Ever wonder how views are calculated on YouTube?

Back in the early days of YouTube, view-counts were determined simply by how many times the page was loaded. You could literally press your browser’s refresh button over and over again to increase a video’s view count. It didn’t take long, however, for YouTube to get wise to this game and implement some changes. As the importance of video view-counts has increased, YouTube has begun to take the situation very seriously and has put into place all sorts of algorithmic and security systems in place to prevent the gaming of view counts.

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The marketing team at Blue Fountain Media has created a search story illustrating the way one of our customers might use Google…

Google Eyes by Blue Fountain Media is a plugin for Google’s Chrome web browser that allows users to quickly pull up the Google Cached Text-Only version of nearly any website. This is an excellent way to view a website through Google’s eyes.

One cool use is to quickly and easily check the raw structure and layout of a page and see how well it’s header tags are optimized.

Once installed, a “T” (as in “Text-Only”) icon will appear on the right-hand side of your address bar. To activate Google Eyes, visit the site you want to look up and click the “T” button.

[DOWNLOAD]

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In an email to Google Apps administrators, Google announced that they will begin phasing out support for the old, outdated Internet Explorer 6

On March 1, 2010 they will drop support for IE 6 in Google Docs. Later in the year, gMail and gCal will also drop support for the outdated browser. Web developers will surely celebrate today as the day the internet was saved from the evils of IE 6. The email is reproduced below:

Dear Google Apps admin,​

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology. This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5. As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010. After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.

Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.

Starting next week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser. We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.

In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience. We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.

Thank you for your continued support!

Sincerely,

The Google Apps team

There’s been a lot of speculation about Google Caffeine. When will it launch? What will change? What will happen to my results?

The speculation needs to stop. Caffeine is almost certainly live right now—the next query you type into Google will probably reflect Caffeine’s changes.
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