Google To Update PageRank 1/1/08

Happy new year! Google are planning to update toolbar pagerank on January the first 2008 to fix the mess they made of the last update.

Google have been inundated with emails since they reduced the PR of any website suspected of selling text links for link juice drastically, many all the way to zero.

While many sites will have their PR restored to what it was before the last update, Not all will be restored. What Google have done is refine their algorithm for detecting what sites are buying and selling links for pagerank, So if you actually were selling text links for pagerank it's likely your PR will remain what it is now.

Google Magazine?

A patent obtained by Google in 2006 indicates that Google may soon be venturing in to the world of printed media.

What Google are planning to do, By the looks of the patent, Is produce a system where by the user will be able to create a magazine based on their input via small kiosks, Similar to the way photo kiosks work now.

The system will aggregate information and articles from various sources based on user input and produce a real world printed publication or digital hard-copy containing targeted adverts. Similar to how RSS aggregation works now, But on paper.

Google previous attempts at printed media haven't worked out too well so we may actually see Google licence the patent out to companies with the intention of providing the adverts for the publication.

it will be interesting to know more about where google plan to get the data from. Scraping content from websites will infringe on intellectual property right. We may even see the introduction of a new meta tag that grants google permission to use a sites content.

Google Hacked?

I was just sent this screen shot by an anonymous reader of another one of my blogs. it's an image supposedly showing a defaced google.co.uk page with the name tex-tenthousand.

At first i though "meh, he just saved the page and then edited it". But if you look at the pagerank bar it shows the correct pagerank for google.co.uk which it wouldn't do if he was viewing an html file locally.

Google Set To Unveil "Android" Phone Software

Google is ready to unveil a suite of software for mobile phones based on open-source technology, backed by some of the largest wireless industry companies in the world.

The company is expected to hold a press conference on Monday to unveil the project, which is expected to incorporate software from the Linux world into a mobile platform code-named Android that's designed to run on phones, according to sources familiar with Google's plans. A software development kit for what's being called "a complete mobile-phone software stack" is believed to be in the works and will be released relatively soon thereafter, the sources said. It's not exactly clear what kind of software will come as part of that stack, but it's said to include everything you need to run a phone.

Japanese wireless carriers KDDI and NTT DoCoMo are said to be heavily involved in what will be called the Open Handset Alliance, according to other sources. The rest of the more than 30 other companies involved reads like a who's-who list of the mobile-computing industry, including Qualcomm, Broadcom, HTC, Intel, Samsung, Motorola, Sprint, and Texas Instruments.

Don't expect to see a Google phone, or Gphone, on store shelves anytime soon. And in such a large project with so many different players, plans and some details could still change over the weekend. It's unclear when the final version will be released. Google has repeatedly declined to talk about the Gphone or confirm the Monday event.