This month, Google has released quite a number of updates to its services: Google Trends, Google Analytics and Google Maps.
Google trends has introduced a new area – “hot trends“, which display the hottest trends in the search, or the way i understand it – it should show those phrases which have received a sudden increase of the searches. Besides hotness (right now from “medium” to “on fire”), the results also displays related searches (similar ones), peak time and most used searches location. During an intensive web search engine optimization it could be quite an important criteria to look for.
Google analytics has launched a completely redesigned interface, completely based on Ajax. They are still maintaining the elder one, for a couple of weeks, but the users are suggested starting their “migration” to the new one. I found the new interface sometimes being quite unstable, crashing the Firefox completely, but since it must be a “beta” release, i hope they will improve the service very fastly. No webmaster or search engine optimizer, who uses Google Analytics will like to continue using quite buggy product. Besides some crashes (something to do with the Firefox extensions ?), the new interface is quite different, and one have to get used to it, so i confess, that for the most of the time i still continue using the old one, while trying to push myself into learning the new one. I hope to be able to “move” to the new one during next couple of days.
I am still fuming about Google Zeitgeist and the absence of Portugal from the results, and by the way, at this very moment they have 2 Irelands listed at the menu links, which should be quite a surprising fact to the united kingdom government. I gotta email to someone at Google, telling them to stop ignoring portuguese optimizers. =O)
p.s. I have forgotten to mention the Google Maps update, which includes now 360 Streetside Views. As usual, this update is for US-based map only(it will be available in Denver, Las Vegas, Miami, New York and San Francisco at the moment), but in the nearest future. Some people over the net have already reported that it helped them avoiding traffic, so it sounds to be a good update, but since Portuguese map has arrived more then a year after american and british counterparts, i am not expecting any “important” info for me in the next months.