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A very well-designed web site is useless if no one can find it on the web. If your company is going to succeed on the web, optimizing your site for search engine visibility is a must. Especially since it is the telephon… More >>
It was said to be coming, and now it’s arrived: Facebook results showing up in Google … kind of. Unlike Bing, backed by the Facebook-investing, search-providing Microsoft, Google is only getting access to updates from Facebook’s Pages section, which tends to host mostly businesses, celebrities, and local businesses and organizations. Come to think of it, having only that kind of access might be preferable to some searchers over getting updates from your social circle or random Facebook users with open privacy settings. [VentureBeat]
Want newer results when you search Google from your smartphone? Want more or fewer pictures in your results page? Google’s recently begun showing Search Options to a number of smartphone users.
Like its desktop counterpart, Search Options lets you restrict search results to recent time frames, tweak how many non-text results crop up, and perform specialty searches, in this case for forum posts and review sites. There aren’t as many options as on a full-sized browser, and the Options menu is similarly tucked away, on the right-hand side in this version.
Still, the reviews search seems useful for browsing what’s gotten good notice around you, when combined with mobile location, at least. Search Options should show up on iPhone, Android, and Palm WebOS phones; Windows Mobile and BlackBerry users might have to wait a bit.
Originally posted 2009-10-12 18:25:08. Republished by Old Post Promoter
There’s a whole lot of mystique, paranoia, and guessing as to how Google comes up with its generally best-in-class search results. Steven Levy at Wired digs in to discover what really makes Google’s search engine different, and how it learns from us.
PageRank, the generally accepted metric of, among other things, how often a page is linked to, is only a small part of the larger story at Google. Talking to Google’s engineers and tracing the history of publicly announced search features, Levy discovers that a good deal of what Google has learned about search comes from the searchers themselves.
Take, for instance, the way Google’s engine learns which words are synonyms. “We discovered a nifty thing very early on,” Singhal says. “People change words in their queries. So someone would say, ‘pictures of dogs,’ and then they’d say, ‘pictures of puppies.’ So that told us that maybe ‘dogs’ and ‘puppies’ were interchangeable. We also learned that when you boil water, it’s hot water. We were relearning semantics from humans, and that was a great advance.”
If you’re at all intrigued by what Google gets right or wrong, Levy’s piece is well worth the read. It’s a lot of straight talk from inside Google about search, written up in plain English.
Google Wave’s mascot, Dr. Wave, offers his introduction to Wave, Apple is rumored to be working towards dropping Google Maps from the iPhone, Mozilla’s browser synchronization tool Weave sees a small update, and more.
Originally posted 2009-10-01 18:00:00. Republished by Old Post Promoter
Android: Google’s already got Goggles for visual search, and Google Shopper’s mobile site can run bar-code scans. Google Shopper, then, is a free app that combines some those features together in one package for those who love to find a deal.
Unlike Goggles, which aims to provide a greater search by image functionality, Shopper only wants you to take pictures of “cover art”—books, CDs, DVDs, and other items with consistent images and iconography. It can also perform bar-code scans when it doesn’t quite get the picture, and if neither of those are working, you can simply type in the name of the product, or just say it for Google’s hard-working voice-to-text translator.
In a test on a few objects this morning, Shopper was pretty impressive when it came to books and CDs. It was fast and efficient, too, over a (T-Mobile) 3G connection, bringing back results almost instantly. In the example pictured up top, the result was slightly askew—an audiobook CD instead of a paper book—but the results included the right product. Those results arrive in the form of a simple item-store-price list, though, and could be a bit more helpful. For our money, ShopSavvy offers a greater convenience, when it works, because it provides local prices, gives directions to get to the store with the better price, and has a more robust history and wishlist functionality.
Here’s the standard Google video demonstration of its latest mobile search offering:
Google Shopper is a free download for Android phones. If you’ve gotten surprisingly good or bad results from this app, or have another preferred mobile shopping tool, tell us about them in the comments.
For reasons yet to be revealed, search giant Google has acquired San Francisco-based reMail, makers of the reMail e-mail client for iPhone OS. The company promptly pulled the application from Apple’s App Store, however, leaving users perplexed as to the reasons why.
reMail CEO Gabor Cselle explained in a statement on reMail’s website that the company, and thus the application, had been acquired by Google, and he was hired to work as a product manager on Google’s GMail team. The reMail website already reads “Copyright 2009 Google,” but not all of the links to the now-vacant spot on the iTunes Store have been removed.
reMail, which continues to work for individuals who purchased the application before its removal, was meant to be an alternative to the iPhone’s built-in mail client. The application allowed for full-text search and offline support, among other things. All mail was stored on the phone in such a way that it took up significantly less space when compared to the same amount of mail on Google’s servers.
It seems Cselle will return to Google where he first started as an engineering intern in 2004 working on the GMail team. On his personal blog, Cselle claims that reMail and Google came to the decision to “discontinue” the iPhone application together. He also reiterates that the app will continue to work for those who have already purchased it, and that all in-app purchase options have been made free. Technical support will continue through the end of March.
While it is unclear what exactly Google’s plans are for reMail on the iPhone, it seems unlikely that the company will rebrand and rerelease. Google already has a spotty history with App Store approvals, including a Google Voice application that still hasn’t seen the light of day, and an initial rejection of its Google Mobile application (which has since been approved).
Though Apple had already approved the application when submitted by reMail, would it really surprise anyone if Apple rejected the application due to duplication of functionality when submitted by Google? Sure it would be a PR nightmare, but Apple seems to have already drawn the line in the sand with regard to Google. In the end we may be more likely to see reMail’s technology make an appearance on Google’s Android OS, perhaps as the official mail client there.
Google’s real-time search results, which include data from Twitter, Yahoo Answers, and other sources, has just added MySpace updates to the mix.
That means that publicly available status updates, blog posts, and other MySpace data will now be included in the “latest results” area that now often pops up in Google search results when looking for information about a current event.
It will also be included when you go to “Updates” under the “Show Options” link in search results. Here’s what it looks like, with “Olympics” and “Valentine’s Day” as examples:
Google’s real-time search features launched back in December, with Twitter, Facebook and MySpace announced as partners. Twitter’s integration has been live since then, though publicly available Facebook updates — like those from Fan Pages — are not yet a part of the fold.
Getting the integration live can certainly be seen as a win for MySpace, who last week saw its CEO leave after less than one year in office. Having its name side-by-side as a source for real-time updates alongside Twitter (and maybe at some point Facebook) in Google results is a good reminder that the service still has considerable influence.
Tags: Google, myspace, real-time search
Now that Google’s Buzz social network has learned from its mistakes, more users might be keen on actually giving it a go. The Google Operating System blog has a great power user’s guide to the finer points of Buzz.
Being the nerdy productive/ergonomic types we are, we immediately jumped to Alex’s roundup of the keyboard shortcuts you can use while moving around inside your Buzz inbox inside Gmail. They fit fairly snug inside the Google shortcuts you already know:
Shift+l – like a message
m – mute (ignore) a conversation
r – add a comment
p / n – go to the newer / older conversation
o – expand conversation
The post also details how to send a direct message to another Buzz user (i.e. Gmail contact), how to search and find messages, Google-Wave-style (author:@gmail.com), and how to import third-party sites and your own feeds into Buzz.
What features have you discovered in Buzz that let you look beyond last weeks’ privacy faux pas? Or does Buzz still not feel like it’s worth your time and attention yet? Dish it out in the comments.
Virtually every Google service has a Labs section devoted to implementing experimental features. There’s Gmail Labs, Google (Search) Labs, Google Calendar Labs, and now, Google Maps Labs.
So what can you expect from Google Maps Labs?
Google Maps Labs is a testing ground for experimental features that aren’t quite ready for primetime. They may change, break or disappear at any time.
Current features include Drag ‘n’ Zoom (for quickly zooming in on a specific spot), Aerial Imagery (“gives you rotatable, high-resolution overhead imagery presented in a new perspective”), a Where in the World game (to test your geography chops), Rotatable Maps (if you’re sick of North always being up), What’s Around Here (always highlight top search results in a view using small blips), and several more. Just hit the link below to broser you options, turn a few on, and get experimental with your maps. Thanks dedobleve!
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