Last month, a handful of privacy groups urged Google to add a link to its privacy policy on its home page, in accordance with California law.

Google said it interpreted the law differently.

Google resisted doing so in part because every bit counts when determining how quickly its home page loads, given that load speed and user satisfaction are strongly related.

The company probably also wanted to avoid giving outsiders the idea that they can force design changes by complaining.

In a blog post, Marissa Mayer, VP of search products and user experience, said that Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin would agree to the change only if the number of the words on the home page (28) remained unchanged. So the word “Google” was dropped because it was implied.

“Today we’re making a homepage change by adding a link to our privacy overview and policies,” said Mayer. “Google values our users’ privacy first and foremost. Trust is the basis of everything we do, so we want you to be familiar and comfortable with the integrity and care we give your personal data. We added this link both to our homepage and to our results page to make it easier for you to find information about our privacy principles.”

So as we can all see, Google replaced the unnecessary “©2008 Google” copyright notice at the bottom of its home page with a privacy link.

Though the copyright symbol and date remain, the bottom text now reads “©2008 – Privacy.”

Well done, Google.

Setting up services for your mobile phone often requires you to perform some configurations via the Web.

This is true for a number of Google services, and apparently people didn’t think it was easy enough.

Google listened to all the feedback and launched a new mobile site today to help make it easier to set your phone up with Google services.

Man, did Google dumb its mobile Web site down. It is so easy to get started, there’s no reason you won’t have your Google services configured in no time.

Going to http://mobile.google.com brings up a landing page. On that page is a list of the major phone manufacturers, along with pictures that resemble those manufacturers’ devices.

Select the choice that most closely resembles your phone, and it whisks you to a page customized for your type of device.

This next page lists all the services that your phone (or platform) supports.

For example, here is the page for BlackBerrys. It has a tool so you can send a link via SMS to your phone that leads directly to Google’s mobile services.

Simply enter your phone number and the link will appear in a few moments. You can also just type m.google.com directly into your phone’s browser.

Additionally, there’s a help center and explanations for everything. Not that it was difficult before, but now it is really easy.

So if you’re a Google user and haven’t set up Google services on your phone because you thought it would be a pain, take heart. What are you waiting for? Get started!

Starting today in the U.S., users of BlackBerry smartphones should begin noticing a number of improvements to their Google search results. Google has tailored its software to better accommodate the BlackBerry Web browser.

Google has been on a roll lately with customized phone support. It goes to greater and greater lengths to make sure each mobile phone platform has what it needs to view and use Google’s mobile services better.

Google has, for example, rolled out some seriously customized versions of its services for the iPhone, which has different usability characteristics than many other phones.

Now, Google has turned its attention to BlackBerry users, specifically the browser.

The Official Google Mobile Blog spells out what it has done:

1. Improved comprehensiveness: Our mobile search now incorporates results from Product Search, Blog Search, News archives search, and more.
2. Blended results: Instead of showing you web, image, local and news results in separate sections, we now combine them to improve relevance. We’ve also made it easier for you to focus your search on any one of these categories — notice how the links are now placed at the top of the results page.
3. Longer snippets: Web results include longer snippets so that your answer may be right on the results page.
4. Related searches: At the bottom of the search results page, you’ll find a list of related searches to help you refine a query.

According to Google, these changes reflect its desktop search results pages. I was not able to test the new enhancements on my BlackBerry to confirm that.

Feel free to check it out for yourself and share your experience in the comments below.

You may also watch a video demonstration here.

Google provides so many services for free, I am rather surprised that it doesn’t offer a free FTP hosting service for small business customers.

Sure, Docs, Apps, and even GMail and Picasa can serve as repositories of files, but they aren’t super convenient for transferring large files back and forth. Will there ever be a Google FTP?

Most FTP services aren’t that expensive. You can get storage for up to 10 GB for less than $10.00 USD or $20.00 USD per month, depending on where you have your FTP site hosted. That’s not a colossal expense for any business.

Small businesses, however, suffer more from the nickel-and-dime effect, and that $10.00 USD can be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

On top of that, not all FTPs are created equal. Some have limits on the amount of data that can be transferred back and forth, charging you more when you go over the limit.

To be fair, Google is very generous with storage in its Gmail accounts. I currently have access to 6.8 GB of storage in my e-mail, and can retrieve anything I’ve sent/received at any time, from nearly any platform.

Google’s photo-sharing service, Picasa, grants you 1 GB of storage. Not bad.

Docs limits file uploads to 500 Kb for HTML, .doc and .rtf files. Spreadsheets can’t be larger than 1 MB, and Presentations can’t surpass 10 MB if uploaded from a PC, 2 MB if transferred from the Web, or just 500 Kb via e-mail.

It’s not uncommon for me to have to send a large batch of picture files, or a video file, here or there. Sending pictures one by one is a major pain in the rear. I often pack them into a single folder and then zip the file but even zipped, the folders can still be bulky.

Most e-mail systems, even Gmail, can’t really handle 30 MB attachments all that well, necessitating the need for FTP to transfer the bigger files/folders.

So, Google, just out of curiosity, why don’t you offer an FTP service for small business? Afraid it will be used to transfer copyrighted material such as movies and/or music?

Have the MPAA and RIAA already squashed any ideas you might have had? What’s the deal? Am I stuck finding some anonymous storage facility?

If you’ve dreamed of starting your own Web site, Google has made it easier than ever. It has expanded the availability of its Google Sites service — originally only for Google Apps users — to everyone. There’s no limit on the number of pages you can create, nor what you can share with the WWW.

When Google first made sites available to Apps users, I took it for a spin. It was fairly easy to register a site and use Google’s tools to crease some basic Web pages. No advanced knowledge of HTML or other Web technologies is required.

I also was able to set up user accounts, e-mail accounts, and make it really official. At the time, it was only for registered businesses with Google Apps accounts. Now every Jane and Joe can have at it.

Google writes in its blog:

“We’ve made it easy for anyone to set up a website to share all types of information — team projects, company intranets, community groups, classrooms, clubs, family updates, you name it — in one place, for a few people, a group or the world.”

Sites isn’t just for one person to set up and manage a Web site. It’s a collaborative tool that lets anyone (who you’ve invited) view or edit content. Setting up access for others is as simple as e-mailing them.

In the spirit of Web 2.0, the ability for many to contribute, change, and collectively alter Web documents can be truly powerful … or utterly annoying. Either way, launching your own Web site just got a little bit simpler.

Google’s only goal: Improve user experience. How does it do that?

According to Udi Manber, VP of engineering at Google, Search Quality, it is a heck of a lot of work. Google improves its search algorithms an average of nine times per week. Here’s why.

Google’s Udi Manber published a massive blog post about what exactly is going on behind Google’s closed doors. It is an interesting read. I invite you to check the entire post out here.

Below are some points I thought were most interesting. Read the rest of this entry…