Google Search blog

Thank you Google and HTC! There are many players in this next Mobile Revolution but HTC and Google are the front men.  For those of you under a rock, run over to Open Handset Alliance and check out the recently announced Alliance that Google is fronting.

Android is the new mobile OS to (hopefully) steal some market share from Microsoft and Mr. Ballmer and put mobile devices back in the consumer’s hand.  Many of you have read my previous post regarding Google and their mobile endeavors.  Definitely a move in the right direction.  For many users, such as myself, who love and own HTC devices will be in luck.  There hasn’t been any official word yet but many of us over at XDA Developers not only agree that Android will be open to previous handsets, but many will find a way to make it work.  You have to love the hackers.

Aside from the desire for Google to push out an OS, and HTC make the hardware for such a device/devices, the interface itself is pretty clean and minimalistic.   Follow the link and check out the sneak peak.

Android Demo

Why Jaiku?

I don’t really know. Twitter was the first one in this space to really get a lot of buzz, but I guess they’ve fallen behind. I actually signed up for Twitter, though, and I was never a Jaiku user. Others agree that Twitter’s simplicity is what makes it appealing.

NetworkWorld has a brief commentary on this. Notably, neither of these sites really had a business model.

Jaiku is not a leader in their market. They’re a microblogging underdog. But it’ll be very intriguing to see what Google does with them, as they tend to bring order to the markets they enter. Will they standardize some protocols for microblogging? Only a company like Google has the ability to effectively create standards.

With microblogging growing explosively, this is certainly a good time to be in this market. Now that Google is a player, how does that change things? It’s certainly going to be difficult for another company to become dominant when Google is their competitor. But it can be done…

How does this fit in with Google’s possible plans for a phone? Jaiku is a way to keep in touch… and being able to do so with a phone from anywhere is truly a killer app. It’s life streaming.

I’m familiar with Jaiku primarily through Leo Laporte, the Chief TWiT.

Interestingly, things did not go as well as hoped for DodgeBall. Along these lines, some complain that Google is an 85% company.

Jaiku is an activity stream and presence sharing service that works from the Web and mobile phones. An activity stream is a log of everyday activities: your status messages, recommendations, events you’re attending, photos you’ve taken - anything you post directly to Jaiku or add using Web feeds.

Google has a plan to use the ideas and technology behind Jaiku to make compelling and useful products.

Google acquired Jaiku, as announced on the Google Blog.

This is my long and elaborate post about how Jaiku affects the Google phone, its relationship to Twitter, how it will change things in the microblogging scene, how using a phone to update your live feed will be a killer app, how competing with Google is different, why Google finds Jaiku useful, microblogging standards, and more… Firefox crashed, and I thought I lost it… but fortunately, WordPress had autosaved it as a draft! Sweet!

Here’s a link to info on FreeTrafficTip.com… there’s info about Jaiku and a link to their site tour.

According to their latest blog post, it looks like Google is moving in a great direction in securing our privacy even more.  I personally have never been worried about Google and my privacy.  I love their tools, I trust them, and if it really came down to it, I don’t have anything to hide.  Even if my bank was compromised I don’t have any thing in there!  But, I do like some of the features they are pushing out.  I have always liked the personalized search feature but even I thought that it was pretty limiting.  Especially when my former wife would snoop around and find out what I had ordered for her birthday.  I would love to have been able to remove that entry so that she wouldn’t have found it.

Many of us carry mobile phones these days. Even if we don’t need it for work, we are buying more smartphones and checking our emails and be in touch with friends while on the go, be it MySpace, Facebook, Email, SMS, etc. But the lack of quality, versatile applications for mobiles to provide access is somewhat limiting. Quite disappointing, especially if you splurged on a Windows Mobile Professional, Smartphone or Blackberry device.

Yahoo! currently has a beta service which is a cool little app that installs on your device and you have access to your Yahoo! Mail, weather alerts, Flickr, News and more. They even have a cool little feature that lists the Traffic issues and what happened, when it happened, giving you a good idea of how bad the traffic maybe, and or how much longer the delay may be. The idea and functionality behind the app is brilliant.

Microsoft also offers something slightly similiar, but only on Windows Mobile devices. It’s called Windows Live. You can connect to your MSN messenger, Sync your contacts over-the-air(OTA) with your hotmail account, and the best part, PUSH EMAIL from your hotmail account! All for free!

Obviously, by virtue of being here, I am a Google Fan. I love Google maps, I think the Gmail App is amazing (save the fact it won’t let me log into my Google Apps Email even though gmail.com on my mobile will), and their Google Mobile Web is fantastic as well. The catch is, there isn’t a single place to go to on your device to access your Gmail, check out maps, when you do (at least in Austin) the traffic display isn’t near accurate or easy to read, or search the web.

So I am here to Challenge Google to create a Mobile App for the people. Lets start with a simple app that links all of your current Google Mobile applications, Maps, Gmail, Web, You Tube(big hit by the way). Then lets push the bounds a little and offer a smoother traffic interface (that you might actually be able to use while in traffic), expand the Gmail application to access the Google Apps Email for Domains, then if you could add Push email for Gmail to devices (especially for Windows Mobile) that would be a huge move ahead of both Yahoo! and Microsoft.

What were people looking for when they found Google Search blog?

Thanks to Webalizer, we know

Google is constantly introducing new tools for AdSense. Now, they’re introducing new policies. At the end of August, Google announced some changes to its policies– but if you weren’t regularly checking the AdSense policy page or following AdSense news, you wouldn’t have heard of it.

The first change is that you can now put ad units in your error, login, registration, thank you and welcome pages.

To ensure you get well-targeted ads on these pages, put some content on them. What do you think your visitors would be interested in?

The second is Google’s Top Queries tool. I don’t think this is really super-new because I’ve seen it before, but it does give you the 25 most popular keywords that people enter into your AdSense search box. That’s really useful and you can turn this into cash.

via Joel Comm

John C. Dvorak says:

Long before Google became the nexus of computerdom, this notion of Microsoft joining forces with Yahoo had come and gone numerous times but was always rejected when anyone objectively looked at all the inherent redundancies. This means that joining two companies like this would not be a 5+5=10 scenario but a 5+5=6 scenario. With all the problems mergers have anyway, it might even be a 5+5=4 situation when all is said and done.

I think that was realized long ago and the idea was never discussed again until recently. The new reason to rethink this idiotic notion is because of the bogeyman Google. Run kids! Run for your lives! The big bad Google is coming to kill you and eat your liver. Run!
…
Let’s face one thing. Both Yahoo and Microsoft are stodgy and borderline hopeless bureaucracies. Neither company is structured to compete with a wild unstructured company like Google, where they chose a CEO because he went to Burning Man.
…
In fact, it is preoccupation itself that is hurting both Yahoo and Microsoft. Sitting around being worried sick about Google accomplishes nothing. If Ulanoff wants to dole out some advice to these companies he should be telling them to ignore Google and just focus on what they can do to substantially improve their offerings. This means looking beyond Google.
…
This is what Google did: a better search engine. A better this and a better that is the key. People tend to gravitate towards better. Yahoo and Microsoft have to make a better product. Combining forces would probably have the opposite result. It always does.

My own note. Leo Laporte has claimed that Yahoo Mail is now better than Gmail, but I disagree. I want something lightweight, fast, and powerful, and Gmail is the only service right now that fits the bill.

In response to Google’s huge growth, Microsoft and Yahoo are discussing merger possibilities. They’ve held informal deal talks over the years, but now that Google is expanding tremendously, Microsoft is looking to ink a deal.

My personal experience with Google has been wonderful, and I’m so glad they’re around. There should be more companies like Google. Microsoft, on the other hand… well, you can read more about them elsewhere.

From a PC Magazine report:

The New York Post reported early on Friday that Microsoft made an offer to buy Yahoo a few months ago, but Yahoo spurned the advances. The paper, putting a price tag of $50 billion on a Yahoo takeover, said that deal discussions continue between the two companies. Investment bank Goldman Sachs is advising on the process, the paper said. The bank declined to comment.

The Wall Street Journal followed with its own story, saying that the two companies are in early-stage talks about a merger or some kind of link-up.

The renewed talks are a sign of Google’s power, the Journal said, and are also a sign of problems over the past year with in-house efforts at Yahoo and Microsoft. A deal could help Microsoft attract advertisers to its online businesses.

Google agreed to buy DoubleClick Inc. last month for $3.1 billion, accelerating a push into the graphic ad market. Google beat out Microsoft and Yahoo to win the deal, sources said.

Update: More discussion here.

I was listening to a podcast by tech legend Leo Laporte in which he interviewed someone on the Adobe Photoshop team. This was a big deal because they were talking about the new release of Photoshop, which is big news because nearly everyone who has anything to do with graphics has used / probably still uses Photoshop. One of the things they talked about were speed improvements. In all past versions of Photoshop, it ran much, much faster on Windows PCs than on Apple Macs… and this was something Mac users were ashamed of… so they didn’t bring it up often. This was true for all PowerPC-based processors, including the G5.

Now with the release of the new universal-binary Photoshop, it should run on Intel Macs with similar performance to PCs… in theory. They actually don’t know, and the benchmarks haven’t been done yet. The point, though, was not the relative performance… or even the actual performance at all. The Photoshop developer said that they had done many things to improve the speed of the product… but actually the perceived speed. That means how fast the application feels… not how long it actually takes to do things.

This is disconcerting at first, especially to me, a person who likes objective statistics… but it’s really true. It doesn’t matter how fast your algorithms are if the users cannot feel the difference. In fact, it is this perceived speed that has the greatest influence on user satisfaction. I’m sure Google understands this… that’s why their search results are always returned in less than a second, and they’re buying up dark fiber to ensure they have fast lines directly to your PCs and other devices.

So I was surprised when I suddenly realized while using Blogger today that Google’s blogging service– Blogger, formerly of Pyra Labs– was painfully slow in terms of perceived speed, at least if you’re publishing to your own server (or a non-Blogger-hosted server). You actually have to sit there and wait while Blogger logs into your server via FTP and publishes all the updated static files. This is good for sites with high traffic… no dynamic content means the server can handle a lot more traffic at a much lower cost. But you suffer in terms of the perceived speed of publishing.

This isn’t the way it has to be, of course. I don’t know if Google realizes this, since these are acquisitions… but a big part of YouTube’s popularity is its speed. You wouldn’t want to sit there waiting 1 hour for a video to download. And similarly, you wouldn’t want to wait an hour for YouTube to convert your xyz-format video. The thing that amazed me about YouTube video uploading when a tried it a few weeks ago is that it doesn’t make you sit at its webpage to wait while their computers are processing your video. Instead, once the upload is complete, you’re free to do whatever you want, leave YouTube, watch some other videos, etc. The upload experience is relatively fast and simple… despite the fact that converting the video takes a long, long time!

How do they do it? They have a separate process running server-side, so right after you upload your video, it’s not online for quite a while. This was frustrating to me at first… until I realized that this is a technical necessity because of the computing hosepower required to manipulate video (and many different video formats, at that).

My Blogger feature request, therefore, is to do something similar with Blogger. Instead of making the publisher wait, just say it’s done right away, in less than a second. And leave us to go do something else… write another post if inspiration strikes us again. Blogger would be logging in to the FTP server in the background at its earliest convenience… but now it doesn’t have to happen right away, and we don’t have to wait until it’s done.

I considered possible downsides to this model. Well, it might be technically hard to implement, but that’s no excuse for a company like Google. It might mislead users because they won’t be able to view their published post right away… but they’re not actually waiting any longer for it. It’s just that they can’t see when it’s done. So Blogger would ideally have a small, unobtrusive status indicator at the top of pages… and it will tell us when the “live” version of the public blog is up-to-date.

This is a really good solution, I think. Blogger team– are you listening?

Update (September 19, 2007): The new Blogger fixes this problem by doing custom domain hosting. Thanks, Blogger team!

So some people thought Google missed a letter in their Valentine’s Day logo. Not so, Google confirms, and I think they’re definitely right. After all, the ‘L’ in the Google logo has always been green, and the stem of a strawberry is also green

Hate the Grind also reports.