Google Fiber Community Manager Rachel Hack ways on the Google Fiber blog:

Last night, the City Alderman in Raytown, Missouri voted unanimously to bring Google Fiber to their city. Raytown is the tenth Kansas City-area expansion we’ve announced, and we hope to bring Fiber to more communities in the area, too.

It will be awhile before we can hook up Raytown residents—we need to plan and build our network there first. When we have more info, we’ll be sure to post it here.

Earlier this month, Google announced it would be adding Grandview, Missouri to the list. The city is just south of Kanas City.

The service will also be coming to Austin, Texas and Provo, Utah in the future as well.

Google announced that Chrome 28, which is currently available in the beta channel, speeds up the browser with a new threaded HTML parser. What does that mean? Google says that Chrome 28 will load DOM content about 10 percent faster, and reduces the the maximum stop time by 40 percent. In other words, you’re going to see pages load much faster.

For users of Chrome for Android, you’re going to find that WebGL has been added as an experimental feature in the beta alongside Web Audio and WebRTC. WebGL and Web Audio can be combined to create web apps and games that run natively across any browser on any device.

Chrome for Android is also getting the Fullscreen API with this latest beta. When enabled, the browser UI and OS status bar will be hidden in favor of a full screen experience. You can test Chrome for Android’s Fullscreen API with this Chrome Experiment.

Google also details two major deprecated features that users and developers will need to be aware of. First, the Content Security Policy HTTP head is no more. Second, Chrome Extensions have been ditched in favor of the Rich Notifications Chrome API. Many see as a sign that Google Now is about to come to Chrome.

If you want to play around with the above beta features, be sure to download the Chrome Beta here.

“For example, now you can search for your friend’s wedding photos or pictures from a concert you attended recently,” says Google product manager Matthew Kulick. “To make computers do the hard work for you, we’ve also begun using computer vision and machine learning to help recognize more general concepts in your photos such as sunsets, food and flowers.”

“Your photos represent some of your most important memories and life events, yet they are increasingly difficult to manage as you build up your photo library, accumulate new devices and make new friends. In many cases, searching for your photos can be challenging because the information you’re looking for is visual,” says Kulick.

The feature works pretty well, even for something as general as “my photos of food”. I have to say, I’m impressed that it can recognize “food” when that can really be any number of things. It struggles with other things. While it will do well with “my photos of people,” it won’t do so well with “my photos of babies”.

The “my photos of food” query also didn’t work too well with Google’s new voice search feature, in my experience.

It handles some timeframes well. For example, queries for “my photos from last year,” “my photos from two years ago,” and so on work pretty well. “Photos from this week” works. “Photos from January,” or “Photos from February” queries don’t work. Something like “my photos from 2009″ does work.

The feature is also available on Google+ Photos.

As Android Police described in an article this week, one of the new, but “unadvertised” Google+ features Google rolled out from Google I/O is photo search with visual recognition.

Tor Norbye1 day ago

I'm blown away by the new photo search in Google+ where it's recognizing subjects in my own photos — here the various times I've run into snakes while hiking.

It's unbelievable how the state of the art in computer vision has progressed recently. And I can't imagine the amount of number crunching that must have gone into all this picture processing!

115    28 Powered by socialditto

This seems to be just one of the latest ways Google continues to tie its various services together into one larger Google experience.

Soon, all users in the U.S. will be getting this functionality. Google software engineer Balazs Racz says in a brief blog post:

As part of field trial we opened in October, it became possible to instantly see your relevant emails, Google Drive files, Calendar events, and more when you search in Gmail. Those of you who participated in the field trial told us that you like the time-saving convenience of searching for all your stuff from one place, and over the coming week, we’ll be rolling out this feature in English to all U.S. users. Now you can find what you’re looking for faster right in Gmail.

The feature is nice, but the part of the field trial that lets users retrieve content from Gmail, Google Drive and Google Calendar when searching Google’s regular web search is even better. It remains to be seen when this functionality will become available to all.

Here’s an early preview of what to expect:

“The Galapagos Islands are some of the most biologically unique ecosystems in the world. Explorers and scientists alike have long studied and marveled at these islands—made famous by Charles Darwin,” says Google Maps Project Lead Raleigh Seamster. “The Ecuadorean Government, local conservation groups and scientists are working to protect the Galapagos from threats posed by invasive species, climate change and other human impacts.”

“It’s critical that we share images with the world of this place in order to continue to study and preserve the islands’ unique biodiversity,” Seamster adds.

The imagery should make a fine complement to Google’s other underwater “Street View” imagery. In fact, Google once again teamed up with the Catlin Seaview Survey (who it teamed up with last time) to capture the new underwater imagery.

This should all also go well with the new, more visual Google Maps experience.

Have you been affected by the new Penguin update? Is this update good or bad for Google results? Let us know what you think in the comments.

In the aforementioned video (below), Cutts said this about the update: “We’re relatively close to deploying the next generation of Penguin. Internally we call it ‘Penguin 2.0,’ and again, Penguin is a webspam change that’s dedicated to try to find black hat webspam, and try to target and address that. So this one is a little more comprehensive than Penguin 1.0, and we expect it to go a little bit deeper, and have a little bit more of an impact than the original version of Penguin.”

Even before that video, Cutts was discussing the update on Twitter. He pretty much said the same thing: it’s called Penguin 2.0, and it would be larger.

Late on Wednesday, Cutts revealed that the update rolled out. He took to his personal blog to say, “We started rolling out the next generation of the Penguin webspam algorithm this afternoon (May 22, 2013), and the rollout is now complete. About 2.3% of English-US queries are affected to the degree that a regular user might notice. The change has also finished rolling out for other languages world-wide. The scope of Penguin varies by language, e.g. languages with more webspam will see more impact.”

“This is the fourth Penguin-related launch Google has done, but because this is an updated algorithm (not just a data refresh), we’ve been referring to this change as Penguin 2.0 internally,” he noted. “For more information on what SEOs should expect in the coming months, see the video that we recently released.”

This does not mean that this is the last we’ll see of Penguin, by any means. When a reader of Cutts’ blog noted that he still sees a lot of spam in results, Cutts responded, “We can adjust the impact but we wanted to start at one level and then we can modify things appropriately.”

Side note: Cutts tweeted out a link to a “special spam report form” for spam that Penguin missed:

So, it sounds like they’ll still be working on Penguin-ifying results more beyond the update that has already rolled out. I presume this will come in the form of data refreshes, much like the last two version of Penguin we’ve seen.

Penguin is all about webspam, and Cutts discussed other webspam initiatives in that video. Specifically, he talked about denying value upstream for link spammers.This is not part of the Penguin update that just rolled out, so expect more there too.

“That comes later,” said Cutts.

Another reader suggested in the comments of Cutts’ blog post that people are finding it riskier to spend the time buildling authoritative sites that Google supposedly likes, because there’s still a chance that an algo update will (even if unintentionally) knock it down for one reason or another. He makes the case that it’s easier to build a bunch of “throwaway affiliate spam sites” that could easily be replaced if Google shuts them down.

Cutts’ response to that was, “We have some things coming later this summer that should help with the type of sites you mention, so I think you made the right choice to work on building authority.”

Cutts briefly discussed the new Penguin update in a conversation with Leo Laporte on Wednesday right before it was getting ready to roll out. In that, he said, “It is a leap. It’s a brand new generation of algorithms. The previous iteration of Penguin would essentially only look at the homepage of a site. The newer generation of Penguin goes much deeper. It has a really big impact in certain small areas.”

It will be interesting to see how long Google waits for a data refresh on Penguin again. Unlike Panda, which saw many refreshes, before ultimately transforming into a rolling update, Penguin, since originally launching in April, 2012, only saw two refreshes before this new update (May and October, 2012). If this one is even bigger, should we expect refreshes even less often? The less often they happen, the harder it is to recover, some webmasters have discovered. I’m guessing a lot of those impacted negatively by this new update will be looking at starting over with new sites.

It remains to be seen just how big the impact of this update really is on webmasters. If you’ve been affected (either positively or negatively) let us know in the comments.

“The Google Publisher Toolbar will continue to include the same popular functionality as before in addition to a new feedback mechanism and blocking capabilities,” says AdSense product manager Fiona Herring.

The new toolbar features pop-up account overview, ad details and a feedback box.

The overview shows you your estimated account earnings summary for today, yesterday, this month and last month, in addition to data on your top 5 channels or sites by revenue over a variety of date ranges.

The bar also gives you detailed info about specific impressions including buyer and advertiser details, the creative, and the ability to block the ad buyer.

Google says 234,000 people have installed the Google Publisher Bar since it launched.

This included eSolar and Makani Power. News is out today that Google has now acquired the latter. Brad Stone at BusinessWeek writes:

Last February, Astro Teller, the director of Google’s (GOOG) secretive research lab, Google X, went to seek approval from Chief Executive Officer Larry Page for an unlikely acquisition. Teller was proposing that Google buy Makani Power, a startup that develops wind turbines mounted on unmanned, fixed-wing aircraft tethered to the ground like a kite. The startup, Teller told Page, was seeing promising results, and, he added proudly, its prototypes had survived all recent tests intact.

Page approved Google X’s acquisition of Makani, which was being completed for an undisclosed amount at press time. He also had a demand. “He said we could have the budget and the people to go do this,” Teller says, “but that we had to make sure to crash at least five of the devices in the near future.”

According to TechCrunch, Google invested $10 million in Makani Power in 2006 and another $5 million in 2008. Frederic Lardinois shares a statement from Teller:

Creating clean energy is one of the most pressing issues facing the world, and Google for years has been interested in helping to solve this problem. Makani Power’s technology has opened the door to a radical new approach to wind energy. They’ve turned a technology that today involves hundreds of tons of steel and precious open space into a problem that can be solved with really intelligent software. We’re looking forward to bringing them into Google[x].

Makani Power has the following statement up on its site:

We are happy to announce that Makani Power is being acquired by Google. This formalizes a long and productive relationship between our two companies, and will provide Makani with the resources to accelerate our work to make wind energy cost competitive with fossil fuels. The timing couldn’t be better, as we completed the first ever autonomous all-modes flight with our Wing 7 prototype last week. Makani could not have reached this point without the support of the US Department of Energy’s ARPA-E program and the hard work of our talented team, past and present. We look forward to working with our new colleagues at Google[x] to make airborne wind a cost-effective reality.

Earlier this year, Google put $200 million into a wind farm in Texas.

Brady is a 12th grade student at Sparta High School. She will receive a $30,000 college scholarship in addition to having her doodle featured. She also gets a Chromebook, and her school gets a $50,000 technology grant.

Google Doodle Team Lead Ryan Germick writes:

Students across all 50 states amazed us with their creative interpretations of this year’s theme, “My Best Day Ever…” From scuba diving to dinosaurs to exploring outer space, we were wowed by the ways young artists brought their best days to life in their doodles.

Sabrina’s doodle stood out in the crowd; it tells the story of her reunion with her father as he returned from an 18 month deployment in Iraq. Her creative use of the Google letters to illustrate this heartfelt moment clearly resonated with voters across the country and all of us at Google.

There were 130,000 submissions to the contest. Google lists the national finalists (who will each win a $5,000 scholarship) here.

For setting up Goals, you now find a profile in your account, click the admin tab, and navigate to the account, property, and and profile of choice. From there, click Goals, and Create a Goal. From there, you will be guided further:

New templates have been added to the set-up flow.

“When you use a template, the Goal setup flow is prefilled with suggested values (based on your industry) that you can either keep or change as you walk through the process,” explains product manager Stefan F. Schnabl. “The templates are organized into four business objectives (Revenue, Acquisition, Inquiry, Engagement) to help you think about the purpose of each Goal, plus you can still create custom goals. Note that ‘revenue’ goals don’t necessarily imply a direct sale — these goals are user activities which have a strong impact on your desired business outcomes. Depending on your business model, a Revenue Goal could be a purchase, such as a completed checkout; or it could also be a successful lead submission, such as a scheduled appointment. Some Revenue Goals might lend themselves to Ecommerce tracking as well.”

Templates are based on Industry Categories selected in your property settings. There are also twenty new categories.

“In addition to the templates, we’ve added a way for you to check your setup before you save,” says Schnabi. “You’ll find a verify option at the end of the setup flow that lets you see what the conversion rate would have been for the past seven days had this Goal been setup. Using the verify option gives you immediate feedback, so you can decide to save or modify the Goal configuration you’re working on.”

You can use the Goals Overview report under Conversions to see how goal completions happen over time. From there, you can also choose relevant metrics with the metric selector.

The updates are now live in Google Analytics.