Google is known for its spare, clean search homepage, A single search box, two buttons.I've always liked the minimal Google.com homepage, but if you prefer a little spice to your search page (like Bing), you'll like Google's new background image feature.
(Google Search - Custom background)
It's a simple enough feature that we've heard rumors of here and there: Just go to Google.com, move your mouse to the bottom left of the screen and click "Change background image." You can then select from a list of Editors' picks, pick any image from Google's public gallery hosted by Picasa, use something from your Picasa web album photos, or upload any image from your desktop.
Some claim that Google is copying Bing. First when Google updated their search with a left side panel similar to Bing's, and now with the addition of the big background image. Maybe; Bing is a successful product in the Microsoft portfolio and is grabbing more and more search share every day.
Bing and Google are not alone in the home page war, as Yahoo is taking on Google with a new ad against Google homepage. Yahoo also bring its social networking focused homepage with its new revamp design where user can customize/add apps like Facebook updates, twitter updates, news, new site feed etc.
And don't forget the on going argument that white background of Google's home page wastes energy when compared to a black background.As part of green initiative addressing that fact, other engines like Blackel and Earthle emerged.
As we just posted that Google also come up with a search box which allow users to send tweet. Yahoo also rolled out a desktop application called Sideline, powered by Adobe Air which is built with the Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI). It allows users to create and group custom queries by topics of interest.
It's not a full featured client that allow you to send tweet, short urls, post images. It just perform twitter search. it's a dedicated application for twitter search where you can see twitter trending topics and open dedicated tab for each search. user can mix up different different search in to one single search, in simple words this app allow to groping search. What I like about sideline is to having a ability to create a unique search terms via the advance mode where user can define the search keywords, see the screenshot below.
Sideline is an open source application released under the BSD license. This is the first beta release is out and the code is hosted on github. to run this application you should have adobe air installed to run this app.
Some information is easy to find. If you want to learn the rules of golf, you can search Google for [something and we'll return a list of relevant web sites right at the top. But not all your information needs are that simple. Some questions can be more complex, requiring you to visit ten, perhaps twenty websites to research and collect what you need.
Google Squared, a new feature just released in Google Labs, to help you batter search.
Google Squared is an experimental search tool that collects facts from the web and presents them in an organized collection, similar to a spreadsheet. If you search for Cars, Google Squared builds a square with rows for each of several specific roller coasters and columns for corresponding facts, such as image, height and maximum speed.
While gathering facts from across the Internet is relatively easy for humans to do, it's far more difficult for computers to do automatically. Google Squared is a first step towards solving that challenge. It essentially searches the web to find the types of facts you might be interested in, extracts them and presents them in a meaningful way.
This technology is by no means perfect. That's why Google Squared to be conversational, enabling you to respond to the initial result and get a better answer. If there's another row or column you'd like to see, you can add it and Google Squared will automatically attempt to fetch and fill in the relevant facts for you. As you remove rows and columns you don't like, Google Squared will get a fresh idea of what you're interested in and suggest new rows and columns to add. See it in action in the video below:
Google launch "Places Directory" on Android Market as a Google Labs product.
As the name implies, Places Directory allows you to browse nearby places in categories like Restaurants, Movie Theaters, Hotels and Banks. You'll see distance and directions to the destination, and if you tap on the listing, we'll show ratings and photos. You can also call the business or view its location on Google Maps. Goog 411 also can be helpful
For instance, if I need some money, do I search for an ATM or a bank? normally I do use Search and Google Maps can help me find the information I need, but here Places Directory help me in different way. I'm searching for ATM & If I click on “ATM” for example, I’ll then get a list of the ATMs around me complete with a thumbnail image, the location’s distance from me and a star rating. Clicking on any of the listings will take you to a page with an overview of the place, including its address and phone number, if Any. You can also read reviews of the place by Google local users and see more pictures of the place.
To download Places Directory to your Android-powered phone, search for "Places Directory" on Android Market. It currently support US English and Chinese.
Google Announced the launch of the latest version of the Google Search Appliance, GSA 6.0. Now it come with full of so many new features.
last August, Google launched "10 million docs in a box ". Building on the premise of scale with simplicity, this time the end result was a new architecture: (GSA)n. It has about all the new features and search power which enable organizations to integrate all the data & information .untill now it could handle millions of docs but this time Google is planning to push it to a new realm: billions! !
One of Google's beta customers, MTCSC Inc., really needs the geographic integration. MTCSC Inc. was in the midst of deploying over 50 GSAs all over the world for a federal customer, connecting to over 2,500 data sources and consisting of data on websites, file shares, databases, and SharePoint servers. The new GSA 6.0 architecture is now helping them integrate information from the varied data centers to provide users with a single, unified set of results.
So imagine there is a database that might “live” in Egypt, some documents in a data center in Sydney, and a fileshare whose homebase is Los Angeles. The new GSA 6.0 integration can handle searching through all those data stores and give the employee who is looking a simple page of search results. one that looks as easy to use as Google.com, even though the backend search is really complicated.
In simpler words this GSA provides is much safer, higher-quality, more customizable enterprise search.
When you are away from your computer and need directory assistance just call GOOG-411. It will give you the address or phone number of any local business. Google added a feature that now tells you the street intersections where a business is located. To get the intersection, just ask for “details”and in addition to the address and phone number of the business, Google will also point you to the nearest street intersection or adjacent streets.
GOOG-411 is all automated & it is using Google’s speech recognition technology. All about that it's free
While you are waiting for it to find the phone number and address, it plays a recording of a human voice pretending to be a computer calculating the answer
The Local Business Center team of Google is rolling out a new feature, a dashboard that will provide you with information on how Google users are interacting with your local listing in Google Maps and Google Search.
If you're a local business, you can drive traffic via Google Maps to your website and to your business. While you may be tracking usage metrics on your website using a tool like Google Analytics, but data about how customers found you in other ways never got back to you & you don't always get as much information from that as you'd like. For example, a user may search for "pizza," click on your business listing, look at the reviews, and decide to pay a visit to your Italian restaurant without ever visiting your website or calling you. here the new LBC dashboard feature will change all that, making this data easily accessible to business owners by introducing a new "dashboard" tab in your Local Business Center (www.google.com/lbc) account. So if you're a business owner who maintains one or more physical locations, and you're curious about what people are searching for when they see your business listing and where your customers are coming from, the dashboard will answer many of those questions for you. Data available in the dashboard will include the following:
Impressions: The number of times the business listing appeared as a result on a Google.com search or Google Maps search in a given period.
Actions: The number of times people interacted with the listing; for example, the number of times they clicked through to the business' website or requested driving directions to the business.
Top search queries: Which queries led customers to the business listing; for example, are they finding the listing for a cafe by searching for "tea" or "coffee"?
Zip codes where driving directions come from: Which zip codes customers are coming from when they request directions to your location.
So how will you use the dashboard? The first thing you'll need to do is make sure that you've claimed your listing in the LBC. Even if you hadn't claimed it until today, you'll be able to use the dashboard, since Google automatically populating it with data from the past month. When you log in to the LBC, you'll notice a new "View report" link right under the statistics.
Clicking on the link will take you to the dashboard page, where you'll find several features. At the very top, you'll see a timeline tracking the number of "Impressions" and "Actions" that your business received on Google. "Impressions" refers to the number of times that users saw your listing appear as a local business search result; "Actions" refers to how many times users interacted with your listing. You can change the date range selected to view more or less data.
Right under the graphs, you'll see a summary for the date range you've selected, along with a breakdown of the various types of "Actions" that users took
Below that, you'll find a list of the top search queries people are using when they discover your business listing. For example, do people tend to find your Italian restaurant more by looking for "pizza" or "pasta"? Do more customers seem to find you because of your reputation as an affordable hotel, or as a quiet hotel? This gives you valuable insight into the ways that your potential customers are looking for you, and what terms are associated with your business. To protect any potentially personally identifiable information, queries with a very low search volume are put into the "other" category, and Google filter addresses out of the queries. for example, if a someone searched for "bakery near 5873 Maple Ave," you would only see the "bakery" term.
Finally, you'll also be able to see a breakdown of zip code starting points for driving direction requests to your business. To protect privacy, Google aggregate these requests at the zip code level. If you hover over the counts inside the map, Google will highlight the area represented by that count. This lets you find out where there's an interest in your business, which can help inform advertising strategies or future growth.
your dashboard will be populated with data for the previous 30 days at launch. After that, Google will add fresh data daily, so you'll want to be sure to check back often to see how things are going and how various strategies like your latest offline ad campaign or the addition of a photo to your listing affect your traffic etc.
Google bringing the Search Box gadget out of beta known as a Blogger in Draft and making it available to everyone who using Blogger platform. With this gadget, your readers will be able to search not just your posts, but web pages linked from your blog, your blog list, other blogs on the blog roll, as well as pages on the shared links list.
To add the gadget, go to your blog's Layout page, then click “Add a Gadget” and click on “Search Box.” Configuration is easy: just select which elements you want your readers to be able to search.It now provides simpler defaults, picks up your blog’s style and colors, integrates more tightly with your blog, and allows you to configure search across specific blog lists
The gadget also uses the AJAX Search APIs to provide a tightly-coupled inline experience, and creates a Custom Search Engine for your blog that automatically updates when you update your blog, blog lists, or link lists.
Custom search is a very useful tool for readers because it provides search within blog content that also includes other linked pages so for Eg: any other site linked to our site the so from now on whenever reader try to do a search other website links will appear in search pages. Great tool for increase the visibility of your website.
To view the demo just try to search, Find the Search Box besides this blog post at the right sidebar, A box which says Powered By Google.
Today Microsoft live the Bing Search Engine for people and according to us it can be a hard competition for Google now. Microsoft can attract more gain by Bing fore sure.
Bing is available in your local version but you're not able to get all features in your local version for Eg: the Indian version of Bing.com does not have search history and side options fore search & you can't change background images on the Bing homepage. To get the all features just go to Bing Worldwide page and set your page United state- English
After doing this user can change the back ground image by going forward or backwards & by hover moves cursor you'll get some pop ups on images, by clicking there you can landed to a new search term. User can use their Windows Live ID for sign in & all your search terms can be saved in your account. You can turn off or on the search history and it can be visible in sidebar.
Same as Google user can turn on or off the safe search settings ans also able to increase or decrease the search result per page. To do that just go tho preference. Bing also can be linked to Microsoft Cash back programs where user get cash back user can perform web search, image search, music search, image search etc..
Image Search
To search images you can enter your search term in search bar and able to see relevant images according to your search terms. You can optimized your search by selecting various option from sidebar menu. Options like size, layout, color, style, people are available. Each options also having sub options like, if you select size you can further enhance your search result by selecting proper size (Small, medium, large, wallpaper) by selecting the proper option you'll get batter results. User also able to change the image search layout like small thumbnail, medium thumbnail, images with detail info etc.
Video Search
To search videos, You can enter your search term in the search bar and you ll get the video search result. By clicking the video it will take you to video player where you can see the whole video and under the video player you can see other relevant videos. Here also user able to see the different options in the sidebar same like Image search has. Options like length, screen size, resolution, source. For Eg: if you select source option you can select the video source site like
MSN
AOL
MTV
Hulu
ESPN
YouTube
MySpace
Dailymotion
Metacafe
here user also able to change search view preference.
Shopping Search
As I already mention that user can get cash back program in Bing also so you can get various cash back according to offers. Bing Shopping search works very good. It also shows smiler kind of feature that recently google announced "rich snippets". It allow you to see data like user reviews about the product, Cash back offer, user ratings etc. her user also able to batter its shopping search term by selecting relevant options from left sidebar. options like cash back, category, brand, price allow you to get batter product results.
Map Search
To search a location in map just enter your location term and you're able to see the location map powered by Microsoft virtual Earth. here user can do many things with it like print or share the map and even you can add the map in your collection for further reference. User can search for driving direction also able to add pushpin.
News Search
User can get relevant news story according to your search terms. it also provides different news category like sports, politics, world news, technology, business etc. For latest updates you can subscribe the news alerts via RSS or Email
Beside these search user can perform other searches like local search, travel search & user able to see what is popular search right now on Bing by visiting the futer page.
Over all Bing can be a answer for Google but we need to see what further development it brings to this engine. This move surly gain Microsoft market share in search. Now need to see what will google bring to Answer the Bing.
Sometimes we all try to find answers on web and for that people do use different tools according to their needs. Mostly people use Search engine like Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN. for details information could be go to Wikipedia but What id you need a short answer on the go?
You need to know some simple answers like who is president of United states? what is the time at Google Headquarter? When Christmas gonna come? for these questions True Knowledge work as a answering engine. Previously we covered webtoim service which use True Knowledge awesome API. It simply gives you short and sweet answer directly to your IM service like Google Talk.
Now True Knowledge has rolled out a Firefox add on which shows you a relevant True Knowledge answer along with your search results. It brings the answers directly to the search Engine pages. This add on support following mainstream search engines :Google, Yahoo, Ask & Live
(True Knowledge Add On with Yahoo Search)
The True Knowledge Firefox add-on enhances your search engine results by inserting a direct answer to your question above your regular search results.
You get the answer if True Knowledge able to find one. If it's not able to find a direct answer then your search results will remain unchanged.
(True Knowledge Add On with Google Search)
In our experiment it does well in topics like history and geography & science . It's become a very handy when you need fast answers. This add-on is a first version and still in what Mozilla calls “experimental” mode.
Google Suggest, which gives suggestions as we're typing our searches.since it saves time by giving suggestions for our searches.
Today Google Provides new features to Google Suggest.
Suggestions on the results page Previously, Google only showed suggestions based on your original search input. Now, when you make a search from a results page, Google will provide suggestions that relate to the current results page. As you can see in the example below, if your previous search was for "roller coasters", when you begin a new query the first few suggestions are still related to roller coasters This feature helping you refine your search queries to quickly find what you want. I also try to search for "missing link found" & try to refine it on the current result page but it didn't work for me.
(Suggestions on the results page)
Personalized suggestions Now, if you're signed in with your Google account and have Web History enabled, Google may show some of your relevant past searches as you type& it will give you personalized suggestions. It will make it easier and faster for you to repeat searches that have worked before. Or, if you need to step away in the middle of a search task, this will help you continue your search tasks at a later time.
Many people don't like Google's personalized service, If you think that there is no privacy in this then you can remove a personalized suggestion that you do not like by clicking "Remove", which will remove the search from your Web History. You can also remove searches from your Web History directly & manage Query Suggestions on the preferences page, or sign out of your Google account entirely to stop seeing personalized suggestions.
(Personalized suggestions)
Navigational suggestions When you try to search something & your first keywords that mach to specific site then Google will list it and send you directly on that website if you click there. See the below example which show direct link to NASA website in suggestions when try to type "kennedy space center"
(Navigational suggestions)
Sponsored links in suggestions Now Google also find a another space for it's sponsored links. Similar to the navigational suggestions above. Google will show sponsored link in suggestions according to relevant keyword you type and if it's mach. When an ad is shown, To identify it, Google mark it with the text "Sponsored Link" and a colored background, as on the results page. see the below example.
(Sponsored links in suggestions)
There are few changes in Google Suggest apart of above, Now Google will no longer show the result count for items in the suggest box because Google is getting feedback that the numbers were not helpful in comparing the relevance of the queries and another change is, Now Google bold the text of suggestions to help you more quickly scan the suggestion list.
US classified ads website Craigslist says it will remove its erotic services category, following claims it promotes prostitution. Law enforcement officials have said prostitutes and clients use the site for illegal sexual encounters.
In recent months the spotlight has been turned on the San Francisco company, following a series of high-profile cases. The one that gained national attention involved Phillip Markoff, 23, who has been charged with killing a young woman who offered her services as a masseuse on Craigslist. Julissa Brisman, 26, was found shot dead in a hotel room in Boston last month. The case was widely covered in the media, with Mr Markoff being dubbed the "Craigslist Killer"
One of the most vocal critics of the erotic services adverts was an Illinois sheriff who sued the site in a federal court. Last week South Carolina's Attorney General Henry McMaster threatened the management of Craigslist with prosecution if it did not remove the local erotic services posting within 10 days.
Last November Craigslist announced a deal with 40 state attorneys general that said it would charge for erotic services ads and require advertisers to user a credit card for payment.
Existing adverts in the erotic services section will remain for the next seven days.The new adult services category has now opened for postings by "legal adult service providers".
In a blog post, Craigslist said each post would be manually reviewed before appearing on the site to ensure compliance with the company's guidelines and terms of use. Craiglist also donated all of the profits from "erotic services" ads to charity, has insisted all along that the site is relatively safe. Recently Craiglist got much traffic then My Space.
How cool it would be to use a mobile application that would correctly display the sky based on your location and the direction you're facing in your mobile device only?
Google launch Sky Map for Android. Google Sky Map turns your Android-powered mobile phone into a dynamic window on the night sky. When you point your phone upwards you will see a map of the brightest stars, constellations and planets in that part of the sky. The next time you see a bright star and want to know what it's called, Sky Map can help you identify it.
The GPS and clock allowed to generate maps for the exact time and location, but the compass and accelerometer were what made Sky Map truly interesting. Using these two sensors, the app can determine the exact direction that your phone is facing and display the stars that are visible. If you want to identify that bright star in the west, all you have to do is point the device in that direction and you'll see "Venus" appear on your screen.
Google also implement search feature so when you enter the name of an object of interest, like Saturn, and the phone displays an arrow pointing to the object. As you get closer, the color of the arrow goes from blue to red and the app circles the object when you find it. Voila!
So spot the elusive Mercury in the evening, see Jupiter and Neptune in same binocular field, or view Venus shining in the morning skies. Sky Map was designed to help you navigate the night sky
Download Sky Map from the Android Market, and search for "sky map", or you can find the application listed by popularity in the Applications > Reference section.
As a webmaster, you have a unique understanding of your web pages and the content they represent. Google helps users find your page by showing them a small sample of that content -- the "snippet." for that they use a variety of techniques to create these snippets and give users relevant information about what they'll find when they click through to visit your site. Today, Google is announcing Rich Snippets, a new presentation of snippets that applies Google's algorithms to highlight structured data embedded in web pages.
Rich Snippets give users convenient summary information about their search results at a glance. . When searching for a product or service, users can easily see reviews and ratings, and when searching for a person, they'll get help distinguishing between people with the same name.
It's a simple change to the display of search results, by this users will find the new valuable data & if they see useful and relevant information from the page, they are more likely to click through. Google is beginning the process of opening up this successful experiment so that more websites can participate.
As a webmaster, you can help by annotating your pages with structured data in a standard format. By incorporating standard annotations in your pages, you not only make your structured data available for Google's search results, but also for any service or tool that supports the same standard. As structured data becomes more widespread on the web,
Well, I'm not talking about the search Box you all see in Gmail. A really nice feature that i always wanted from Gmail. As you people know that Gmail is a Search based email and when you need to search anything from a product to a client's important email at that time we have to leave the Gmail interface and it was very distracted. With the new Google Search experiment in Gmail Labs When you turn this feature on from the Labs tab under Settings, you'll see a new search box on the left side of your inbox, like this:
Type your search in, and a window similar like a chat window that appears in Gmail, It will Displays Google search results inside your mail window, letting you quickly find things and use them when you're writing an email. but a bit bigger which appears at the bottom of your screen with the first few search results.
When you click on a search result and it'll open up in another window or another tab & you can make sure it's what you're looking for. You can also Pop Out the result which will also open in new window or tab. Once you're sure it's a result you need, moving your mouse over the result back in Gmail reveals a pull-down menu that lets you do stuff with the search result. According to your activity menu will appear like this:
Google search within the Gmail like a chat window
When you're reading an email, at that time if you search you can Reply that email with the search result.
When you're composing an email, you can paste the result or just past the URL into your email or send entire result by email
If you're chatting with someone, you can send the Search result via chat.
You can also always compose a new email to send the search result.
Whatever you search from that Sidebar. it will show you the keyword history, Of course you can clear the history just by a click says "clear"
This feature is not working for searching emails within your Inbox. It would be nice if we can search emails also via this search box.
On Thursday the company added search tool to every user's Twitter home page. It was available for some users seance February but now everyone can see the search box to their twitter page after log in.
Searching in Twitter Trends
In this major update Twitter also providing top ten search list which is happening right now on twitter. Twitter analyze the tweets to detect when certain words or phrases occur with higher frequency. These trending phrases are surfaced in the Twitter home page just under the new search box and they're updated throughout the day. By this twitter user can see out of the box that what's happening around the world.
Saving Your Searches
If you find yourself searching for the same word or phrase on a regular basis, then you'll probably like using "save this search" which, when clicked, will place those keywords as links into your home page just under the search box. This gives you one-click access to your favorite searches. To remove the saved search links, click the word again and notice the new option to, "Remove this saved search." We've also added an option to collapse your list of saved searches as well as the icons of the accounts you are following for a cleaner view.
Collapse Your List
Now Twitter user can also collapse list of saved searches as well as the icons of the accounts you are following for a cleaner view.
Google launched a new search feature that makes it easy to find and compare public data. If you go to Google.com and type in unemployment rate or population followed by a U.S. state or county, you will see the most recent estimates like this:
Once you click the link, you'll go to an interactive chart that lets you add and remove data for different geographical areas.
You can find interesting public data available on the web. There are statistics for prices of cookies, CO2 emissions, asthma frequency, high school graduation rates, bakers' salaries, number of wildfires, and the list goes on.
many new services coming with Twitter integration and now ilistmicro come up which provides classified in 140 characters!
So How it works? very simple. It works in two direction for sell and for buy Just Tweet your listing with the hashtag #ihave (ex. for selling or Give away) & Tweet your listing with the hashtag #iwant (for Buying or wanted) listings. Here iList Micro robots will automatically put all of those tweets listing to the iListMicro's website.
It's search feature is really cool. You can find if you need some thing or if you wanna give something. It has three category "Someone Has" "Someone wants" & "is listed" so just insert the keyword and if the thing that you need is listed so just contact the person via twitter. superb ans simple
another cool feature of the site i like the most is get auto tweet about the listing. for that just follow@ilismicro and if any tweet mach with others tweet than ilistmicro will send automatically direct message to both person.
For Eg: I have YouTube RealTime invitation so I'll tweet; #ihave YouTube RealTime invitations and if other want the invitations then they tweet: #iwant a YouTube RealTime invitation. Now you can find this thing by searching the website and if both person are follower of the auto bot then both will get a notification.
Use also able to add the zip code as a hash tag to locket location based stuff and also able to add hash tag for different category.
Many of you always try to find your Friends and family members via Google search or other search engines.. Some are trying to get information to establish a contact with old school met or some are trying to get a progressive report on Friends and may be some are trying to get info about the girl you had a crush in collage days..so mostly all person do try to find people via search engines. People do have multiple profiles in various web properties like Facebook, my space, LinkedIn, Bebo so to centralized these all profiles and you can be controlled over your profiles google bring service where you can create your profiles and able to add your all stuff like your websites, blogs, profile links etc..
To give a start with your profile do this:
Add information about yourself on the Edit profile page so people can find you when they search by keywords associated with your profile. For example, include details such as the name of your hometown, your job title, where you work or go to school
Link to your profile on another website (for instance, your blog or online photo album).
If you have a common name, add enough information about you to distinguish your profile from similar ones. Photos are especially useful.
Verify your name, and get a "Verified" badge on your profile. Verify alternate addresses on your account.
According to Google: "If you want your profile to appear in Google search results, make sure you've selected to display your full name on the Edit profile page. Adding more information will help you improve your profile's rank."
To give you greater control over what people find when they search for your name, Google will show Google profile results at the bottom of U.S. name-query search pages. These results offer abbreviated information from user-created Google profiles and a link to the full profiles and as I already mention that they also added links so it's easy to search for the same name on MySpace, Facebook, Classmates and LinkedIn.
Don't have a Google profile? Just search for [me] and follow the instructions at the top of the page to create one. In just a few minutes, you can create a public profile that represents you and that appears when people search for your name on Google. Check out www.google.com/profiles
(Google Search - Custom background)
