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Friday, November 25, 2005

How Google Holiday Logos are Planned

Doug Edwards’ new blog has so much interesting stuff that I feel like quoting all of it, but you better just visit. The following passage describes how Google holiday logos are created:

“The process, when I was part of it, was highly efficient and extremely stressful. We’d set up meetings quarterly to map out a calendar, discuss which countries would be offended if we left out their biggest holiday, throw out suggestions for people and events worth commemorating and make sure we were not becoming predictable in what we selected to put on the home page. Then, for some reason, the meeting would be cancelled, rescheduled and postponed until someone would note that, “Oh my god, tomorrow is Mother’s Day! What are we doing for a logo?” And Dennis would go to work, churning out one great idea after another within the hour. (...)

Sergey provided the final sign off and he always encouraged Dennis to push the envelope a bit. Every once and a while things went off the rails. There was the time one of Dennis’ Olympians displayed an unfortunate tenting in his toga and we received about a dozen emails asking why the Greek Guy on our homepage had a boner.”

Google Honeypots Article

The O3 magazine has an article titled Opening the Jar on Google Honeypots which I’ve converted from PDF for easy reading.

Play Videos Back-to-Back

Google Video has a new feature: you can play videos for any given search back-to-back. For example, searching for “weather man” returns 52 clips. Click on “Play these videos back-to-back” and they will all play in continuation, one by one. A very interesting feature.

Google Analytics Message

If you’re a Google Analytics user, you might have seen this email from Google in your inbox:

“First, due to extremely high demand, we’ve temporarily limited the number of new signups as we increase capacity. This allows us to focus on our primary objective – to provide a great user experience for our existing users.

Next, here is current information on the most common questions we’re receiving:

1. The ’Check Status’ button is being reworked to check for properly installed tracking code. This should be fixed by the end of November.

2. The ’+Add Profile’ link has been temporarily removed until we increase capacity. We’ll alert all current users when the feature is restored.

3. While we increase capacity, you may see longer than normal delays in data showing up in your reports. All data continues to be collected and no data has been lost.”

Google Web Accelerator Solves Google Troubles in Germany

Sometimes, the best solutions are so simple. Thanks to a forum comment by EES, now I know how to:

And all that had to be done was to install the Google Web Accelerator (which goes through a California proxy, if I’m not mistaken). I actually tried US proxy servers before, but none worked to solve above problems so far. If you are also in Germany or another country in which Google doesn’t work for you, you might want to try download the Web Accelerator as well.

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