Posts Tagged ‘google’

Google Real-Time Search

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

Google is finally rolling out its long-awaited real-time search option.

The search engine will now include some results in real-time on its main results page.

“Our users will get the results as they are produced,” said Google fellow Amit Singhal at an event in Mountain View in California.

How it works? Well, a search for “Obama” would include a constantly updated listing of the “latest results” on Obama pulled from live tweets, Yahoo Answers, news articles, and web pages. Click “pause” and the listing stops refreshing.

Google will offer realtime trends, similar to Twitter’s, and you’ll see the real time option labeled “latest” alongside the current past “day” and “hour”. This new realtime search will also work on both Android devices and iPhones immediately. There is also a way to filter results just to status updates from Twitter, Facebook etc.

Google’s just announced partnerships with both Facebook and MySpace, both of which will see Google pull in any available public data in real-time.

Real-time results will be rolled out to users over the next few days. How can you try real time serch now? Simply search for something and then add the following text to the end of the URL: “&esrch=RTSearch”. The trick doesn’t work for every query, but for searches where there are a lot of results you’ll find a small, frequently updating box somewhere among the first search results.

Source: Google Blog

Google Image Swirl

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009

Google is trialling an interesting new take on Image Search – Image Swirl.

Image Search is a hugely popular part of how people use Google and it’s become increasingly advanced in recent years. The ability to recognise similar images to the one you’re looking at is particularly useful.

Image Swirl, a new product from Google Labs, takes that and makes it all a whole lot easier to use. It’s based on Google’s existing Wonder Wheel search tool but because it uses images it’s much sexier to look at.

Enter a search term and a grid of twelve matching images in displayed. If you on any of those it flies out from the grid and a bunch of similar images to that one spawn off it like a spider diagram. Click on one of the new images and the same will happen again.

While it doesn’t change much about the actual results you get from a search, it’s far more click and natural to cick through a series of images than it is to tweak ‘advanced search’ options to find the best result.

As it’s still a test product not all search terms currently work with it.

Source: Google Blog

Google Previews next-generation infrastructure

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009

On August 10, 2009 Google has begun testing a new engine for its search product. Codenamed “Caffeine”, it promises to push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits “under the hood” of Google’s search engine, which means that most users won’t notice a difference in search results.

You can test it here.

Source: Google Webmaster Central Blog

Facebook buys FriendFeed

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

Facebook, the world’s largest social networking site, said it will buy FriendFeed, netting a group of prized ex-Google engineers in the fast-growing Internet business. FriendFeed, an up-and-coming social media startup, lets people share content online in real time across various social networks and blogs.

The service is similar to, though less popular than Twitter, the microblogging site that Facebook tried to buy for $500 million in 2008, according to sources familiar with the matter.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed on Monday, but Facebook said FriendFeed would operate as it has for the time being as the teams determine long-term plans.

Facebook’s big gain in the acquisition is the engineering talent at FriendFeed, rather than the actual product, which has won critical praise, but lagged in popularity compared to Twitter, said Forrester Research analyst Jeremiah Owyang. FriendFeed’s four founders are former Google Inc employees who count well known products like Gmail and Google Maps among their accomplishments.

One bridge between Facebook and FriendFeed might have been Matt Cohler, Facebook’s former management vice president. He joined FriendFeed backer Benchmark Capital last year.

Source: Facebook