Google Archive

Staffing solutions provider Jobscience has announced the launch of Jobscience for Google Apps today. The new service combines Google Apps and a custom recruiting application built on the Salesforce Force.com platform. What a change from the old days of trying to integrate Resumix with a job web site.

Interestingly they push you to use Blogger for the company job blog. They quickly note that the job blog offers RSS so you can share the jobs anywhere. The company describes the service as, “…allows small to medium size companies to publicly broadcast jobs, accept online applications, and utilize Google Docs to manage resumes and other recruitment-related documents.”

A site license is $100/month and works with any level of Salesforce account. The company created a demo video which is a walkthrough of the steps to get the application running.

Yesterday we were the first to report on the Google News outage in the AM hours on the East Coast. This morning it appears that Google News is down again.

It looks like the outage started about 9am Eastern. As of 9:30am, I am still receiving the error message seen on the right. Please report in if Google News is down where you are.

Yesterday’s issue apparently had to do with planes and backed-up Web traffic. After Google News came back to life yesterday, an announcement was posted about a new design for Google News.

Check Twitter search for additional commentary on the Google News outage.

Update 9:37 Eastern – appears Google News is running once again.

Google News appears to be down providing a 503 server error message. The outage started approximately 8:40AM Eastern and continues at the time of this posting 8:47AM Eastern.

Please report in if Google News is down where you are. We have received reports that the Russian Google News is functioning correctly.

Check Twitter search for additional commentary on the Google News outage.

Update: after some pinging and a whole lot of tracerouting, it appears some datacenters might be down but not the entire Google News service as some are getting in and I get in on some loads (about 3 out of 10)

Update 2: 9:30AM Eastern – Google News still appears to be inconsistently down – as CN commenters have noted it’s down more than it is up. I am still getting the 503 error.

Earlier this month CenterNetworks was converted from Drupal to Wordpress. Part of the conversion resulted in several of the CN sites getting hit with an exploit. It appears that one of the CN sites might have actually been hit earlier and I just never noticed it and only upon CN getting hit did I realize this other site was also hit.

This other site apparently lost most of its “Google Juice” which resulted in a major reduction in organic search site traffic. Here’s a graph of the before, during and after.

At the lowest point, nearly 70% of Google-referral traffic to the site in question was lost. As you can see from the chart above, slowly the Google Juice has been restored and we are back to normal traffic today. Phew, at least now I can get the investors off my back.

What did I learn from this experience? Google indexes sites very quickly but it seems to take about two weeks for the Google search crawlers to update an entire site. From what I can tell, there’s no real way to tell Google that a site was infected and that it is now clean of bad links. There is a re-inclusion request form but I’ve never received any feedback when I have submitted that form in the past so no idea if it actually worked. More importantly, the experience made me realize just how much Google controls how this site does monetarily each and every day.

Over the past few weeks I’ve had customer service/support issues with Twitter, Google and Amazon. Each handled my issue in a different manner to a different conclusion and I thought it might be interesting to share the results. I also want to note that it’s disappointing that it seems to get support you have to know someone who knows someone. In two of the three cases below I was able to get a direct contact on the inside who was able to at least get me on the right path for help. Sadly I only was able to get a resolution on one of the three issues.

Twitter

I posted some issues I had (am having) with my Twitter account for my startup. I still have not received any sort of reply from Twitter staff to my post or my trouble ticket in their system. I asked Twitter investor Fred Wilson for an update and he told me to go to Get Satisfaction as "some users seem to like it".

Amazon

I had an issue with Amazon Web Services and after clicking help, I posted a message to their customer service form. About 24 hours later I received a very generic reply that the person was going to have to investigate my issue further but he did note that I can’t reply to that email. So that left me with nowhere to turn as the days clicked by without a resolution.

After multiple days I turned to my friends and asked for help. I was able to chat with an Amazon executive (who actually helped me on the weekend while he was on a business trip!) and he got the case moving. I can say that the issue has been resolved to my satisfaction. I would suggest that Amazon look at how they handle support emails on the web services side – it’s a bit odd to me to have such poor email customer service on the web services side when the product side (normal amazon.com) has always worked so well.

Update: one note, the email from the support person who resolved the issue also comes from a no-reply mailbox. I have a follow up question regarding how to handle part of the problem and now I am back to square 1.

Google

I realized about two weeks ago that I never received a required form from Google AdSense. I headed over to the support section for Google AdSense and was promptly told that there is only "limited" email support for Google AdSense. I honestly have no idea what limited means but I learned that I will never know. No matter what I tried, I was never able to reach an email form to even ask for help – all I got was the run-around inside Google’s supposed help section.

After a friend provided me with an email address for a person in the AdSense team, I sent off an email and received a reply pretty quickly stating that I would get a followup from someone who could help me. It has now been 10 days without a response.

Summary

I do wonder (especially on Twitter) if the so-called celebrities receive actual support when needed. Does Shaq or Britney have a hotline for support when or if there’s a request?

If you read CN you know that I put customer service at the top of the list when it comes to a product or service. One of the first posts on CN was a web apps customer service face-off (Dogster received the only A grade). It’s certainly disappointing that it seems like to get any sort of help from the companies I’ve listed you need to know someone.

Arlene Lee from Google has announced that at the end of April, AdSense will no longer support "video units". This was a program that Google started to allow publishers to run video channels that would be monetized using Google AdSense ads.

The announcement blog post is worth a read – apparently the video ad units were U.S. only and many publishers believe the reason they failed is because Google didn’t provide any guidance on usage. WebProNews has additional thoughts on the closure. If I remember, we tried the video ad units on HTMLCenter but they never produced any real income so we removed them.

Once the closure is final at the end of April, the ad units will be replaced with YouTube banners and/or YouTube video boxes. Arlene suggests you swap out any video ad units with traditional AdSense units.

On another AdSense topic, I learned this weekend that Google has no actual support for their publishers. I don’t believe I was issued a tax form for last year and attempted to contact Google for help. All you get is a form that takes you round and round and a note that they provide "limited email support" – not sure what "limited" means but at least from what I can tell it means "none". Too bad there isn’t a Matt Cutts for AdSense.

The Google Checkout team has announced some major changes to the fee structure for merchants using the Google Checkout payment processing system. The new pricing appears to match the pricing by competitor PayPal.

Andy Beal has a good overview of the changes which he calls, "worse, worser and even worser". Here is the new fee tier structure based on monthly sales:

• less than $3,000 – 2.9% + $0.30
• $3,000 – $9,999.99 – 2.5% + $0.30
• $10,000 – $99,999.99 – 2.2% + $0.30
• $100,000 or more – 1.9% + $0.30

To give you an idea, as of today, here’s what you pay: 2% + $0.20 per transaction. While Google makes out that customers may see a decrease, I doubt the percentage is that high for customers with over $100,000 a month in sales.

The other news is that the fee credit provided by purchasing AdWords is also going to be removed. When I signed up for Google Checkout last month, I was pleasantly surprised to see the fee credit. It’s certainly disappointing to see the credit removed – wonder how that will impact AdWords sales which in turn will affect AdSense publishers.

Also, if your customer is located in another country, you will need to tack on another 1% fee on the purchase amount.

Update: Rich has a good overview of the changes from a UK perspective.