Google Announces Opt-Out Tool To Keep Content Out Of Its Specialized Search Engines

Google has launched a new way for sites to opt out of having their content show up in Google Shopping, Advisor, Flights, Hotels, and Google+ Local search.

Google Opt-Out Tool

Matt Cutts announced the feature in a very brief post on the Google Webmaster Central blog, saying, “Webmasters can now choose this option through our Webmaster Tools, and crawled content currently being displayed on Shopping, Advisor, Flights, Hotels, or Google+ Local search pages will be removed within 30 days.”

This is obviously not a feature that Google would want a ton of people to use, because the less content that appears in these services, the less useful they are. Perhaps that’s why Cutts hasn’t tweeted about the tool (maybe not, but perhaps). At least with the short announcement, they have something they can point to.

The feature is a direct response to an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission. When Google settled with the FTC, one of the voluntary concessions Google made was a feature that would let sites opt out of Google’s specialized search engines.

As Danny Sullivan notes, the feature doesn’t let you choose which search engines you wish to opt out of. If you use the feature, you’re opting out of all of those mentioned.

On a help page, Google says, “This opt-out option currently applies only to services hosted on google.com and won’t apply to other Google domains.”

source:- webpronews.com

Google Celebrates Google Play’s first birthday By Giving You Discounts

One year after rebranding itself and ditching the "Android Market" label, Google Play is celebrating the occasion by offering deals to Android users.

Google Play has grown rapidly in the last year, bringing you more content in more languages and places around the globe. In addition to offering more than 700,000 apps and games, they’ve partnered with all of the major music companies, movie studios and publishers to bring you the music, movies, TV shows, books and magazines you love. And They’ve added more ways for you to buy them, including paying through your phone bill and gift cards, which we're beginning to roll out in the U.K. this week. 

Since no birthday is complete without presents, Google Play celebrating with a bunch of special offers across the store on songs, TV shows, movies and books. 

As of Wednesday, the site offered: a free $15 gift card and free shipping on photo-sharing webstore, The Fancy; a free fantasy book called A Quest of Heroes by Morgan Rice; a 10% discount applicable to bookings on Hotels.com; a limited edition character of the game, Yumby Smash; 50% off the movie, Kung Fu Panda; access to a new "Mars" location on the Disney game, Gnome Village; and a variety of in-app savings for the game, Royal Revolt!

While its current offerings are not that impressive, users will have to wait and see what other deals Google Play may have in store later this week.

Google pays tribute to Miriam Makeba 'Mama Africa' with doodle

Miriam Makeba, the South African chanteuse renowned for her collaborations with Calypso king Harry Belafonte and folk legend Paul Simon on his the tours of seminal world music album Graceland in 1987, received tribute from Google in the form of a doodle on her 81st birthday.
Born in Johannesburg on March 4, 1932, Makeba gained initial fame in 1959 during a tour of the United States with South African group the Manhattan Brothers.

Makeba's was a strong voice against her home country's racist apartheid government. She ran afoul of the government in 1960 after she participated in Come Back, Africa, an anti-apartheid documentary, a year earlier.
Her subsequent exile, which lasted for nearly 30 years, did nothing to diminish her International renown though she would not return until after Nelson Mandela emerged from prison in 1990.
Five years after her exile, she would become the first woman of African heritage to have the honour of winning a Grammy Award, which she shared with Belafonte for An Evening with Belafonte/Makeba. It was the first US-produced album to feature authentic Zulu and Swahili music, a milestone in the world music genre.

With a turbulent personal life contrasting the fame she had received as Mama Africa, she was divorced four times. Her first marriage was to trumpeter Hugh Masekelaand her most controversial one was to civil rights activist/Black Panther Stokely Carmichael, which led to her moving to Guinea.
She was responsible for popularising African music in the United States. With iconic traditional flowing gowns and hairstyles, she would belt out music that was richly flavoured by her African roots and childhood Jazz influences.
In 2008, after a concert in the southern Italian town of Caserta, Makeba, the first African woman to address the United Nations (where she testified against apartheid in 1963), passed away.