Six More Features Graduate From Gmail Labs

It looks like the people in charge of Gmail Labs have decided to do a little spring (or more accurately, late winter) cleaning.  They've removed a full 11 experimental features from Labs, with six of the bunch becoming regular Gmail features and the other five failing to make the cut.

Many of the "graduated" features are ones you're probably familiar with, or can at least guess the functions of.  Forgotten Attachment Detector, YouTube Previews, Custom Label Colors, and Vacation Dates all fall under this heading.

The last two approved features are Search Autocomplete and Go To Label, and a post on the Official Gmail Blog covers the only tricky parts, explaining, "If you have keyboard shortcuts turned on, type 'g' then 'l' and instead of getting the old 'Go to label' pop-up, you'll be in the search box with the 'label:' operator filled in for you.  Start typing the label you want to go to, and autocomplete will take it from there.  All you have to do is hit enter.  If you want to send your cursor to the blank search field, the keyboard shortcut '/' will do it."

As for the experimental features that've been dropped, they're called Muzzle, Fixed Width Font, Email Addict, Location in Signature, and Random Signature.  And a lack of popularity is the main reason they didn't make it further, in case you were wondering.

Anyway, Google's likely to introduce more Gmail Labs features to replace all of this stuff before long.

Google, Bing Perform Well In Latest comScore Report

The latest comScore report concerning the search market has arrived, and although it may not cause too many jaws to drop, there are some interesting tidbits contained within.  It seems that Google hit its stride again in October, and Bing continued to make some impressive gains.

Google experienced a couple months' worth of shakiness earlier this year, failing to win any share between May and June, and then actually losing a little heading into July and August.  But between September and October, Google moved its needle from 64.9 percent to 65.4 percent, which is fairly impressive.

In fact, according to comScore, the search giant managed a 17.4 percent year-over-year increase.

Bing, for its part, did even better, pulling off a 30.8 percent gain in the same time span.  And in terms of just the last little bit, Bing bumped its share from 9.4 percent to 9.9 percent between September and October.  Not bad at all.

It's Yahoo fans who have cause to be disappointed.  Yahoo's share of the search market has sunk 0.7 percent on a year-over-year basis, and comScore determined that it dropped from 18.8 percent in September to 18.0 percent in October.

Have You Read This?

> Bing Gets A Bunch Of New Search Features

> Microsoft Bing Goes Live In The UK

> Bing Managed Big Gain In October

Making the AdSense Ads suit your website – Part 3 (Positioning of Ads)

The four important properties that help in making the AdSense Ads look good on your website are – shape, size, color of the Ads and their positioning. While the first three can be customized using the customization options provided by Google, ‘positioning of Ads’ is something that Google can only give you advice on. You are the best judge of what position would be best suitable for your AdSense Ads.

The positioning of your Ads relative to the rest of the content is important in order to adequately emphasize the Ads. However, positioning of the Ads is also dependent on the size and shape of the AdSense Ads. Though shape and size are customizable too, large size Ads are generally preferred because they help increase the number of Ad impressions you can get. However, sometimes the structure of your webpage might not allow a big size Ad. In such a case you would need to strike a balance between the size of your ad and the best positioning for it. A number of website owners use other properties in order to make the big size Ads appear smaller e.g. they might use the background color of the webpage for the background and border of the AdSense ad thereby making it look smaller than it actually is (besides achieving the blending effect, of course).

Position your AdSense Ads in such a way that they look in-place with the general flow of content on your website. You can even position a block in the middle of the content in such a way that it adds value to the content (while it also serves your purpose of increasing the AdSense revenue through clicks) e.g. you could add an AdSense Ad block just after a statement that points to resources for a particular task – and your AdSense Ads could possibly form some such resources. Placing the Ads just above the heading of an article or just after the end of the article is another good way of positioning your AdSense Ads.

So, position your AdSense Ads intelligently and you would be in for a party much earlier than you would have expected.