Google is pleased to announce that they have acquired GrandCentral Communications (http://www.grandcentral.com), a company that provides services for managing your voice communications. GrandCentral is an innovative service that lets users integrate all of their existing phone numbers and voice mailboxes into one account, which can be accessed from the web. Google thinks GrandCentral's technology fits well into their efforts to provide services that enhance the collaborative exchange of information between our users.

GrandCentral offers many features that complement the phone services you already use. If you have multiple phone numbers (e.g., home, work, cell), you get one phone number that you can set to ring all, some, or none of your phones, based on who's calling. This way, your phone number is tied to you, and not your location or job. The service also gives you one central voice mailbox. You can listen to your voicemails online or from any phone, forward them to anybody, add the caller to your address book, block a caller as spam, and a lot more. You can even listen in on voicemail messages from your phone while they are being recorded, or switch a call from your cell phone to your desk phone and back again. All in all, you'll have a lot more control over your phones.

Google says we're are really excited to welcome the GrandCentral team to Google. While we're moving their technology over to Google's network, a limited number of invitations will be available to register for a GrandCentral beta account. If you have a U.S. telephone number, you can sign up for an invitation at www.grandcentral.com. Current GrandCentral customers will continue to have uninterrupted access to the service.

Source: googleblog.blogspot.com

In mid April, Google released a new way to remove content from Google. Since then, people have been using it but there has been a lot of confusion on how it works and doesn't work.

A Google Group thread (http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help-Tools/browse_thread/t
hread/4654434ab4e95fd7) has dozens of posts with questions on why pages they remove, still appear. Or why it may take so long to remove a page.

Due to that, Susan Moskwa, of Google Webmaster Central, promised clearer instructions on the Google URL removal tool and also provided more details on what you should do to remove content from Google's index.

"I'm sorry that you've been frustrated by the URL removal process! Just to clarify, here's what's required in order to get a URL successfully removed:

If you want to remove an individual file (a web page, an image, etc.), you can do any one of the following:
-Make sure that the URL returns an HTTP 404 or 410 status code
-Block the URL using a meta noindex tag
-Block the URL using a robots.txt file

However, if you want to remove an entire directory (or an entire website), you have to block that content using a robots.txt file. Just returning a 404 isn't enough; this is because it's possible for a directory to return a 404 status code, but still serve out files underneath it. Robotting out the entire directory ensures that all of its children are disallowed as well."

Source: seroundtable.com