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Posts tagged with "Google"

Google Launches: Similar Images, Safe Search, DNS, Near Instant Voice Translation, Google Goggles and Chrome for Mac and Linux

Thursday, 10. December 2009, 20:03:32

We didn’t cover Google lately and the search engine announced a lot of changes in the past few weeks so prepare for a long post.

At first Google launched “Similar Images” search, (go to Daily Bits for more)and lockable SafeSearch, which according to Daily Bits is still " has suffered from being easy to unlock — even without a child actively trying to circumvent it."

In response to complains from publishers that Google " steals" from publishers


Google decided to allow publishers to limit the number of accesses under the First Click Free policy to [our emphasis] five free accesses per user each day. This change applies to both Google News publishers as well as websites indexed in Google’s Web Search. We hope that this encourages even more publishers to open up more content to users around the world!



Check Google News blog for details.

In December Search Engine Land reported that Google is starting Page Speed report in Webmaster Tools, allowing customers to see how fast their page is loading.

Surprisingly for many, Google decided to start their own DNS project. DNS converts names (Google) into IP addresses (99.999.99.999). Get on Search Engine Land to read more.


As people begin to use Google Public DNS, we plan to share what we learn with the broader web community and other DNS providers, to improve the browsing experience for Internet users globally. The goal of Google Public DNS is to benefit users worldwide while also helping the tens of thousands of DNS resolvers improve their services, ultimately making the web faster for everyone.



Google didn’t stop there and on December 7th, released 5 other interesting features: Near Instant Voice Translation ( search by voice and instant translation between English and Spanish); Near Me Now (suggestions based on location for mobile phones); Google Product Search ( get real-time product info from local retailers and stock availability); Local Info ( like restaurants) enabled on Android phones and Google Goggles - "visual search. Take a photo, click a button and Google will analyze imagery and text in the photo for your search query”. Take a look at Read/Write/Web blog for more.

And finally, Google announced availability of Chrome for Mac and Linux platforms and extensions ( add –ons) in Google Chrome for Windows and Linux (Beta). The Official Google Blog will shed a lot of light with this development.

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Google Adds Drag and Drop in Gmail, Acquires ReCaptcha, Signs A Deal for Print-On-Demand Titles And Starts Google Sidewiki

Tuesday, 13. October 2009, 20:07:16

The fact that we are not talking about Google doesn’t mean that nothing is happening at the headquarters of the search giant.

In the hot summer months Google made the Gmail community happy by adding drag and drop capability for messages.



With the new feature customers will be able to drag messages into labels, and labels onto messages. More details are available from the Official Gmail blog.

Later Google acquired ReCaptcha, a company that provides CAPTCHAs to help protect from spam and fraud bots. Get the details from CNET news.


Google plans to use ReCaptcha's technology both as a security measure within certain Google sites and to make its massive book-scanning project a little smarter, the company said in a blog post. ReCaptcha is an offshoot of Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science, and puts a twist on the traditional captcha: a string of letters in squiggly text meant to confuse spam bots and other nonhuman Web pests.



In September Google and On Demand Books (creator of the Espresso Book Machine)have signed a deal to provide print-on-demand (PoD) access to more than two million public domain books (published before 1923). Click here to see out past coverage of the Espresso Book Machine. Library Journal has more information on the subject.

If you like social networking and leaving comments and ratings on websites, you will like the new Google Sidewiki product.


Google Sidewiki is a new feature being added today to the Google Toolbar that allows anyone to leave comments about pages as they surf the web. Love something you’re reading? Hate it? You can share your views with others who visit the page and who also have Sidewiki enabled.


Sidewiki is available for now only as a feature in Google Toolbar in Internet Explorer and Firefox. Go to Search Engine Land to read more.

In the beginning of October Google improved Search Options, the side panel on the top of the search engine that allows you to filter and refine your search by time, media and results.


Today, we're announcing nine new Search Options tools: past hour, specific date range, more shopping sites, fewer shopping sites, visited pages, not yet visited, books, blogs and news.



Search Engine Land has more information and pictures.

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Google Shocks Us With The New Chrome Operating System: Get The Blog Community Response

Friday, 10. July 2009, 00:39:03

Google Chrome is not only a browser anymore but the latest platform for the new operating system for netbooks developed by Google, called Google Chrome OS.

The engineers at Google are affirmative that old operating systems were not designed for the Internet and they declare that the new Chrome OS is their way to define "what operating systems should be".


The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.

People want to get to their email instantly, without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up. They want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought them. They want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files. Even more importantly, they don't want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware, or have to worry about constant software updates.



The source code for Chrome OS will be available for the public by the end of 2009 and early next year Google promises to supply new netbooks with the Chrome Operating System.

Search Engine Land blog captured the positive ( TechCrunch, Computerworld, Mashable), negative (PC World, CNET News, Search Engine Watch) and "wait and see " (BBC, eWeek, GigaOM, ReadWriteWeb ) reactions from the blogging community. See for yourself.

Considering the new cloud technology trend (computing and storage on the Internet) and the fact that there is a generation now that lives with the Internet, I think that Google is moving in the right directions and they have proven already that they have the resources and talent to build an attractive OS for the younger generation. Is this going to kick Microsoft out of the computer OS business? Doubtfully.

Via: The Official Google Blog
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/introducing-google-chrome-os.html

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Google Gives Money Saving Tips, Starts New Chrome Beta, Experiments With A Wonder Wheel, And Revealed Its Data Centers Secret

Monday, 6. April 2009, 18:26:32

How long can you postpone writing about Google? No more than a month, if you don’t want to have a lot of topics to explain and write about, once you decide to resume.

At first the search engine decided to create a new site with Google Moderator called Tip Jar, which is a "collection of money saving tips submitted and ranked by web users". Garett Rogers Googling Google blog has more. Garett also wrote about the new beta version of Google's browser Chrome.

"The new beta version touts a much faster javascript engine (V8) and several bug fixes. Give it a try, and let me know what you think in the Talk Back!", explained Garett.



About at the same time another famous Google blogger Philipp Lenssen from Google Blogoscoped discovered that Google is "running an experiment in their search results, apparently shown to a portion of their users." After a search is run, Google shows "a Flash-based interactive mini app which starts with your keyword in the center, and related terms around it."

Clicking on a related term creates a new, connected circle with more related terms. And whenever you click on a term, to the very right, the web results change to reflect your current topic of focus. The wonder wheel worked quite smoothly, except when I tried using the back button after going to a page from the results.



The biggest news this period for Google was the release of Google Voice for Grand Central users. Here is how Google explained the new feature:

Google Voice is a service that gives you one number for all your phones, voicemail that is easy as email, and many enhanced calling features like call blocking and screening, voicemail transcripts, call conferencing, international calls, and more. Google Voice is currently available for GrandCentral users only, but will be open to new users soon.



Towards the end of March, Google also announced the addition of voice search and My Location on the Google Mobile App for Blackberry. Search Engine Land has the details.

For the first time, Google also revealed one of its close guarded secrets: design of data centers and servers. Read more at Search Engine Land blog.

The latest news that came from the search engine headquarters is the involvement of Googe in the venture capital business and the formation of the new venture capital fund called Google Venture.Search Engine Land blog can give you the details.

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Google Allowed Developers To Be Rich, Added Location To Signatures in Gmail And Enabled Editing With Google Spreadsheets

Thursday, 26. February 2009, 19:34:34

What is happening with Google lately?

In the middle of February Google announced that "developers can now charge for their applications — something that will surely make the ones with brilliant ideas, and the drive to turn them into reality, very rich." Garett Rogers wrote more on this subject.

At about the same time Google announced that users in Gmail will be able now to add their location to their signature.

To try it, turn on Location in Signature from the Labs tab under Settings, then go to your signature preferences and check the box next to "Append your location to the signature.

The Gmail blog has details.

"A year ago, Google enabled read-only access to your Google Spreadsheets from your mobile browser. Now the Google Docs team has added editing capabilities to Google Spreadsheets from popular phones, including the iPhone and Android phone.", explained the popular lifehacker blog.

Google also announced to its users that they will be able to synchronize the contacts and calendar on their mobile phones with their Google account. To see how to synchronize your contacts and calendar with your phone, take a look at the instructional video on Google Sync.

Three days ago Google experienced a Gmail outage and the company immediately responded with "Google Apps Status Dashboard. The dashboard offers an at-a-glance look at the system health of most popular Google services, including Gmail, Google Calendar, and the company’s suite of web-based document editors." TechCrunch will give you more.

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Google Starts Latitude, Goes Mobile With Gmail, Calendar And Book Search And Disconnects Video, Notebook & Catalog Search

Friday, 6. February 2009, 19:14:41

Today is Friday, and it's time for our Google summary post.

At first Google unplug the following services Google Video, Notebook & Catalog Search, Dodgeball and Mashup Editor. See SearchEngineLand for more.

Later the search giant launched a site ( with the help of Bloomberg administration) called NYCgo.com that is "designed to help tourists and residents find their way around" New York City. Googling Google posted about it.

Gmail went offline and Garett Rogers from Googling Google has the following instructions to enable the service:


1 Sign in to Gmail and click ‘Settings’.
2 Click the ‘Labs’ tab and select ‘Enable’ next to ‘Offline Gmail’.
Click ‘Save Changes.’
3 In the upper righthand corner of your account, next to your username, there will be a new ‘Offline’ link.
4 Click this link to start the offline synchronization process.



Google Calendar also went offline, but many bloggers were disappointed. .

However mobile users are happy with the newly released Google Book Search Mobilethat permits "search through and read in full, 1.5 million books on your phone's browser". ReadWriteWeb has an interesting post on the subject.

Another useful mobile implementation for Google was the Task application, but probably the most talked about was Google Latitude, which " allow you to broadcast your location to select friends, family, and colleagues based on the coordinates of your cell phone (via GPS or otherwise)". TechCrunch explains how the service works.

To help users who travel outside of there hometown, Google Maps added public transit layer
in 50 Cities, which will display public transportation routes.

Google Earth was released with new upgraded version that includes a 3D map of the Ocean floor. ReadWriteWeb has more.

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Google Updated With Voice On iPhone, Starts Flu Trends, Search Wiki , Keyword Tool, Revamps Gmail With Chat, Video And Skins

Saturday, 29. November 2008, 20:43:55

In the past two weeks Google started so many new services and I am afraid that I will barely have time to mention all of them.

In the middle of November Google announced that it "will be pushing out an update for the Google application on the iPhone that lets users search with their voice rather than trying to use the on-screen keyboard.", wrote Garett Rogers from Googling Google blog. I guess Google wants to show the iPhone fans that they can create fancy applications too. Google application is available in the iTunes store.

Later the search engine rolled out the Google Flu Trends website, which uses data from searches for flu on Google to create predict flu trends for diferent states. "Of course, not every person who searches for “flu” is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries from each state and region are added together", admits Google. Philipp Lenssen from GoogleBlogoscoped has more info.

If the design of your Gmail account bores you, than you will be glad to learn that Google decided to offer 40 new different themes. Gmail blog has the details and preview of some of the new Gmail designs.

Consumers who picked Gmail as their email, will be grateful for the Daily Bits blog post "40 Killer Gmail Tips", with info on how to search, set up and use Google's email account.

Google also enabled video and voice chat for Gmail. To start video and voice chat with friends, first you need to install a browser plug-in, that works with Windows XP or later operating system. ReadWriteWeb has more.

The most radical change that Google started in the past two weeks was Google Search Wiki, a search experiment allowing users logged into their Google account to rearrange, comment and delete their search results. Curious to see how it works? Take a look at the video. This feature is only available when you search Google while you are logged into your Google account.

Last but not least, Search Engine Land blog posted about a new Search-Based Keyword Tool, that shows users what other keywords they can advertising on Google to maximize profits.

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Google Creates Canned Responses, Searches Scanned Documents, Settles With Publishers And Adds RSS Feeds

Friday, 7. November 2008, 21:12:09

It is Friday again and it's time for our ( almost regular) Google post.

Google's new browser adds GreaseMonkey support, wrote Garett Rogers in his Googling Google blog.( meaning that now you can customize the way web pages display, create mashups and so on...)

Gmail Canned Responses is another new release from Google Labs that lets you save repetitive emails ( messages) to a template, so you don’t have to write a new message every time. ReadWriteWeb even discovered how to twist the filters, so the emails from Canned Responses are send automatically.

TechCrunch was excited about Google's new ability to index ( search) scanned documents.

Unlike standard text documents, scanned files don’t contain any text data that Google’s spiders can index. Instead, Google has employed Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology, converting photos of words into digital text files. In the past Google would attempt to index these image files as well as possible, but could typically search only file titles and nearby metadata - not the contents of the documents.



One of the biggest news around Google, since we reviewed it last time is the settlement with publishers over Google Book Search scan project.

The settlement would expand online access to millions of in-copyright books and other written materials in the U.S. from the collections of a number of major U.S. libraries participating in Google Book Search



Information Today's NewsBreaks and Barbara Quint have more info and a detailed analysis on this topic.

Finally Google decided to add RSS feed for web searches in Google Alert, noted Search Engine Land. Users now have a choice between an alert send through email or RSS. And if you need a guide on " How to Use the New Google Web Search RSS Feedshow" go to ReadWriteWeb.

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Google Checks Broken Links, Starts Techmeme, Digitization Deal And Participates In SemantiFind

Friday, 17. October 2008, 21:12:22

Before Google creates too many innovations that will be hard to track, lets talk about a few new initiatives that the search giant has started recently.

The first one showing of broken backlinks helps webmasters who have to monitor hundreds of links for big sites.

The Google webmaster tools added a feature which lets you see the sources of links which trigger a “file not found” on your site. To try this, click on your site in the dashboard (provided you verified it’s yours) and view Diagnostics -> Web crawl -> Not found. Next to a given unfound URL – say, “http://example.com/archive%3E” – you can click the “pages” link to the right, which pops up a list of sites referencing that URL*. Often the link is just malformed and the error won’t be on your end.



The second one concerns Google Blog Search,and its page, which now "looks more like Google News or Techmeme: it groups related stories into groups" . Details about the new showing of broken links and techmeme features are available from Google Blogoscoped.

Proquest, one of the biggest databases and Google reached out an agreement to scan millions of pages, so customers can easily find them through services offered by the search giant.

While ProQuest has vowed to continue improving and expanding its Historical Newspapers collection independently, the Google deal aims to create searchable electronic versions of smaller newspapers otherwise unlikely to be digitized, making them available on the open web via Google’s News archive search.



The last tool in which Google only participates is SemantiFind, a search service plugin that tries to improve Goggle's search results.

To get started with SemantiFind, you must first create an account. You can then download the browser plugin which installs the SemantiFind toolbar. This plugin is available for both Internet Explorer and Firefox.


Picture Taken From ReadWriteWeb

After the installation for every word that you type, Google suggests relevant multiple topics and related search results. ReadWriteWeb has the details.

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Finally Yahoo Comes Up With Yahoo Web Analytics

Saturday, 11. October 2008, 19:34:45

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Yahoo is now starting in beta their own Yahoo Web Analytics tool to help webmasters understand where their traffic is coming from and create custom reports.

Yahoo! Web Analytics is designed to make it easy for you to answer your specific business questions. With features like drag & drop data filters, custom report wizards, and our segmentation selector, you can easily apply or remove filters to view the performance or characteristics of specific types of products, visitors and web pages.



Website metrics is very important indicator of what is going on with a website, its services and customers and Yahoo should have started the product long ago, if they want to be competitive.

As you know Google has their own web site analysis tool called Google Analytics and we have posted information about how to analyze and optimize web pages.

Via: Search Engine Land
http://searchengineland.com/yahoo-launches-web-analytics-14988.php

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Google With Transit Info For NYC, Opens Book Search APIs, Starts Indexing Audio, Face Recognition With Picasa And Develops G1

Wednesday, 1. October 2008, 00:20:26

Google started so many things lately that I better start telling you about them rught away.

First I will start with NYC transit directions in Google Maps. ( because I live and work in the Big Apple). The Official Google blog announced that they have added " comprehensive transit info for the entire New York metro region, encompassing subway, commuter rail, bus and ferry services from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, New Jersey Transit and the City of New York.". Look for directions in NYC on Google Maps and you will be given subway, train, bus and ferry directions ( if such are available for your trip). Want to try it, click here. ( HopStop provides similar services)

Second " Google has decided to reduce the period it keeps personal information in its datalogs by half, from 18 to 9 months.", explained Pandia Search Engine News. The famous blog written by Per and Susanne Koch in Norway also pointed out that Google's Picasa ( photo editing program) now identifies faces ( face recognition) and customers can label many photos with one click.

And you think Google will stop with face recognition. Think again, because The Official Google blog announces that they have started indexing audio text with GAudi and customers can now find spoken content within a video.

If GAudi is not giving you what the two US Presidential candidates, John McCain and Barack Obama say, than try Google's In Quotes, which allows you to compare quotes between the two.

Want to integrate context ( book previews, ratings ) from Google Book Search on your website, no problem, just use the recently opened Google Book Search APIs and with a little Javascript tweaking you are all set.

And last but not least, curious to see the first Android ( open source operating system for mobile devices, based on Linux developed by Google and other major companies) mobile phone called G1, just click here. The presentation is a little long but navigate from minute 15 to minute 23 and you will see the actual phone. Wait for the end of the presentation and you are in for a surprise. Want to buy G1 ($179), keep in mind that the phone won't be sold at stores outside of 2 to 5 mile radius of T-Mobile'network coverage area

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Google Starts Walking Directions And A Browser: Google Chrome

Saturday, 6. September 2008, 16:48:11

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The blogosphere is all about Google's new browser lately, so it is pretty much impossible to write about anything else.

As you heard Google started their own browser called Google Chrome. Here is briefly what you need to remember:

* Chrome is open source, so if you want to contribute the door is open
* the browser is faster ( each transaction is processed in a separate tab)
* more secure - keeps track of harmful websites with warnings for malware and phishing.
* the engine of the browser is JavaScript Virtual Machine called V8(created in Denmark)
* one-box for searching websites or the Web ( with typing suggestions)

Interested in downloading the browser, click here. For more details read the Pandia Search Engine News post or check the videos.

Another development with Google that we didn’t mention is walking directions in Google Maps.

Starting today, you can tell Google Maps that you want walking directions, and we'll try to find you a route that's direct, flat, and uses pedestrian pathways when we know about them. Just get directions as you normally would



Walking directions are available only for routes that are shorter than 6.2 miles (or 10 kilometers). Get more from Google Lat Long blog.

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Google Adds Suggest, Yahoo Drops Boolean

Tuesday, 26. August 2008, 18:27:11

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For no apparent reason Yahoo decided to drop Boolean search support and the search operator "NOT".

Now the NOT operator is gone in Yahoo!, and searchers will have to stick to the “search engine math” operator to achieve the same effect. Put a minus-sign directly in front of a term that you want excluded from search result (meaning that Yahoo! will exclude pages that has that term in their text).



Customers will have to use a minus sign now, when they want to exclude "Buckingham Palace" from a search for "Buckingham". Per and Susanne Koch from Pandia Search Engine News blog also noticed that in Yahoo the OR operator works, but nesting with parentheses is missing.

At the same time Google decided to add Google Suggest to its impressive array of online tools.

Today we're excited because Google Suggest will be "graduating" from Labs and available by default on the Google.com homepage. Over the next week, we'll be rolling this out so that more and more of you will start seeing a list of query suggestions when you start typing into the search box.




Google Suggest is a handy, saves time and increases the precision of search results. More details about the new feature are available from the " Official Google Blog.

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Google Improves Gmail, Related Searches, Displays Code And Uses Voice With Maps

Wednesday, 23. July 2008, 17:55:35

One of the hardest things to do for a blogger is keeping up with all the changes and innovations around Google. We haven’t talk about Google lately, so let me briefly mention what have happened with search engine №1

A month ago Google announced that they have improved "related searches" and now hyperlinked suggestions for additional searches pop up on the top of your search. Get more from Search Engine Land.

Image reprinted from Search Engine Land blog



Later bloggers at Tech Crunch discovered that Google is now displaying in search results code from Google Code Search.

Blackberry owners of the following models (Pearl 8110, 8120, and 8130) in the US got lucky because now they can use their voice to search Google Maps on their cell phones. Google Mobile blog has the details.

Using your voice to search for businesses is super useful in situations when you can't type, when the name of the business is long, or when you're not sure how to spell it.



And the last improvement that Google did was for Gmail users by rolling out an account activity information, which helps user with security by pointing out to recent activity history with (partial) IP addresses and also gives you the option to sign out your account if it is used some where else. Go to Google Blogoscoped for more information.

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Google Finance With Free Real Time Quotes

Friday, 6. June 2008, 17:03:42

Google Finance is now displaying real time quotes on securities, announced the Goggling Google blog.

This is good news for anyone, who works with financial data because they don’t have to wait 15-20 minutes or pay for subscription to get the current stocks info from Dow Jones Indices, NASDAQ Indices, NASDAQ Stock Exchange, New York Stock Exchange Indices, S&P Indices, Shanghai Stock Exchange and Shenzhen Stock Exchange.

Yahoo Finance for example, still charges $13.95 for real time package deals to display live information from the stock exchanges.

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Are Books Always Going To Be Around?

Friday, 30. May 2008, 05:05:37

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Last night I read an article posted on the Library Link Of The Day blog called " The Library in the New Age" printed in The New York Review of Books.

I have read a few articles about digitization, future of libraries, books and Google Books Search project, and this is the first one that really goes beyond the surface of the problem and tries to compare and analyze the facts.

I agree that digitization is one form of preserving books and knowledge and no matter how rich Google is, it will only be able to scan less than 10% of books in research libraries in the US.


"While dispensing books, most research libraries operate as nerve centers for transmitting electronic impulses. They acquire data sets, maintain digital re-positories, provide access to e-journals, and orchestrate information systems that reach deep into laboratories as well as studies."



However I am a little skeptical that books will always be as many as they are today. Just think: how far are we from the generation X..Y..Z that will grow up reading only electronic texts from PCs and mobile devices? That will be the generation that will bring the end of the book, as we know it, although books as a print on demand service, probably will always be available.

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Google Health Is Here

Friday, 23. May 2008, 15:09:41

I am on vacation this week and plan to slow a little bit on posts and make up towards the end of next week.

Google Health simply wants customers to load their health profiles and offers an extensive database with information for different diseases and medical conditions.

Image taken from Google Health




It is questionable how many customers at this point will trust Google Health with their medical records, even though the search engine promises not to reveal data.

Microsoft's HealthVault is in direct competition with Google Health and it seems to me that for now it has more partner health companies than Google Health, but this is probably going to change considering the financial power of Google.

To get an idea of how everything works, click here

Via: TechCrunch
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/19/google-health-a-quick-peek/

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Quo Vadis Google?

Thursday, 15. May 2008, 17:48:56

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Since we started with Google yesterday, let's continue. Last night I read an interesting article in Forbes entitled " Where Does Google Go Next?", which asks the question: If working at Google is great, than why so many employees are leaving.

There is no easy answer on that. The founders of Google had a head start ahead of everyone else, and their brilliant idea of how to search the Web, made them industry leaders and gave them a phenomenal success. They also realized that original ideas in the world of web programming and search engines is what is going to drive their success and that is why they installed that "creative" culture at Google headquarters, allowing employees to work 20% of the time on projects of their choice.

The main reason why employees are leaving now, I think is because they understand better how powerful "innovative ideas" and want to try to repeat the success of the founders of Google, outside of the company doors. Remember, that 10 years ago there weren’t so many hungry venture capitalists, CEO's and lawyers ready to quickly turn your dream into gold.

I will leave you to draw your own conclusions, but will just bring to your attention a paragraph that I think best represents what is happening now at Google’s headquarters:

"...They've introduced a new model for software. Think of it this way. If they are a household brand on products like Google Maps and Gmail, that may be more than just search." In other words, getting customers to use Google all the time would make it ubiquitous on the web, as Windows is on PCs. "It may be that they're in a whole other world from everyone else," says Jaffe. "They could be such pioneers that no one will know for years."

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Google Starts On The Invisible Web, Adds Street View, Traffic Predictions And Quotations

Wednesday, 14. May 2008, 18:00:17

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I don’t want to write only about innovations at Google every other day (and sometimes, they do happen almost daily), and that is why you haven’t been reading anything about the search giant lately. However, there were some major changes in the past few weeks that we need to mention.

First, Google decided to start searching the invisible web, which up to now was impossible to be searched by search engines, because of content hidden behind "search forms". Pandia Search Engine News blog found out that "Google is letting their spiders do test searches when finding forms".

After that search engine N1 announced that they have added Street View - the "interactive 360-degree street-level" in Google Maps. Originally, Street View started at 5 cities and now allows customers to see real images for the maps displayed for more than 44 regions in the US.

To top Street View, Google also enabled traffic predictions on Google Maps, "based on historical traffic information.", explained the Search Engine Land blog.

Search Engine Land also found out that Google users don’t have to have AdWords to use Google's Website Optimizer. "Now, you can use Website Optimizer to not just A/B test your AdWords landing pages, but also test your Yahoo landing pages, your banner landing pages, and different elements throughout your web site to improve conversions and desired actions from your users.", advises the blog.

The last feature added to Google News was quotations to search results, so now you can search for your favorite presidential candidate and get a quote.

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Google and Amazon Move Into The Database Maintenance Business

Thursday, 24. April 2008, 17:44:07

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In the past few months Amazon and Google decided to offer their computer centers and databases to the public.

At first Amazon declared that customers should stop worrying about how to buy more computers and how to run huge database applications. They should simply use Amazon's SimpleDB - "web service for running queries on structured data in real time. This service works in close conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), collectively providing the ability to store, process and query data sets in the cloud. These services are designed to make web-scale computing easier and more cost-effective for developers."

Later Google also opened their Google Application Engine that "enables you to build web applications on the same scalable systems that power Google applications." Every user is allowed "500MB of persistent storage and enough bandwidth and CPU for 5 million monthly page views."
Take a look at the video below for more details.



For Amazon and Google this is a step in a different direction and it shows a current trend: development of big databases will become cheaper with the advancement of computer technology. What programmers and developers need to worry is how popular, current, and accessible the content of their databases is, so they can be used by more and more customers.

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