Introducing Google’s Own URL Shortener

The order of battle for Google this week seems to be on URL shorteners. This has been quite a trend on Twitter and Facebook with various third-party URL shortener sites offering this kind of service. But while others offer it as a stand-alone service, Google is taking the URL shortening thingie on a different approach – via Feedburner and Google Toolbar.

As mentioned by the a post from the Official Google Blog, Google’s URL Shortener is offering a service based on the following:

• Stability: Google’s scalable, multi-datacenter infrastructure provides great uptime and a reliable service to our users.
• Security: As we do with web search, shortened URLs are automatically checked to detect sites that may be malicious and warn users when the short URL resolves to such sites.
• Speed: At Google we like fast products and we’ve worked hard to ensure this service is quick. We’ll continue to iterate and improve the speed of Google Url Shortener.

To use Google’s URL Shortener, you need to have either Google Toolbar. When you share a website or blog via the Toolbar and you selected Twitter, the link will automatically be shortened when posted as a tweet. It works similar to other URL shortener that you have already used in Twitter before. The shortened URL always begin with “http://goo.gl/”

For Feedburner, the URL shortener feature offers something else aside from letting you share links. You can try this out by going to Feedburner Publicize Tab’s Socialize service. Then add the Twitter account to which you would like to post items from your Feed.  After doing this, you can either start sharing all your feeds to Twitter or customize which feeds you want to share to Twitter and how exactly you want them to look like when you send them as a tweet.

Google said that URL shortener is currently being tested yet. Hence it was rolled out as a feature of Google Toolbar and Feedburner. But  they are planning to make it available as a stand-alone product once they’ve proven it to be useful. I’m pretty sure it will soon be available on a wider audience pretty soon.

Bing Beats Google in November Search Volume Growth

Latest comScore data for November search volume is showing a slightly unexpected result. For the second time Bing managed to beat Google in terms of total US core search volumes, while Yahoo’s search volume continues to go down.So while the total US core search volume increased from 13.2% in October to 17.8% Y/Y in November, Microsoft sites domestic core search market share increased by .4% from 9.9% in October to 10.3% in November. Likewise, Microsoft sites domestic core search volume  for October-November increased by 38.2% from Q3’s  25.8%. Comparing it with October’s core search volume, it is also up from 30.8% to 46.0%.


For Google, domestic core search market slightly increased from 65.4% to 65.6% in November. Core search volume also increased from October’s 17.4% to 21.8%. In the domestic core search for the first two months of Q4, Google’s search volume decreased from 21.1% in Q3 to 19.6% in Q4.

As for the remaining search engine:

    * Yahoo! domestic core search market share dropped to 17.5% in November from 18.0% in October. Yahoo! grew November core search volume by 1.1% Y/Y, up from down 0.7% Y/Y growth in October. Yahoo!’s first 2 months of 4Q domestic core search volume growth of 0.2% Y/Y trails 3Q’s 11.6% Y/Y growth.

    * Microsoft sites domestic core search market share increased to 10.3% in November from 9.9% in October. Microsoft sites grew November core search volume by 46.0% Y/Y, up from 30.8% Y/Y growth in October. Microsoft sites domestic core search volume was up 38.2% Y/Y in the first two months of 4Q, ahead of 25.8% Y/Y growth in 3Q.

    * Ask Network domestic core search market share dropped slightly to 3.8% in November from 3.9% in October. Ask grew November core search volume by 10.8% Y/Y, up from 4.2% Y/Y growth in October. Ask Network domestic core search volume was up by 7.4% Y/Y in the first two months of 4Q vs. 4.5% Y/Y growth in 3Q.

    * AOL November domestic core search market share declined to 2.8% from 2.9% in October. AOL November core search volume declined by 13.7% Y/Y vs. a 12.8% Y/Y decline in October. AOL domestic core search volume was down 13.2% Y/Y in the first two months of 4Q vs. a 15.4% decline in 3Q.

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Bing Beats Google in November Search Volume Growth

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Iran Election Tops Twitter Trends 2009

After Hitwise’s Top Search Term and Top Visited of 2009, it’s now Twitter’s turn to release its Top Twitter Trends of 2009. Since Twitter is considered as the major source of real-time and up-to-date information, its trending topics would enable us to understand what was happening around the world as well as show us how people everywere can be united in their concern for what is happening in the world.

This year’s most popular topic on Twitter is the Iranian elections. This topic were the most used keywords, hashtags and phrase and have proliferated on Twitter’s public timeline all throughout the year. Aside from the hashtag #iranelection, topics suc as Iran and Tehran were also considered when #iranelection were deemed the top trending topic on Twitter.

Other topics which made it to the top include Michael Jackson for people-related topics, Harry Potter for movies, American Idol for TV Shows, Super Bowl for Sports, Google Wave for Technology (woot!), and #musicmonday for hashtags.

And here is the complete list of Top Trending Topics on Twitter in 2009:

News Events

1. #iranelection

2. Swine Flu

3. Gaza

4. Iran

5. Tehran

6. #swineflu

7. AIG

8. #uksnow

9. Earth Hour

10. #inaug09

People

1. Michael Jackson

2. Susan Boyle

3. Adam Lambert

4. Kobe (Bryant)

5. Chris Brown

6. Chuck Norris

7. Joe Wilson

8. Tiger Woods

9. Christian Bale

10. A-Rod (Alex Rodriguez)

Movies

1. Harry Potter

2. New Moon

3. District 9

4. Paranormal Activity

5. Star Trek

6. True Blood

7. Transformers 2

8. Watchmen

9. Slumdog Millionaire

10. G.I. Joe

TV Shows

1. American Idol

2. Glee

3. Teen Choice Awards

4. SNL (Saturday Night Live)

5. Dollhouse

6. Grey’s Anatomy

7. VMAS (Video Music Awards)

8. #bsg (Battlestar Galatica)

9. BET Awards

10. Lost

Sports (Teams, Events, Leagues)

1. Super Bowl

2. Lakers

3. Wimbledon

4. Cavs (Cleveland Cavaliers)

5. Superbowl

6. Chelsea

7. NFL

8. UFC 100

9. Yankees

10. Liverpool

Technology

1. Google Wave

2. Snow Leopard

3. Tweetdeck

4. Windows 7

5. CES

6. Palm Pre

7. Google Latitude

8. #E3

9. #amazonfail

10. Macworld

Hash Tags

1. #musicmonday

2. #iranelection

3. #sxsw

4. #swineflu

5. #nevertrust

6. #mm

7. #rememberwhen

8. #3drunkwords

9. #unacceptable

10. #iwish