Ever since the inception of Electronic mail (e-mail), the internet world has flourished and only moved further ahead; and now we have ‘The Wave’ by Google. Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. It’s a very potent open sourced tool where in people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. Lars Rasmussen, a member of Google’s technical staff, based in the Sydney office, and with his brother Jens, is co-founder of the Google Wave effort. These brothers are also the think-tank behind the critically acclaimed Google Maps. Let me cater to a couple of rudimentary questions that may crop up in one’s mind.

• What is a wave?

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

• What does a wave primarily do?

It ends the long existing divide between different types of communication viz. email versus chat, or conversations versus documents. This means we can now indulge in instant chats, shoot e-mails, transfer images and documents, organize and collaboratively edit images and other documents etc. There’s a lot more to it than you and I can imagine.

It’s a single communications model which spans all or most of the systems in use on the web today, in one smooth consistency.

It’s a communications system that takes advantage of computers’ current abilities, rather than imitating non-electronic forms.

Google Wave boasts some amazing features to make your instant messaging a lot more effervescent. It facilitates live transmission from the server to the browser with real time character display. Gone are the days when you would wait an eternity seeing ‘ABC is typing…’ with no text on display; and if you suck at spelling then there’s a state-of-the-art spell checker for your assistance!!

Attaching files simply means you have to drag and drop your required files from the desktop to the browser with no unnecessary clicks.

What’s amazing is that there is still a lot more to it!!  With a whole bunch of embedded API’s, Google Wave makes the web dance to its tunes. ‘Bloggy’ is one such interface wherein, changes made to the actual wave can be directly replicated on the blog site and vice versa. ‘Rozy’ is another sly interface which acts as a medium of real time translation between two users trying to chat in two different languages.

A single wave can be viewed and edited by many participants. If a new participant is added to an existing wave, he or she can simply hit ‘Playback’ to view the order in which the wave shaped up. ‘Playback’ is an exciting feature which lets all the participants keep a track on the entire evolution of a particular wave.

Google Wave is time and time again referred to as an HTML 5 application by its developers and has got the potential to create wonders in the World Wide Web. Google also foresees other network providers coming up with their own versions of a wave sometime in the near future. Even though Google Wave is in a very rudimentary stage, it is certainly here to stay and could soon make e-mails and other online clients turn obsolete.

We keep hearing internet pundits predict how the internet browser is slowly going to become the centre of all our work. The internet browser is rapidly moving away from just merely being a software that lets you browse the web. Opera Unite is one of many such browsers making all of this possible.

It may not be as popular as the Internet Explorer or the Firefox, but Opera browser has forged a reputation of being one of the most innovative in the world. Now, with its latest version, 10.10, Opera has once again added a new dimension to browsing, by including a server in the browser itself. With the new opera browser you can share pictures, music, documents and just about any file with the people you want without having to upload any file to a website or attach it to an e-mail. You do not even need to compress or zip up heavy files. The Opera Unite browser lets you specify which files on your computer you would like to share with your friends. Once you do this, it generates a URL. Now, all that remains to be done to make sure your friends view the file, just send them the URL and ask them to enter it in their browser and they will see the content you wish to share. Opera Unite actually turns your computer into a server. So when a user enters the URL you send him or her, they are actually looking at the files on your computer itself. You can even play music on your computer and let your friends hear it on theirs. No uploading or downloading involved!! This obviously raises security issues since people are looking at the data on your computer. Well, a well protected password takes care of this.

I feel other browsers would come up with a similar version of their own. In the meantime, you can save yourself a lot of time, now that you won’t have to wait for the files to upload or download. It only gets better from here on!

Google seems to be continuing their UI changing spree. It seems that the Google India homepage is now showing the fade in effect first reported by TechCrunch for the Google.com homepage. Here is a screenshot of the Google India homepage when you land on it :

Google India Homepage - no elements

And when you move your mouse, rest of the elements fade in, and it looks very very cool

Google India Homepage - elements fade in

Strangely, the elements do not fade in if you start typing your search query. Only when you move your mouse do the elements become visible

This was not seen before on the Google India homepage till now. Do not be disheartened if you do not see this homepage. It is highly plausible that this is being shown to a limited set of users – keep your fingers crossed!!

As you all must have noticed it by now, Google search bar has gotten bigger and in Google’s words “symbolizes our focus on search and because it makes our clean, minimalist homepage even easier and more fun to use. The new, larger Google search box features larger text when you type so you can see your query more clearly. It also uses a larger text size for the suggestions below the search box, making it easier to select one of the possible refinements.”

Google Homepage - Before

Google Homepage - After

Google has been making many changes in recent history and to make the larger search bar public without any beta testing seems like a gutsy move for Google. As for statistics, the new search bar is 32% larger than its predecessor. As for my two pennies on this phenomenon, I am not very enthusiastic about this change and definitely looks strange; seeing that we’ve been using the old page for quite some time now and are very used to it.

One of the latest developments in Google organic search has been the way they now use the feature ’show more results from’. Google has removed the HTML link to a specific site command feature. Unlike before, Google now dynamically opens up multiple other results on the same organic search engine results page. Additional results, enabled by the AJAX driven plus sign are displayed along with the results from the web. This has brought a new dimension to the search engine optimization and the field of seo optimization.
Once clicked, the plus sign opens up in the form of five new links, and turns into a minus sign. This feature has turned out to be very effective in terms of google organic search as well. You can hide these additional links by clicking on the minus sign which will turn back to plus sign. The links that open up on the click of the plus sign are all contextual to the main search topic. This feature allows Google to accommodate multiple contextual search results within the same organic search results page and also makes it easier for the user to decide and access the additional results. We are yet to see if this is helpful to improve search engine rankings or affects the traffic of a website from an SEO perspective.

Having trouble with the code for Google Analytics on a site needing sub-domain or multiple domain tracking? Google-ing the web, trying to figure out what are setDomainName, setAllowHash, setAllowLinker; and how to use them?? No sweat! Google Analytics does it for you now. The code has been updated for automatic modifications for sub-domains and multiple domains. Just click on the appropriate check-box while generating the code, and voila!

Google seems to be on the verge of doing something big. The reason for saying this is that we’ve seen a lot of activity concerning Google. We saw the launch of Google Wave (for developers only, yet) and Google released ‘Caffeine’ for developers and public to test it out. Google also shifted the sponsored links column a bit to the left and there seems to be a lot of testing with the Google SERP itself with dropdowns and what not. Today, I noticed that using Chrome you can directly search Google from the address bar (a la Launchy).

As seen below if you start typing Google in the bar, it suggests that you press tab to search Google

And when you press tab it gives you suggestions on what to do:

So, when you start typing in your keyword, Chrome gives you the option of seeing pages in your recent histroy related to that keyword

What Next?

Right now, Google lets you search some sites directly from the SERP (search for Flickr), so the only thing I can think of, for this handy addition, is when you start typing flickr in the address bar you press tab and then you can search Flickr !

Also this works only in Chrome……………for now.

I was just exploring Google’s wonder wheel some days back & one question came to my mind instantly – why would someone use the Google wonder wheel? Although, the wonder wheel is launched to enhance user experience, how many users actually use it? But then I thought, just forget the user for time being and see what the wonder wheel can do for us – the SEO guys!

I did some research which can be summarized as follows –

1. Keyword research tool – Most important part for any successful SEO campaign is keyword research. This is where the wonder wheel can come in handy. Just put in your search query and see the related search terms in a comprehensive manner.

The Wonder Wheel

2. New website – suppose, someone is launching a website for his business. He can find out what Google wants in his site by just exploring the generic keywords related to the website using the wonder wheel. Google is just telling us what it wants on our site by means of the wonder wheel.

3. Niche searches – The wonder wheel can show a lot of related keywords when you query for niche terms. I “Googled” some random things and found some related terms to the query! Why don’t you guys try it out?

4. Content writing – Before writing content on a specific topic, we can just explore wonder wheel and know what Google relates to that sort of content and then write content around those related terms, thereby generating a theme around those keywords.

I noticed one more thing, the keywords in “Related Searches” tab and those in the branches of the wonder wheel are SAME. I wonder, what if the keywords in the related searches tab and the branches of the wonder wheel are different? What would be the scenario then? And, what algorithm will Google use for both, the related search tabs and the wonder wheel?

Those who follow search engine trends will be well aware that since mid 2008, Google’s algorithm has been attributing increasing importance to the geographical fraction of the website parameters it evaluates. Every SEO company had realized this with a shock last year, as they usually do with most alterations in the algorithm.

But as with every modification geared towards “more relevant results for the user”, this I believe, has only generated optimized solutions that have served to make websites more organized. Solutions geared towards additional verticals of categorization of websites, making the websites and in turn the results more structured.

One of the most important factors that very noticeably affect the “geographic algorithmic categorization” of a website is the location of the server where it is hosted and even more so, the geographical location of the registrant of the website. In fact even the incoming link building to your website should focused be from a web page hosted in an appropriate location. These factors affect the region of the world wherein the websites visibility on search engines will be good.

Sub- domains are another extremely underutilized method of targeting audiences across a wide range of physical locations. Apart from creating sub-domains, further emphasizing the location of the target audience by specifying it in Google’s Webmaster Tools is a good move.

Localizing the content on your website and maintaining a physical address in the target location, will help you grab traffic from sources such as the Local results displayed by search engines these days.

As, Google’s algorithm is going to get only more location specific and more discerning when displaying results it only makes sense for websites to move in the same direction strategically.