Search

Google Calendar Finally Launches
Search giant Google has announced a free, Web-based ‘shareable’ calendar service called, appropriately enough, Google Calendar, which allows users to post up events and share them with others.
Calendar owners can send out invitations to their chums and keep track of their responses and comments (like, “Bog off weirdo – we’re not coming to your party”).
Conveniently, friends can still receive and add responses to your invites even if they don’t use Google Calendar themselves.
A neat ‘Quick Add’ feature uses Google’s clever-clogs technology to understand phrases like, “Dinner at the Old Scrote And Hounds with Tony, 1.30pm Saturday” and automatically slap it in the right place in your calendar.
Gmail Integration
Gmail can also recognise events mentioned in emails, letting users add events without leaving their Gmail inbox.
Naturally, you can search your own calendar, with Google adding the ability to search public calendars to look for interesting events to add to your own diary (like Cardiff City FC fixtures, for example).
Powered by Javascript and XML, the calendar offers support for Microsoft IE 6.0+ and Mozilla Firefox 1.07+, although users will need JavaScript and cookies to be enabled for the calendar to work.
Based on open calendar standards, events can be imported from popular programs like Microsoft Outlook and Apple iCal, while schedules can be viewed by any external application or device that accepts iCal or XML files.
Taking on Yahoo!
Although Google is offering compatibility with Yahoo’s popular calendar service (events can be shared between the two services), there’s no question that they’re looking to move in on Yahoo’s patch.
In fact, Google have added a whole page explaining how users can migrate their entire Yahoo! Calendar to Google Calendar, which suggests that things might get a little lively between the two services soon.
Google Calendar
13 April, 2006
Google Releases Toolbar v2 for Firefox
Google is launching an upgrade to its toolbar for Mozilla’s Firefox browser, adding enhancements to the search box and an antiphishing feature.
Google Toolbar 2.0 will now offer suggestions on the fly for narrowing queries and correcting spelling – great news if yore speling esn’t up to muuch.
The all-new, turbo-charged search box also remembers previous query terms inputted by a user – as well as bookmarks – and serves them up as query suggestions, with a handy drop-down menu letting users select which part of Google’s empire to search.
The new release includes feed integration with the Google Personalised Homepage, with the toolbar automatically detecting Web content available for subscription, and a click of the “Subscribe” button taking users to their preferred feed reader.
Pheck Off Phishers
To help battle against pesky phishers, the upgraded Firefox toolbar includes Google’s Safe Browsing extension.
Previously an optional add-in, this feature warns users when they innocently roam onto Websites that could be a phishing trap, with Google using clever-clogs advanced algorithms and reports about dodgy pages to flag up the iffy sites.
Gmail users should like the new feature that opens mailto: links on webpages straight into a compose window in Gmail – no need to copy and paste emails off Webpages.
“We’ve made searching better by including previous queries, spelling corrections, and suggestions for popular choices”, a company employee purred on the Google Blog.
Google blog
Toolbar 2.0 features
7 April, 2006
Google Increases US Search Dominance
After reporting Google’s huge dominance of the UK search market, new figures reveal that it also looks set to grab a gorilla-sized chunk of the US search market.
According to the latest statistics from ComScore Networks, Google is increasing its lead over rivals Yahoo and Microsoft, with its US domestic market share soaring to 42.3 percent in February, up from 36.3 percent in the same period last year.
While the vintage champagne corks popped (or water, if we know Google’s public modesty) in Google’s San Francisco’s offices, it was Woodpecker cider for the fading stars at Yahoo who saw their market share slump to 27.6 percent from 31.1 percent a year ago.
Elsewhere, Microsoft’s MSN share of the search market tumbled down to 13.5 percent from 16.3 percent , while Time Warner’s America Online saw their popularity ebb in a downwards direction, falling to 8 percent from 8.9 percent.
Only the newly rebranded Ask.com could muster any cheer, with the Jeeves-less company seeing their share rising to 6 percent from 5.3 percent.
Analysts reckon that that Google could be on an unstoppable roll, with RBC Capital Markets analyst Jordan Rohan commenting, “We see little to stop Google from reaching 70 percent market share eventually; the question, really, comes down to, ‘How long could it take?”
Merrill Lynch analyst Lauren Fine predicted that, “Google’s increased market share and better monetisation of queries will lead to an increased share of ad dollars relative to competitors in the first half of this year.”
Fine also said that Google’s clear strategic focus on search will continue to give the company a competitive edge in the coming months as leading competitors “struggle” to improve their search platforms.
Microsoft fightback
Although Google looks to be running away with the search market, things may get interesting later in the year when Microsoft roll out their new Live.com search and Windows Vista and IE7 packages.
“Microsoft is making a business and technology transition that could affect search in the short term. The company has placed its bets on long-term gains,” commented Jupiter Research senior analyst Joe Wilcox.
“Strangely, Microsoft seems to deliver best when the pressure is greatest. So, Google gains might actually benefit Microsoft over the long haul,” he added.
29 March, 2006
Google Grabs 75 Percent In UK
With a leather-gloved stroke of the company white cat, Google’s mastermind cackled loudly as new figures revealed that their plans for UK domination are nearly complete, with almost three out of every four searches in the UK using their search engine.
During February, 2006, Google referred a whopping average of 74.67 percent of all U.K. visitors to other sites on the web – streets ahead of their nearest competitor Yahoo, who could only muster a comparatively feeble 9.3 per cent.
The figures were released by analysis company WebSideStory, who used a fancypants-sounding “statistical barometer” featuring “techno-graphic trends” (weren’t we dancing to that last night?) to reveal Google’s near-total domination of the UK search market.
It looks like the Brits have taken a particular shine to the San Francisco-based search giant, with February’s search referral stats outperforming Google’s US average for the the month (55.39 percent) and their global average (62.4 percent).
“Even more so in the U.K. than in the U.S., when people think of search, they think of Google,” commented Rand Schulman, Chief Marketing Officer for WebSideStory.
“This has large implications for U.K. marketers, whose search engine marketing and optimization strategies should be Google-centric,” he added.
Looking down to the sorry gang of search engines trailing several laps behind, we can see Yahoo at 9.30 percent, MSN at 5.46 percent, AOL with 4.21 and a coughing, spluttering Ask (Jeeves) with just 2.28 percent.
27 March, 2006
Yahoo Messenger With Voice Gets US launch
Things are hotting up in the US VoIP market as Yahoo announces their low cost Messenger with Voice service, letting users make phone calls through the company’s instant messaging software.
The version 7.5 Beta launch comes after successful trials in five other countries since December, with the service letting users make calls from their computers for 2 cents a minute (or less) to the most popular national phone markets, including the United States.
Just like rival Skype, the new service lets users make freebie computer-to-computer calls, with a “Phone Out” and “Phone In” feature allowing users to dial or receive calls from landlines in 180 countries.
The Phone In service – which lets customers to receive calls on their computers from regular and mobile phones – is priced at $2.99 a month, or $29.90 (~£17, ~€25) a year, compared to Skype’s €30 yearly charge.
Keen to elbow Skype off the VoIP table by appealing to consumer’s wallets, Yahoo claim that their service is noticeably cheaper.
They claim Messenger with Voice costs between 20 to 30 percent lower than Skype’s fees to many major markets outside the United States.
Yahoo are upbeat about prospects for their new service after trials in the initial five countries proved more successful than anticipated, especially in France.
Mindful that not everyone wants to bark into their computer, Yahoo have also struck deals with various hardware manufactures including headset makers Plantronics, USB handset manufacturers VTech and cordless phone kings Siemens AG.
With Yahoo Instant Messenger already enjoying a huge market presence, the new voice service could hurt Skype’s prospects – after all, why should a user go through all the hassle of signing up with a third party when they’re already with Yahoo?
Yahoo Messenger with Voice
22 March, 2006
Google Finance Beta Launches
Like Dr Strangelove with a modem, Google has made another stride in its plans to take over the virtual world, with a new Google Finance service announced today.
Pitched directly against well-established financial information and news sites like Yahoo Finance and Microsoft’s MSN Money, the free service was dreamt up by Google engineers in India looking for ways to improve financial information searching.
Katie Jacobs Stanton, a senior Google product manager, said that Google Finance was created in response to user surveys which found that their customers craved a financial information service.
Google hopes that their service will steal a march on rivals by providing an easier way to search for stocks, mutual funds, public and private companies.
There’ll also be a broad range of company news and information, an interactive chart correlating news and other events with stock price spikes and falls, delivered in a “clean, uncluttered user interface.”
For those who like this kind of thing, Google Finance will incorporate interactive charts correlating market data with corresponding dated news stories, letting you track how a company’s stock reacted to related news.
These charts can also be clicked, dragged and zoomed to reveal different time periods and more detailed information.
Google Finance also provides a personalised area for keeping track of stock quotes for selected companies along with any related news.
For a bigger financial picture, blog postings and (moderated) content from related discussion forums will also be incorporated in the service.
Although financial sites like Yahoo Finance, Marketwatch.com and TheStreet.com currently enjoy loyal followings, pundits are predicting that Google’s advanced features and simplified interface could have a serious impact on the market.
Google currently has no plans to display ads on Google Finance, with a spokeswoman saying that all information on the site will be free of charge.
finance.google.com
22 March, 2006
Wikipedia Hits One Million Articles
The English version of Wikipedia has now notched up more than one million articles, according to the Wikimedia Foundation, the fellas who run the free online encyclopedia.
Comprised of articles largely written collaboratively by its thousands of users, Wikipedia lets readers get involved by contributing their own articles or modifying existing entries, not always with the best intentions in mind.
Wikipedia’s reach is truly global, with versions of the encyclopaedia currently available in 125 languages, containing a total of 3.3 million articles.
The lucky millionth article (on March 1st) was an entry on Jordanhill railway station in Scotland, written by Ewan Macdonald, a Wikipedia contributor who posts under the tag, Nach0king.
Writing on his Wikipedia homepage, Macdonald admitted that he’d been coveting the honour of the millioneth post: “While I am, of course, delighted at being the one to hit this milestone, I must confess that, along with many others, I timed my contributions tonight to give me a chance at being the lucky one.”
With the million-article mark passed and the Wikimedia Foundation estimating that new articles are coming in at a rate of 1,700 new articles every day, our back-of-a-beer-mat calculation reckons they’ll be hitting 2 million sometime 2009.
Started in 2001, Wikipedia is now the largest reference website on the Internet and along with text articles, the English Wikipedia includes graphical timelines, subject-specific portals, four hundred thousand images and hundreds of full-length songs, videos, and animations.
Wikipedia
Wikipedia: Jordanhill railway station
2 March, 2006
Ask Jeeves Rebrands, Adds New Search Tools
The site formerly known as Ask Jeeves has retired its long serving butler, rebranded itself as ‘Ask.com’ and served up a new, simplified homepage offering access to new tools like enhanced maps, driving directions, encyclopaedia search and a Web-based desktop search.
With the butler now booted off the homepage, ask.com presents a simple, Google-like interface with a text search box and a collapsible, customisable sidebar with shortcuts to 10 default search tools including maps, bloglines, images, weather, dictionary and weather.
New map features galore (if you’re in the US)
Ask.com says that the map search service has been considerably improved, employing the new AJAX-based technology to let users add new locations (pins) on the map, and then move the pins around on the map to get instantly updated walking or driving directions.
Aerial photos can also be overlaid or combined with regular street views, with the option to print aerial shots for a fee.
After several minutes frantically looking for some pin-pushing, drag’n’drop action of our own, we realised that it’s not for the likes of us Brits and all the groovy functionality is reserved for US maps only.
Were we impressed? Not at all.
And as if to wind us up a bit further, we then discovered that ask.com’s much-touted new encyclopedia search function was also noticeable by its absence on the UK homepage, as was the local search function.
Here’s an idea Ask.com – how about you include a help file to explain this to users, or, even better, give us the same goodies too?
Keeping it simple
In an attempt to stand out from a highly competitive (and Google dominated) market, Ask executives are aiming to provide a super-clean interface with fewer ads and editorial results displayed above advertisements.
“We want to get the message out that Ask.com is a serious alternative to any search engine out there,” said Daniel Read, vice president of consumer products at Ask.com.
Old Danny boy’s got his work cut out for him as Ask Jeeves has remained the least used among the largest search engines, way behind market leaders Google who currently hog an estimated 40 per cent of all queries.
Trailing behind Yahoo, Microsoft, MSN and AOL, Ask Jeeves can only muster a paltry 6.5% of the market, and until we get the same advanced functionality that our US counterparts enjoy, we’ll be sticking with Google, thanks.
Ask.com
27 February, 2006
AOL Set To Battle Skype, Google And MySpace
America Online is about to come out of its corner fighting as it gets ready to slug it out with Internet heavyweights such as MySpace, Skype and Google.
Ignoring shouts from the crowd that ‘they’re a big organisation but they’re out of shape’, AOL CEO Jonathan Miller told USA Today that they’re ready to KO the opposition with a salvo of killer punches.
New video search tools
First up is a new video search tool which integrates with the innovative Truveo technology which AOL bought in December.
The company claim that by using Truveo’s “visual crawlers”, they can now find and index high-quality video on the Web that traditional search engines can’t see, and will include AOL Hi-Q Videos (DVD-quality) in their video indexes.
The 1.8 million videos already indexed through Truveo will be added to AOL’s existing archive of 20,000+ original and licensed videos, along with the 2.5 million Web videos indexed through Singingfish.
Come mid-March, AOL will also be making 14,000 Warner Brothers-owned classic TV shows available for free (but supported by advertising), as part of its new In2TV service.
Mashing up MySpace
With 43 million active users signed up to their AIM messaging service, AOL is hoping that with their substantial music and video offerings, they’ll be able to mount an effective challenge to the immensely successful MySpace social networking community.
Seeing as they already operate the world’s most popular messaging service, AOL should be in a strong position to take on Murdoch’s company.
As Miller points out, with so many people already using Buddy Lists to chat with others, “the barrier to getting people to use it would be very low.”
With the new service, subscribers could simply click on a name in a Buddy List and be taken directly to that person’s personal website.
Charlene Li, analyst at Forrester Research, reckoned AOL’s plans made perfect sense, adding: “The key is making a strong link with AOL Music. Part of the reason MySpace works so well is it has music.”
Stalking Skype
Miller also revealed plans to turn AIM into a full voice platform which would compete directly with Skype.
Although Google and Yahoo instant message services already offer VoIP calls, AOL’s market dominance could quickly establish them as a force in cheap Internet phone calling.
Expected to should roll out in late spring, AOL also intends to open up the new AIM voice service to outside software developers.
No doubt AIM users will be hoping that this may finally produce long-overdue tools to let them chat with users of other messaging services.
AOL
21 February, 2006
Google To Power Vodafone Mobile Search – Imagination Lacking: 3GSM
The news is coming out of 3GSM thick and fast, so we’re going to be reporting in a slightly different way. When we see a press release that we think it’s of interest to you, Dear Reader, we’ll put it up in full, with a brief comment at the top. Normal service will be resumed post 3GSM – unless you tell us you like this format.
We’re increasingly disappointed about the view of a couple of technologies by the wider market. The primary recipients of over-glowing acceptance in our view are Apple with their iPod and Google with search. OK, they’re good products, but really …. have some imagination. There are other products/services around that are equally good, and we’re sure that it’s only a matter of time before the alternatives exceed what is currently seen as the benchmark.
To fit in with this trend, Vodafone (who for goodness sake should have more confidence and technical expertise) have signed with Google, to have them power search on the Vodafone network.
Vodafone and Google team to create innovative mobile search experience for mobile phone users
Vodafone today announced that it is collaborating with Google todevelop innovative mobile search services for its customers.
Vodafone will integrate Google’s search capability into its consumerservice, Vodafone live!, providing customers with the most relevantinformation, wherever they are and whatever time of day it is.
Google’s search results will be delivered through Vodafone’s high speeddata networks. Combining Vodafone’s mobile expertise with Google’ssearch capability will ensure that customers can quickly and easilyfind what’s relevant to them. The new service will offer simultaneoussearch both on Vodafone live! and the wider Web.
Vodafone’s integration of Google search will take the mobile internetto a new level. Vodafone live! was the first mobile service to makedata services easily accessible to mobile customers. Whether checkingthe weather, looking for a restaurant or getting the most up-to-datenews, consumers want search services that meet their everyday needs.
Alan Harper, Group Strategy Director, Vodafone, said: “Innovative mobile search will become increasingly important as fastand easy access to information and services are increasingly demandedby customers on the move. Together, Vodafone and Google will focus oncreating the best mobile search service in the market, helping to bringthe mobile internet to life. Our customers will be able to findrelevant information and services faster, making the Vodafone live!customer experience even better. Our intention is to develop ourrelationship with Google to ensure Vodafone customers continue to havethe very best in mobile services.”
Nikesh Arora, Vice President, European Operations, Google Inc., said: “As people become more mobile, it’s increasingly important that we canprovide them with access to information when on-the-go. Googleunderstands that mobile phone users are looking for more than a desktopreplacement – they want directly relevant content, quickly. Vodafonehas long been a pioneer in providing mobile data services to itscustomers and we believe that by working together we will ensure a userfriendly experience for mobile users.”
14 February, 2006