There’s been endless rumours, denials and loud speculation on the web about the existence of Goggle’s GPhone project, but a report today in the New York Times seems to confirm that the search engine giants are indeed about to release their own mobile operating system and possibly a handset.
Continue reading Google GPhone Rumours Continue – OS Only?
Category: Google
Video Adverts on YouTube Homepage
We know that Google is driven by advertising, right?
Well, since buying YouTube, they haven’t plastered the site with advertising, as a less savvy company might do, but they have played around a few times with raising revenue including adding promotions, supposedly linked to the video playing, at the bottom of the video, but above the playing controls.
Continue reading Video Adverts on YouTube Homepage
Advanced Search: Is The Name A Problem?
When you’re preparing a newspaper for the world of on-line news, helping your audience find the information they need is paramount.
Anders M Olausson, CTO of hd.se (a local Swedish newspaper/site) ponders the problem.
According to Google only 1% of the searches uses “advanced search”. It’s a remarkable low figure if you think about how tough some people think it is to find what they are looking for. But then it struck me, is it advanced to use “Advanced search”? Not particularly.
Continue reading Advanced Search: Is The Name A Problem?
Japan Fund Google Rival: Are They Joking?
Japan has stuck €89m-€95m in to a research project to try and build a search engine to rival Google, reports the FT.
10 Japanese companies are pooling their talent, as they’ve just noticed that hardware isn’t selling so well, South Korea and Taiwan are making and selling just what Japan is – but much cheaper. Oh, and that software services are growing.
Continue reading Japan Fund Google Rival: Are They Joking?
GDrive Launches? Good Margins For Google
We covered the launch of the pay for addition for Google’s Gmail, where they ‘let you’ pay for additional storage beyond the 2.8Gb that they give you for free.
We’ve been wondering if this is an under cover launch of the long-rumoured GDrive service from Google – utilising Google huge, worldwide server infrastructure to host your data, for easy recall using any Internet connection.
Continue reading GDrive Launches? Good Margins For Google
GMail: Pay For Increased Storage: UPDATED
Google have quietly (as ever) introduced a pay for extra storage facility on GMail.
I’ve come close to stop using Gmail over the last 6 months or so, after having heavily used it on a daily basis for over two years. It’s has all of my emails for my numerous accounts going through it.
Continue reading GMail: Pay For Increased Storage: UPDATED
Google Car License Plate: Sweden
News reaches us from Helsingborg, on the gorgeous west coast of Sweden, that some sneaky chap has registered their car license plate as G O O G L E.
Joakim Jardenberg, the clever fellow who thought up the jolly wheeze, has also blogged the adventure (for those of you who read Swedish!).
He raises some interesting points about brands and by extension, individuals registering trade marks as car registrations, while pointing out that “one of the highest valued brands in the world, Google, is now my number plate.”
Anyone for “adPlate or plateSense,” japes Joakim, who is a development manager at the newspaper, Helsingborgs Dagblad (who have the super cool short domain name hd.se).
What’s Google reaction?
Rather amusingly, Joakim’s been on to Google Sweden and has had a response from Maria Göth, their PR manager.
Google have made a statement about … not making a statement, which reads
We cannot make a statement before we know exactly what has happened. The persons at “Vägverket” (The authority which is responsible for the roads and car regulations) who handles personal number plates is on vacation but we shall contact them on Monday.
We await further news with bated breath …
Many thanks to Anders Olausson, long time chum on Digital-Lifestyles for the pointer.
Wikipedia Founder Launches Google Rival Wikia
Jimmy Wales, the founder of the hugely popular online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, has outlined his plans for a new search engine service to rival Google.
Wales’s new start-up firm Wikia has bought up a web crawling technology called Grub from LookSmart, and released it under an open source licence. Like the famous SETI project, Grub relies on users donating their personal computing resources as well as human editors.
Continue reading Wikipedia Founder Launches Google Rival Wikia
Porn Scum Stoop Ever Lower
This morning my daughter was having a look around for some pictures of medieval castle’s on Google Images. She’s six and a half.
My Wife was sitting with her while she browsed the index, and as the results looked quite reasonable, she left the room to let her browse around the search results.
Next thing, our daughter was calling out that she didn’t like what was on the screen – and seeing what was there, no wonder. It was a porn site.
Continue reading Porn Scum Stoop Ever Lower
Search Engines Disagree On Top Matches
The most popular search engines rarely agree with each other when it comes to the top results for identical queries – and the differences are growing yearly.
In a study involving 19,332 queries typed (presumably not by hand) into Google, Yahoo, Windows Live and Ask, the same top result only popped up on all four search engines 3.6 percent of the time.
Continue reading Search Engines Disagree On Top Matches