Launched a few days ago in the US and now in the UK, Google has integrated real time search within their search engine results as this search for iPhone demonstrates (see screenshot on the right!). Real time search integrates posts from blogs, news sources, twitter and facebook posts to bring up to the second results. The interface is a bit clunky which is surprising for Google who pride themselves on simple and clean as their new homepage shows. For those of you who haven't seen it the "new" Google homepage has a fade in effect for it's menu items when you move your mouse over the screen. In other Google news, yesterday's Google doodle featured Popeye to celebrate his creator (E.C. Segar)'s birthday, 8th December 1894. Maybe next year we'll get a Dimebag Darrell doodle?
Google celebrates St. Andrews day today with a new Google Doodle (right). Yahoo and Ask haven't bothered whilst Bing has a lovely picture of the Old Man of Stor and the same hidden links they used for Remembrance Day.
Bing have rolled out more features as part of "Bing Wave 2". These include:
Integration with Wolfram|Alpha in the diet and fitness category allowing you to work out your BMI and other useful things.
Improved "hover preview" (where you hover your mouse over an icon and see a preview of a website without actually clicking through to the site) which adds customer service phone numbers, search within this site, a Google Site Links style list of deep links, a screenshot of the webpage and for Facebook accounts you'll see a picture of the account owner, who is in their Facebook network and send them a message or friend request.
Weather / Event results which brings together news, events, xRank results, Twitter feeds, images, Best Match results and content from trusted sites for the Weather / Events results.
Share Search Results on Facebook and Twitter, email to a friend or print results.
The Travel tools have a makeover as well. If you hover over Travel on the homepage you'll see options to search airfares and hotels. Going into the travel category will bring up an Instant Answers box where you can enter your travel dates, starting point and destination and narrow your search to sites that can match this data. City results now include events listings.
Health has received a makeover to make it more organized.
Of course all these options are on the US version of Bing, looks like the UK users will have to wait.
Locking Safe Search in Google Images. Stop your young ones from seeing things they shouldn't by locking Safe Search on which includes a handy graphical clue so you can see from across the room is Safe Search is on. See the video below for more info.
More images Universal search. For example search for digital cameras in Google.com and you'll see a range of images of digital cameras so you can see the variety of makes and models on offer.
"On broader queries, this helps you get a sense of the range of products available to you for the query."
says the Official Google Blog. This feature is not currently active on Google UK.
Google Music Search. Again not available in the UK but I'm sure we'll get it soon. It's probably due to copyright and licensing issues. This feature lets you enter an artist's name, lyrics or song title into Google and you'll be able to preview the song from selected media partners of Google.
There's also a whole host of updates to the Movies search feature, see the Official Google Blog for more information. Again this doesn't work in the UK.
Google have also updated the keywords tool in the Webmaster control panel.
"We'll now be updating the data daily, providing details on how often we found a specific keyword, and displaying a handful of URLs that contain a specific keyword. The significance column compares the frequency of a keyword to the frequency of the most popular keyword on your site. When you click on a keyword to view more details, you will get a list of up to 10 URLs which contain that keyword."
The World Bank data looks to me like Google missed out on a deal with Wolfram|Alpha to Bing so went for the next best thing. Safe Search locking seems like an excellent idea to me and will be very useful in schools and to parents. Personally I can't wait for Google music search to be available in the UK but I imagine the amount of paperwork and feet-dragging by the major labels may delay this for a long time until they can work out how to make a quick buck from it. The improvements to Bing show they're finally serious about search but until UK users get similar features then Google will remain number one in the UK.
Today is Armistice day, marking the end of the First World War. Google, Bing and Ask all have commemerative logos / layouts whereas Yahoo has nothing. No poppies, no special logo. Now I don't know if Yahoo had something on Remembrance Sunday but considering this marks the end of one of the bloodiest global conflicts in human history I expected something.
The logos for Google, Ask and Bing are below.
If you mouse over several parts of the Bing image it presents you with facts about Armistice Day, Poppies, World War 1 and related poetry.
Google have closed down their Caffeine "sandbox" testing area and have put their new infrastructure in place and live on the Internet just in time for the holiday season. However it seems Google have learnt from the debacle of the "Florida Update" of 2003 and have only put the new, improved Google on one datacenter. Therefore only a small number of Google users will see the new stuff, the rest of us will have to wait. The Florida Update was released just before the Christmas holiday shopping season started and caused a lot of distress as website owners saw their sites plummet in the rankings and therefore sales fell. With the news that Caffeine was going live there was some rumblings of a similar panic occuring with this update. However Google's Matt Cutts has promised that Caffeine won't be rolled out to the rest of the datacenters until the new year and the current roll out is merely for live testing, a sort of "open beta" if you like.
Of course if Google had rolled it out the more skeptical online store owners would have cried foul and pointed to Google's recent release of Google Commerce Search, a paid for inclusion shopping portal, as the reason Google borked the search results. During Florida it was claimed that Google deliberately messed up peoples rankings so they would have no option but to open and Adwords account.
As you'll know from our previous posts Google has been counting down the the 40th anniversary of Sesame Street on it's home page all week with a different character every day. Today's ensemble picture (right) is the final doodle in the series as today is the 40th anniversary of the first broadcast of Sesame Street. The series of images were intended to help the Sesame Workshop and support it's goal of educating children.
Here's a quick run-down of the images they've used so far: Today - Ensemble Monday 9th- Count Von Count Sunday 8th - Elmo Saturday 7th - Oscar the Grouch Friday 6th - Bert & Ernie Thursday 5th - Cookie Monster Wednesday 4th - Wallace & Gromit on Google UK, selected Sesame Street characters on various international sites.
Personally I think Google can do what they like whith their homepages and helping educate children is a good way to prevent things like the Berlin Wall and global conflicts happening again.
Ask Jeeves have also put in a little dig via their Twitter account: "I hate to be bitchy but is anyone else bored of Google's Sesame Street logo- I'm all for cookie monster but us Brits are more about Rainbow". Seems you really can't please all of the people all of the time.
Following on from our Wallace and Gromit post the other day where we mentioned that most of the other Google sites around the world had Sesame Street themed logos whilst Google UK had Wallace and Gromit, Google UK (and Google France, Spain, Australia, Arabic, Canada, Belgium, Finland, Hong Kong, Hrvatska, Indonesia, India, Israel, Japan, Korea and many more) has a Sesame Street logo today. Again it's celebrating 40 years of Sesame Street but I can't help wondering if Google got their dates wrong as according to the official Sesame Street site the show was first broadcast on November 10th 1969, so Google is 4 - 6 days off. *Update* Missed this yesterday but Google UK had Cookie Monster on the home page so it looks like Google are doing some sort of countdown to the 40th Anniversary.
Today's Google Doodle celebrates the landmark occassion of man and dog walking on the Moon in the search of cheese. Yes it's 20 years since Wallace & Gromit's Grand Day Out. The doodle is only showing on Google.co.uk. *Update* Search Engine Roundtable has a nice round up of today's Google Doodles from around the world as it is also Sesame Street's 40th Anniversary today.
