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Customize Your Google Search with Background Images

admin — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 21:28:11 +0000

Google announced today on its Official Google Blog that users are now able to customize the Google Search homepage with background images similar to Bing, which uses a different [amazing] photo everyday. The Google Search homepage is renowned around the world for its simplicity. However, it’s always good to have something to look at other than a plain white background.According to the company, users can choose to upload their very own image from their computer, their own Picasa Web Albums, or a public gallery hosted by Picasa. The feature is actually being rolled out to users gradually over the coming days. Therefore it will take about a week for everyone to be able to customize their Google Search backgrounds. The feature is also being made available internationally, Google states.
To change the background image, all you have to do is click on the “Change background image” on the lower left-hand corner of the Google Search homepage. That is assuming the features has become available for you already, which eventually will.Unfortunately, the background image would have to be changed manually, unlike Bing. The feature looks awfully similar to Bing, so we’re not quite sure whether it’s a stolen idea or just a nice detail by Google that goes on par with the ability to customize Gmail, Chrome, and iGoogle with different themes.

BuzzAware. Yup, Now There’s An App Directory For Google Buzz

admin — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 19:31:13 +0000

Google Buzz might have been pushed out too soon, but there are already at least a dozen apps for Google Buzz, most of them unoffical. That’s not a lot, but it’s enough to start BuzzAware, a Google Buzz app directory. BuzzAware is started by the same folks behind Twitdom, a Twitter app directory with more than 1,500 apps.
Some of the apps in BuzzAware include

Google Adds Facebook Pages to Real-time Search

admin — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 11:55:16 +0000

Google has announced that it has added a new content source to its real-time search feature: Facebook Pages.
Google launched real-time search in December, providing a real-time feed of information from Yahoo Answers, Twitter, blogs, news websites, and other sources for hot or trending search results.
Two integrations have lagged though: MySpace and Facebook.Eight days ago, Google added MySpace updates to its stream. And now Google has added Facebook Pages to the mix.Still, Google’s stream doesn’t include public Facebook profiles, something only rival search engine Bing can access. This limits the usefulness of today’s update, but we still welcome the addition.

Buzz: Google Needs Better ‘People Skills’

admin — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 20:09:07 +0000

Google’s inability to deal with people issues–like Buzz privacy and Nexus One customer support–makes the company look technically sophisticated but socially inept.Google’s millionaire genius-nerds need to learn what real people expect from technology and how to deliver it.
Forget for a moment that Google Buzz meets no obvious need, and consider just the human factors.There are both privacy and functionality issues with Buzz. The social network, as introduced this week, was a privacy nightmare and a hard one to use, at that.
Given the option, Google’s choice for default settings were what benefited Google the most, not what best protected its consumers.
This is what happens when a company is too engineering driven and strives to make only fact-based decisions.It is hard to complain about the Buzz technology itself, as creating followers automatically from mail contacts is a neat trick. So it follows that making those automatic connections public allows more connections to be made, right?
It does, but…
Goggle missed the fact that making automatically-generated contacts visible to the entire world–by default–might creep some people out and even endanger the safety of others.That’s not something they teach in engineering school.To its credit, the Google was fairly quick to make changes, but these could go farther. Google needs to adopt a mindset of defaulting to the most restrictive privacy settings and then explaining to users the pluses and minuses of being less restrictive.
Google needs to be asking itself, “How did this happen?” Another episode could earn the company the same sort of reputation for privacy cluelessness that Facebook has captured.
As for the Nexus One, it likewise never seems to have occurred to Google that its customers might demand support, especially personal support, or that setting Early Termination Fees much above the industry norm might be considered abusive.
The good news here, too, is that Google has tried to make amends. The better news is that handsets are not a core business for Google–I don’t expect them to sell smartphones for long–so these problems aren’t likely to continue indefinitely.Privacy, however, impacts everything Google does. That the company could get Buzz privacy so terribly wrong is reason for serious concern.Google needs to learn when to put people first and technology second.

Google Acquires Aardvark For $50 million

admin — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 18:24:44 +0000

Google has acquired social search service Aardvark, says a source that has been briefed on the deal, for around $50 million. We first reported on the discussions between the two companies in December. Those discussions have now turned into a signed deal, says our source, and will be announced today or tomorrow.

Aardvark, founded by ex-Googlers, has raised around $6 million in venture capital to date. The service lets users ask questions and get immediate responses from their friends and friends of friends.

Earlier this month the company published a research report that included some key stats about their business:

As of October 2009, Aardvark had 90,361 users, of whom 55.9% had created content (asked or answered a question). The site’s average query volume was 3,167.2 questions per day, with the median active user asking 3.1 questions per month. Interestingly, mobile users are more active than desktop users. The Aardvark team attributes this to users wanting quick, short answers on their phones without having to dig for anything. They also think people are more used to using more natural language patterns on their phones.

The average query length was 18.6 words (median of 13) versus 2.2-2.9 words on a standard search engine. Some of this difference comes from the more natural language people use (with words like “a”, “the”, and “if”). It’s also because people tend to add more context to their queries, with the knowledge that it will be read by a human and will likely lead to a better answer.

98.1% of questions asked on Aardvark were unique, compared with between 57 and 63% on traditional search engines.

87.7% of questions submitted were answered, and nearly 60% of them were answered within 10 minutes. The median answering time was 6 minutes and 37 seconds, with the average question receiving two answers. 70.4% of answers were deemed to be ‘good’, with 14.1% as ‘OK’ and 15.5% were rated as bad.

86.7% of Aardvark users had been asked by Aardvark to answer a question, of whom 70% actually looked at the question and 38% could answer. 50% of all members had answered a question (including 75% of all users who had ever actually interacted with the site), though 20% of users accounted for 85% of answers.