According to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Google’s top priority this year is to make money off YouTube, the video-sharing site they acquired in 2006. In an interview which aired on CNBC Wednesday, Schmidt talked about Google’s plans for YouTube and sent shares of the company up 4.7%.

Schmidt revealed that Google hadn’t yet figured out “the perfect solution of how to make money”, but insists that they’re “working on that.” He also revealed that YouTube planned to roll out a series of new products this year aimed at generating advertising. Speaking of these products, he said that “they’re not announced” and that these ads would be “much more participative, much more creative” and “much more interesting in and of themselves.”

The new ad services that Google is planning to offer will go beyond their basic in-line advertising, said Schmidt. In-line advertising already runs on YouTube, and run along the bottom of YouTube videos.

In the interview, Schmidt also left open the possibility of working with Yahoo more, indicating that Google is still in the running for a business deal which would see Yahoo replace some of the ads running along side its search results with Google-delivered ads.

One of the problems that search engines have had is its ability to give good results when users search for a specific picture. The folks over at Google think that they may have solved this with a new algorithm. Much like their pagerank system, ranking the name given to Google’s method of ranking pages according to a number of factors such as link popularity, their new image search looks to provide users the best possible results.

The Register Writes about the update in image searching

Last week, at the International World Wide Web Conference in Beijing, two Google-affiliated researchers presented a paper called “PageRank for Product Image Search,” trumpeting a fledging algorithm that overhauls the primitive text-based methods used by the company’s current image search technologies.

“Our experiment results show significant improvement, in terms of user satisfaction and relevancy, in comparison to the most recent Google Image Search results,” Shumeet Baluja and Yushi Jing tell the world from the pages of their research paper, available here.

Looks like Google has found yet another way to make our jobs as information professionals easier.

Google Product Search, formerly known (which Google shouldn’t have changed) as Froogle, has experienced a significant upgrade. The folks over at Google Operating System noticed that that the search engine now detects multiple products, and also lets you read reviews about the products. The moral of the story is that you will no longer have to head to Amazon to see what other people are saying about the product before you pay your hard earned money for something using their site.

Libraries are turning to blogging more and more, as the medium of connecting with users becomes mainstream. What is one of the benefits of blogging for your library? Your presence in Google, and other search engines. The more content that you write the more likely a patron will be able to find you in Google. Whether its hawking library services or programming, or giving tutorials that will help users, the more you update your blog the better the chance you will reach an audience. And when you get a new person to your site, it will be easier to convert them to a patron. So if your library doesn’t blog yet, what are you waiting for?

The Associated Press took a glimpse into the process behind Google’s digital book project. The article states that 28 libraries are now working with Google scanning rare books that will be searchable through books.google.com. Google’s much heralded partnership with the University of Michigan has yielded 1 Million total books that have been put in the database with 5 Million more to go. Preservation Librarians will find the article interesting as it gives you a glimpse of how workers take great care in keeping the books safe during the process with special temperatures (brrr) so the books are not damages. Do yourself a favor and read the informative article by clicking the link above.

Google is throwing us some curve balls. The folks over at a Blog called Pingdom have stumbled across some strange names that the search engine has registered. Among the strangest are 30dayfitness.com, bayareaburritos.com, and bankgoogle.com.

Perhaps Google wants people to have enough money to buy their burritos, and then get so fat that they will have to join a gym in order to get back in shape. In all seriousness though some of the names on the list are very interesting and give you a glimpse into what may be the next service, including googleauction.com and googlebroadband.com, that the Internet giant may have up their sleeve.

One of the most frequent questions I seem to receive from people just passing by the library is information on bus routes. As you may or may not be aware, our friends at Google have taken it upon themselves to make looking up bus route information as easy as using their user-friendly search engine. While not all major metro areas are up yet, including Cleveland where I reside, Google Transit is growing by leaps and bounds with over 40 United States countries and also international databases in 8 countries throughout 4 continents.

While your city may not be represented (like Cleveland who boasts that they have the number #1 transit system in the country), it’s probably a good idea as an information specialist to verse yourself in Google Transit. You know that one day your Transit Authority will be added to Google’s listing and you will want to know how to answer the question that you have been asked countless times ie “Do you have the bus route for (insert your local route here)”.

The other day I was helping a patron who was looking for yellow pages for New York City. While our library had access to most major cities directories in the past, due to rising costs,  the advent of the internet, the wear and tear that the paper directories sustained, and the enormous amount of space that the collection needed we stopped receiving the paper directories.

The patron was a bit upset that we did not carry the print copies anymore but I told him about the wonders of Google Street View. At first the man was rather skeptical saying that computers were worthless and could not be used for this type of search.  After I convinced him that I would be able to find the information he gave me the query he was looking for. After a tough search, honestly the gentleman wouldn’t have found what he was looking for in a traditional directory because he had the wrong address wasn’t 100% sure what the business actually did, we found the exact building he was looking for and the man left a happy customer. The man luckily knew the area and was able to virtually “walk around” to find the area. Needless to say the man doesn’t think search engines are “worthless” anymore and was enthralled by the power of the almighty Google.

The moral of the story here is that while a lot of the products that Google roll out have a definite “fun factor” they also have some academic uses that you may not think of when asked for a question.

I’m not going to re-write the entire article that I posted at SEJ, but Google has invested an unspecified sum into a second genetic testing company, Navigenics. If you recall, Google made headlines last year when they invested $4.4 million in 23andMe, a DNA testing company founded by Sergey Brin’s wife and her business partner.

Believe it or not, these kind of questions come up pretty frequently.  So how do you figure it out?  The fastest and easiest way to do so is to go to timeanddate.com/calendar.  You can get a calendar for ANY YEAR there. Just type in the year and select your country (the US is the default), and you’ll be able to find out what day any date fell on in any given year.

By the way, the answer to the question is: in 1959, March 1 fell on a Sunday.