Android Users Can Launch Google Places As Its Own App

Google has released Google Maps for mobile version 4.4, and this comes with a new dedicated "Places" icon designed to make it easier to find nearby places with updated Place Pages.

The icon appears on Android-powered devices in the app launcher along with all of the other apps. This way you can go right to Places from the homescreen if you choose to add it.

Michael Siliski, Product Manager for the Google Mobile Team explains:

Search for several convenient types of places with the default categories or add your own for your most frequent searches. You can also use the search bar at the top to type or speak any query. I tend to use the “coffee” search a lot, but I’ve also looked for “gas stations” on the road, “ice cream shops” in my neighborhood, and even specific places like “Chelsea Market” on a recent trip to New York.

Of course, you’ll often want to learn more before deciding where to go. With updated Place Pages, you should be able to find all you need to know about a place, whether you’re wandering into a new restaurant or deciding from your couch. In addition to photos and reviews, Place Pages now have a bunch of new details, such as prices, parking and menu links to inform your quest for the perfect steak. You'll also notice that the search results list now highlights business opening hours in addition to compass direction and distance -- consider it your late night caffeine radar.

The new version of Google Maps and the Places icon are available for devices running Android version 1.6 and higher. They can be found by searching for Google Maps in the Android Market. Blackberry users will soon get the new features.

Google Launches New Image Search Ads

Google began rolling out a new design for its image search today, and along with that came a new ad format. The format is called (appropriately) Image Search Ads.

"These ads appear only on Google Images, and they let you include a thumbnail image alongside your lines of text," explains Google Images Product Manager Nate Smith. "we hope they’re a useful way to reach folks who are specifically looking for images."

Advertisers can review specific performance metrics for their ads on Google Images. They are priced the same as standard AdWords ads with cost-per-click pricing.

Advertisers can create the ads using Google's Display Ad Builder. They can use a template to pair relevant ad text with targeted images.

 To create an Image Search Ad, simply go to your AdWords account, select the campaign or ad group where you want to create it, click the Ads tab, select Display ad builder from the "new ad" drop-down menu, then select "templates for search" and choose Image Search Ad.

Google recommends that advertisers create a new ad group so that they can target keywords, adjust bids, and track performance for ads specifically on Google Images.

Google Arranges To Scan Over 160,000 More Books

The digital collection of public domain works Google Books maintains is in store for yet another major boost.  Google's struck a deal with the National Library of the Netherlands that will see the search giant gain access to more than 160,000 additional books.

This should bring Google a fair step closer to achieving its goal of organizing the world's information and making it accessible to everyone.  A post on the company's European Public Policy Blog explained with regards to the first matter, "The books we'll be scanning constitute nearly the library's entire collection of out-of-copyright books, written during the 18th and 19th centuries."

And more specifically, "The collection covers a tumultuous period of Dutch history, which saw the establishment of the country's constitution and its parliamentary democracy.  Anyone interested in Dutch history will be able to access and view a fascinating range of works by prominent Dutch thinkers, statesmen, poets and academics and gain new insights into the development of the Netherlands as a nation state."

 Then, in terms of accessibility, it turns out that Google and the National Library of the Netherlands intend to make all of the scanned texts available via the European Union's Europeana portal.

It looks like all sorts of individuals and organizations will benefit from this development, then.

Don't hold your breath - there are many, many factors at work - but Google might even see an extra perk if the Dutch library's willingness to cooperate influences the Google Books settlement case.

comScore: Yahoo Loses "Time Spent" Fight

June did not go at all well for Yahoo, judging by new statistics from comScore. In fact, at least in terms of time spent on the company's properties, June was terrible, with Yahoo managing to set a couple of records of the wrong sort.

Jay Yarow noted earlier today, "Time spent on Google sites (38.9 billion minutes) was greater than Yahoo (38.8 billion minutes) for the first time." And the "time spent" measurement was one of the few areas in which Yahoo had an advantage over Google.

Then here's another important detail: Yarow wrote, "As a percentage of total internet time for Q2, Yahoo hit an all-time low, says [Citi analyst Mark] Mahaney." Which is perhaps especially embarrassing since Yahoo and Microsoft are in the final stages of implementing their search and advertising deal.

So now, the company is of course sure to try to correct the problem, and the good news is that some possible solutions are already available to it. Yahoo's recent acquisition of Associated Content could prove useful in this respect, for example, and its partnership with Offerpal and integration with Facebook may also come in handy.

We should note that comScore's revelation doesn't exactly have shareholders in a panic, though. While Google and Microsoft did manage to make bigger gains, Yahoo's stock still rose 0.34 percent today, which put it ahead of the Dow and Nasdaq (which rose 0.18 and 0.09 percent, respectively).

That's a pretty sure sign that not many folks think the financial fate of the company is at risk because of comScore's finding.

Hulu CEO: Ad-Free Version Not Out Of The Question

When the details of Hulu Plus were announced, many people were dismayed that the service still included advertisements. Now, Hulu's CEO has indicated that he'd be willing to do away with the ads - so long as enough customers are willing to pay more money.



Om Malik was able to talk to CEO Jason Kilar sometime yesterday, and in an article published today, Malik wrote, "When I asked Kilar to comment on the criticism being leveled at the company, he said that the company was comfortable with the idea of offering a higher-priced version if there is demand from customers."

And if that plan involving multiple tiers sounds a little overcomplicated considering the existence of free alternatives - and the simple fact that people can use commercials as an opportunity to check their email - there is sort of a precedent. source: www.webpronews.com/topnews/

More Smartphone Owners Using Local Search And Social Networking

More people are increasingly using their smartphones for local search, social networking and gaming, according to a new survey from Compete.

Nearly one in three smartphone owners has called or stopped into a local business after finding it using a local search application. In the first quarter, close to a third of Android and iPhone users found at least two new businesses that they previously were not aware after using local search applications.

"With the increasing popularity of local search, retailers should ensure their sites are optimized for mobile browsers," said Danielle Nohe, director, technology and entertainment for Compete.

"Making it easy for consumers to discover businesses via their devices opens local companies up to a whole new customer demographic, and savvy businesses should make sure they're maximizing this opportunity."

Consumers are increasingly accessing social networking sites via their mobile devices. According to Compete's findings, 33 percent of smartphone Twitter users primarily send tweets via their smartphones, and 33 percent of these consumers prefer to read tweets on their phone. Of those accessing Facebook from their smartphone, consumers are increasingly using the device to read news feeds (66 percent), post status updates (60 percent), read/reply to private messages (59 percent) and post photos (44 percent).

"Given the increasing popularity of Facebook, Twitter and other social sites, it follows that users are eager to access these outlets on their phones," said Nohe.

"Based on our findings, I recommend marketers start thinking about new ways to maximize consumers' use of smartphones on social sites, as mobile adoption will likely only increase with time."

Over half (51%) of iPhone users have five or more games on their devices. In contrast, 46 percent of BlackBerry users have no games on their smartphones. Not only do iPhone owners download more games, they play games more frequently than do owners of other smartphones. Of the consumers surveyed, 37 percent of iPhone users report playing games on their smartphones at least daily and puzzle games seem to be capturing the majority of this attention.

"It's evident that iPhone owners have embraced mobile gaming," commented Nohe. "Developers should turn their attention to targeting other smartphone users in an effort to even out the discrepancies in mobile gaming adoption." source: www.webpronews.com/topnews/

Bing Launches Tour De France Bing Maps App

Microsoft's Bing has been doing some really interesting things with Bing Maps, and more specifically Bing Maps Apps. This week, the company launched a new map app for the Tour De France, which starts today and runs through July 25th.

"The 97th Tour de France will be made up of 1 prologue and 20 stages and will cover a total distance of 3,642 kilometers," says Bing's Chris Pendleton. "I was looking at Le Tour de France site and they have this PDF route map – a bit antiquated. I’m going to go out on a limb and say you might want to check out the Bing 2010 Tour de France map app for a better experience."



Key features of the app include:

- Each stage of the event being displayed on the map with pushpins to indicate the start and finish

- Interactive profiles displayed along the top of the map, which lets you see elevation and slope changes for the selected stage

- Stage description and weather prediction

- Daily results.

Pendleton says the best experience is in Bird's Eye View (enhanced). More info about the app can be found here.

Search Google and Twitter Faster with FastestFox

How much do you search daily? If you are a reader of this blog, I bet you search quite a lot. That’s why I am sharing more and more various search tools here every week. Today I am going to offer another cool search utility that you may find useful.

FastestFox is a FireFox addon that adds some more fun to web searching with FireFox (huge thanks to Edward Khoo who shared the tool in his top 10 FireFox addons post).

Basically (and among other features), the addon allows to quickly access more search options:

• For highlighted text;
• From Google search results page.

Here’s how it works:

1. Scan through any web document and find some words or phrases that you need more explanation for;

2. Select these phrase and instantly get access to Google, Twitter, Wikipedia and OneRiot search engines (in the “Popup Bubble”):

3. Choose Google and get access to even more search engines right from Google SERPs:

4. Customize which sites you want to see in the Popup Bubble. Supported search engines include:

• OneRiot;
• Delicious;
• Twitter;
• Surf Canyon;
• Bing;
• Youtube;
• Wiktionary;
• Google:

You can also turn off the popup bubble whatsoever or customize its behavior:

And here’s the customized bubble:

We have seen quite a few more FireFox addons that make web searching faster and more fun:

• 11 FireFox Extensions to Search Google Properly: the post lists some cool ways to customize Google SERPs;
• 3 Ways to Customize Google Search in FireFox: the post provides some tips on how to make searching Google with FireFox easier and quicker;
• Featured FireFox Addon: Search Any Site with Google: the post shares a Greasemonkey scrip that allows to easily access Google’s SITE: operator;
• Featured FireFox Addon: Google Enhancer: the post shares an addon that allows to quicker access some of the Google’s advanced operators. source: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/

Will Google Still Operate in China Without Search?

Google may try to continue with operations in China, even if it shuts its search engine down due to censorship. You must remember that Google is much, much more than just a search engine, and the censoring search results doesn’t necessarily come into play in all other aspects of its business.

According to the New York Times, Google will be holding talks with Chinese government officials soon, which will likely determine the fate of Google's operations in the country, and to what (if any) extent those operations will continue to exist.

"In most countries, Google draws the majority of its revenue from ads that appear on its search engine, but the No. 1 source of revenue in China comes from ads that Chinese companies place on Google’s sites in the United States," reports Miguel Helft with the Times. "A person knowledgeable about Google’s business in China said ads that run on a network of Chinese Web sites are the company’s second-largest source of revenue in the country. Google can retain both of those if it is allowed to keep a sales force and advertising network there."

The question is, is the Google China situation going to be an all or nothing scenario? We will probably know soon enough if said talks get underway (according to the Times they will be in the coming days and weeks).

On a related note, the Wall Street Journal has spotted that Google is showing ads on search results related to the situation that point to the company's official blog post that announced its decision to stop censoring search results in China. I guess that's the best way to make sure the true source turns up no matter what combination of related keywords are used to search for information on the matter (I wonder what that says about the SEO vs PPC debate)?

Respond to Facebook Comments From Your Email

Today Facebook launched a feature that some would consider long overdue. They now let you reply to comments via email. In other words, when you get an email notification alerting you that someone has left a comment on one of your status updates, you can simply type your reply in the email and hit send, rather than having to leave your inbox, go to Facebook and respond there.

"One of the easiest ways to stay updated on relevant conversations happening on Facebook is through email notifications, which inform you about comments made on the posts you've created or commented on," says Facebook's Tom Whitnah. "These notifications—for comments on such content as status updates, photos, videos and Wall posts—allow you to stay informed about your Facebook friends' activities without being logged in when you're on the go, on your phone or at work."



The addition of the new feature is simply an added convenience for Facebook users. It's one less step you have to take to stay engaged in the conversation.

If you don't have email notifications activated, then this of course won't apply to you. If you don’t have them activated and you want to now because of this feature, just go to your account settings and find the Notifications tab, where you can select the option to receive them.

Where Have All The Old Tweets Gone?

Looking for old tweets? You won’t find any that are more than a week or so old on Twitter. Put the blame on all the massive number of new tweets coming in. The engines, they canna hold captain! Or that is, the search index behind Twitter Search can’t hold it all.

To see this in action, consider a search for “happy new year,” date restricted to New Year’s Day 2010. You’d expect a huge number of matches on that day. You’ll find none.

In fact, in testing the date restriction command on Twitter Search’s advanced search page, I found that it doesn’t seem to be functional. I looked for any tweets containing “happy new year” since Monday and received only four matches. In contrast, if I remove the date restriction, I can see there have been at least 1,500 tweets with those words today alone.

So are the tweets still there in Twitter Search, just inaccessible because of a bad search function? No. I did a different test, a regular search for the word “pedometer.” To find the oldest tweet, I went back page-by-page as far as I could. Actually, I did the search, then changed the “page=” part of the URL to a higher page value. The oldest tweet is six days old. Any that are seven days or older don’t appear.

This matches to what a reader asked about earlier this month. They’d emailed us:

Why am I the only person upset with Twitters cutback on their search engine results? Earlier this month I noticed that they were only displaying the results from previous two weeks. Today I see they have slipped to just showing results from previous 7 days? I can find no mention of this anywhere including their blogs.

Out Of Room In The Search Index

I checked with Twitter and got back this response from Doug Cook, Twitter’s director of search:

In response to your reader’s question, we weren’t growing our search index as fast as the tweet volume was increasing, so it started to represent a decreasing amount of time. In the last couple of days we increased our index size somewhat, so the amount of time will go back up, but there’s going to be a natural “yo yo” effect as the tweet volume increases in advance of our next index size “jump.” As you might guess, we’re working on making this far, far better.

Increasing indeed. This week Twitter cofounder Ev Williams tweeted that the service has seen its highest usage ever. All those tweets have to go somewhere, and that impacts the search index.

The search index is like a big book that contains all the information that the search engine looks through. With Twitter, when you’re searching for something like “pedometer,” if flips open that book and starts listing all the pages in it that mention that word — those “pages” being individual tweets.

However, an index can run out of room, and that seems to be what’s happened in this case. There wasn’t enough room to keep all the tweets recorded in the index, easily accessible for searching, so only about a week or so seem to be present. That’s why you can’t “page back” beyond a certain date. The problems with date restricted searching seem to be a combination of both the index limitation and probably a bug.

Meanwhile, Mashable noted this week discovering that the number of tweets shown for some individuals appears to have gone down massively, when the figures should have gone up. Cook said that’s almost certainly unrelated to the index issue and a separate problem Twitter is exploring.

Old Tweets Are Safe & Online — Twitter Search Just Can’t Find Them

Don’t worry that your old tweets have gone missing for good. They’re still out there, just not immediately accessible to locate through search or by working back page-by-page.

I bolded the words “through search” to stress another point. The old tweets do exist online, if you know where to find them directly. It’s just that Twitter Search itself can’t point you to them. For example, here’s a tweet I did from July 2009.

Some Search Alternatives For Twitter Archeologists

What if you do need to find an old tweet and don’t know where to look? Some suggestions:

Google offers its own real time search (see Google Launches Real Time Search) as does Bing (see Up Close With Bing’s Twitter Search Engine). Unfortunately, neither of those services allow you to narrow your Twitter search to a specific date range.

“Regular” Google can help. Do a search like this:

google os site:twitter.com

The site:twitter.com portion makes Google show only things on the Twitter site (mostly updates people are making) for the words you specify (google os, in this example). After that, you can use the Show Option feature to choose “Recent Results,” then “Sorted By Date” to get the freshest posts at the top. Here’s an example:

The problem is, Google doesn’t always get the datesof a tweet correct, I’ve found. But it’s something to try.

By the way, if you want to search for tweets from a particular person, try it like this:

site:twitter.com/dannysullivan

Just put the person’s Twitter name after the site:twitter.com/ part, as I’ve done for myself above. It works to focus the results to matches from just that person. You can also narrow further to get tweets from that person about a particular topic, such as this:

site:twitter.com/dannysullivan bar sign

Over at Bing, the same techniques I’ve shown also work, though Google tends to be more comprehensive and consistent in what it shows, I’ve found.

At Yahoo, they also work — though if you do site:twitter.com or site:twitter.com/username without following those with any search terms, you’ll be kicked over to the Yahoo Site Explorer area. You still get results, but it’s through a different interface.

The best way I’ve found to dependably locate old tweets has been through FriendFeed. The caveat is that this only works for people who have imported their tweets into FriendFeed. As I do this, FriendFeed works as a great backup service for me to locate my own posts.

Here’s an example of the key commands:

service:twitter.com from:dannysullivan bar sign

In that example, I’m saying find any tweets from Twitter done by the FriendFeed user dannysullivan (which is also my Twitter name) and which has the words bar sign in them. Voila — I get a nice list.

Still, there are issues. Consider this search:

service:twitter.com from:graywolf google

That should get me any tweets from the FriendFeed user named “graywolf.” Instead, I get back matches from Google Reader. And the Graywolf on FriendFeed isn’t the same as the Twitter user Graywolf (Michael Gray). So if that was who I was after — and I was — I’m out of luck.

source: http://searchengineland.com

AOL Layoffs Begin: 1,400 Jobs to Be Slashed

In the wake of its relaunch as an independent company, AOL could lay off around 1,400 people starting today, according to a memo to the HR team. It’s not going to be pretty.

We knew this was coming. Back in November, AOL revealed that it was going to need to downsize by 2,500 employees and asked for volunteers. According to the memo, the company found 1,100 people who offered to leave, all of them with voluntary separation packages.

That leaves 1,400 or so to be let go this week in order to reach the 2,500 mark. The memo states that most of the layoffs will occur on Wednesday, but that the process will continue even after January 13. Several European offices, including those in Sweden and Spain, will be closed entirely.

This will be a harsh and tough week at AOL. We’ll try to assess the fallout, both for AOL and for the companies that are likely snatch up the company’s exodus of talent. Here’s the full memo:

---

Memo to AOL HR Staff

---

“In November, we announced that the company would take a $200 million charge and that we planned to decrease the size of our global workforce by one-third. Late last year, we offered Voluntary Separation Program to enable employees to decide what was in their best personal and professional interest. We had approximately 1,100 employees opt to join the Voluntary program. At that time we announced the Voluntary program we noted that if we didn’t reach our target reduction of a third we would need to follow the voluntary program with an involuntary action. We did not reach that target.

The next phase of our restructuring plan will include an involuntary layoff. Our process internationally varies by country and is subject to local laws. We began meeting with employees throughout Europe today. For example meetings have already taken place in the UK, Germany and France, and we announced plans to shut down many of our offices in Europe, beginning with those in Spain and Sweden. In addition, we will be beginning the consultative process with the Workers’ Councils in relevant countries this week.

In the United States, we will begin notifying a limited number of individuals impacted by the involuntary layoff today, with the majority of notifications taking place in the U.S. on Wednesday, January 13. As of this point, this layoff will not trigger the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act (WARN) in any of our locations. For many of the employees impacted in the U.S., Wednesday will be their last day in the office.

Since April, we have been moving through a process that started with strategy, then focused on structure, and has most recently been centered on aligning our costs with the company’s strategy and structure. As a part of this process, we’ve looked at every aspect of this business. We evaluated our competitive position and product portfolio in every market – and we asked the hard questions about areas that were no longer core to the strategy and our profit profiles in the businesses and countries where we operate.

We will be offering packages to impacted employees in the U.S. that will include severance, benefits and outplacement assistance, among other things.

All of our cost alignment work is about ensuring AOL’s sustainability and future success. Project Everest is the completion of phase one of AOL’s turnaround.”

source: http://mashable.com/2010/01/11/aol-layoffs-3/

Predictions for Google's 2010

1. Google Chrome's bookmark sync will be extended to sync the documents stored in Google Docs.

2. Google will launch a service that indexes and ranks web applications.

3. Google will use different interfaces for displaying search results, depending on your query.

4. Google's search engine will group related results.

5. Google Image Search will let you upload an image and will show related images from the web.

6. Google Street View's images will become searchable and Google will start to show information about different places in Street View.

7. Google will release an online development environment optimized for building web applications.

8. An open platform for search experiments: tweak Google's ranking factors, customize the interface and create a better search engine.

9. Android will have more users than Windows Mobile.

10. Many browsers will copy Google Chrome's features: the simplified interface, the rapid development model, the lightweight extensions, sandboxing, compiling JavaScript code.

11. Google Drive will finally launch, but it will only be an extended version of Google Docs. Instead of sending attachments, you'll be able to upload files to Google Drive from Gmail.

12. Google Wave won't become successful, but its features will be used in other Google products.

13. Google will buy True Knowledge and will launch a fact search engine.

14. Gmail's spam filtering algorithms will be more transparent and you'll be able to define custom rules for flagging messages as spam.

15. Google Trends will show popular web sites from different categories.

16. Google Desktop will be discontinued and replaced by Google Quick Search Box.

17. If you use Google Chrome, you'll be able to use the most important features of Chrome OS.

18. Google users will be able to add comments and start conversations if they want to find some information about a hot topic.

19. Google Toolbar will be available for Chrome and Google will start to bundle Chrome with Google Toolbar for IE.

20. Google will buy Spotify and make it available for free.