Google Data

Webmaster Level: All

Many thanks to the more than 1,600 people who filled out our survey in February. You gave us your feedback on the Webmaster Central Blog, Google Webmaster Tools, the Webmaster Help Forum, and our Webmaster Central videos on YouTube.

You told us what you like and want to see more of:

• Webmaster Central gives users insight into Google: "[I like] being able to access, communicate, and see how my sites relate to Google."
• Webmaster Central provides high quality information: "What I have enjoyed most of all, is reading Google's guidelines for webmasters, which is on-point with what I have been telling customers about SEO."
• Webmaster Central collects several useful tools in one place: "It's an innovative central hub for all the tools supported and provided by the industry leader Google, for free."

We also learned about what you don't like and where we could be doing better. Our top finding is that beginner webmasters (about 20% of the survey respondents) are less satisfied than intermediate or advanced webmasters with Webmaster Central. Open-ended comments suggested that new webmasters want basic, less technical information from us. A common feedback that we received: "Many users like myself are not of the hi-tech, IT-savvy variety and prefer simplicity, whether we create a website for information or to generate revenue." Based on your responses, we've planned some new resources like a series of how-to videos especially for new webmasters (coming soon to YouTube).

We take your feedback seriously and will continue improving Webmaster Central and our other webmaster sites. Again, thanks for your participation in the survey. We want Webmaster Central to continue being a useful resource for you.

Written by Carolyn Wei, User Experience Researcher

Posted by Amanda Kleha, Product Marketing Manager

Here at Google Enterprise, we're always wondering what's on the minds of IT professionals and end users. So we asked them. An annual tradition started by Postini, this year's survey on message security and compliance was conducted by a third party and involved 575 IT professionals. Questions ranged from "What productivity challenges does IT face?" to "Who is responsible for security and data leakage?"

Not surprisingly, the majority of respondents (53%) believe that IT holds ultimate responsibility for their organization's communications security and compliance, as shown below. They also realize that organizations need to have policies and mechanisms in place to help achieve this.


These results and more are now available in a white paper called the 2008 Communications Intelligence Report. The report also includes sections on Google's expectations for security in 2008 and security and compliance best practices.

We hope these findings will help shed light on the forces that are influencing the growing adoption of software-as-a-service (SaaS), which is taking the place of in-house solutions that tend to require significant internal resources to maintain. The results suggest that one reason SaaS is gaining momentum is that the problems it solves are top-of-mind for IT departments, such as spending too much time or money on troubleshooting and maintenance.


By using service providers, organizations can offload capacity challenges, get real-time updates, and benefit from the economies of scale of a large network. And there's more good news: With Google's recent launch of new security and compliance products, organizations of all sizes can afford and easily implement best-in-class security and compliance.

Posted by Katie Jacobs Stanton, Group Product Manager, Google Finance

First things first: thanks to all of you who posted so many great comments. We've enjoyed reading them and are excited to try this Q&A thing out. So now to the good stuff:

Internationalization. There are a lot of suggestions to add quotes from various international markets including Australia and India. We can assure you that we are committed to providing a comprehensive online finance product and we do believe internationalization is important. Currently, Google Finance offers quotes from many international stock exchanges including Amsterdam, Brussels, Lisbon, London, Paris, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Toronto. It's great to have your input as to which markets should be our top priority. Stay tuned!

Tools. Many of you have asked for more tools like stock screeners. There are a bunch of online finance sites with stock screeners, but they could probably use some updating. We have a Noogler (a.k.a. "new Googler") on the team who is also keen to check out this space. In the comments section, please tell us more about the inadequacies you have with current stock screeners (i.e., What features are missing? What problems do you encounter?). Other tool requests include technical charts. We also agree that this is important. Which technicals would you most like to see?

Content. We've had a number of suggestions from people like Avinash (our most enthusiastic commenter!), to add earnings estimates, institutional ownership and options data. These are all very important pieces of content for investors and we agree that it's content we should spend time on. Thank you for pushing us in the right direction! Also, we often get requests to add more functionality for data such as downloading. If it were up to us, we would let you download everything, but we have certain content contracts in place which dictate otherwise. We'll be delighted to share your feedback with our content partners and let them know there is demand for more downloading rights. :)

Real-time quotes. Getting real-time quotes to you for free is one of the top requests we're seeing. We couldn't agree more. In January, we announced a deal with the New York Stock Exchange which would allow our dissemination of last sale quote data to all of our users for free. We reached a similar agreement with Nasdaq shortly thereafter. However, because market data pricing is regulated by the SEC, we have to wait for the SEC to approve these deals. We're as anxious as you are to get this out to you as soon as possible.

As for the Q&A itself: is this helpful? Should we do this more regularly? Please let us know. Thanks again for all your comments and ideas.

MIT's running a Weblog Survey, if you've got a few spare minutes.