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Google AdWords is beta testing a new AdWords interface. The beta test includes a small group of U.S. advertisers. If your account is included in the test, you should see a notification upon signing up to the account.

You can also request to be included in the beta test by signing up here.

Note that this beta test is for the interface and doesn’t change how AdWords campaigns work (i.e. bidding, Quality Score, etc.). They’re looking to improve the way users navigate their campaigns and edit campaigns across multiple ad groups.

Have you been included in the beta test? Let us know your first impressions by leaving a comment.

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An Update on Last Week’s AdWords Updates

Yahoo! has announced that Jerry Yang will step down as CEO once his replacement has been found. Yang will remain on board as Chief Yahoo!

Yang became CEO in June 2007 at the request of the Board of Directors. Board Chairman Roy Bostock will lead the search for a new CEO. Here’s his official corporate-speak on the matter:

“Over the past year and a half, despite extraordinary challenges and distractions, Jerry Yang has led the repositioning of Yahoo! on an open platform model as well as the improved alignment of costs and revenues. Jerry and the Board have had an ongoing dialogue about succession timing, and we all agree that now is the right time to make the transition to a new CEO who can take the company to the next level. We are deeply grateful to Jerry for his many contributions as CEO over the past 18 months, and we are pleased that he plans to stay actively involved at Yahoo! as a key executive and member of the Board.”

Google announced early this morning that they have updated their Site Search product to provide for on demand indexing of your site. What this means is that if you are using Google’s Site Search feature to provide visitors to your web site with a tool to search your site, you can always keep that on site search tool up to date. It is important to note that this new tool does NOT provide on demand indexing for your site in Google’s general index.

Nonetheless, this is a very cool tool, so let’s walk through a quick scenario. Imagine that you have a site where you have added a substantial amount of new content. Perhaps you have added 100 pages of new articles and data to the site. Prior to this announcement, you would have had to wait for the Googlebot to come along and find those changes, and for them to be incorporated in the index before your Site Search would be able to search on that new content.

Now, with today’s announcement, you can go into the configuration screen for your Site Search, request on demand indexing, and a fresh crawl will be done of your entire site. This data is then made available to users who use Site Search on your site, in real time.

This is a really neat enhancement, ensuring that you can always offer users a full and robust search function on your site, even immediately after you have made massive changes.

Last night I spoke with Nitin Mangtani, the lead product manager for Google Enterprise Search, and he indicated that the new functionality would not be possible without Google’s cloud computing architecture. Basically, the index for your Site Search is unique in nature.

If there was only one copy of that index (perhaps on a Google server near your web site’s hosting location), people all over the world would have to access that server (causing potentially large latencies) to get the data from that index. The cloud computing architecture used by Google results in your unique index being distributed across the globe, and eliminates those latencies.

In July, Google launched Knol, a knowledge sharing platform. You can find all sorts of information from baking to AutoCAD.

Google says users have been asking for a more “robust” search platform for Knol. And who is Google to turn down such a request.

However, Google wanted to maintain the look and feel of Knol. So they used Custom Search to keep it feeling very Knol-y and not so regular Google-y.

What do you think of the Custom Search in Knol? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

Related Reading:
Google SERP Bias? Google Knols Best

Google has reached an agreement with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers (AAP), which represented a broad class of authors and publishers to expand online access to in-copyright books and other written materials in the U.S. The publications will come from the library collections participating in Google Book Search.

The agreement was reached after two years of negotiations. The deal includes Google dishing out $125 million to establish the Book Rights Registry, which would resolve an existing class action lawsuit brought by the groups.

If the court approves, the agreement allows:

• More Access to Out-of-Print Books — Generating greater
  exposure for millions of in-copyright works, including hard-to-find
  out-of-print books, by enabling readers in the U.S. to search these
  works and preview them online
• Additional Ways to Purchase Copyrighted Books — Building off publishers’ and authors’ current efforts and further expanding the
  electronic market for copyrighted books in the U.S., by offering users the ability to purchase online access to many in-copyright books
• Institutional Subscriptions to Millions of Books Online –Offering a means for U.S. colleges, universities and other organizations to obtain subscriptions for online access to collections from some of
  the world’s most renowned libraries
• Free Access From U.S. Libraries — Providing free, full-text, online viewing of millions of out-of-print books at designated computers
  in U.S. public and university libraries
• Compensation to Authors and Publishers and Control Over Access to Their Works — Distributing payments earned from online access provided by Google and, prospectively, from similar programs that may be established by other providers, through a newly created independent, not-for-profit Book Rights Registry that will also locate rightsholders, collect and maintain accurate rightsholder information, and provide a way for rightsholders to request inclusion in or exclusion from the project.

“Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Today, together with the authors, publishers, and libraries, we have been able to make a great leap in this endeavor,” said Sergey Brin, co-founder & president of technology at Google. “While this agreement is a real win-win for all of us, the real victors are all the readers. The tremendous wealth of knowledge that lies within the books of the world will now be at their
fingertips.”

What do you think about the agreement? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Related Reading:
Google SERPs Promoting Google Book Links
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Google Webmaster Central has released a couple of updates: one to the API settings and one to the crawl errors feature.

Here’s the sparkling new things you can do with your API settings:

• Crawl Rate: You can request that Googlebot crawl your site slower or faster than it normally would (the details can be found in our Help Center article about crawl rate control). If many of your sites are hosted on the same server and you know your server’s capacity, you may want to update all sites at the same time. This now a trivial task using the Webmaster Tools GData API.
• Geographic Location: If your site is targeted towards a particular geographic location but your domain doesn’t reflect that (for example with a .com domain), you can provide information to help us determine where your target users are located.
• Preferred Domain: You can select which is the canonical domain to use to index your pages. For example, if you have a site like www.example.com, you can set either example.com or www.example.com as the preferred domain to use. This avoids the risk of treating both sites differently.
• Enhanced Image Search: Tools like the Google Image Labeler allow users to tag images in order to improve Image Search results. Now you can opt in or out for all your sites in a breeze using the Webmaster Tools API.

For the crawl error feature, you now get to see the URL of the inbound link that is linking to an error page.

Related Reading:
Google Extends Webmaster Tools Access Program to Qualifying Hosting Providers
Google Webmaster Central Blog Addresses Duplicate Content Issues
New Google Webmaster Tool Aids Robots.txt Creation

Semantic search engine hakia is calling for librarians to contribute credible web sources. They’ve done this in the past in the health industry. One of the reasons behind the request is that popular websites aren’t always credible and vice versa.

It’s also clearly a strategic alternative to Google, which bases rankings largely on popularity via links.

“By having information experts suggest sites to hakia, we can guide searchers to relevant and credible information on the Web. As a search engine, we will rely on information professionals’ collective knowledge to add a dimension to search: credibility,” said Melek Pulatkonak, President and Chief Operating Officer of hakia, at the Web Search University event in Washington DC.

“The campaign that hakia is starting is a great way to leverage the never-ending knowledge and information analysis skills of the information professional in building a Web database full of the web resources that are most useful, and most importantly, have the most credibility,” said Gary Price, Editor, ResourceShelf.com. “This is a new chapter for library collection development. I hope this is only the beginning.”

Librarians can find out more or contribute here.

Related Reading:
hakia Comments on Leveraging Yahoo’s BOSS
Semantic Search Engine hakia Launches Syndication Web Services
Hakia Holds Concert To Launch Music Search

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AdCenter customers requested more clicks for their ads. Microsoft ran tests that found adding a fourth mainline ad (the ads that appear above the organic results) increased clicks. So, the Live Search team is implementing those changes, and advertisers should notice the change beginning today.

The top 2 mainline ads will continue to get an extra placement at the bottom of the page as well. This is something that also proved successful in the ad placement testing.

What do you think of these changes? Will they increase your clicks? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

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The Google AdWords Agency blog has announced the release of a new guide for AdWords Editor, their account management tool. The guide is available as a 2 page PDF download.

In it you’ll find tips for bulk editing, copying and pasting, error checking and exception requests, account performance evaluation, and collaboration. You’ll also find several keyboard shortcuts to help you navigate Editor even faster.

Related Reading:
AdWords Editor Update Launches Performance Statistics Download
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Google AdWords Editor a Great Tool for Content — and for Yahoo/Microsoft!