Technologizer

Last November, I wrote about a test version of Google that left its search options sidebar open all the time. It never graduated to full public status. But I just stumbled upon what seems to be a variant. (It’s what I’m getting when I go to Google in Safari, but doesn’t show up in Chrome.)

Like the early test, it puts a left-hand sidebar of search options on the screen whenever you search–but this one’s sleeker, with fewer options (some stuff is hidden by default).

Continue reading this story…

Google gets Facebook page updates.

Sprint’s major-market WiMax plans.

Are TV commercials now obsolete?

iPhone mod: titanium back cover.

Mossberg: new Mac Quicken “iffy.”

Engadget compares smartphone GPS programs.

Google prunes Gmail Labs features.

_______________________

Like 5Words? Subscribe via RSS.

[NOTE: Here’s another story I wrote for FoxNews.com. This one’s on cool ways to find information that go beyond Google, and mentions Aardvark.I wrote it last Monday and it was was published on Tuesday–and on Thursday, TechCrunch broke the news that Google was buying Aardvark.)

How much do I love Google? Thanks to the stats provided by Google Web History, it’s easy to quantify: Over the past four and a half years, I’ve Googled for information 43,295 times. That works out to about one search per hour, 24/7/365. If that doesn’t indicate passion for the world’s most popular search engine, I don’t know what does.

But I’d never argue that Google is always the fastest, most effective way to find facts, seek advice, take actions, or simply satisfy your curiosity about the world around you. Actually, there are more viable Google alternatives than ever. For the most part, they don’t compete by trying to out-Google Google at basic Web searching. Instead, they do useful things that Google doesn’t.

I’m nowhere near as dependent on any of these five free services as I am on Google — but I use and recommend them all.

Continue reading this story…

I’m at Yahoo this morning for a press event the company is holding about its search activities. One overarching goal, clearly, is to make the case that Yahoo intends to remain an innovative force in search even assuming that its deal with Microsoft goes through and Bing’s index winds up as the basis of Yahoo’s search features.

Unlike yesterday’s Google Buzz launch, Yahoo’s event doesn’t involve any major announcement. We’ve seen a few brief recaps of minor recent additions to Yahoo’s search features, and gotten some quick previews of features in the works. The most interesting of the latter demos was of an iPhone app that lets you draw an outline with your fingertip on a map to indicate a geographic area, then get local results–for instance, to find restaurants on the waterfront.

Here’s a lousy photograph of the feature in action:

Yahoo says the goal is to let people search as easily as kids draw with an Etch-a-Sketch–it calls this feature “sketch-a-search.” As someone who spent a lot of time with an Etch-a-Sketch in my youth, the metaphor doesn’t quite make sense: The defining feature of the Etch-a-Sketch is that it’s hard to get a picture out of it that’s anything like the one you might have in your head. (It’s a lot of fun to try, though.)

I do like Sketch-a-Search, though–I’ve certainly spent a lot of time on the iPhone and other phones futzing with maps and having trouble zooming in to the geographical area I care about. I tend to end up either with the entire United States or a one-block radius, when what I really want is a region of half a mile or so.

Yahoo didn’t have anything to say about when or how they’ll make Sketch-a-Search available to consumers.

For as long as western companies have been doing business in China–under Chinese laws–there’s been a fundamental question that’s been a subject of immense controversy: Are they helping to make China more free, or are they helping the Chinese government prevent more freedom?

Until now, Google has been one of a number of U.S. Web companies that has willingly provided a censored version of its services in China as a prerequisite of doing business there. It’s maintained that providing the Chinese people with access to some information is better than denying them access to Google entirely, and its Chinese search engine has carried a disclaimer that some links are suppressed.

But now that’s changing. In a fascinating blog post, Google has disclosed that it discovered a sophisticated hacker attack on its systems in mid-December. Its investigation revealed that the target was the accounts of Chinese human rights activists, and that the attack encompassed other large companies. It further found that the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists had been breached through such means as malware installed on their computers.

Continue reading this story…

It’s been an uncommonly busy week for Google search. On Monday, the company unveiled its new real-time search feature and Google Goggles visual search. Now it’s ending the week with two additional meaningful new features. (And hey, it celebrated Popeye on its home page in between.)

New feature #1: Google Suggest, the feature that starts providing possible queries as you type, now provides possible answers in some cases.

The feature in its current form is fairly limited: It includes ten types of information (weather, flight status, local time, area codes, package tracking, answers, definitions, calculator, currency, and unit conversions) and is only smart enough to figure out what you’re typing with certain phrasings of questions. (It seems to work best if you use as few words as possible rather than typing in wordy questions.) But at its best, it’s kind of eerie–Google gives you answers while you’re still typing.

New feature #2 is only for folks running the beta of Chrome 4 for Windows, but it’s also neat: It’s Quick Scroll, which auto-scrolls to sections of Web pages relevant to queries you’ve searched for–once you’ve clicked off Google onto a site in the results.

Quick Scroll is clever and useful. It’s interesting, though, to see it debuting as a Chrome extension–even though vastly more folks could take advantage of its goodness if it was a Firefox one. Google’s blog post on the new features doesn’t mention if the company plans to make it more widely available, but this is the most recent evidence that Google is starting to favor its own products in a way it hadn’t in the past.

Sorry, Bing: Google took a step today that tickles me so much that it’s hard to imagine a response that would please me more. Here’s today’s “Google Doodle” celebratory logo, as seen on the Google home page today.

Continue reading this story…

Google announced several interesting things at its press event today, including Google Goggles, a vision-assisted search app for Android phones that lets you snap a photo of a real-world item, then get information about it. But the big news turned out to be Google Real-Time Search, a new search feature that gives you the very latest results for your search queries. As in ones that are seconds old.

It’s not a replacement for Google search as we know it–in fact, it’ll be embedded within standard Google search results, in a scrolling window that updates automatically and lets you backtrack to see what you might have missed. You’ll also be able to view real-time results all by themselves, via a new “Latest” option in Google’s Search Options menu. That gets you a page that mashes up items from Twitter, news sites, blogs, and other sources–and Google announced today that it’s struck deals with Facebook and MySpace to bring public information from their users into Google Real-Time Search.

Continue reading this story…

Greetings from the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Google’s about to announce something relating to search–I don’t know exactly what yet, but a Google representative just told me it was a big moment for the company. I’ll blog about it here soon, but for the fastest updates, check out my Twitter feed.

Microsoft’s Bing search engine went offline this evening, greeting visitors with an error message instead of a pretty picture and a search field–for somewhere between thirty minutes and nearly an hour, depending on which report you believe. I don’t see any mention of the outage, its end, or the culprit at Bing’s blog, but as TechCrunch’s MG Siegler points out, a member of the Bing team tweeted about it a bit. And the official Bing Twitterfeed says it’ll share details when it has them.

The outage’s timing isn’t auspicious–it comes a day after Bing’s big press event and rollout of new features. But at least it’s in good company: Google had a weird hour-long period back in January when it thought the entire Web was dangerous, and Gmail has suffered multiple extended hiccups this year. I wonder what the biggest Web site is that’s never been suffered for more than, oh, five minutes of unplanned downtime?

[UPDATE: Bing has explained the problem–unintended consequences of a configuration change.)

I kinda doubt that anyone involved planned it this way, but yesterday provided an interesting study in contrasts between the world’s biggest search engine and its most notable rising star. In the morning, I attended a Bing press event. It was highlighted by the debut of a feature-packed new version of Bing Maps, but also included demonstrations of how you can get weather reports from three different providers right within Bing. And watch movie trailers, and view slideshows. Bing may be a search engine, but that doesn’t mean its goal is to get you to leave–it’s at least as happy if it can help you without you having to click away to another site, and it won’t shy away from throwing a lot of stuff at you.

Continue reading this story…

At a press event in San Francisco this morning, Microsoft demonstrated recent, brand-new, and upcoming features it’s adding to its Bing search engine. The big news: The company is launching a beta of a major upgrade to Bing Maps. The beta is available here–and for the sake of comparison, here’s the existing version of Bing Maps, which remains the default.

From my experience so far, the new Bing Maps may be a true beta in the “we’re still working on making it work” sense: It sometimes performed very slowly, or conked out altogether. (Disclosure: I’m trying it on an EVDO connection, which probably doesn’t help.) The new version requires Microsoft’s SilverLight browser plug-in to work, which will be a source of controversy: There are folks who dislike plug-ins in general, and some who have a particular distaste for SilverLight. And since SilverLight is far from universal, there’s a good chance you’ll need to install it before you can test-drive the new Bing Maps.

Continue reading this story…

It’s become a tradition for the major search engines to release year-end summaries of what their users have been searching for–and for reasons unknown to me, all of them unveil these lists on December 1st, so they really cover 11/12th of the year.

After the jump, lists from Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask.com–sadly but unsurprisingly, the gent to the right hit number one on three out of the four charts. And just for the heck of it, I’ll tell you about the searches that bring folks to Technologizer, absolutely none of which involve deceased celebrities, reality TV, or infectious diseases.

Continue reading this story…

Google guru Philipp Lenssen has a cool tip on his Google Blogoscoped site: He shows how to turn on an experimental version of Google by pasting a URL into your browser. It’s got a number of minor visual tweaks, including a much cleaner version of the Google logo (it even skips the TM sign).

But for me, the real treat of the new version is the fact that it turns the Google Search Options left-hand filters on as a standard part of the default search-results view. I’ve been hooked on them since they showed up last May, especially for restricting my results to a specific time frame. And as far as I can tell, there hasn’t even been a way to tell Google that you’d like to leave the Search Results panel open permanently–it’s required a click every time I’ve wanted to use it.

Google’s instinctive desire to keep its pages from getting cluttered up is one of the company’s most admirable traits. But I hope it decides that the Search Results are worth the real estate they occupy–and that this new design becomes the default view real soon now.

Use Bing, spend extra money.

Remember Joost? It’s been sold.

More on “the Google phone.”

Vudu movie service gets Wikipedia.

It’s war: Amazon vs. Wal-Mart.

More publishers talk Google withdrawal.

Google explains offensive image result.

Google and Tivo strike deal.

HP’s new iPAQ world phone.

________________________

Like 5Words? Subscribe via RSS.

It’s just a rumor, but a fascinating one: Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. is supposedly talking to Microsoft about some sort of deal that would involve Microsoft giving News Corp. a boatload of cash to block Google from indexing its news sites, so Microsoft’s Bing could step in and become News Corp.’s official search engine. I have no idea whether there’s any truth to it, but the idea plays into the  whole “Google should be paying content companies” meme that Murdoch and others have been pushing.

If Murdoch was to yank his news sites out of Google’s index, that would only leave…well, all of the world’s news sources except for those owned by Rupert Murdoch. You gotta think that the harm to Google would be minimal, and that the harm to Murdoch’s sites might be considerable. If most of the world uses Google to find stuff–and it does–don’t you want your stuff to be there? Or can you imagine saying to yourself “Hmmm, I want to make sure that the New York Post shows up in my search results–guess I’ll use Bing?”

As a consumer, the notion of search engines cutting deals with content companies to opt in or opt out of certain engines leaves me antsy. If the practice caught on, we’d be left with a scenario in which no search engine could aspire to be comprehensive, and we’d be stuck having to use several engines if we wanted to find everything of value.

Even so, I remain in the apparent small minority of pundits who would like to see Murdoch do something about the supposed relentless persecution of his poor, struggling business by a bullying, thieving Google. If that something involved an alliance with Microsoft, everybody involved would learn a lot, no?