Inside the "Let’s make the web faster" website, Google is sharing the tips & tutorials for better performing webpages.
Besides the articles, It is possible to reach videos of speeches by several organizations on website performance.
Also, links to various tools for the issue provided & a large community discusses the subject continiously.
Google Web Elements is a fresh website where you can find all Google widgets in one place & easily add any of them to your websites.
The website simply offers a similar customization interface for each widget and generates the JavaScript code for embedding them.
Exactfactor is a free web based service that enables you to analyze the positions of keywords of a website in major search engines.
It lets you to add competitors & compare your website’s results with a competitor.
Another nice feature is the ability to add alerts. You can get alerts when:
Exactfactor is very easy to use with a clean interface & considering search engines are the most important "factors" of traffic, the service is definitely helpful.
If you have ever advertised at Google Adwords, you probably experienced a keyword guessing process.
Google now helps this with the Search-Based Keyword Tool.
The example simply demonstrates, if webresourcesdepot.com was to be advertised with Google Adwords & web design was a keyword to be used:
Definitely a time saver for Google Adwords users.
Google Trends for Websites is a web-based service where you can compare the visitor statistics of websites.
The data displayed is daily unique visitors (after logging in, you can see the numbers that graphs represent) and currently, up to 5 websites can be compared.
Google Ad Planner provides you information about websites by simply entering demographics and sites associated with your target audience. This is a tool to be used when you are planning or searching for websites to advertise.
Ad Planner, currently, can be used by invitation only. You can apply for it here.
More info can be found at Inside Adwords blog.
Google tries to make the use JavaScript frameworks easier and faster with the Ajax Libraries API.
Main idea is hosting the JavaScript framework files on Google servers, serving them faster by Google’s fast & distributed servers, gzipping them when needed and most importantly, preventing several downloads of the same libraries by caching.
The caching mechanism may work great in the future if many websites use the Ajax Libraries API. This way if a user browsing your website, let’s say, if browsed another website using the API with jQuery, that user would have already downloaded the jQuery file and won’t need to download again on your website.
<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/prototype/1.6.0.2/prototype.js"> </script>
<script src="http://www.google.com/jsapi"> </script> <script> google.load("prototype", "1"); </script>
The official announcement can be found here.
Google released the Google Maps API for Flash which lets Flex and Flash developers embed Google Maps in Flash applications.
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The API is smooth and fast. Flash graphics can be used for each tile layer, marker and info window. This opens up possibilities like dynamic shading, shadowing, animation, and video. When the user zooms the map, magnification changes happen smoothly and place names fade in.
The title is fun, I know (and I love Lords Of The Rings).
Mapstraction has kind of a similar logic. It provides a common API for the major mapping providers. This means, when you code with Mapstraction API, you can easily switch from Yahoo Maps to Google maps or else.
You can even use this power to create creative solutions like this syncronizing maps example:
GoogieSpell is Gmail-like spell checker that you can use in your applications.
It is AJAX based, supports over 27 languages and well-documented.
This AJAX spell checker simply sends a query to Google’s spell checking address: "https://www.google.com/tbproxy/spell?lang=" and displays the results and recommendations according to the result of this data.
GoogieSpell is well tested to work in all major browsers.
Google AJAX Translation API is a library for translating words or sentences from one language to another using Google Translate database.
google.language.translate(’Beaucoup’, ‘fr’, ‘en’, function(result) {
alert(result.translation);
});
This Google AJAX Translation API example simply translates "Beaucoup" from French to English.
A great feature of the API is getting the language of the input and best of all the accuracy ratio of the results.
Languages supported are limited with the ones in the Google Translate service.
