Your Web, Half a Second Sooner

At Google we’re constantly trying to make the web faster — not just our corner of it, but the whole thing. Over the past few days we’ve been rolling out a new and improved version of show_ads.js, the piece of JavaScript used by more than two million publishers to put AdSense advertisements on their web pages. The new show_ads is small and fast, built so that your browser can turn its attention back to its main task — working on the rest of the web page — as soon as possible. This change is now making billions of web pages every day load faster by half a second or more.

The old show_ads did lots of work: loading additional scripts, gathering information about the web page it was running on, and building the ad request to send back to Google. The new show_ads has a different job. It creates a friendly (same-origin) iframe on the web page, and starts the old script with a new name, show_ads_impl, running inside that iframe. The _impl does all the heavy lifting, and in the end the ads look exactly the same. But there’s a substantial speed advantage: many things happening inside an iframe don’t block the web browser’s other work.

How much of an effect this has depends on context: a page with nothing but ads on it isn’t going to get any faster. But on the real-world sites we tested, the latency overhead from our ads is basically gone. Page load times with the new asynchronous AdSense implementation are statistically indistinguishable from load times for the same pages with no ads at all.

The new show_ads is a drop-in replacement for the old one: web site owners don’t need to do anything to get this speed-up. But these dynamically-populated friendly iframes are finicky beasts. For now, we’re only using this technique on Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer 8, with more to come once we’re sure that it plays well with other browsers.

And what if you’ve built a page that loads AdSense ads and then manipulates them in exotic ways not compatible with friendly iframes? (This is the web, after all, land of “What do you mean that’s ‘not supported’? I tried it, and it worked!”) You can set “google_enable_async = false” for any individual ad slot to revert to the old blocking behavior. But if your site loads ads in some tortuous way because you were looking for latency benefits, consider giving the straightforward invocation of show_ads.js a whirl. Because now, we’re fast.

By Michael Kleber, Ads Latency Team

Even more ways for developers to optimize with AdSense

Last year, we announced that developers can earn revenue by showing ads in two of our products, the GoogleBar for Local Searches on a Google Map and the Custom Search element for site-restricted and other curated searches. Today, we're happy to announce two new AdSense product updates to help monetize your website.

AdSense for search ads only
AdSense for search allows publishers to add Google search functionality to their site and monetize from search ads. The Custom Search element is a prime example. However, despite the power and flexibility of the element, you may want to show ads next to your own non-Google search results. With AdSense for search ads only, developers can now include AdSense for search ads on their pages, paired with their own homegrown search results.

AdSense for Ajax
The other side of AdSense is ads targeted to content on your site. In this case, developers turn to AdSense for content. But what if your content isn't crawlable by search engines or uses Ajax to dynamically update without a page refresh? Now you can deliver AdSense for content ads via AdSense for Ajax, which allows you to give hints about your uncrawlable content. Even better, it allows you to refresh the ads dynamically when there is a context change.

If your site is a good fit for either, or both, of these offerings, sign-up for AdSense for Ajax or AdSense for search ads only today! Learn more about them from the AdSense Blog post.

By Adam Feldman and Mike Brandell, AdSense Team

Introducing Google's DoubleClick For Publishers API

Today, we announced the next generation of our ad serving technology for online publishers, the new DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) from Google. We are pleased to announce that the new version of DFP comes with a modern API that enables publishers and third-parties to customize and extend the product.

The new API is available to publishers who use DFP, as well as to third-parties and vendors who would like to build applications on top of DFP. A growing community of developers are already working on sales, order management, workflow and data visualization tools. We've incorporated feedback on the existing DART for Publishers API and believe the new API is a significant step forward. It uses SOAP, a standard and widely-adopted messaging technology that uses HTTP requests to transmit and receive XML data between your client and our servers. This means you can use it with virtually any programming language of your choice. We have a wealth of public documentation available online and there are numerous code samples and client libraries ready for you to download.

To learn more about the new API, there are a few places to get started:

• The DoubleClick for Publishers API blog:
  http://doubleclickpublishersapi.blogspot.com/


• The Google Code site that hosts all of the documentation for the new API:
  http://code.google.com/apis/dfp


• The Google Groups forum where we provide support and where you can provide feedback to us:
  http://groups.google.com/group/google-doubleclick-for-publishers-api/

We are looking forward to working with you and seeing what you build!

By Adam Rogal, DoubleClick For Publishers API Team

Updated GoogleBar features new UI and targeted sponsored results

By Adam Feldman, Google Developer Team

The GoogleBar, a control in the Maps API to allow users to search the map for local businesses, landmarks and points of interest, has just launched a new version. In addition to a greatly improved UI, the new GoogleBar includes advertising targeted to the user's searches. This new feature will improve the user experience by providing targeted and relevant sponsored results, and you can benefit by sharing in the revenue of including these results on your site. You can see the new GoogleBar, together with ads, below:


As shown above, the new version of the GoogleBar contains advertising. Profiting from the advertising personally is as easy as signing up for an AdSense account and including your AdSense publisher ID when you create the GoogleBar. See the recent Maps API Blog post for details. Whether you already have a map on your webpage or not, it only takes a few lines of code to embed a fully searchable map into your site - the GoogleBar documentation will tell you everything you need to know.

The GoogleBar is built upon our low-level Local Search Control. For those interested in peeking under the covers, check out the Local Search Control documentation and Code Playground examples.

Questions or comments? Please visit the AJAX API and Maps API discussion groups.