It’s kinda like the Google News “Elections” section, but with different filtering options on news content and added data related to this year’s campaigns. The new elections hub has predefined filters for the major U.S. presidential candidates (President Obama along with seven Republicans), as well as some of the primary issues being discussed (healthcare, government spending, etc.)

Google News offers similar filtering options for candidates, like this breakout of Mitt Romney news.

Where the hub gets unique is in its data and localization. With the Iowa Caucuses just a day away, the On the Ground section maps news and video content from around the state.

There’s also a Trends page that lets users compare search data, Google News mentions and YouTube video views for each of the eight candidates.

Google launched a similar hub during the 2008 presidential election, and later also launched a Onebox helping people find their local polling stations.

Postscript: Google has also created a Google+ page related to its politics/elections hub.

Search Engine Land reader Alex, who works in the hospitality industry, tipped us to this development and at least one of our SEL editors was able to replicate it on a search for “las vegas hotels.”

The Hotel Finder ad is listed as a “comparison ad” and is separated very slightly from the regular AdWords listings below it. It occupies premium space at the top of Google’s search results and pushes hotel ads and organic listings further down the page. The comparison ad invites searchers to select a hotel quality level and click a “Book hotels” button. It’s quite similar to the mortgage comparison ads that Google launched in late 2009. Comparison ads are now also available for credit cards, checking accounts, savings accounts and CDs (the money kind, not music).

Clicking on the Hotel Finder comparison ad leads the searcher to the Google Hotel Finder, an experiment that Google launched in July.

The Hotel Finder is a somewhat innovative hotel search tool that mainly separates itself from some other sites by letting users draw shapes on a map to indicate where they’re looking for a place to stay. From the Hotel Finder, searchers can book hotel rooms directly via Google’s Hotel Price Ads — an ad program that seems to mainly consist of third-party advertisers, not hotels themselves.

I won’t claim to speak for anyone in hospitality businesses, but as our tipster Alex said, “this is huge for the hotel industry.” These Hotel Finder ads, if and when they become more than a test, would be the first that aren’t related to the financial industry.

Cadbury posted on their Google + page a picture of their latest milk chocolate bars named “Dairy Milk+ Bars.” The Milk+ bars come in two flavors, Sergey Brin & Larry Page – i.e. the co-founders of Google.

As part of a social media experiment, Cadbury posted this on their Google + page, saying:

Remember our 1kg Dairy Milk+ Bars? We’ve had some special personalised ones made, including these delicious ones for Google founders Larry & Sergey. Whose name would you like to see on a bar?

Hat tip to WebProNews for spotting this first.

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These are a few of about 100 ideas that Google is reportedly toying with inside Google X, the name of a “top-secret lab” somewhere in the Bay Area. The New York Times wrote about it this weekend after speaking to a dozen people that are aware of the project.

According to the Times, robots (and I don’t mean the .txt file) play a big part in Google X:

Robots figure prominently in many of the ideas. They have long captured the imagination of Google engineers, including Mr. Brin, who has already attended a conference through robot instead of in the flesh.

Fleets of robots could assist Google with collecting information, replacing the humans that photograph streets for Google Maps, say people with knowledge of Google X. Robots born in the lab could be destined for homes and offices, where they could assist with mundane tasks or allow people to work remotely, they say.

Though many of the projects are secret, the Times article mentions a couple that we’ve written about before. Those automated, driverless cars are being developed in Google X; the Times says Google is thinking about manufacturing them and using them to show ads to passengers inside.

A Google spokeswoman emphasized to the Times that Google’s financial investments in these projects “are very small by comparison” to the company’s investment in its core products.

Although most of the projects are highly conceptual, the Times found two sources who said at least one of the ideas would be released by the end of this year.

(In case the small print on the image above is too small, that’s not a real/official Google X logo. It’s an image of our own making.)

On first glance, there’s almost an overwhelming amount of information in Think Insights … thus the “data porn” reference in our headline. If you love statistics and marketing, you could pretty easily get lost in there.

It’s part of the ThinkWithGoogle.com domain and comes from the same group that debuted the Think Quarterly online magazine earlier this year.

Google calls Think Insights a “digital cheat sheet” for marketers.

Here you will find a selection of the research, insights and ideas — from both inside and outside of Google — that informs our strategies, decisions, and products. There are videos, articles, interviews, and studies designed to bring you everything from high-level inspiration to deck-ready data points. Consider this your digital cheat sheet.

There are research reports, infographics, video interviews and statistics (broken down by industry, marketing objective and more), and you get the impression that Think Insights is only going to get bigger — much bigger — over time.

It’s an interesting product and one that will likely be popular with a lot of online marketers.

Inside Google’s Time Warp

As searchers, we want fresh results, which Google usually provides. But Google also offers many other services, such as Google Docs, Gmail, and so on, that rely on much more accurate time stamping. Like most other online services, Google uses a service called the “Network Time Protocol” (NTP), which periodically checks a computer’s time against a more accurate server, such as an atomic clock. NTP also takes into account variable factors like how long the NTP server takes to reply, or the speed of the network between you and the server when setting a to-the-second or better time on the computer you’re using. So most of the time (so to speak) you can rely on Google to be spot-on when it comes to time-stamping everything you do.

Problem: Leap years. Of even more concern: Leap seconds. As Christopher Pascoe, Google Site Reliability Engineer writes on the Google blog, “It turns out that being on a revolving imperfect sphere floating in space, being reshaped by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, and being dragged around by gravitational forces makes your rotation somewhat irregular. These fluctuations in Earth’s rotational speed mean that even very accurate clocks, like the atomic clocks used by global timekeeping services, occasionally have to be adjusted slightly to bring them in line with ‘solar time.’”

For most of us, that second of flux is something that (if we even notice it) is irrelevant. But for Google, which may process thousands or even millions of events during that transitional second, this can lead to major problems.

According to Pascoe, “Our systems are engineered for data integrity, and some will refuse to work if their time is sufficiently “wrong.” We saw some of our clustered systems stop accepting work on a small scale during the leap second in 2005, and while it didn’t affect the site or any of our data, we wanted to fix such issues once and for all.”

Google’s solution? Adding what they call a “leap smear,”—injecting code that would effectively “lie” to its own servers during the day that a leap second was taking place. Pascoe again: “We modified our internal NTP servers to gradually add a couple of milliseconds to every update, varying over a time window before the moment when the leap second actually happens. This meant that when it became time to add an extra second at midnight, our clocks had already taken this into account, by skewing the time over the course of the day.”

Lest you think this was a trivial patch, Google actually developed some serious math to solve the problem, and performed two “smears” (one going back in time, the other pushing into the future) and tested them using about 10,000 servers, comparing “standard atomic time,” their own servers and a variety of public NTP clients.

The result? Google has figured out how halt the ravages of time (at least in this case). For more of the science and math behind the fix, check out the official Google blog post.

Telephone support for AdWords was first announced earlier this year in April and it saw some coverage. However since that time Google has been silent about it. I spoke to Brougher roughly a week ago and was surprised to hear how large and sophisticated the operation has become.

A Thousand Reps Servicing 60 Countries

Google has invested heavily in building an organization that can address calls from 60 countries around the world. The company has more than 1,000 Google-employed customer service people divided between email and phone support. The phone reps are now handling “more than 10,000 calls a week,” according to Brougher. The reps are located in several regional call centers around the world.

Google is learning a great deal about its customers through these phone calls. This may seem an obvious point but it’s giving Google more insight into advertiser needs and issues than in the past. And many of these insights can be used by marketing and product development people. This offers a kind of virtuous cycle or loop between customer care and marketing and product development. Too many companies treat their customer care organizations purely as a “cost center” and fail to see customer service as a strategic asset with a wide range of organizational benefits.

Brougher understands very clearly the benefit of this organization for Google. She lobbied the executive team to make significant investments up front that now appear to be paying off.

“People Like to Talk”

One of the surprises for Google is the nature of the inquiries it’s receiving on the phone. Google has had email-based support for AdWords for a long time but the calls coming in are qualitatively different. Calls are more expansive, friendly and less pointed. “People like to talk,” Brougher joked. Beyond this, she explained, calls coming from different countries are also quite different from one another, reflecting various cultural differences.

Google is encountering numerous first time small business advertisers who want education and help. (Roughly 20 percent of the calls Google is receiving are from new advertisers.) With telephone calls Google is in a much better position to provide small business support than with email and online tools exclusively.

Brougher is also the one who leads the group that manages AdWords reseller relationships, Google’s network of publishers and partners that sell to small businesses. As with Google’s move into direct small business sales (Offers, AdWords Express) — the customer support reps don’t do any outbound sales — the creation of this customer care organization reflects a “cultural shift” and maturation within Google.

I asked why Google didn’t simply outsource customer service to a third party, as so many US companies do. She said that Google is able to deliver a much higher level of quality and service by having all the reps in house.

Positive ROI from Customer Service

Beyond the fact of its existence and size, most impressive perhaps is the rigor with which Google is tracking the ROI of its customer service investment. I asked Brougher about ROI because service is often a “fuzzy” and intangible thing that doesn’t map directly to the bottom line.

She outlined several ways in which Google uses data and analytics to track the efficacy of its individual reps and overall customer service effort. According to her, Google is definitely seeing a positive ROI and spending lift from advertisers touched by Google AdWords customer service.

Postscript: Google contacted me to clarify that the 1,000 reps include email support people. Accordingly, they’re not all dedicated to phone support.

Google Hotel Finder is a search tool specifically designed to make it easier to find and compare hotels for your trips. The features include:

• Draw simple shapes to define the neighborhoods (yes, more than one!) that interest you.
• See popular locations on maps with highlights
• One click adds hotels to your shortlist, where you can review them easily.
• See if you will get a good deal by by comparing a hotel’s current price with its typical one.

It starts with the filter on the left hand side that gives you various options such as:

• Location Filters (with drawing shapes
• Dates for your stay
• Price point filters
• Hotel ratings & user rating filters

Here is a screen shot of the side bar:

Once you type in a location, you can then position the map with your clicker and draw lines around the specific location you want to stay. Google will then show you hotels in that area.

Clicking on the hotel icons on the map will show you more details about the hotel. You can then book the hotel or add it to your shortlist:

Booking a hotel is driven by Google Hotel Ads:

If you are unsure, just add it to your shortlist and you can compare the hotels on your list. Google also shows you if the price the hotel is currently offering is a good price based on the average prices the hotel charges throughout the year.

There are many hotel search engines, including hotels.com and many others. Will this Google Hotel Finder last or will it die off with many of the other Google experiments? I am not sure but I bet you many of the hotel search engines are a bit worried.

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• Google Expanding Its Hotel Prices Experiment In Google Maps
• First Look: Hotel Price Ads In Google.com Search Results
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Today, Google has completely removed the Google Directory as a Google service. Going to directory.google.com will show you a notice that reads the “Google Directory is no longer available.” Yesterday the directory was live but today, Google quietly and without warning removed it.

I believe the Google Directory was one of the first additional links added to Google, but you have to assume it was rarely used by searchers in the past few years.

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Over the years, Google has continued to add new products, services, portals, and features to their portfolio. Keeping up on all that Google has to offer has been hard.

There are pages that show Google products options, or new products and pages that have Google ad options and the list goes on and on. One single page of all of Google’s services and products is hard to put together, so Google designed wdyl.com to let users search for the Google product they want.

How well does it work? Well, I searched for email trying to see if Google would return Gmail, the very popular Google email service, as a top listing. Guess what? Gmail is the second to last option on the right column.

Let’s not get into asking Google to find a search engine. I guess Google’s relevancy algorithm is not yet there for this service?

Here is an image of the search results for ‘email’:

Hat tip to TechCrunch for covering this.

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