According the the Google Adsense Blog :

We’re constantly looking for ways to improve AdSense by developing and supporting features which drive the best monetization results for our publishers. Sometimes, this requires retiring existing features so we can focus our efforts on the ones that will be most effective in the long term. For this reason, we will be retiring the AdSense Referrals program during the last week of August.

Even though it’s sad news for many people, I really do understand the “focus” problem they had. We have to deal with this reality everyday and it causes many headaches…

Bye bye referrals! Now let’s hope the adsense team will be able to use all this extra focus to offer us an even better service!

For those of you webmasters who are using Google Analytics to monitor your website’s stats and who are wondering why nobody came to visit them today, note that the stats service is currently on hold. Neither your stats or your visitors are lost!
There is a temporary reporting delay within Google Analytics accounts. For most accounts, reporting is current through this past Saturday night. Please note that no data will be lost - data will continue to be collected and processed during this time.

Google Analytics Blog »

Here is a Google Adword I’ve just found on the blog…

I really don’t know if it’s a bug or a very brilliant ad, for I’m sure it’s clicked a lot!

I’ve just read a very interesting article about Google on the NY Times website entitled Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine, have a look!

Read the article »

Google added recently the GMarkerManager class to the Google Maps API. This class is used to manage visibility of hundreds of markers on a map, based on the map’s current viewport and zoom level.

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Here is a little trick to use if you’d like to know more about a website’s indexation on Google.

The “link:” option

This option allows the webmasters to see rapidly what are the websites, known by googlebot, that are linking to a particular website.

The “site:” option

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Viacom, owner of MTV and Comedy Central, complains that almost 160,000 unauthorized clips of Viacom’s programming have been available on YouTube and that these clips had been viewed more than 1.5 billion times.

Google said that it and YouTube had yet to see the lawsuit but added they feel “confident that YouTube has respected the legal rights of copyright holders and believe the courts will agree.”

• blogs.business2.com
• money.cnn.com

Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion last year.