Google Analytics has been re-designed to help you learn even more about where your visitors come from and how they interact with your site. The new Google Analytics makes it easy to improve your results online. Best of all, Google Analytics is free to all advertisers, publishers, and site owners.

All you need to do is paste some tracking code (a small snippet of Javascript) into each Web page that you want tracked, and you're done. You can then track your activity through the built-in reports.

Read more about the makeover here.

For some time, I've been sharing a neat hack that I came up with for finding files using Google. Here's how it works:

Assume you are looking for a specific file, such as northwind.mdb.

• If you enter "northwind", you'll find 1,666,000 hits.
• If you enter "northwind.mdb", you'll find 186,000 hits (mostly articles talking about northwind.mdb)

To find pages that have the file itself, type the following underlined search ...

"index of" northwind.mdb

This returns 712 pages, and you want to look for the ones that begin with "index of", such as Index of /english_examples/exceltmm/22.

These "index of" pages are simply directory listings from Web servers where directory browsing was enabled. This is generally considered a security hole, but some sites (like .edu sites) leave them open because it's an easy way to share files.

So, here's an update to my hack, sent to me anonymously:

intitle:index.of "mp3" +"Jack Jones" -htm -html -php -asp "Last Modified"

As you can see, this sample is looking for MP3s, and includes "Last Modified" and excludes some noise. It's a little cleaner and reduces the chances you'll return pages that aren't really directory listings.

Update: Here's yet another blog posting on how to do this, from Amazon's official blog ...

Note: you shouldn't download licensed/copyrighted material that doesn't belong to you.

I just received an email from Yahoo, letting me know about their Yahoo! Answers service. Sounds a lot like Google Answers.

So, why not ask it How much wood could a woodchuck chuck? or, as Dennis The Menace puts it ... How much ground could a groundhog grind?

One of my students from Israel sent me this link. It seems someone has built a clever facade that sits over the Google search engine. Funny.

I had a student just show me the Wayback Machine, which is a Web site that caches other sites all the way back to 1998. So, if you want to see how the old Microsoft or Google site looked a few years ago, you can! And, yes Google's site did look different in 1999.

I seem to remember suggesting this to a few of the Google guys at their room party at PDC 2003. Well, it took them two years to do it, but it looks promising.

Read the CNET article here, Google's FAQ here, or try it!

You've no doubt heard about earth.google.com by now. Well, it was only a matter of time before we got moon.google.com as well.

"In honor of the first manned Moon landing, which took place on July 20, 1969, we’ve added some NASA imagery to the Google Maps interface to help you pay your own visit to our celestial neighbor. Happy lunar surfing."

Tip: Be sure to zoom all the way in on the moon!

I decided to let Google Fight make the final decision in this age-old beer debate ...

Wanna have some fun? Visit Googlefight and put in any two phrases (quots work best) and let the fight begin. Try C# and Java or Delphi and FoxPro.