Google Ads Get an iPhone Makeover

Google build its Internet empire not just on the shoulders of its search engine, but also on the cash cow that is its AdSense advertising program. By targeting text ads based on relevancy on millions of websites, Google has become the de-facto leader on online advertising.

Mobile web technology has grown significantly in recent years though, a lot of it due to the iPhone (iPhone) and its sophisticated Safari (Safari) mobile browser. Mobile ad networks (e.g. AdMob) have seized upon the mobile advertising opportunity.

But now Google (Google) is entering the smartphone advertising market with a new AdSense feature, AdSense for Mobile Content.

The program, which Google announced today, allows website owners to create ads specifically optimized for “high-end smartphones” (read: iPhone, BlackBerry, Palm Pre). It involves adding a new JavaScript snippet for adding these new mobile Google ads. The result are lower-latency ads with smaller text and images, perfect for the mobile web browser.



Google realizes that more and more of the web is going mobile, and it isn’t about to let any part of the online ad market slip away. The launched a separate mobile ad program last year, but this development makes it even easier to deliver Google ads on smartphones. With targeted and optimized mobile ads, Google’s in great position to be a leading mobile ad provider. This could be bad news for AdMob and other mobile advertising startups.

Google Launches 9 New Ways to Search

Google continues to work to address the threat posed by the real-time search capabilities of services like Twitter and Facebook.

In May, they launched “Search Options” to allow users to refine search results by content type and time (within the past day was the timeliest you could get), but today, they’re launching a “past hour” filter to make its index even fresher.

Along with this key update, Google is rolling out 8 other search options which should be available to everyone at some point today. Those include the ability to search within a specific date range, shopping site filters, a visited pages filter, and an option to see only results from Google’s book, blog, and news search tools.





The “past hour” filter is certainly the most interesting addition, though. While Google offers other timely ways to get information – Google News and Google Trends being atop that list – the vast majority of users simply turn to its search engine.
By giving users the option to filter results from the past hour, they’ll see more current news and information as opposed to the WikipediaWikipedia entries and other high ranking content that dominate the top of many results in regular search. Earlier this week, GoogleGoogle also added “hot trends” to search results, a move that might portend TwitterTwitter-like trending topics being integrated throughout at some point down the road.
Google is playing catch up here – not in the sense of market share, but in the sense of making their results as timely as those found on social media sites. To see how they’re doing, we’ll need to put the “past hour” filter to the test next time there is a major current event breaking. Stay tuned.

Translate Any Site Instantly in Firefox with Google Toolbar

There’s a whole lot of translation action going on this week, with both Google and Facebook already announcing a translation product for webmasters earlier.
Now Google has another translation announcement, this time bringing multi-language support right into the Google Toolbar for Firefox.

With the translate tool available right in your browser, a webmaster won’t need to have translation enabled for his or her site — he or she can simply select the translate button in the toolbar and have the page rendered into any of the 51 languages Google Translate currently supports.
Do you use the Google Toolbar? If so, what do you use it for? If not, does translation support add enough value for you to consider installing it? Let us know in the comments.