The Google AdWords blog yesterday announced that it is beta testing a new AdWords user interface. The beta test is conducted with a small group of U.S. advertisers. The beta test includes some improvements to the month-old AdWords management console.

“If your account is included in the test, you should see a notification upon signing up to the account.”

The new interface that is being tested simplifies the ways that AdWords advertisers see and manage their campaigns. These modifications make it easier to tackle common tasks, such as navigating campaigns and editing keywords across several ad groups.

Furthermore, this beta test will not affect how your ads run, or your bid changing or ad placement dropping. This is just a user interface change to the AdWords management screen.

Los Angeles -- Search engine giant Google Inc., which recently launched voice and video chat utility for its beloved Gmail, is now ripe with another cool offering. Google, on Wednesday has released more than “30 Themes” you can choose from to make your in-box look more colorful, cool or just better tuned to your personality.

The move echoes Google’s introduction of iGoogle artist themes in April, released with much flair by Google search guru Marissa Mayer in Manhattan in summer 2008. And now the similar concept has been rolled out to the popular Gmail service.

Google’s Gmail service lags far behind the likes of Microsoft’s Live Hotmail and Yahoo mail, but it has taken a considerable chunk of the market. And Google now claims that it aims Gmail at the technological elite, and by rolling out themes for Gmail, a feature that allows people to customize the appearance of the Webmail application with a variety of new looks. Perhaps more interesting from a brand perspective, Google is even willing to give up the Gmail logo in some of the skins.

San Francisco -- Are you upset with Google’s search results? Then simply wipe them out and personalize it to your hearts content! Hoping to embellish its search engine with a more personal touch, Google Inc. just yesterday rolled out a new feature called “SearchWiki” that enables people to elevate, delete, add, and annotate search results.

Google has been providing SearchWiki as part of an experimental feature to selected people for months, but beginning Thursday it will become available to anybody who is searching while logged in with a Google account.

“This is a search characteristic that gives out a user more control over their search results,” said Cedric Dupont, Google’s SearchWiki product manager.

New York -- Striving to bring to light every hidden treasure to the fore, Google Inc. today announced that it has opened one of the largest collections of 10 million historic photos and digitized images from the Life magazine archives in the world that dates back to the 1880s through to the seminal moments of the 20th century and on into the present day was made available to the public online yesterday.

The new service, called Life images, and many has not been published, -- will be stored in Google Image Search at http://images.google.com/hosted/life, debuted Tuesday with only a small percentage of the images -- including newly digitized images from photos and etchings -- have even been published, Google said in a blog post.

The remaining has been “lying in dusty archives in the form of negatives, slides, glass plates, etchings, and prints,” Google said. Ultimately, Google plans to scan all 10 million photos from Life’s library so they can be viewed on any computer with an Internet connection.

New York -- Google has recently released SketchUp 7, the latest free version of its 3D modeling software for download, and SketchUp Pro 7, the new versions of the company’s 3D modeling software, released early this week, is bundled with simple templates that help you gauge size through feet or meters, but it also includes architectural design, Google Earth, and a product design template to aid you in your modeling endeavors.

SketchUp 7, like its predecessor will enable you to model just about anything you would like as long as you start with a pre-designed template. The new features added offers a realistic 3D modeling environment for designing models of gardens, homes and other objects. Free 3D modeling software such as SketchUp 7 is still dependent on high-powered graphics on a computer.

“Google described the new version is bundled with features that makes modeling more intuitive and to make it easier for beginners to get started.”

New York -- No wonder that Flash based ad campaigns could be most powerful form of advertising, though it has long posed loads of problems for advertisers to measure how users are interacting with those ad widgets to see how effective those ads really are. In an attempt to overcome one of the most nettlesome challenges in analyzing Web content, Google Inc. earlier today announced on its Official Analytics Blog that the company is now teaming up with Adobe Systems Inc. to allow Google Analytics users to track Flash based content.

Now the newly introduced Google Analytics Tracking for Adobe Flash tool enables users of the free Google Analytics tool trounce the current challenges that disrupt the tracking of Flash content on Web pages, Google said.

“In the past, Flash tracking was not readily offered, and every execution had to be customized,” Nick Mihailovski, Analytics Specialist, wrote in a post on the Google Analytics Blog. “Moreover, there was a lack of standards, and new developers who tracked Flash had to create their own processes to get it working.”

New York -- Market analysis firm Hitwise reported that Internet search giant Google Inc., even with the recession in economic scenario around the globe, it still continues to increase its U.S. search shares of the U.S. Internet search market rose to 71.7% in October from 71.16% in September and 64.49% a year ago, widening its lead over Yahoo and Microsoft, according the research firm Hitwise.

Among the other players losing the market shares are:
It is no wonder that Google is the major player in the online search industry, and the lead is primarily achieved at the expense of rival Yahoo, which say it share drop from 18.1 percent in September to 17.7 percent in October, and 21.7 percent a year ago.

San Francisco -- Google is finally advancing over its arch rivals Microsoft and Yahoo for once. The search engine goliath is reportedly rolling out its complimentary voice-recognition technology for search on Apple Inc.’s iPhone, that allows users to conduct searches with their voice rather than typing.

Google has worked persistently in designing an operating system for mobile phones, called Android. The Apple App Store was anticipated to get hold of the free application before devices running Google’s own Android mobile platform. The operating system designed is to be applied on HTC’s G1 phone, which is known as an impending “iPhone killer.”

New York -- Google Inc. on Thursday said it has introduced a new feature called “On-Demand Indexing” to its Google Site Search service giving a speedy boost to help businesses that uses its service to place the freshest search engine results in front of visitors and customers. New feature provides control to Web publishers over the frequency with which Google refreshes its index of Site Search’s content.

The move is designed to gain a footing in the highly competitive enterprise search market, to help businesses that employ its Site Search service to instantly integrate and update new Web pages in the latest phase of its expansion into business services where Microsoft Fast, Autonomy, Endeca, Vivisimo and others compete.

Rome -- Quite obviously, two millennia ago there were no satellites to beam pictures of Rome. But thanks to the wonders of Google Earth that lets you travel back in time to see Ancient Rome and all of its architecture in full 3D. Search engine giant Google has added a fresh twist to its popular 3D map tool, resurrected ancient Rome online that meticulously reconstructs nearly 7,000 buildings of ancient Rome, including the Colosseum, the Forum and the Circus Maximus, offering millions of users the chance to visit a virtual ancient Rome, officials said Wednesday.

Google Earth’s “Ancient Rome 3-D,” which was launched Wednesday at a news conference in city hall, has been founded on a simulation created by an international team led by the University of Virginia and the University of California.

New York -- In June, Google released Google Ad Planner on an invitation-basis only, is a tool that is utilized by both publishers and advertisers for examining user demographics and search behavior is now available to everyone.

Google described Ad Planner as: The most useful research and media planning tool that combines advertisers and publishers in identifying targeted demographics for search advertising. Though Ad Planner is intended at media buyers to help them find the best sites to advertise on to reach their target audience, we have often used it as a way to compare sites within the same niche. When employing Google Ad Planner, simply enter demographics and sites associated with your target audience, and the tool will return information about sites that your audience is likely to visit.

Washington -- If you are like most people fascinated by innovative technology, then guess what the official Google Reader blog just announced that Google is rolling out another ingenious project: A better Google Reader that automatically translates world wide feeds into your native language.

Google Reader is an online feed reader that allows you to subscribe to your favorite sites. So you can just go to http://reader.google.com, to collect all your news in one place.

Now you can have access to even more data about your favorite topics, because now Google Reader takes advantage of “Google Translate” technology to convert any feed to your preferred language. You can find feeds by looking for the orange RSS icon like the one at the bottom of our right-hand column.

San Francisco -- In yet another high-flying venture of spreading its wings, Google Inc. on Tuesday announced that it is rolling out voice and video plug-in capabilities for the chat that is embedded in the Gmail its free e-mail service, entering in a race with Microsoft and Yahoo to make communication on the Web a more social experience and that competes with the likes of eBay’s Skype.

Even though it is not as sophisticated as Skype, Gmail’s voice and video, as it is named, cannot connect to the plain phone network, as Skype’s paid service can. It is just a nitty-gritty voice and video-conferencing service, but it is rather simple to install and use and is a very good addition to Gmail.

New York -- Due to an increased display of interest from AdSense publishers in filtering ads, and asking about ad blocking is the result of the expensive, divisive battle over California’s Proposition 8. Arlene Lee of AdSense Publisher Support discussed a couple of tools at the Inside AdSense Blog.

Stung by complaints about political ads that have been appearing on the Web sites of its AdSense publishing partners, Google listened and quickly blogged that they will be speeding up the AdSense ad filter and increasing the ability to block categories. The blog post said:

We intend to improve the speed of your filters, and we are preparing to bring out improved filters in the future that will take effect in less than an hour.

Milan -- This is rather disturbing news, we just reported a massive copyright lawsuit filed by a Russian company and now four Google executives are facing defamation charges in Italy for failing to stop a video being uploaded that shows a disabled kid getting bullied. An Italian prosecutor has called for four former and current Google officials to stand trial on charges of “defamation and failure to exercise control over personal data” in Italy, court sources said late last week.

This all stems from a user uploaded offending video only appeared on Google Video, the three-minute video in question depicts four teens teasing and harassing a boy with Down’s syndrome, and hitting him over the head with a pack of tissues.

Baltimore -- Curious about visiting the Charm City in Baltimore neighborhood, wish to glance at its streets virtually before taking a house-hunting drive? Don’t be dejected, Baltimore has just revved up a notch in its street cred with tech geeks, Google just introduced it in Baltimore, Washington D.C. and Seattle two days ago, according to its official map blog.

The Google team is busy rolling out the feature in other U.S. cities and countries for awhile. But for now, you can just relax comfortably at your computer and use Google’s new-for-Baltimore feature in its mapping application, called “Street View”.

Washington -- Yahoo Inc., in an unprecedented consequence of event is back to square one, the search pioneer that has seen the light of hope by a proposed ad deal with Google following its successful -- and highly controversial -- resistance of a Microsoft takeover bid earlier this year, search giant Google Inc. on Wednesday finally ended the ad deal with Yahoo to avert “a protracted legal battle” with regulators.

Search engine giant Google Inc. on Wednesday announced that it will pull out of a joint search advertising partnership with Internet portal Yahoo Inc. after facing fierce criticisms from customers, rivals and the U.S. Department of Justice who saw the Google/Yahoo alliance as being resolutely anti-competitive and made it clear that it would seek to block the agreement in court.

Sunnyvale, Calif., -- In an attempt to allow its enterprise users derive more information from their user bases, Google becomes generous as it boosts administrative features of its Web-based suite as it prepares to compete with an online version of Office. Google Apps administrators can now have a wider range of Google’s Web Analytics tools allowing them to gain detailed insight into how users are working with Google Docs and Google Sites, according to a company blog post Monday.

Google Analytics for Google Apps will empower administrators with data and graphs on how frequently staff log in to Google Docs and Google Sites, and the duration of their visit. The search giant recommended that organizations could establish whether employees have read the latest company policy, for example, or how adept they are at finding a particular web site.

New York -- It appears that Googlebot’s obsession to text has reached a new level?  Search engine giant Google Inc. last week announced that it has begun using a new technology called “Optical Character Recognition” (OCR) that allows the search engine to read text from scanned documents saved in Adobe PDF format and include the words from those documents in its search results.

Scanned documents have been popping up in Google's search index for a while now. That is because Google has begun indexing Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) documents metadata for a long while now, and even offering the option of converting the documents to HTML.

San Francisco -- Google is continuing on its effort of bringing forth new features, earlier this week announced the release of a number of “experiments” for Gmail. Henceforth users will get more sidebar options from Gmail Labs that enables them to add the gadgets Google Calendar and Google Docs.

Google’s released gadgets created by its Google Labs project that offers Gmail users to look at Google Calendar and Google Docs data without having to open the hosted applications.

“Users can now add gadgets to the left-navigation panel of their Gmail account, next to Labels and Gchat.”