In July, Google upgraded AdWords to allow advertisers to add the full address to their search ads through location extensions. It appears that they are now testing a new ad layout similar to the one developed for Local Listing Ads.

Tim Coleman of A Second Opinion, sent along this screen shot from last week of a search for “garage door repair denver” that displays a new local AdWords ad type. (Click the image to view larger)

Bluementhals

I like this software, it works Now they have discount sale going on for 5 days from today,  more than 50% discount…

Click here to visit them

Google Inc. is working on a new operating system for inexpensive computers in a daring attempt to diminish Microsoft Corp.’s longstanding control over people’s computer experience.

The new operating system, announced Tuesday night on Google’s Web site, will be based on the company’s 9-month-old Web browser, Chrome. Google intends to rely on help from the community of open-source programmers to develop the Chrome operating system, which is expected to begin running computers in the second half of 2010.

Shares of Google jumped $6.92, 1.8 percent, to $403.55 in morning trading Wednesday, while Microsoft fell 15 cents to $22.38.

Google is designing the operating system primarily for “netbooks,” a lower-cost, less powerful breed of laptop computers that is becoming increasingly popular among budget-conscious consumers primarily interested in surfing the Web.

Google has already introduced an operating system for smart phones and other mobile devices, called Android, that vies against various other systems, including ones made by Microsoft and Apple Inc.

The Android system worked well enough to entice some computer makers to begin developing netbooks that will run on it. For instance, Acer Inc., the world’s third-largest PC maker, said last month it would make netbooks that run Android instead of Windows. Acer said Android would make the computers less expensive and possibly help them boot up faster.

Google, though, apparently believes a Chrome-based system will be better suited for netbooks.

That is a direct challenge to Microsoft, whose next operating system, Windows 7, is being geared for netbooks as well as larger computers. And it would be Google’s boldest confrontation yet with its biggest nemesis.

Microsoft had no immediate comment Wednesday.

A duel between the two technology powerhouses has been steadily escalating in recent years as Google’s dominance of the Internet’s lucrative search market has given it the means to threaten Microsoft in ways that few other companies can.

Google already has rankled Microsoft by luring some of its top employees and developing an online package of computer programs that provide an alternative to Microsoft’s top-selling word processing, spreadsheet and calendar applications.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has been trying to thwart Google by investing billions of dollars to improve its own Internet search and advertising systems — to little avail so far.

In the past month or so, though, Microsoft has been winning positive reviews and picking up more users with the latest upgrade to its search engine, now called Bing. Microsoft is hailing the makeover with a $100 million marketing campaign.

Now Google is aiming for Microsoft’s financial jugular with Chrome its operating system.

Microsoft has drawn much of its power — and profits — from the Windows operating system that has steered most personal computers for the past two decades.

Google’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, and its co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, have not concealed their disdain for Windows.

Schmidt maintains Microsoft sometimes unfairly rigs its operating system to limit consumer choices — something that Microsoft has consistently denied doing. Google fears Microsoft could limit access to its search engine and other products if Windows is set up to favor Microsoft products.

Google made a veiled reference to Windows’ perceived shortcomings in its blog posting Tuesday.

“We hear a lot from our users and their message is clear — computers need to get better,” wrote Sundar Pichai, Google’s vice president of product management and Linus Upson, Google’s engineering director. “We believe choice will drive innovation for the benefit of everyone, including Google.”

Schmidt and Brin are expected to discuss Google’s new operating system this week when they appear at a media conference hosted by Allen & Co. at the Sun Valley resort in Idaho.

Despite its own power and prominence, Google won’t have an easy time changing the status quo that has governed personal computing.

As an example of how difficult it is to topple a long-established market leader, Google estimates about 30 million people are now using its Chrome browser — a small fraction of those that rely on Microsoft’s market-leading Internet Explorer. And there have been various attempts to develop open-source software to undermine Windows on PCs, with relatively little effect.

Nowadays, even regular Web surfers know some of the things to do when designing a Web site for fast performance. Cut the number of requests to the Web server. Shrink JPEG sizes. Enlist the services of a content delivery network vendor like Akamai Technologies Inc. or Limelight Networks Inc.

Problem is, according to Steve Souders, steps like those, which are aimed at optimizing the Web server, make only a tiny impact.

“We used to tear apart the Apache [Web server] code to figure out what Yahoo was doing,” said Souders, who was Yahoo Inc.’s chief performance engineer for several years before moving to Google Inc. in the same role.

But after performing a detailed analysis, Souders discovered something startling: Only 10% to 20% of the time it took to load a Web site could be attributed to the Web server.

The vast majority was the result of code executing inside the Web browser, said Souders at a talk on Tuesday at Microsoft Corp.’s Tech Ed conference in Los Angeles (download PowerPoint here).

In today’s AJAX-heavy Web sites, the offending code is usually JavaScript, Souders said. That’s not because JavaScript files on a Web page are large, they aren’t; it’s because of the way Web browsers treat JavaScript, he said.

“The first generation of Web browsers decided that because they had to execute all of the JavaScript files in order, we might as well execute one while stopping all other downloads” — and preventing any other code from being executed or rendered, he said.

That might have made sense a decade ago, but in today’s era of PCs powered by dual- and quad-core CPUs, it doesn’t. And the cost of the delays created can be high.

Google has found that a 500-millisecond delay results in a 20% decrease in Web traffic, while Amazon.com Inc. has seen a 100-millisecond delay cutting its sales by 1%, Souders said.
Better browsers, better performance

New and upcoming Web browsers will be able to download JavaScript files while executing them. Internet Explorer 8, released last month, has that capability, Souders said, as do the upcoming Firefox 3.5 from Mozilla Corp. and Chrome 2.0 from Google.

Barring an overhaul of the JavaScript, the boost will stay small, Souders said.

To fix the problem, Souders first recommends a free tool he created called Yslow, which analyzes and then grades how well a Web page is designed for maximum speed. Originally developed for IE, Yslow 2.0 is an add-on for Firefox integrated with the Firebug Web development tool. It can be downloaded on the Yahoo Developer Network.

Read more

Twitter is looking to become a Google competitor in real time search by announcing plans to build a search ranking algorithm. The algorithm will assign a “reputation” score to certain tweets and use this to deliver the most relevant results to searches.

Currently, search.twitter.com simply performs a text match and returns all posts that mention the keyword you’ve searched for. The down side of this is that for popular terms, many times you will just see re-tweets and low value content from hundreds or thousands of users. By assigning a ranking system to these results, you’ll be able to see the most meaningful results first.

The changes were announced by Santosh Jayaram, who recently joined Twitter after managing search quality operations at Google. Jayaram said that not only will Twitter launch a ranking algorithm; they will also begin scanning the links included within tweets and start indexing this content.

This could see Twitter become a serious competitor to Google in the field of real time search. By indexing external links it will help to make twitter a more complete index about what’s happening in real time across the web.

There’s no mention of an estimated launch date, but we’ll be sure to keep you posted. For more info, check out the post on news.com.

Reported on ineedhits