Catching up on a week of new stuff from the GOOG.

Google and DISH Network may be teaming up for a TV search.

AdWords released a new feature for advertising on the Google Content Network that filters out below-the-fold inventory.

Google Webmaster Tools now offers Fetch as Googlebot Mobile and the ability for page owners to claim their Sidewiki entry.

Google Public Data Explorer is a new Labs application.

Google Maps served up three updates:  Read more... (132 words, estimated 32 secs reading time)

• A new imagery update was released for Maps and Earth. It includes new imagery for areas affected by the Chile earthquake.

If you want to learn more about how fast your site loads, then you’ll want to check out a new feature from Google Webmaster Central. It’s appropriately (and a bit vanilla-y) called Site Performance and right now it’s an experimental feature.

It will measure the speed of your site and then make suggestions for a quicker load time.

The site speed stats are provided via aggregated data gathered from users who have the Google Toolbar installed – and have opted into enhanced features. Sites with low traffic levels won’t be able to use this feature because of the way data is collected.

Google is making it easier to identify where some sites exist geographically. Normally, you can tell this information from the URL, such as .ca for Canada or .br for Brazil.

But when it comes to TLDs such as .com and .net, it’s not always clear. Google is adding country-specific information to the green URL line in the search results. Here’s an example per the Google Webmaster Central blog:

You can tell Google what country your web site is associated with. Log on to your Webmaster Tools account. Then go to Site configuration > Settings > Geographic Target.

Google has updated the Keywords user interface in Webmaster Tools. The update includes:

• Daily data updates
• Details on how often specific keywords were found
• Displaying up to 10 URLs that contain a keyword
• Significance column comparing each keyword’s frequency to the most popular keyword’s frequency

This tool really helps you know how Google sees your site. You can quickly recognize problem areas or address hacked content.

Have you checked out the new user interface? Let us know your first impressions of the update by leaving a comment.

Google recently launched a new feature that uses RSS and Atom feeds to discover new web pages. This helps Google index new webpages faster than traditional methods.

As a result, you’ll want to make sure that your robots.txt file allows Googlebot to crawl your feeds. To learn more about robots.txt from Google’s standpoint, click here.

In other feed news related to Google, AdSense for Feeds is now available directly in Blogger. You can find the integration under the “Monetize” tab in the Blogger dashboard.  Read more... (137 words, estimated 33 secs reading time)

Google had another busy week pushing out updates. That’s really no surprise considering Apple released product refreshes and Microsoft released Windows 7. Google hasn’t let any major update from any competitor go by without their own news and this week was no different.

We’ve already covered Google getting a deal with Twitter (similar to Bing’s deal with Twitter) as well as a new social search experiment set up in Google Labs.

Here are 7 updates that are slightly minor but you’ll still want to know about:  Read more... (196 words, estimated 47 secs reading time)

Google is releasing into Webmaster Tools Labs a couple of features that help you view things from their angle. The two features are “Fetch as Googlebot” and “Malware Details.”

Fetch as Googlebot lets you view your web pages as Google’s famous indexing spider. This will answer a question Google (and SEOs) gets asked ALL. THE. TIME.

Malware details show you code snippets on your website that Google has determined are malicious. The goal is to help streamline the often tedious process of ridding your site of malware.  Read more... (130 words, estimated 31 secs reading time)

There was a ton of news about Google today (in addition to the two [see here and here] we’ve already covered today), so let’s dive right in:

Search Options was released on the mobile version of web search for Android, iPhone, and Palm WebOS. By the way, that’s the second time in a week where a mobile update is for those three types of devices. Blackberry and Nokia phones are noticeably missing while omitting Windows Mobile is no real surprise.

Google Maps released a major update, with improved details for parks, bike paths, and college campuses.  Read more... (286 words, estimated 1:09 mins reading time)

The Google Webmaster Central team has developed a new feature to assist with duplicate content issues. It’s called parameter handling and it allows you to tell Google what to ignore or pay attention to when it comes to indexing your site.

This is great for the SEO that doesn’t have quick access to add code regarding duplicate content to a website. However, these parameters will be treated as “hints” by Google. Getting that code or URL rewrites into your website are still ultimately important.

The Google Webmaster Central team has made some changes to a couple of the website verification methods in Webmaster Tools. Here’s what you need to know:

Meta Tag Verification – Previously, this had to be associated with an email address in your Google account. Obviously, changing email addresses could pose verification issues. Now, the meta tag verification does not require an email address.

HTML File Verification – The change here has to do with the use (or lack thereof) of 404 error pages for non-existent URLs on websites. Websites that didn’t use 404s couldn’t use the HTML file verification. Just upload the new HTML file that Google Webmaster Central provides for verification.  Read more... (144 words, estimated 35 secs reading time)