Wouldn’t it be great to know how many people visit your site, what content is most popular, and if searches are getting people to the right places? Google Analytics is a free online service with stats, graphs, and reports that answer these questions and a number of other things you might like to know about how people use your site. Analytics offers sophisticated analytical tools that are simple and secure to use, and appeals to a wide range of users.
Up until recently, Google Analytics wasn’t integrated with Google Sites, but now it is easy to get started (no coding required) with three steps:
1. If you don’t have Google Analytics already, sign up for a free account 2. Login to Google Analytics and find your tracking ID 3. Login to Google sites to enable Google Analytics and enter your tracking ID in your Google Sites settings
You only have to set this up once to apply to all the existing and future pages in your Google Sites website. It works if your site is public or private. If you would also like to track search results on your site (good for knowing what people are looking for and whether they are finding it), this feature can also be enabled.
Once you are set up, all you need to do is login to Google Analytics to check reports and see how people are using your site. Here are some of the cool things you can do.
During a recent mother’s day trip I realized how valuable Google Sites could be for parents and families, so as part of our latest launch I decided to create a couple of new example websites: a family site and a playgroup site.
Many families, like mine, are scattered across the US or even the world. Our family used to rely mostly on email to keep in touch and send out photos (pleases grandma, scale the photos down before sending them). Now we use Google Sites as a single place for sharing family events (never miss another birthday!), photos, recipes and news. Here are some things I like most:
Calendar – Anyone can see and add birthdays, graduations, upcoming trips and more. It is easy, so I am no longer a bottleneck for keeping everyone updated.
Photos – We are always snapping photos when we are out, and it is fun to share slideshows of these by embedding Picasa Web Albums in our website.
Recipes – Using the “list” page type, I put all our family recipes in one place, so I can quickly search for any recipe. Now I don’t have to look all over the place for family favorites (like my mom’s famous Chicken Lasagna).
Play group website When I became a mom my social life expanded to include other parents who had children of similar ages. Having had more than a few frustrating experiences organizing events via email, I decided to set up a play group website on Google Sites. It is very convenient that anyone in our group can add an event, upload photos of our past play dates, and update important information about their child (allergies, favorite foods, adorable videos). Here is some of the cool stuff about the play group site:
Home – The hub of all the action, the home page gives a quick overview of upcoming events, general announcements, a slideshow of our last activity (Swimming!), and some other fun gadgets (like top selling baby items).
Players! – All the members are listed in one place, and all the kids have their own detailed pages that parents can customize as they like.
Toddler friendly places – Combining a Google spreadsheet form with a Google maps gadget, the group can add and see good places for little kids.
These example websites were easy to set up (just added content), and they show just a couple of the many possibilities for a wide variety of groups and clubs to make their own sites on Google Sites.
Welcome to our new blog, where you can get the latest on Google Sites’ new features, product updates, special announcements, and more.
For those of you unfamiliar with Google Sites, here’s a quick intro. It started out as JotSpot, was acquired by Google, and a few months ago was re-launched as part of Google Apps for businesses, schools, and organizations with their own domains. Now we’ve opened up Google Sites to everyone, and made it easy for anyone to get started with their own group website. For a three-minute tutorial on how it works, watch this:
We’re excited about what we have planned for Google Sites, and hope that this blog will be helpful to you. To get updates whenever we post here, just subscribe to our feed. Our Google Sites Group is another useful resource, where you can ask questions, leave suggestions, and share experiences.
Thanks for visiting, and I encourage you to get started with your own website, if you haven’t already.
We’ve been protecting Google users from malicious web pages since 2006 by showing warning labels in Google’s search results and by publishing the data via the Safe Browsing API to client programs such as Firefox and Google Desktop Search. To create our data, we’ve built a large-scale infrastructure to automatically determine if web pages pose a risk to users. This system has proven to be highly accurate, but we’ve noted that it can sometimes be difficult for webmasters and users to verify our results, as attackers often use sophisticated obfuscation techniques or inject malicious payloads only under certain conditions. With that in mind, we’ve developed a Safe Browsing diagnostic page that will provide detailed information about our automatic investigations and findings.
What is the current listing status for [the site in question]?
We display the current listing status of a site and also information on how often a site or parts of it were listed in the past.
What happened when Google visited this site?
This section includes information on when we analyzed the page, when it was last malicious, what kind of malware we encountered and so fourth. To help web masters clean up their site, we also provide information about the sites that were serving malicious software to users and which sites might have served as intermediaries.
Has this site acted as an intermediary resulting in further distribution of malware?
Here we provide information if this site has facilitated the distribution of malicious software in the past. This could be an advertising network or statistics site that accidentally participated in the distribution of malicious software.
Has this site hosted malware?
Here we provide information if the the site has hosted malicious software in the past. We also provide information on the victim sites that initiated the distribution of malicious software.
All information we show is historical over the last ninety days but does not go further into the past. Initially, we are making the Safe Browsing diagnostic page available in two ways. We are adding a link on the interstitial page a user sees after clicking on a search result with a warning label, and also via an “additional information” link in Firefox 3’s warning page. Of course, for anyone who wants to know more about how our detection system works, we also provide a detailed tech report [pdf] including an overview of the detection system and in-depth data analysis.
Mobile web browsers have come a long way since we first introduced an XHTML version of Reader back in 2006. For example, iPhone and iPod Touch owners know how powerful having a full-featured browser is. We on the Reader team are heavy mobile Safari users. Sometimes we use it to kill time, other times for answering important questions that come up during brunch: What is Tyrol’s first name? How is maple butter made? How do you sweeten rhubarb for sangria? What is John Gruber saying now? For questions like the last one, we of course use Reader to keep up with our subscriptions.
To make our (and your) Reader iPhone experience better, we wanted to really take advantage of the iPhone’s capabilities. Today we’re releasing a new beta version of Reader designed for the iPhone and other mobile phones with advanced browsers. You can use it by visiting http://www.google.com/reader/i/ on your phone.
This new version is designed to offer many of the same features as the desktop, while making it quick and easy to act on items. If you’ve used list view, then it should be familiar to you. Scan the titles for an item that interests you, tap and it expands in place. Starring, sharing, and keeping unread are done in place, so you never have to leave the list view or refresh the page. We think it’s a very fast way to power through your reading list.
Since it’s still in beta, we’re not going to automatically send you to it, so bookmark the site so that you don’t forget the address (http://www.google.com/reader/i/). We love getting feedback from users, so let us know what you think in our discussion group or the otherchannels.
We recently added the ability to create Google Talk chatback badges in several new styles. These options are available by clicking on the “Styles” drop down menu when creating a chatback badge. Examples of the new types of formats can be seen on the right.
The two borderless versions of the badge make it easier to fit into your page and customize the appearance as you like. You can just paste the code where you want the link to appear. If you want to further tweak the appearance, you can add some style parameters: Add fontfamily and fontsize to choose a specific font or size, and textcolor and linkcolor to set the colors using a hexadecimal RRGGBB value. You can add these parameters to either the new badge URL or to the iframe’s src URL in the generated HTML. You can also use the h and w parameters to specify the height or width of the badge.
For example, &fontfamily=courier%20new&fontsize=13&linkcolor=000000&textcolor=880000 will give you Courier New 13 with black for the link text and dark red for the rest of the text. Here is an example of how this looks with the classic badge:
In addition to providing more flexibility in terms of appearance, chatback can now be used on web sites that don’t allow frames. For these sites, use the new HTML version of the badge. This version can’t display a status messages but it will show your status as a colored circle anywhere you can embed an image. And if you can’t embed an image (like in an email message), you can use the hyperlink by itself or just the URL.
To create a badge, visit http://www.google.com/talk/service/badge/New or, if you are a Google Apps user, visit http://www.google.com/talk/service/a/DOMAIN/badge/New replacing DOMAIN with the name of your domain.
Posted by: Vrishali Wagle and Tom Duerig, Software Engineers
Since the launch of Custom Search, we’ve seen more and more webmasters, publishers and organizations enable high-quality search engines on their web sites and blogs to help their users find what they’re looking for. Thanks to your continuous feedback, we’ve been able add new features and global support, resulting in even more growth.
Now, the Custom Search platform is expanding further by simultaneously improving our indexing for your search engine and broadening our reach to power AdSense for Search. AdSense publishers can now create Custom Search Engines (CSEs) and take advantage of the most popular customization features right within their AdSense accounts.
As you may know, Custom Search is built on top of the Google index, which means that pages that are available on Google.com are also available to your search engine. In addition, Custom Search now maintains its own index for enhanced coverage for web sites included in CSEs.
If you have pages that aren’t currently being indexed in Google.com, you can let us know about these pages by submitting a Sitemap through Webmaster Tools, and pages in your Sitemap that aren’t included in the Google index will be detected and indexed for your search engine. Improved index coverage is not instantaneous as it takes some time for the pages to be crawled and indexed. Please also note that this improved indexing only affects search results within the search engine you create, not your rank and indexing on Google.com.
We’d like to welcome all AdSense publishers to the Custom Search community! By growing our community, we’re hoping to work with more of you to help users across the web find exactly what they’re searching for.
From operating systems to web browsers, open source software plays a critical role in the operation of the Internet. The security of open source software is therefore quite important, as it often interacts with personal information — ranging from credit card numbers to medical records — that needs to be kept safe. There has been a long-lived discussion on whether open source software is inherently more secure than closed source software. While popular opinion has begun to tilt in favor of openness, there are still arguments for both sides. Instead of diving into those treacherous waters (or giving weight to the idea of “inherent security”), I’d like to focus on the fruits of this extensive discussion. In particular, David A. Wheeler laid out a “bottom line” in his Secure Programming for Linux and Unix HOWTO which applies to both open and closed source software. It predicates real security in software on three actions:
people need to actually review the code
developers/reviewers need to know how to write secure code
once found, security problems need to be fixed quickly, and their fixes distributed quickly
While distilling anything down to three steps makes it seem easy, this isn’t necessarily the case. Given how important open source software is to Google, we’ve attempted to contribute to this bottom line. As Chris said before, our engineers are encouraged to contribute both software and time to open source efforts. We regularly submit the results of our automated and manual security analysis of open source software back to the community, including related software engineering time. In addition, our engineering teams frequently release software under open source licenses. This software was written either with security in mind, such as with security testing tools, or by engineers well-versed in the security challenges of their project.
These efforts leave one area completely unaddressed — getting security problems fixed quickly, and then getting those fixes distributed quickly. It has been unclear how to best resolve this issue. There is no centralized security authority for open source projects, and operating system distribution publishers are the best bet for getting updates to the highest number of users. Even if users can get updates in this manner, how should a security researcher contact a particular project’s author? If there’s a potential, security-related issue, who can help evaluate the risk for a project? What resources are there for projects that have been compromised, but have no operational security background?
I’m proud to announce that Google has sponsored participation in oCERT, the open source computer emergency response team. oCERT is a volunteer workforce of security professionals from the open source community with the goal of providing security vulnerability mediation and incident response services to open source projects. It will strive to contact software authors with all security reports and aid in debugging and patching, especially in cases where the author, or the reporter, doesn’t have a background in security. Reliable contacts for projects, publishers, and vendors will be maintained where possible and used for notification when issues arise and fixes are available for mediated issues. Additionally, oCERT will aid projects of any size with responses to security incidents, such as server compromises.
It is my hope that this initiative will not only aid in remediating security issues in a timely fashion, but also provide a means for additional security contributions to the open source community.
Mobile web browsers have come a long way since we first introduced an XHTML version of Reader 
