Get Optimized Google Search Suggestions on Android and iPhone

Typing on cellphones is more difficult than it is on computers. While the computer keyboard offers us a place to rest our hands to type and keys large enough to easily press, in a cellphone the tiny keys often make typing rather time consuming.

Google has recognized this difficulty faced by mobile phone users and has now introduced a new feature to save our time while running Google Search on our cellphones.



When we type some characters in the search bar of Google, some suggestions automatically appear. These suggestions might seem random to the average user and might be useless. But at times the suggestion is exactly what we need and occasionally even better than what we about to originally search for.

Google has now improved their search suggestions for cellphone users by presenting search suggestions based on the current or recent location of the cellphone user. For instance, typing ‘muse’ in the search bar while a user is in Boston will present suggestions like “Museums in Boston.”

Source: http://techcityinc.com

Google Barcode Logo Celebrates 57 Years of Barcode Patent

Google is celebrating the 57th anniversary of the patenting of the barcode with a Google logo that is literally a barcode.

On October 7, 1952, Joseph Woodland, Bernard Silver, and Jordin Johanson were awarded US Patent 2,612,994, after waiting since 1949 for it to come through.



The barcode could have ended up in the hands of IBM, where Woodland and Johanson moved to in 1951 and “continually tried to interest IBM in developing the system.” IBM commissioned a report which concluded “that it was both feasible and interesting, but that processing the resulting information would require equipment that was some time off in the future.”

In 1952 Philco purchased the patent, and then sold it to RCA the same year.

The common use of barcodes though was more recent. In July 1972 RCA began an eighteen-month test of their system in a Kroger store in Cincinnati. By 1977, there were scanning machines in fewer than 200 grocery stores in the United States. By 1980 the technology was being adopted by 8000 stores per year.

At 34 I’m just old enough to remember shopping at a supermarket where every item had a price tag. During the 80’s old fashioned price tags
disappeared, and today you even see self service checkouts in supermarkets.

Although not yet confirmed by Google, it’s fair guess that the barcode logo on Google.com equates to something along the lines of Google, be it in the numeric form of the word.

Via:http://www.inquisitr.com/41117/google-barcode-logo/

Bing Looses Search Share To Google

Microsoft Bing was launched as a challenger to Google this summer. But according to the latest search engine statistics from Stat Counter, the MS search engine has lost its sheen to Google search. The decline isn’t limited to the U.S., either. The search engine’s global market share has dipped slightly to 3.3 percent in September from 3.6 percent the month before. It means that the initial hype is now fading and people are now looking for some “real search results” instead of all the fun and fancy results.

On the other side, Google search was a big gainer. Google’s search market share went up from 77.83% to 80.08%. It also has a global market share of over 90%. The statistics have been collected using more than 4.6 billion search engine clicks on sites that are tracked by StatCounter. US traffic accounts for over 1.1 billion of those clicks.

Hired gun for Microsoft, in dogged pursuit of Google

REDMOND, Wash.--Qi Lu knows as well as anyone just how difficult it is to take on Google.

For nearly a decade, Lu played a leading role in building Yahoo's Internet search and advertising technologies. The effort was so important that Yahoo backed it with billions of dollars to acquire companies, hire armies of engineers and develop and run its own systems. Yet Yahoo fell further and further behind and many analysts said the company was simply outgunned by Google.

Lu, who is 47, left Yahoo 14 months ago but now finds himself once again leading the charge against Google. This time, he is backed by a patron that vows to spend even more than Yahoo did on the mission: Microsoft.

"It's an unfinished mission that I would like to work on," he said.

The challenge for Lu and his team remains enormous, and success appears improbable. But since Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's chief executive, tapped him to become president of the company's online services division in December, Lu, a self-effacing engineer who is one of the most private and atypical executives in the upper ranks of the Internet industry, has earned the confidence of Microsoft's troops and helped to bring a dose of optimism to a beaten-down team.

Possessing unusual stamina and a maniacal work ethic, he has pushed his team hard to give Microsoft an important victory. In nightly 9:30 meetings over several weeks, he leaned on his managers to find creative ways to structure a sweeping and complex partnership with Yahoo. The deal, signed in July, will give Microsoft something it has coveted for years: a vastly larger audience that will make Bing, its search engine, the runner-up to Google.

By Miguel Helft [VIA:The New York Times ]

Also Read On :http://news.cnet.com/

Google Yahoo or Bing: Apps

Google Yahoo and Bing fight for the top three spots for search engines. Apps are very important features for many users. Each of these three giants have focused differently on the subject at hand…apps.

Google, Yahoo, and Bing are the three most used search engines on the internet. Each one has apps which we use to make our (online) life more enjoyable and more productive. The apps which we enjoy so much are developed in order to appease the appetites of the internet world for more techno-advancements.

Google, Yahoo, and Bing all use their apps to attract new users in order to garner higher usage, thus getting higher ranking and pay for their services and goods. Let’s take a look at some of the individual apps that Google, Yahoo, and Bing have in their portfolios.

Google’s apps are very useful, indeed. For starters, Google calendars is a great way to keep track of the events in your life. You can also use the calendar to update your friends as to what is going on in your life.

This is can be very beneficial for someone who is on the go! When people have a difficult time following what you are up to in your busy world, they can receive updates via the web! You won’t have to answer so many questions like, “where have you been?” A simple, bur rewarding feature to Google’s apps list.

Yahoo has an app called Daily activities planner, which is similar to Google’s calendar, yet more customizable as it has many templates one can use to make their daily grind more enjoyable to update. Bing’s apps are pretty much limited as of yet. I believe this an attempt to streamline in order to produce a more useful search engine.

Cutting the fat may have allowed for more focus on the search engine’s capabilities for search. Of course MSN has apps as well, but this is a discussion of the top three search engines apps, so we’ll stick with the discussion.

Next up is email platforms.Google’s email platform is used by more advertisers (spammers) because it seems to get passed the spam guards more easily. It also seems that there are more options for those with slow connections or weak computers. One can load only in basic HTML if the connection seems to have trouble loading.

This is great for someone such as myself with lack of computing power. Yahoo’s mail services, both plus and classic seem to load very slowly and take quite a bit of resources for the slow computer.Multitasking can be a pain while trying to utilize Yahoo mail at the same time.

The features offered are well put together, though. It is a more navigable environment than Gmail once inside. Bing uses Windows live or hotmail as their platform for email service. There are several extensions which makes this engine a great place to setup throwaway accounts and I for one just found passwords for a mail account that I have not opened for at least four years.

There were over 8, 500 emails in the inbox, but the account was still functioning! I was amazed. I guess reliability is not a problem with Microsoft’s email platform.

[Via:http://webupon.com/search-engines/google-yahoo-or-bing-apps/]

"Going Google" with Google Apps

Every morning, millions of people wake up to a very refreshing experience at work. They don't see "mailbox is full" errors in their email. They don't worry about backing up their data. They can get to any file they need from any computer, anywhere with Internet access and a browser. They can all access and edit the same documents and spreadsheets at the same time as their colleagues. They use Gmail and Google Calendar at work as fluidly and easily as they use their personal Gmail accounts. They video, voice and text chat with their peers globally as naturally as they send email.

The IT people at these companies and organizations don't waste time or money buying, installing or managing email servers. They focus on the smart, innovative stuff they want to work on, because they never have to bother with expensive and painful software upgrades, hardware compatibility issues or managing data centers. They have left many IT frustrations and costs behind and moved on to something better.



Official Google Blog: "Going Google" with Google Apps

Google to Launch a Microblogging Search Engine

Google prepares to launch a service that indexes and ranks content from microblogging services like Twitter. Since it's very easy to post updates and the posts are usually very short, micro-blogging services are great for live blogging, posting real-time information about an event.

Twitter's search engine has two important drawbacks: it's limited to Twitter and it sorts the results by date. While there are other search engines like Tweefind that try to sort Twitter posts by relevancy and search engines like Twingly that index multiple microblogging sites, none of them does a great job.

Much like Google Blog Search, Google's microblogging search service will sort the results by relevancy and it also be integrated with Google's web search engine: the keywords that are frequently used in recent posts will trigger a MicroBlogsearch universal search group.

Here's the description used in Google's localization service:

"Recent updates about QUERY. This is the MicroBlogsearch Universal result group header text. A Microblog is a blog with very short entries. Twitter is the popular service associated with this format."


In May, Marissa Mayer discussed the significance of Twitter for Google:

"What's really happening in Twitter is that there are a lot of clues in it in terms of what's happening that's interesting overall. It's similar to what we see in Google Trends, where people will often type what they're interested in into the search box, and we can make some predictions off of that. So we are interested in being able to offer, for example, micro-blogging and micro-messaging in our search. Particularly in Blog Search and possibly in Web Search, but we don't have any particular plans to announce."

For more updation on google news visit: googlesystem.blogspot.com

The Local Business Center dashboard opens its doors

If you're a local business owner, it's likely that Google plays a role in helping customers find you. And we're not just talking about your website — thanks to Google Maps and Google Search, you may also be getting a lot of online traffic to your business listing.

You also probably know how they tend to work: A potential customer does a search on Google.com or in Google Maps, comes across your listing, clicks on it to see your reviews and details, and then gets directions to your location.

Now, imagine if there were a way for you to get a better understanding of how those customers are finding you. Did they search for "pizza" or "pasta" to get to the listing for your Italian restaurant? Do they live across town, but drive miles for your great selection of camping gear? What happens to traffic to your new dental practice when you start advertising in the local paper? With information like that, you'd be able to make better informed decisions on how to drive more traffic to your listing and attract more customers.

Later today, you'll be able to do just that, thanks to a new dashboard feature we're launching in the Local Business Center (www.google.com/lbc). The LBC is a free tool that enables business owners to control the content of their business listings as they appear in Google Search and Google Maps. All you have to do is claim your listing in the LBC and go through a quick verification process to get access to the following kinds of data:

* 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.



For learning more details about local business center, Visit Official Google Blog .

Blog search and beyond

Since we launched the Custom Search AJAX gadget for Blogger on our experimental site, we've gotten some great feedback. Now, the tuned-up search gadget is available to all Blogger users. You can configure this gadget to help your readers search all the information that's relevant to your blog — your posts, webpages that you link to, and sites that you link to from the sidebar — all in one shot. When your readers search using this gadget, the results are displayed with the look and feel of your blog. And they show up inline, so readers don't have to leave your blog. After they're done, they can quickly dismiss the results and go back to reading your blog posts. Take a look at how S. Krishna's Books uses the gadget.

You can configure the gadget on your blog with just a few clicks:

* Edit your blog's layout, and click "Add a Gadget"
* Select and configure the search box gadget

The search box will then show up on the sidebar on your blog.

By default, the following 3 search tabs are configured:

* This blog: searches across your blog posts
* Linked from here: searches blog posts, webpages linked from your posts, blog lists, and link lists
* The web: searches across all pages on the web

The gadget also provides an option that lets you restrict search results to pages linked from a specific blog list or link list. For example, if you have many link lists on your sidebar, you can choose to surface only the most important ones in specific search tabs. "Linked from here" includes pages from all of them.

The goal of this gadget is to expand the search capabilities of your blog and give your readers a better search experience. If you're using it, we'd love to hear your feedback on other improvements we can make. Learn more at the Custom Search Blog.

More Information on:http://googleblog.blogspot.com/

Google: The browser is the computer

SAN FRANCISCO--Google spent Wednesday morning trying to get developers excited about the next generation of Web technologies by showing off how future Web applications will mimic desktop apps.

"It's time for us to take advantage of the amazing opportunity that is before us," said Google CEO Eric Schmidt, kicking off Google I/O 2009 in San Francisco. Schmidt was referring to the growing sense that the Internet and browsers--rather than a computer's operating system--will be the future foundation for application development.

The industry isn't quite ready for that yet. Many of applications demonstrated before the crowd of around 4,000 developers will require the widespread adoption of HTML 5 technologies, which are still under development by a consortium of companies and organizations.

Still, Google's Vic Gundotra, vice president of engineering, noted that the four modern open standards browsers (Firefox, Safari, Chrome,and Opera) are all adopting some HTML 5 technologies as they become more stable, taking every opportunity possible to ding Microsoft's Internet Explorer for lagging behind the other four browsers.

However, offstage after his keynote, Gundotra downplayed any conflict with Microsoft, noting that its task in moving toward HTML 5 is more complex because of the large number of enterprises running Internet Explorer, and the possibility that internal applications developed for that browser could break. "As they follow through, they are going to have a huge impact on moving the Web forward," he said.

Gundotra showed off how Web applications will be able to take advantage of five main HTML 5 concepts: canvas tags, video tags, geolocation, application caching and database, and Web Workers.

For example, canvas tags help developers bring all kinds of sophisticated graphics to their Web applications without having to use a plug-in--which is also the appeal of the video tag. Google showed off an "experiment" with YouTube videos coded using the video tags, which gives developers quite a few more options when it comes to how those videos can be embedded into a Web page.

Geolocation is another huge topic of late with mobile applications. Google showed off how its Google Latitude application takes advantage of a new iPhone geolocation API that Apple will release as part of the iPhone 3.0 software to run in the mobile Safari browser. Mozilla's Jay Sullivan also showed off how Firefox 3.5 will come with a button that allows the browser to pinpoint your location in Google Maps using Wi-Fi and cell tower positioning data.

In a briefing session following the keynote, Google's Matthew Papakipos, engineering director, said Google has various aspects of the HTML 5 capabilities demonstrated Wednesday in different parts of the development process. For example, the canvas tags that allow for richer graphics are present in Chrome 2.0, which is currently available, but others, such as the video tags, are farther away from reaching the world.

Mozilla plans to support all the HTML 5 technologies demonstrated Wednesday with the release of Firefox 3.5, Sullivan said. That is expected to arrive fairly soon.

One interesting question, perhaps saved for another day, concerned how, or if, Google plans to index the coming wave of Web applications as part of its search efforts. Attempting to index these rich applications at the moment presents quite a "challenge" for search bots trying to figure out how to categorize the content within an application.

"Content won't be a problem, but how do you index Gmail? Should you index Gmail?" Gundotra pondered.

Source: http://news.cnet.com/

Google unveils new search tools

Google said in its quest to create the perfect search engine, it cannot afford to rest on its laurels.

The company's comments came at an event billed as a "state of the union" on search as it unveiled new products that aim to push search in a new direction.

Google has over 63% of the US market compared to rival Yahoo with 20%.

"The race in search is far from over and innovation and continued improvement is absolutely pivotal," said Google's Marissa Mayer.

"I've said this many times but search is still in its infancy. Our engineers are worried about what is the next big thing in search and how are they going to find it," said Ms Mayer who is the vice president of search products and user experience.

She said last year Google released over 365 products and in the first quarter of this year it was 120. Ms Mayer added that this was proof that "Google gets better all the time."

Google has in the past said that despite its lead in the marketplace, users were "one click away" from switching to other alternatives.

Vanessa Fox of SearchEngineLand told the BBC that Google's ability to constantly innovate gives them a leading edge.

"Google is saying we have to provide for all searchers and do things at scale. It means they have to launch all sorts of features while some companies can concentrate on just one thing. The key thing behind why they are still ahead is because they are able to innovate at such a pace," said Ms Fox.

Google Squared

During the "Searchology" event at Google's Mountain View headquarters, Ms Mayer and her team showcased four new products that she said would give users a "different way to look at the web."

One of the more experimental was called Google Squared which will go public in the next month or so. It takes information from the web and displays it in a spreadsheet in "split seconds," something Ms Mayer said would normally take someone a half a day to do.

During the demonstration, a query for "small dog" was typed into the search box. Seconds later a table popped up showing photographs of various dogs, their origin, weight and height in a clear and simple layout.

While Ms Mayer described this product as "transformative" she would only hint at the specific techniques that Google uses to drive this feature.

"I think we can open the kimono a little bit without talking about the computer science behind it.

"What they are basically doing is looking for structures on the web that seem to imply facts. Like something 'is' something.

"Different tables, different structures, and then corroborating the evidence around whether or not something is a fact by looking at whether that fact occurs across pages.

"This is all in the secret sauce of what we are doing and it takes an incredible amount of compute power to create those squares," said Ms Mayer.

"Refine, filter and view"

Google Search Options is a tool that is aimed at letting users "slice and dice" results so they can manipulate the information and get what they want faster.

They come into play after a normal web search and allow users to drill down into the results by offering an option for different genres like product reviews, forum posts or videos. Other choices include recently added blogs, images, timelines and so on.

Ms Mayer said this new feature should help people who struggle with the "vexing" problem of exactly what query they should type into the search box.

It is meant to give users the opportunity to "refine, filter and view results in a different way."

Another feature is called "Rich Snippets" which are search results that return more information in every listing.

For example, users looking for reviews of a new restaurant might get a "rich snippet" of average review scores, number of reviews and the restaurant's price range.

"This is a step toward making the whole internet smarter," said Google product manager Kavi Goel.

'Skymap'

A final feature had Ms Mayer "reaching for the stars" with an app for mobile phones using the Android operating system.

"For a long time here at Google we joked could we actually find physical things like keys and now with the power and technology of Android, coupled with search, you can see we are starting to find some physical things like stars," said Ms Mayer.

Skymap displays the constellations. By using the smart phone's GPS capability, it offers the user a dynamic star map that knows where they are standing and which way they are pointing

The feature came about as a result of Google's 20% time that allows engineers to spend one fifth of their time working on pet projects.

The app is now available on the Android app market.

"Clearly Google is still pushing the envelope with all these new additions," said Rob Hof, Silicon Valley editor of Business Week.

"They are certainly continuing to improve daily. Whether it makes a difference and will stave off the competition, I don't know. But they are not standing still."

Ms Mayer said keeping the user happy is at the heart of everything they do.

"There is a shoe company called Stuart Weitzman and their slogan is "a little obsessed with shoes."

"Google is a little more than obsessed with search," confessed Ms Mayer.


By: Maggie Shiels
Technology Reporter, BBC News, Silicon Valley

Source :http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8047076.stm

Cool changes coming to Twitter Search

Twitter Search is going to get a lot more interesting soon, I learned tonight from Twitter's new VP of Operations, Santosh Jayaram. Until recently, Jayaram was VP of Search Quality for Google.

Speaking (with LinkedIn co-founder Allen Blue) on a panel I was moderating, and later in a one-on-one discussion, Jayaram confirmed that Twitter Search, which currently searches only the text of Twitter posts, will soon begin to crawl the links included in tweets and begin to index the content of those pages.

This will make Twitter Search a much more complete index of what's happening in real time on the Web, and make it an even more credible competitor to Google Search for people who are looking for very timely content.

Twitter Search will also get a reputation ranking system soon, Jayaram told me. When you do a search on a "trending" topic (a topic that is so big it gets its own link in the Twitter.com sidebar), Twitter will take into account the reputation of the person who wrote each tweet and rank search results in part based on that.

Jayaram did not say precisely how reputation would be calculated; he indicated that engineers are still figuring that out. But this, again, makes Twitter Search more valuable. Currently, if you search for a hot topic on Twitter, the results may be swamped by retweets and low-value content from hundreds or thousands of other users. A ranking system will help a great deal. See Twitter search is broken and Three start-ups attack Twitter Search.

I'm looking forward to these changes.

Finally, a real-time search story from Jayaram, which he used to illustrate the immediacy of Twitter Search during the panel discussion: he told of being in the Twitter offices in San Francisco on March 30, when the Twitter engineers noticed that the word "earthquake" had suddenly started trending up. They didn't know where the earthquake was. Several seconds later, their building started to shake. The earthquake had been in Morgan Hill, 60 miles south of San Francisco, and the tweets about the shaker reached the office faster than the seismic waves themselves.

Read More : http://news.cnet.com