Google Street View in Google Maps is a good service to explore just about any location.

Most of Street View is focused on landmarks and roads that are accessible to Google with its Street View car. Now Google has officially introduced its Street View trike, which is aimed at photographing pedestrian only locations.

The Street View trike is a bicycle with three wheels, a mounted camera and a specially decorated unit with imaging and GPS technology.

Google is inviting users to give it suggestions of places they would like to see added to Street View that are off the beaten path. Locations can be nominated within six categories:

• Parks & Trails
• University Campuses
• Theme Parks & Zoos
• Pedestrian Malls (ie: outdoor shopping areas, boardwalks)
• Landmarks
• Sports Venues (ie: golf courses, racing tracks, stadium grounds)

Nominations will be open until October 28 and can be submitted here. Google will go through all the suggestions and allow the public to cast their final votes on a winner from each category for the Street view trike to visit.

In August more than 25 billion videos were viewed, with Google sites accounting for more than 10 billion.

Google sites remained as the top U.S. video property in August as it surpassed the 10 billion videos viewed threshold, representing 40 percent of all videos viewed online. YouTube accounted for 99 percent of all videos viewed on Google sites.

Microsoft sites ranked second with 547 million (2.2%) followed by Viacom Digital with 539 million videos viewed (2.1%) and Hulu with 488 million (1.9%).

More than 161 million viewers watched an average of 157 million videos per viewer during the month of August. Google sites pulled in 121.4 million unique viewers during the month (82.8 videos per viewer) followed by Microsoft sites with 54.9 million viewers (10 videos per viewer) and Yahoo sites with 51. 6 million viewers (6.9 videos per viewer).

Tremor Media ranked as the top video ad network during the month with a potenial reach of 68 million viewers, or 42.2 percent of the total viewing audience. YuMe Video Netowrk ranked second with a potential reach of 59.1 million viewers (36.7 % reach) followed by ScanScout Network with 57. 6 million viewers (35.7%).

Other highlights from the report include:

The top video ad networks in terms of their actual delivered reach were: Tremor Media Video Network (19.5 percent penetration of all online video viewers), BrightRoll Video Network (16.2 percent penetration), and BroadbandEnterprises.com (14.8 percent penetration).

• 81.6 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video.

• The average online video viewer watched 582 minutes of video, or 9.7 hours.

• 120.5 million viewers watched nearly 10 billion videos on YouTube.com (82.6 videos per viewer).

• 44.9 million viewers watched 340 million videos on MySpace.com (7.6 videos per viewer).

• The average Hulu viewer watched 12.7 videos, totaling 1 hour and 17 minutes of videos per viewer.

• The duration of the average online video was 3.7 minutes.

Google sites ranked as the most visited Internet property globally with 854 million unique visitors in July, an increase of 18 percent during the past year.

Google usage is more common in certain global markets than others. In July, 29. 8 percent of total time spent online in Brazil was spent on Google sites, with India only slightly lower at 28.9 percent. The next highest global market was Ireland at 15.9 percent.

“It’s interesting that the dynamics of Google usage would be so similar in Brazil and India given that the two markets are on opposite sides of the world and quite different culturally from one another,” said Alex Banks, managing director of comScore Latin America. “As it turns out, there are interesting similarities between Brazil and India as emerging Internet markets.

Google’s prevalence in these markets can perhaps best be explained by the fact that the time at which these markets really began to develop and flourish was around the same time that Google was becoming a major player in the search landscape. As a result, Google became the dominant Internet brand in these markets and its success appears to have bled from search into other areas of the web like social networking.”

In Brazil, Google sites account for 88.4 percent of all searches conducted, and had a commanding share of time spent in social networking with Orkut (68.2%), maps with Google Maps (63.9%), multimedia with YouTube (82.9%). Google also had nearly half of all time spent in the blogs category with Blogger (47.6%) and email with Gmail (46.8%).

In India, Google sites accounted for 88.4 percent of all searches conducted, and had commanding share of time spent in social networking with Orkut (68.2%), Google Maps (63.9%), multimedia with YouTube (82.8%). It also had nearly half of the time spent in the blogs category with Blogger (47.6%) and email with Gmail (46.8%).

Google continued to dominate, capturing 72.39 percent of all U.S. searches for the month.

Yahoo trailed with 16.36 percent of the search market share, falling 19 percent year-over-year.

MSN Search also saw its search share dip 17 percent year-over-year to grab 5.50 percent of the market.

Ask.com received 4.07 percent of the search market and dropped just one percent year-over-year.

Google was the only major search engine to see its search share increase, rising 8 percent year-over-year.

The length of search queries has increased over the past year, according to Hitwise. Longer search queries, averaging searches of five to more than eight words in length have increased 8 percent between March 2009 and March 2008.

Searches of eight or more words increased 20 percent. The same time period showed that shorter search queries – those averaging one to four words long – have decreased 2 percent. Searches of two words accounted for the majority of searches, amounting to 23.17 percent of all queries.

Search engines continue to be the most popular way Internet users navigate to key industry categories.  Comparing March 2009 with March 2008, business and finance, sports, online video and social networking categories showed double-digit increases in their share of traffic coming directly from search engines.

Webmasters can use GData to access feeds from the Google Message Center without having to continually check your messages in Webmaster tools

The Message Center GData API allows webmasters to retrieve all messages, mark them as read or unread, and delete messages.

The Google Webmaster Central Blog provides more details.

Retrieve messages: The messages feed contains all the messages sent to your account. These messages have important information about your verified sites. Examples of messages include infinite spaces warnings and crawl rate change notifications.

Mark messages as read or unread: In order to keep track of new communications from Google, you can mark your messages as read or unread, the same way that you would manage your inbox. If you retrieve a single message, this message will be automatically marked as read.

Delete messages: It’s possible to delete messages using the GData API. However, be careful because if you delete a message through the API it will also be deleted in your Webmaster Tools account, as both interfaces share the same data.

For more information visit the GData website. The homepage of the Webmaster Tools GData API has a section on message feeds, and details about protocol.

Users will now be able to see tax and shipping cost displayed alongside the product listings for which merchants have submitted this information. Google says that by providing this information it is a good way to maximize the visibility of your products during the holiday shopping season. It also helps buyers when they are making purchasing decisions.

The Google Base Help page explains how to submit information.

You can submit this information in two ways:
1. Set account-level default values in your Google Base account: These preferences will serve as the default values for all of your items. This is the easiest way to set up tax and shipping for your account.
2. Include item-level override values in your data feeds or via the Google Base API: These values will override your account-level default settings for that item.
To submit tax information there are three options.
1. Opt to not charge tax.
2. Set a tax rate based on the state an item ships to.
3. Use an estimate based on the destination ZIP code. Note: To estimate the tax rate, we use data from Tax Data Systems based on the destination ZIP code.
For shipping there are also three options.
1. Specify a flat shipping rate (or free shipping).
2. Define custom tables if the shipping rate you charge varies by price, weight, or number of items. Note: If you define a table based on the number of items, for now, we’ll use the rate in the first row only.
3. Apply a carrier-calculated rate if the shipping rate you charge is based on rates from UPS, FedEx, or USPS. Note: We use daily rates for UPS, and standard (non-retail counter) rates for FedEx.

Google also has tips for Google Product Search merchants.

From the Google Base Blog: Include unique product identifiers: In addition to using our five required attributes, be sure to include the recommended attributes relevant to your products, such as product identifiers like MPN, UPC, or ISBN. By including these, you’re giving us more information to help us include your products on Google Product Search product pages (our merchant comparison pages) when multiple merchants are selling the same product.

Use effective titles: There’s nothing like an accurate title to tell shoppers at a glance exactly what you’re selling, so be sure to use detailed and descriptive titles for your products. Do keep in mind that Product Search truncates titles to under 70 characters, so avoid exceedingly lengthy titles.

Write accurate descriptions: Descriptions offer an overview of the product you’re selling, so make sure that your descriptions are accurate and more than a few words in length. But if your descriptions are over 150 characters, you may want to shorten them to only include the most crucial information, as Product Search truncates longer descriptions.

Submit your feeds frequently: Lastly, remember to submit your data feeds regularly — up to once a day — to ensure that your product information is current for shoppers.