Sometimes, Google news seems to happen all at once. For instance, occasionally they’ll release free software on the same day a European country declares war on them. Like today. And that’s not all…but let’s start with the European country thing.
“This just in, from our way-too-easy-joke correspondent” The Guardian reports, along with a dryly snickering headline, news that French President Jacques Chirac wants his legacy to include a search engine that will put Google to shame. Called Quaero (“I search” in Latin), and to be co-developed by French and German engineers, the article says it’s intended to be the “first to efficiently sort through audio, images and video.” We first reported about it here, but here’s an update: it’ll have to make to with an operating budget of 450 million Euros over five years, a sum that’s already been derided by French satirists for being much, much less than the resources available to your average Google or Microsoft.
“I knew I should’a taken that left turn at Stuttgart” Maybe Chirac was just peeved that Big G was encroaching on French turf. Google’s blog announced yesterday that the street maps, driving directions and local business search of Google Maps Beta are live in France, Germany, Italy and Spain. Appropriately, Google Maps and Google Earth both have improved resolution of many European locations.
Sometimes, less is…less Danny Sullivan points to a somewhat cryptic post on the Inside AdWords Blog, saying that over the next couple of weeks, they’ll be “implementing an ads quality change designed to show fewer ads on queries for which our users might prefer not to see them and more ads on queries for which ads are useful.”
Sullivan reasoned that Google would be increasing the maximum number of ads served on their results pages in certain circumstances, but Google told him that wasn’t the case; apparently they’ll just be serving fewer ads for “queries where users are most likely not interested in a product or service, such as ‘dog friendly parks in Mountain View.’” Hmm…hopefully this change won’t be worked in as arbitrarily as that example makes it sound. Advertisers who notice undesired effects to their campaigns are advised to either stop relying too much on keyword broad or phrase matches, or to add negative keywords to “more finely tune your targeting.”
And now, the obligatory Google tchotchke Google snapped up SketchUp last month, and today they released a free download of the company’s 3D-modeling software, says Slashdot. Windows XP users (and soon, Mac users as well) can take a crack at it.
