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Google Buys Real-Time Video Communications Company —

Google announced early this morning that it would acquire Global IP Solutions Holding. The company provides the VOIP engine behind Yahoo, AOL, WebEx and Lotus conferencing and had said last month that it would be the first to bring video chat to Android phones.

Google has offered $68.2 million for the company, which it has said it will use for real-time video and audio communications.

Sponsor

"The Web is evolving quickly as a development platform, and real-time video and audio communication over the Internet are becoming important new tools for users," said Rian Liebenberg, an engineering director at Google, in a statement.

The question now is, what does Google plan to do with this acquisition? The company can keep hold of it and use it to power real-time video communication on Android. It could also create a direct competitor with Skype by adding video capabilities to Google Voice (such as are already possible with GChat, but with mobile capabilities). At the same time, Google could offer the technology to developers via API in an attempt to become a defacto place to look when deciding to add real-time communications to Web applications.

Larry Dignan at ZDNet also brings up an interesting point - what will become of GIPS' multitude of other clients, all of which happen to be Google competitors? According to the joint statement, GIPS CEO Emerick Woods said that "we are confident that our existing customers will continue to be fully supported while we continue to enhance and extend our products and technology at Google."

The purchase is part of a general push at Google in moving to an increasingly real-time web. Whether it's adding Twitter and Facebook updates to its search results or making Google Reader and the Google index itself real-time with PuSH, Google has consistently moved away from the old way of doing things, wherein updates occur on a timed schedule.

Yesterday, Marshall Kirkpatrick broke the story on a new version of Google's Feed API, which will push updates directly to a user's browser. He argued in that article that it was a sign of the times: "No more refreshing pages to see when new content is available - the real-time web comes to you live, nearly instantly as soon as it's published."

An API from Google incorporating this real-time video communication, pushing content in the same way as it will with its Feed API, would further enable this possibility. With Google's developing capabilities with speech recognition and translation, an embeddable and linked real-time video communication protocol could be revolutionary.

Discuss

I love the Google AdWords Keyword Tool.  I use it all the time and I demo it a lot when speaking at events. But I have no idea what the URL is. When I want to use it, I just do whatever else does whenever they want to go to any site on the web. I do a Google search for it. Specifically, I type [google adwords keyword tool] into Google and click on the first result.

Until today.

Now when I do that search, the tool is nowhere to be found.

Instead, I find the Google AdWords landing page, a bunch of articles on other sites about the keyword tool, and the UK version of the tool.  Huh. What’s up with that? (I don’t even see a paid search ad for it.)

Google recently completely revamped the tool and as part of that, changed the URL. The old URL was https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordTool. Now, when you (or Googlebot, if you are not you, but instead, a search engine webcrawler looking to update your index) access that URL, you get a 302 redirect to https://adwords.google.com/o/Targeting/Explorer?__u=5701132992&__c=8003242272&stylePrefOverride=2#search.none!ideaType=KEYWORD&requestType=IDEAS. And a captcha.

When I look for that URL in Google, I see it’s not indexed, although at least I see a paid search ad for the tool.

Of course, that URL doesn’t show up in part because it’s not a permanent URL. If I try to access inurl:https://adwords.google.com/o/Targeting/Explorer, I also get the keyword tool, via a set of redirect that leads to this URL: https://adwords.google.com/o/Targeting/Explorer?&stylePrefOverride=2&__u=5701132992&__c=8003242272#search.none!ideaType=KEYWORD&requestType=IDEAS.

Which is actually the same URL with the parameters in a different order. Although things don’t look much better in the Google index when I search for any URL that begins with https://adwords.google.com/o/Targeting/Explorer.

Let’s look a little more closely at those redirects. The source code of https://adwords.google.com/o/Targeting/Explorer looks like this:

<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript">
var jsRedirect = true;
var url = "/select/Login?aw3=true&dst=%2Fo%2FTargeting%2FExplorer&frag=search.none%21ideaType%3DKEYWORD%26requestType%3DIDEAS";
window.location.assign(url);
</script> </body> </html>

Which then leads to this (HTTP response edited to show the vital components for this example):

https://adwords.google.com/select/Login?aw3=true&dst=%2Fo%2FTargeting%2FExplorer&frag=search.none%21ideaType%3DKEYWORD%26requestType%3DIDEAS

HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily

----------------------------------------------------------

https://adwords.google.com/um/StartNewLogin?aw3=true&dst=%2Fo%2FTargeting%2FExplorer&frag=search.none%21ideaType%3DKEYWORD%26requestType%3DIDEAS

HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily

----------------------------------------------------------

https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=adwords&hl=en_US&ltmpl=regionale&passive=true&ifr=false&alwf=true&continue=https%3A%2F%2Fadwords.google.com%2Fum%2Fgaiaauth%3Fapt%3DNone%26ugl%3Dtrue

HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily

----------------------------------------------------------

https://adwords.google.com/um/gaiaauth?apt=None&ugl=true&pli=1&auth=DQAAALUAAAAMl8-Jos-ywfDoe9g9erkG4klYT-fzYde8k9MEQMmOkonqCalB_LbFISNUgDOMGnoAZkaofqL2ZGwAbwAwV8-rQ6dGM9XnEjgrwUJsc9l_S-0NFsPz0om6ExrJSZf8lQnKJkASgaEqE7SGWbCpcMYd_qihOdzJVvGH0P7_jopql3FQJ5vGT6PuazK260Z2hXVAxy3eyEICPHqe7R9LvLrjbM1fHZLgquTrd6dMYIN64iMDKvShFg_rXfjonOCj6jo

HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily

----------------------------------------------------------

https://adwords.google.com/um/gaiaauth?apt=None&ugl=true&pli=1

HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily

----------------------------------------------------------

https://adwords.google.com/select/gaiaauth?__u=5701132992&__c=8003242272&stylePrefOverride=2&30Login=true&url=%2Fo%2FTargeting%2FExplorer#search.none!ideaType=KEYWORD&requestType=IDEAS

HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily

----------------------------------------------------------

https://adwords.google.com/o/Targeting/Explorer?&stylePrefOverride=2&__u=5701132992&__c=8003242272#search.none!ideaType=KEYWORD&requestType=IDEAS

HTTP/1.1 200 OK

Perhaps Google has a few things to add to their SEO report card:

• If possible, keep the URL the same when you change content.
• If that’s not possible, don’t use a JavaScript redirect to move the URL.
• Also don’t use a 302. Use a 301.
• Don’t redirect multiple times.
• If that’s not possible, keep the number of redirects under 5.
• Googlebot can’t fill out a captcha.
• If you don’t show up at all in organic search, a paid search ad for the name of your product can be helpful.

Confidential to the Google AdWords Keyword Tool team: If you’re not sure if your URLs are being crawled, check the crawl errors section of Google Webmaster Tools. It’s got this great “URLs not followed” report that may provide some helpful information.

Confidential to everyone else: You can find the Google AdWords Keyword Tool here.