By: Ross Dunn | Source: seo-news.com

Google launched a free packaged business solution for enterprises today including online chat, email, calendars, and hosting. Called "Gmail for Your Domain " (a ghastly name that is only slightly better referred to as "Google Apps" within the actual admin area) this application package will allow a business owner or administrator to create a separate account per employee.

Each Google Apps account comes complete with the following Google applications:

Gmail: Google’s email program is the central offering of this set of applications; it acts as the main portal where the Talk and Calendar functions are provided. Each user has 2 gigabytes of email storage complete with some robust email management tools that allow automatic email filtering, POP email access, SPAM management, and contact management.

Required Setup Procedure: Requires that you shift all email protocol from your domain (i.e. www.stepforth.com) to Google so that email can be sent and received using your domain (so that your email correctly displays it came from your domain).

What Else May Be Coming to Google Apps?
I fully expect that following apps will be included in the near future, just click on them to see their formal description at Google:

• Google Notepad (more info)
  Share important notes with your staff and allow them to search notes company-wide.
• Personalized Home Page
  Okay, I cheated here, Google has already posted that this will be coming and they even have a help menu setup for this already. Essentially this option will allow you to customize the home search page for your employees to a limited degree locking certain areas of their Google start page.

Get more information here…

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By: Vanessa Fox | Source: googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com

Most people know that Googlebot downloads pages from web servers to crawl the web. Not as many people know that if Googlebot accesses a page and gets a 304 (Not-Modified) response to a If-Modified-Since qualified request, Googlebot doesn’t download the contents of that page. This reduces the bandwidth consumed on your web server.

When you look at Google’s cache of a page (for instance, by using the cache: operator or clicking the Cached link under a URL in the search results), you can see the date that Googlebot retrieved that page. Previously, the date we listed for the page’s cache was the date that we last successfully fetched the content of the page. This meant that even if we visited a page very recently, the cache date might be quite a bit older if the page hadn’t changed since the previous visit. This made it difficult for webmasters to use the cache date we display to determine Googlebot’s most recent visit. Consider the following example:

Read more here…

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By: Chris Sherman | Source: searchenginewatch.com

News and history junkies take heart: Google’s new News Archive Search lets you search back over twenty decades worth of historical content, including scads of articles not previously available via the search engine.

"The goal of this service is to allow people to search and explore how history unfolded," said Anurag Acharya, Google distinguished engineer, who played a major role in shepherding the new product.

Google has partnered with news organizations including Time, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Guardian and the Washington Post, and aggregators including Factiva, LexisNexis, Thomson Gale and HighBeam Research, to index the full-text of content going back 200 years.

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