Google Updates: July-August 2006

We’ve had more than our fair share of Google AdSense and AdWords tutorials for the past two weeks. Much has happened with Google lately. Here’s a recap.

ClickFraud issue publicized and settled. Lane’s Gifts, which advertises with Google AdWords, has sued Google for the latter’s inaction on the matter of clickfraud. Apparently, Lane’s Gifts had been charged for clicks that it claims are fraudulent. It seems Google has settled with the advertisers involved.

This issue is also hotly discussed in the mainstream media. Even Google’s closest competitors in the contextual-advertising business are joining forces against this new wave of online crimes. Contextual advertising is big business, after all. But if potential advertisers are turned off because of the prospect of their money going to waste because of fraudulent clicking, then we might just see this boom going bust.

The Google Earth Team gets an award. Now you know Google Earth isn’t just for fun. The Google Earth team helped rescuers find people and survey the extent of the damage from last year’s Hurricane Katrina disaster. Hey, why didn’t they do this when the South Asian tsunami struck?

Picasa for the Mac. Now I wonder if Google will be wooing .MAC users. Anyway, this seems like a good idea. For the longest time, I’ve had the feeling that Google was neglecting Mac users. They don’t even have a Google talk client for the Mac yet (iChat is cool, but you can’t do VoIP via Jabber). Maybe it’s because they’re mostly builing Web apps (or maybe they’re still using Lego blocks to build their servers–what, no Macs?).

The Gadget contest is extended. The Google Desktop Gadget contest we earlier wrote about has been extended. Deadline is now August 14. Hurry, you might just win that $ 5,000 first prize.

New Google Talk features. Google says we’re supposed to have file-transfer, voicemail and music status features on our Google Talk clients. Frankly, I’ve been expecting my client to auto-update for a week now. But I still don’t see the new features! I’ve even downloaded from the Google talk download page, but still nothing!