2011 | by Google Docs | published in Google Docs
One of my favorite things about being the community manager on the Google Docs team is working alongside people with a myriad of backgrounds, interests, and talents. From learning of one of teammate’s pro cricket player past or another’s literary a…