Today, Google.org announced its new core philanthropic initiatives: Climate Change, Poverty, & Emerging Threats.

Google.org is the public service component of the Googleplex machine. In the past, Google.org has helped in many different areas, but without a real specific focus. But today (17 Jan. ‘08), Google.org’s mandate to “make the world a better place” has decided on a few very specific foci, by zeroing in on five core initiatives.

Predict & Prevent

Google.org’s Predict & Prevent initiative focuses on empowering local communities to predict and prevent events before they become crises by identifying ‘hot spots’ and enabling a rapid response. The first step of this new program is targeted in Southeast Asia and tropical Africa, with grants given to Innovative Support to Emergencies, Diseases and Disasters, Global Health and Security Initiative, and Clark Labs.

Inform & Empower to Improve Public Services

Google.org’s Inform & Empower initiative is aimed at improving the flow of vital information to increase basic services for the developing world. The program is at first targeted in India and East Africa, with grants given to Pratham, the Centre for Budget & Policy Studies, and the Center for Policy Research.

Fuel the Growth of Small & Medium-Sized Enterprises

Google.org’s SME support is intended to lower transaction costs in SME investment and to create opportunities to access larger financial markets. The program is initially focused on the developing world, with initial partner TechnoServe.

Develop Renewable Energy Cheaper Than Coal (RE<C)

Google.org’s RE<C support sets a goal of producing one gigawatt of renewable energy capacity that’s cheaper than coal. Initially launched in November 2007, Google.org is expanding its investment in this area by supporting eSolar (pdf), a solar power oriented power plant technology company.

Accelerate the Commercialization of Plug-In Vehicles (RechargeIT)

Google.org’s RechargeIT initiative aims to reduce CO₂ emissions, cut oil use, and stabilize the electrical grid by accelerating hybrid electric vehicle adoption. Unlike the other four initiatives announced today, Google.org specifically mentioned that its investments in this area will mostly go to for-profit companies that are working in this area.

Google Giving

It’s refreshing to see a company so dedicated to giving back. Google sometimes has to deal with a number of critics, but their Google.org division seems to be fully intent of fulfilling their mandate of “making the world a better place”.

Posted by Eric Herboso.
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BREAKING NEWS:
At pubcon, Matt Cutts of Google just announced that they will start limiting search results to two subdomains for any one web search. This is a drastic revision, and may very well affect your site, possibly very negatively. Thankfully, the announcement specifically stated that the changes would be rolled out only in the next couple of weeks, so you still have time to prepare.

What This Means

In the past, search engine results have treated subdomains as though they were different sites. If your company is QWERTY, Inc., for example, and you sell widgets and fizzsnaps, then you might use widgets.qwerty.com as your widgets site, and fizzsnaps.qwerty.com as your fizzsnaps site. In this way, you could keep using the same branding for all your sites by using the same domain, but use different sites for each product.

But now, that logic has been perverted by google’s recent announcement, because now, no matter what the search is, your domain can at most occupy two slots on any search engine result. Which means a search on “qwerty”, for example, would at most show the www subdomain and your most popular other subdomain. Other slots will go to other people’s sites.

Even worse is if you do not own your own domain, but are just renting out a subdomain–now, for any given search, you are almost GUARANTEED not to get into the search results AT ALL.

How To Make Sure Your Site Does Not Take a Hit

If you are currently relying on subdomains for the different departments of your site, now is a good time to start thinking about setting up different domains for each of your departments. Do not abandon your old sites, especially if you have long term seo investment already in them, but start up new sites with unique one-page content on each, that links strongly back to your old domains. Once these pages reach sufficient pagerank, they should be able to replace the positions that you will have lost from Google’s drastic change.

If, however, you unfortunately are hosting your site under a mere subdomain, then this is the call for you to get your own domain. When this new policy rolls into place (Matt Cutts said it would be “in the next couple of weeks”), your site will be effectively dropped from all search engine results, period. The only way to fix this, unfortunately, is to get your own domain.

Posted by Eric Herboso.

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