Sorry, could not resist the post title.

It appears Gmail users are having a bad day.

Gmail has had mini outages before but this one is seems to have caught the big G off guard.

The Class A types soon headed over to twitter to see if their Gmail problems were isolated. However the flurry of tweets about Gmail arrived by the thousands.

Tips: Apparently Gmail’s  IMAP support is still operational and if you have an iPhone you can still access the service. Most typical users who access the service via a web browser will have to sit this one out.

Gmail has 113m users worldwide so I guess this is kind of a big problem and it is very unlike Google to be offline for this amount of time. Currently 3 hours and counting.

For updates see: http://mail.google.com/support/ or to check out the carnage in real time while it happens see: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=gmail

A couple of weeks ago I was very enthusiastic about Google’s Internet browser Chrome.

You only get to know a product by using it and so far I haven’t regretted by move.

There are only some minor niggles from a user point of view.

1) Some fonts don’t render properly, not a biggie for me.

2) Doesn’t work with Pay Pal.

3) Some issues with you tube style flash video.

All of these I can live with.

The one reason I am sticking with Chrome is the ability to drag a browser tab onto another monitor. This feature alone will keep me a Chrome user.

Someone asked me the other day what I thought about Google’s new Chrome web browser and I replied I has just rebuilt my computer and installing software is how it got all crudded up in the first place.

However curiosity got the better of me so I installed it on my non work machine.

When it comes to Internet browsers I use Internet Explorer as my main browser and have Firefox installed with the Google tool bar so I can quickly check web site Google PR ratings, in all honesty I actually dislike both browsers.

So what do I think of Google Chrome?

Easily and by far a better and more fluid user experience. It feels evolved and well thought out.

I need to play with it a little more but my instinct tells me I’m going to be a Google Chrome user very shortly. I don’t care its still in beta.

A good intro into Google Chrome is this 10 features video.

Link: http://www.google.com/chrome/index.html

Google have a new search tool called Google Insight.

It allows you to compare search trends in different regions of the world.

This would be ideal for companies researching how products are searched for in different countries or regions within countries.

Say for example you had a single web site for your international company but were based in 3 international territories this tool could help you identify the popular search terms in the countries that matter to you.

I love how Google share this kind of thing.

Link: http://www.google.com/insights/search/#

Web Site analytics are painful to decode at the best of times. But one metric that is usually sound is the number of unique visitors that your Web Site gets.

Unless your web site is super sticky commercial companies rely on being able to be found in Internet search engines like Google.

I monitor and report on the web stats for several companies spread over many different business classifications. In July 2008 on average and collectively the number of unique visitors dropped by 7% and this was unusual based on the pattern of web traffic in the preceding months.

July should have been a big month as it had 23 working days compared to June’s 21. My clients are UK based so would not have been affected by the American July 4th Holiday.

So what happened:

There are two possible things happening here:

1) Google changed dramatically the ranking algorithm.

or

2) The doom and gloom in the economy has affected the number of unique visitors looking for products and services from commercial companies.

I actually think its bit of both 15% Google and 85% the economy.

At some level there is a link between consumer confidence and web traffic to commercial companies.

Michael Arrington over at Techcrunch has a video showing some new experimental Google features.

It allows people to vote and comment on search results.

This works very much like the Social News website Digg where people can vote, promote and comment on stories.

This could just be a sandbox experiment for Google or an early peak at the future of user driven Internet search.

User created input/content is at the heart of popular web sites like Wikipedia and Digg so the concept is well established.

At the core this turns Google into a popularity contest. It will turn Google search results into a Ebay style rating system where “98% of people think the link is good”.

There is nothing better than a personal recommendation, so would user input on search results make for better search?

Overall I would say yes.

Check the video fascinating stuff.

Link: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/16/is-this-the-future-of-search/

Google’s Matt Cutts has a brief Video Interview over at USA today about the basics of getting your site into Google, he also dispels some common myths.

The written article on the link below is also very useful for someone looking for entry level tips about search engines. It covers what you need to do to your content to get ranked.

Video and Article Link:

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/services/2008-06-22-google-search-engine-optimization_N.htm

Matt has his own site where he publishes some “good to know” information.

Link: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/

Google have updated their easy to read guide “Making the Most of your Content”.

It comprises a 13 page PDF that explains in easy to understand language some of the more complicated aspects of what Google does with your content in their search engine.

Ideal for anyone who has an interest in these things.

The last page is a Glossary explaining all the terms like Crawling and Page Rank.

Link: http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/press/files/webmaster-guide-en.pdf

I had never heard of Udi Manber before. He is the chap in charge of “Search Quality” over at Google.

He gave Popular Mechanics a recent interview in the form of a Question and Answer session over 20 questions.

Some tidbits:

“Last year we made over 450 improvements to the algorithm”

“At Google we do not manually change results. For example, if we find for a particular query that result No. 4 should be result No. 1, we do not have the capability to manually change it.”

This makes for fascinating reading for anyone with a passing interest in Google and search.

Also covered: Privacy, user expectations and Social Networking and search.

Link: http://www.popularmechanics.com/blogs/technology_news/4259137.html

Yes, now you can.

In business most people use Microsoft Outlook to manage their diary.

At home for say a family or personal calendar using Google Calendar would be the way to go.

But up until now the two competing calendars did not have a synchronisation model to share information between them.

Google have just announced a Sync tool that allows this.

It works like this:-

2-Way: info goes both ways.

or

1-Way either Up or Down. From Outlook to Google, or Google to Outlook.

Example of how this might be handy:-

If my partner wanted to see if I was available to go to a parents event at school, today she does not know my availability as this information is stored in my Outlook calendar. However If I synced my Outlook Calendar with Google I could give her access to view my calendar online and she would be able to view it.

I would imagine this might also be a way for small businesses to utilise shared Outlook/Google calendaring especially those that don’t have Microsoft Exchange.

Link: http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?answer=89955