Microsoft company is gathering a group of beta testers for testing desktop applications for AdCenter Desktop. This application, which was released in June of this year, allows advertisers and agencies manage AdCenter accounts through off-line desktop applications. All the changes made by users after saving are uploaded into the account and applied on-line.

Among the possibilities of AdCenter Desktop, in particular it may be noted, is managing multiple accounts, search and management of keywords imported from Excel tables, simultaneous editing of parameters for several campaigns (bidet prices, URL, targeting ad groups), scanning campaigns for errors before uploading them into Live account, the Search Engine Journal publication reports.

Video search engine Blinkx released a service called "blinkx Red Label." The composition of the service include API and a way to enable more small sites to use the Blinkx search for free. Larger players who need to produce video search, will make profit on pages independently or display advertising from Blinkx.

Sites that place the decision of Blinkx will have access to all indexed video. The search engine offers two options for solutions - one of them is based on XML and gives full control over the appearance of search, the second - displays the results of the Blinkx, but is adjusted according to general site style.

Blinkx is one of the oldest players in the market of video-searching. It has been in existence since 2005. The main functions of the search engine - enabling search on partner sites. It has about 350 of such partners. According to the administration, Blinkx has the most extensive database in the industry.

Recently Google announced the improvement of Flash files indexing. This update, however, does not support Flash added through SWFObject. New version of indexing has introduced support of widespread JavaScript technologies in order to add this type of content, including SWFObject and SWFObject2.

Dynamic Flash content added from files still remains unindexed. This option has already been requested and will be included in one of the expected updates.

Your IP address, user agent and browser determination service: What Is My IP Address? & What is my User-Agent?

In May, Udi Manber introduced our search quality group, the group responsible for the ranking of search results. He introduced various teams within "Quality" (as we like to call the group) including Core Ranking, International Search, User Interfaces, Evaluation, Webspam, and other teams. In this post, I want to tell you more about one of these: the Core Ranking team.

Let me introduce myself. My name is Amit Singhal. I'm a Google Fellow in charge of the ranking team at Google. I've worked in the field of search for the past eighteen years, having been introduced to search in 1990 as a graduate student in computer science. In the academic world, the field of search is known as Information Retrieval (or IR). After spending a decade as an IR researcher, I came to Google in 2000, and have worked on Google ranking ever since.

Google ranking is a collection of algorithms used to find the most relevant documents for a user query. We do this for hundreds of millions of queries a day, from a collection of billions and billions of pages. These algorithms are run for every query entered into most of Google's search services. While our web search is the most used Google search service and the most widely known, the same ranking algorithms are also used - with some modifications - for other Google search services, including Images, News, YouTube, Maps, Product Search, Book Search, and more.

Read more: Introduction to Google Ranking