Philip Wen’s Virtual Residence

Google Lay Offs or Google Rumor?

Google`s stock plummeted this year

News have been traveling around the circles recently that Google is looking to shave down some expenses.  Today, this article floated up to the top.

Considering the rate that Google have expanded over the past few years, this one wouldn’t sound too surprising to me.  The way they would go about those lay offs don’t sound too far fetched either.  Google has accrued an army of System experts, whether Computer Systems or the Legal System.  But to think that they would lay off approximately half of their workers is a hard to imagine– the Google today is an Android compared to its RoboSapien past. Having ½ of Googlers running the show would be a bit too skeletal.  Then again, with GOOG losing more than half of its Market Cap over the past year, only the brainiac Googly bean counters would know best just how many heads would need to roll.

Internet Ad spending has been contracting at a rapid race, not just because of the economy, but the direction that the ‘net is going toward. (I will talk about this topic some other time)  I wonder if Google Trends is picking this up?

Regardless of its validity, it will be interesting to see how Eric, Larry and Sergey have in store to steer the Googlybot through this downturn.

Tags: Business, google, lay offs

New Google Sync for Blackberry - Now with Contact Sync

For those to you who are Blackberry AND Google fans like myself - We have just gotten an early Christmas present.

Google’s Mobile Team just released a new version of Sync which will now also synchronize your Contacts as well as Calendar between your BB and Google account.

Go learn more and grab it from this link.  The new version is 0.5.9.

Thanks to the guys at the Google Mobile team.  More and more each day, you guys are making the blackberry experience inch closer to that of a mini netbook.

It’s too bad they have not released the Voice Search feature that is now in the iPhone version.

For those of you with a smartphone but don’t know what the fart I am talking about - Go to this link and enjoy productivity bliss.

A list of services in Google Mobile Apps

Tags: blackberry, google, Google Mobile Apps, smartphones

Google Site Search adds on-demand feature

If you run decent sized websites, this will probably be of interest to you.  Google is announcing an on-demand feature to call out their bots whenever you are ready to a re-index.  So instead of working on the bots’ schedule, you can now index on demand.

Here is a youtube vid pumping the new feature.

Here’s another from Adobe pumping site search in general.

For a webmaster dealing with ~ 5000 pages, $100/year may not be a bad deal for this new feature alone.

To find out more about Google’s Site Search, head over to their site.

Tags: google, sem, seo