Google today announces a selection of gadgets for your website.

Google Gadgets for your webpage can help make a site dynamic and rich with content. Google Gadgets, which have long been available for users to add to the Google homepage and Google Desktop, are now available for webpage owners to add to their own webpages. Google Gadgets are miniature-sized objects that offer cool and dynamic content that can be placed on any page on the web.

“Now anyone can have a great-looking website with automatically updating content,” said Adam Sah, Google Gadgets Architect. “By making Google Gadgets available for you to add to your webpage, we’re working to connect developers with enthusiastic consumers and to make information universally accessible and useful to the individual user.”

There are games, news clips, weather reports, maps, and much more.

Eric Schmidt has been interviewed for Time Magazine and goes into some detail on partnerships, particularly for Google, which has a very narrow base of operation for such a large company. “… we tried to pick partners that represented different initiatives that we wanted to work with for a long time.”

It’s in the secondary growth period that the need for new talent becomes irresistible :

“I think that to some degree when you’re a small company you sort of have to do everything yourself, and as you get more established you begin to realize you’ll never get everything done by yourself. You’re fundamentally going to be a better player, a better solution, if you can share in the success, and get the benefit of the hard work these other people have done.”

Essentially, Schmidt recognizes that it’s a matter of distribution, of reach towards new customers. “In most cases what I’m describing is distribution: they have a way of reaching customers that we do not on our own. And also the combination solves a new problem.”

Finance is not the central issue here, as it is with venture capitalists : “So it wasn’t particularly financial, although the financials are all good in these deals, it was really more reach; distribution. It was really strategic. My point is you don’t just do partnerships to do partnerships. You do partnerships for a reason.”

There’s a Google PageRank update in progress as I write (Sunday). So far, 11 of the 18 datacenters have been updated.

If you can’t see the new PR on your toolbar, that’s because “toolbar queries” has not yet been updated.

This seems to be a comprehensive uprate, brought in a month early, presumably to compensate for the last one which seemed to be a month late. It will provide a good lift-off for the coming Christmas/Festivals season.

For Syntagma Media, all of our sites more than two months old are now out of the sandbox, most up to PR5.

The official Google Blog has announced that the innovative search giant is eight years old this week.

Webmaster Dennis Hwang writes : “This week we celebrate Google’s 8th birthday, and I hope you like the commemorative logo that appears on today’s homepage:

There’s also a link to other commemorative logos designed for specific occasions. I particularly like this one of Sherlock Holmes :

Check them all out. As usual from Google they’re very inventive.