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Google News adds quotation search

Google News has added a feature to track quotations in news articles. For example, if you search for a person's name in Google News, if there is a recent quotation from that figure, it will pop up next to the results. Clicking on their name takes you to a listing of quotations from various Google news sources associated with that person. You can then search those quotations to further hone in on specific topics or to find a key phrase or citation.

[via Official Google News Blog]


Google advises best practices in moving domains

Moving a website from one domain to another while retaining page rank, search results and other Google information can be a daunting process. Thankfully, Google has outlined some of the best practices on their Webmaster Central blog to limit any complications and help keep your site well crawled in Google's database.

[via Google Webmaster Central Blog]


Remove country restrictions on YouTube videos

More and more YouTube videos are starting to restrict viewership to certain parts of the world (most likely because of global distribution licensing issues) or to users 18 and up (which requires you to be logged in to view). Google Operating System has come up with a great way to get around these restrictions so that you can watch videos in any country, regardless of the "limitations." Simply change the YouTube URL from youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEOID to youtube.com/v/VIDEOID -- this redirects to the equivalent of the embedded YouTube player, which does not check for location based restrictions.

[via Google Operating System]


YouTube changes policy enforcement system

YouTube has updated their policy enforcement system (the system that determines when or if you are kicked off of YouTube) to attempt to be more equitable to the users and the community.

In the past, videos found to violate YouTube's community guidelines were kept on a user's record. Now, those violation expire after six months. Any users that had one or two violations before April 16, 2008 now have clean slates going forward. NOTE: This only applies to Community Guidelines violations -- not copyright claims -- those violations (or strikes) remain permanent.

Additionally, the notification process that a video has been removed due to a violation or copyright complaint has been modified to include notice as soon as the user logs into YouTube, instead of just an e-mailed notice.

YouTube is also experimenting with a probationary policy of sorts known as "muting" accounts -- that is, users will still be able to watch videos while logged in, but they won't be able to post new content. Right now this muting process will last two weeks for any user who receives more than two Community Guidelines violations in six months. YouTube will be evaluating user feedback to see if this system will be expanded to other violations in the future.

[via the YouTube Blog]

Round-up of other Google news from earlier this week

• Google Maps adds traffic predictions - Google has followed Live Maps' lead and introduced traffic predictions to Google Maps.
• Google publicly launches Website Optimizer No longer in beta, Google Website Optimizer is now live. Website Optimizer allows webmasters to run tests to see what design is most effective in reaching users.
• Google releases Picasa 2.7 for Linux -- Google has launched Picasa 2.7 for Linux. Mac users are still Picasa-less. As we'v discussed before, Picasa is part of Google's contribution to the Wine project, as it ships with a lightly patched version of Wine -- making the Linux port much less programming intensive than writing a Cocoa (or we suppose, Carbon) variation from scratch.