Crenk » Search Engines

Google Images Has a New Search Product Called Image Swirl

Dean Sherwin — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 09:47:03 +0000

Google Image Search is used by most of us when we want to find an image for our blogs our websites – or even our desktop wallpapers. I’d like to introduce to you a new type of image search (currently in Google Labs) called Image Swirl. It’s a new way of displaying search results and it make the whole process much easier and more…fun!

When you first search for a term, the results are divided up into categories and are all stacked together as shown below.

When you click on one of these stacks the results are shown in a swirl format like below. At first, only one circle is displayed but then you click on an image that circle is moved further down the swirl and a new circle appears. This process repeats itself until your left with a huge swirl of results and the main circle has only one image left in it. When you click on that you’re brought to that image’s page.

A cool new way of searching for images. Check it out here.

New Chrome OS Screenshots and Video

Dean Sherwin — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 09:04:32 +0000

Yesterday, Google released public information about its new Chrome OS at the official press event. They showed videos of the OS and gave real-time demonstrations to reporters.

It looks a lot like the popular browser of the same name. It uses tabs like those in the browser instead of buttons in the task bar. The colour scheme is also very bright with a lack of colour. This may pose problems for laptop users in terms of battery life.

Here are a few screenshots to give you an idea:

I guess this would be the equivalent of the start menu in Windows. It’s called the applications panel and it’s where you launch programs from. May of these are affiliated with Google as you would expect such as YouTube, Google Reader and GMail however they also have others such as Facebook, Twitter and their old rival, Yahoo Mail.

The Chrome browser is integrated fully with the OS, as one would expect. Other Google services such as Google Talk also work seamlessly with it by launching discreet pop-ups and notifications when user interaction is needed.

Here is chess, an example of an app, running in a tab in the new OS. All apps can either run as a tab or can be viewed in full-screen.

Google Open Sources Its Own Development Programs

Dean Sherwin — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:29:32 +0000

It’s a great day when Internet giant Google open sources the programs it uses to build well-known favourites such as GMail, Docs and Google Maps. It announced on its blog that it will be making a lot of it’s own development software available to developers all over the world. This release comes as Google are undoubtedly upgrading their own tools especially with the upcoming launch of Google Wave.

The first of the three tools they released is called Closure Compiler which helps developers trim down code and optimize it for better performance. There is also a plug-in for Firefox released alongside this so they can view heir Java Script code in the browser.

The second one is called Library which is a tool to help build Java Script Apps. Here is what Google said on their official blog about the program:

The Closure Library is a JavaScript library that provides many features that are useful for building web applications across browsers. It helps to abstract browser differences and provides clean class and function interfaces for common tasks. Besides DOM interaction and UI tools, the library includes tools for arrays, objects, string manipulation and much more. The library also implements a name spacing and import standard, which helps keep scripts small and load fast when used with the Closure Compiler.

The third and final release until further notice was Templates. This is an app that is for creating HTML elements that can be used within Java Script.

Closure Templates simplify the task of dynamically creating HTML and have an easy-to-read syntax. They allow you to write templates for reusable HTML and UI elements that can be used within JavaScript or on the server side in Java. They also have excellent run-time performance because they are never parsed on the client side.

Over the next month or so there is undoubtedly going to be a big rush of new Java apps and programs onto the market thanks to the Google outsourcing. Be sure to stay in touch with Crenk to stay informed!

Google Celebrate Anniversaries of Children’s TV Shows

Dean Sherwin — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 22:29:25 +0000

Google has always been known to mark special occasions such as Christmas, St. Patricks Day, 4^th of July and many others depending on what country you live in, by creating a new Google logo, or doodle as they have become known, for their homepage.

Well for two days in a row they have been celebrating the anniversaries of two famous children’s TV shows.

Yesterday they had a Wallace and Grommet logo to mark the 20^th anniversary of their creation:

And today, Google.co.uk is displaying the Cookie Monster from Sesame Street to mark the 40th anniversary of the show.

Takes me back…

Random Posts

GazoPa: Search Images by Similarity

Dean Sherwin — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:56:41 +0000

GazoPa is an image search engine that allows you to scour the web for images not by entering a word – but by entering another image.

Its main function is to find similar images around the web to that of the one you entered. It’s like the service currently offered by Google Labs.

You can also draw a quick sketch of what you want your picture to look like and submit it so you get back photographs or artwork. You can then filter your results by colour, shape and size. The search engine will also bring back video content that is related to the images – it. If a picture is used as a thumbnail for a video on YouTube then GazoPa will retrieve the video as well.

Check it out here.

Internet Music Innovation with Songbeat360

Luis Sandoval — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 05:41:11 +0000

Today finding the music you want, when you want it has been channeled to using sites like the Amazon store or iTunes. Sometimes, when looming for an obscure song that is not mainstream, you’d be lucky to find it. This frustrating experience paired with the perceived greedines of corporate music labels has forced many of us to find our music on peer to peer networks or bitorrent sites such the Pirate Bay.

Songbeat360.com is an amazingly innovative way of integrating a music player with a music search. Now you can listen to your favorite songs while searching for more. You are essentially still building your own station, much like Pandora or Last.fm, but on this music player you have the ability to download your music immediately.

Bypassing the need to go to the likes of Amazon or iTunes may please some, but does the pricing compare? Based on the site, the application is an Adobe Air app, and comes with 25 free credits. Credits are used when a search is done, and searches are supposedly capable of returning up to 500 results, ensuring you will fond what you need. For further credits, those can be purchased via a stored credit card. For $15 you receive 1000 credits for more music, which breaks down to a whole lot less than $.99 per song on the iTunes store. This is of course assuming you find what you want in one search.

Is the next revolution to your music search? I’d say know, but it’s definitely interesting. The pricing alone is attractive, and if the quality is the same, I can see this web app becoming extremely successful.

Offers.com Launch Their New ‘Locker’ Feature

Dean Sherwin — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 10:00:39 +0000

Offers.com is the leading coupon and special offers website on the World Wide Web these days – having worked damn hard to get there over the past six years that it has been online. Every single day the upload hundreds of new offers and coupon codes for us consumers to devour and save money on.

Some offers I seen after just a few minutes of browsing could save you up to 50% – not bad for the Christmas shopping!

Recently, they launched a new feature on their website called ‘Locker’. This new feature allows you to store and track offers from certain companies and websites without even having to register. Beside every offer on the website there is a ‘Watch this offer’ button, once you click it the offer is stored in your locker on that computer. However, if you want to have access to your offers from multiple computers or devices it’s recommended that you sign up with just an e-mail address.

Seriously though, if you want to save big bucks online and in retail outlets – Offers.com.

Google’s New Barcode Logo

Dean Sherwin — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 08:11:02 +0000

If you’ve been surfing the web (do people still say that?) for a while today you may have noticed that Google’s doodle today is odd, in fact it’s not really a doodle – but a barcode. Oh, and in spite of the recent debacle when Google announced that it would no longer be paying artists to create their doodles, rather the publicity alone would act as payment, this isn’t the beginning of a decline in Google’s doodles as a result.

They are simply celebrating the anniversary of that little invention we all take for granted at the supermarket; the barcode. By clicking on the doodle you get search results for ‘Barcode’. I can only imagine what the image results would be.

Before I sign off for today, a few facts about the barcode.

v It was originally circular so it could be scanned from all angles. Often called a bull’s-eye.

v The first product ever to be scanned in a real life situation was a packet of Wrigley’s chewing gum in a supermarket in Ohio in June of 1974.

v Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver (the inventors) never made much money from their invention as they sold the patent before it was commercialised. Silver never even lived to see its success as he died in a car crash before it was released to the public.

Googles New Look

Dean Sherwin — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 14:21:56 +0000

Google’s minimalistic homepage has been a cornerstone of the internet for the past decade or so. Now, they’re testing out a new homepage which will take the word count from thirty down to one; ‘Google’.

Basically, it will look like the screenshot above with everything but the Google logo and search function being removed. This includes their famous ‘I’m feeling lucky’ button

When you move the mouse however near any area where buttons used to be they will appear. The thinking is that this new method will have the best of both worlds: minimalism and functionality.

However, they are only bucket testing the new homepage to see how it goes down so only a certain percentage of users will actually get access to the new design. For those of you who can’t, see the video below.

Twittorati : Where the Blogosphere and the Twittersphere meet.

John Steppens — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 15:57:21 +0000

The Internet moves at a staggering pace. In a single day it gains more news, blogs and twitters than you could read in a lifetime. Fads come and go over night and it’s becoming increasingly hard to keep track of what is relevant. This is where Twittorati comes in.

From the guys who brought us Technorati, one of the top blog search engines on the net, Twittorati aims to sift the gibberish from junk, tracking tweets from the highest authority bloggers and posting them in a way that’s meaningful and easy to follow.

It’s all about ‘authority’ and what determines a blogs authority is the number of unique blogs that link to that blog. The technology for this is the same as Technorati. In fact Twittorati incorporates blogs from the Technorati Top 100 and promises to include “many more of the web’s most influential voices.”

It’s certainly a good idea but after a brief look on the website I couldn’t actually find I was genuinely interested. Sure it’s all convenient, at any time at anytime I”m only a few clicks away from the highest authority blogs and tweets on the net but therein lies the problem.

There are no rare gems, no cult hits and no must know info-bites. Having a high authority does not mean it’s a good blog. Take a quick look at the front page, how much of that do you actually care about? Very little I bet. Well it’s not all bad and it really depends on how much you care about tweets in general.

Google Timeline

Augusto Alvarez — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 15:37:58 +0000

No, it’s not exactly Google’s Twitter Timeline; but you could consider these as tweets I guess. This list represents the entire life of Google represented in chronologically: Google Timeline.

Here you will see every significant milestone this company had since the first time Google was just a thought (BackRub search engine) until the newest ones like “Google Translates in 41 languages”, or “Picasa for Mac”.

A few months back we’ve talked about the history of Microsoft, the OTHER big company, and we had the chance to see how from a simple idea you can, not only build an entire company, you can design the future. Quite similar like they did with Google, here’s what they’ve called “Google Master Plan”.

(Click on the picture to see a large version. You would probably be amazed with all the stuff that appears there and they haven’t done it, just yet)

Getting back to Google Timeline, take a close look to that, because you would probably find some things that you didn’t even know.

Facebook Mobile Getting Ready for Expansion

Augusto Alvarez — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 15:23:46 +0000

We’ve discussed before about Facebook’s future: Mark Zuckeberg said in an interview that they are not only focusing in maintaining it as a simple website, Facebook will represent the entire platform that any user will need as for identification, business and relationship, said Zuckeberg. And now they are taking another step towards that goal: Expanding the Facebook Mobile platform, that exists since 2008 for traditional websites and Apple’s iPhone, and now it will be available for any mobile platform.

Henri Moissinac, head of Facebook’s mobile operations, presented in the Nokia World about the implementation of “Facebook Connect for Mobile Web” in a new and simple method. With only 4 lines of code, any site, application and platform can use Facebook’s API, the only requirement: A web browser.

“What we did for photo sharing, we are going to do for mobile applications,” said Moissinac. And they seem that are doing it right, because in last month of August, Facebook Mobile had 65 million users.

And of course, the expansion strategy keeps on going: Facebook’s television interaction it is here already. Moissinac said that one of their ambitions is to start working with games consoles, as they announced previously with Microsoft’s Xbox.

Do you still think that their goal about representing an entire platform of identification, business and relationship sounds too much?

Yahoo! and Bing Still Rivals

Dean Sherwin — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 18:07:28 +0000

When Bing and Yahoo! decided recently that they would work together in an effort to stage an offensive against the internet giant that is Google, I though competition between the two had come to an untimely end. I was wrong.

As it happens, although the two search engines will work together to defeat Google they will still compete for glory. Perhaps we will see a kind of WW2 cooperation just like the bitter Allies united to defeat the Nazis…not that Google is a Nazi.

A senior vice president of Yahoo! said “We are Yahoo and that will continue…We collaborate on the back-end but we are competitors on the front-end,”

I guess this makes sense. I mean, what were we all expecting? Yahoo! and Bing to come together like two lost lovers? Nonsense. This is a recession and both companies will by going full steam ahead to stay afloat. They will share advertising revenue with both search engines using the Bing ad model. The deal is due to come into affect next year and will last for ten years. By the end of that time will Google have been defeated? And will Yahoo! be left needing Bing more than Bing needs Yahoo?

Gogul to “Protect” Kids?

Dean Sherwin — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 11:53:21 +0000

I’m all for protecting children online. There are a lot of unsuitable content, and indeed sick people out there. But I say most of that work should be placed the hands of companies who make content filtering software like Norton and of course the parents. It most certainly should not be the job of the search engines to censor results – in my opinion.

Recently, a search engine launched in Russia. It’s called, Gougle (ring any bells?). It filters our bad content such as porn and graphic or violent videos. But then it goes a step further and takes a leaf out of China’s book.

Gougle won’t let you access some of the accounts of horrible events in history such as genocide or evil people like Hitler. While I can see their thinking, I think they are making a huge mistake. If you hide history, what will future generations learn from?

MIT Report Could Save Internet Companies Millions

Dean Sherwin — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 15:06:30 +0000

Google, Yahoo, Amazon, and Facebook are some of the internets biggest names. All of them have huge online presence with millions of hits every single day. Their names have become so well known that even elderly people who have never sat at a computer know what they are. Ever think about their electricity bills?

Me neither, until I came across a report by MIT which states that they are easily spending $30 million per annum on electricity. This is to keep their servers up and running. First they have to power the servers. Then comes the technology that runs them and all the cooling and networking systems in between. A tall task with an even taller bill.

This report suggests a way in which these companies could save on their electricity bills.

It doesn’t offer a green solution of cutting back, rather it suggests that they constantly change which servers power their machines on a daily, even hourly basis.

So for example, the cost of electricity could rise in the US for any given reason so they shift the workload to servers in Belgium where the electricity is cheaper on that particular day.

While this would be a costly investment to begin with, it should pay off. After all, the total energy usage by the internet’s servers is set to go up four times within the next decade. Time for the big lads to make a big decision I think.

All new Flickr Search

Dean Sherwin — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 18:22:35 +0000

Flickr, owned and run by Yahoo is the YouTube of photography. If I ever fancied a change in wallpaper I’d go to Flickr and enter in phrases such as ’forest’ or ’ocean’. I would get back loads of professional photographs taken all over the world that looked stunning on my desktop. However, in getting those results I would always be annoyed at the amount of page surfing through the results I would have to do in order to find the right one. Scrolling down through the lot got on my nerves too.

Now, Flicker must have read one of my five million angry e-mails and changed how your search results are displayed. Instead of having a long list of images with all the information about it to the side such as name, photographer, tags and a description, everything has been streamlined.

The updated search results show a load of small images right the way across and down the screen with just the users name under it in small writing. This is a much better way of searching for images and way less stressful given the sheer amount of images on Flicker.

I am also very impressed with the quality of the thumb nails shown. With other services such as ‘Image Search’ on Yahoo! or Google the images are fuzzy and have tons of useless information surrounding them.

Crenk’s Top 10 SEO Blogs Worth Subscribing To

Steven Finch — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 20:28:24 +0000

Our friends over at DailySeoBlog have put together a great list of the Top 20 SEO blog feeds you should follow. We have decided to show you our top 10 SEO blogs worth subscribing to.

SEO Moz

Online Marketing Blog

Matt Cutt’s SEO blog

Search Engine Watch Blog

SEO Book

Dave Naylor

Search Engine Guide

Michael Gray Wolf’s SEO Blog

SEO Round Table

19. Blog Storm

Google Acquire Video Compression Company

Dean — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 11:31:20 +0000

Google have just announced that they have acquired a new technology company that will serve YouTube very well indeed.

That have just invested shares worth over $106 million dollars in On2 Technologies which are a video compression company. This new venture could change YouTube forever giving it faster download speeds and less buffering as a result.

This may also help to cut Google’s massive bandwidth bill of over $300 million per year that is necessary to keep YouTube up and running. By compressing the size of the videos (some of which are as big of 2GB since HD was introduced) this would make the site smaller and easier to manage while attracting more because of a better user experience.

“Because we spend a lot of time working to make the overall web experience better for users, we think that video compression technology should be a part of the web platform.

“To that end, we’re happy to announce today that we’ve signed a deal to acquire On2 Technologies, a leading creator of high-quality video compression technology.”

Yahoo! Has Clause to Back Out From Microsoft Deal

Dean — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 21:26:51 +0000

Last week, here at Crenk we reported that Microsoft and Yahoo! are entering into a deal to combine search technology and the revenue from their engines in a bid to strike Google who has a share of around 65% of the global market. Yahoo! and Microsoft barely have 28% – combined.

It has emerged that the companies’ lack of market holding has led to Yahoo! putting a clause in the agreement which states that Yahoo! can back out of the deal at any time before the scheduled five year renewal if their revenue share falls too low.

Yahoo! and Microsoft failed to specify what exactly the number was that would entitle Yahoo! to pull out should revenue fall below it however it is expected that the danger zone will be in the first eighteen months.

This is because any new service, whether continuing on from an old one or starting from scratch will experience growing pains. A few other details have emerged since the deal was officially filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

For example, Microsoft must hire 400 Yahoo! engineers and pay them “market-competitive” wages. Furthermore, a full deal must be struck by October 27th otherwise the debates will be brought to a arbitration panel. Time is money.

I guess now we all have to play the waiting game. I wonder in two years time will be caught saying “I Binged myself and I’m 5^th in the search results!”.

Google Mobile: Links Getting Shorter and Smarter

Augusto Alvarez — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 12:29:57 +0000

If you have some kind of mobile addiction and feel the necessity to constantly check your email with your mobile; I’m pretty sure that you usually get uncomfortable trying to use the small screen on your phone. Well this is not a revolutionary invention, but it keeps reminding me that Google is trying to keep things simpler: “Smart Links” automatically shortens long links and converts them into named links.

This is what you usually when you are reading an email with a long link:

And Smart Links converting it like this:

Of course these links, at least for now, will only work with Google related sites: Google Maps, Google Sites web pages and YouTube videos (but they are expecting to make it available soon for Google Docs as well).

There’s an important disclaimer about the use of this feature: only works with plain text emails.

Google Wave: Open Source

Augusto Alvarez — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 13:26:09 +0000

At this point I think that saying that Google released a new and very ambitious project as open source should not surprise anyone. Google officially announced that one of their recent projects, Google Wave, and the protocol involved, will be open source and they expect a lot of contribution from the entire community (I’m sure they will get it).

Google Wave will be oriented to concurrent messaging in a collaborative environment, multiple users can be manipulating the same content at the same time and user activity is immediately visible to other participants. As any collaborative environment and architecture, most of the operations will converge when the server receives the concurrent requests; but the real challenge appears making all that an “invisible transparency” to the user without resigning the usability, functionality and performance.

Will be something like this:

Google says: “To kickoff Federation Day, we open sourced two components: 1) the Operational Transform (OT) code and the underlying wave model, and 2) a basic client/server prototype that uses the wave protocol. The OT code is the heart and soul of the collaborative experience in Google Wave and we plan that code will evolve into the production-quality reference implementation”.

You can even take a peak to the source code of this protocol. And you can check also a nice overview.

Yahoo and Microsoft Search – Possible Collaboration

Dean — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 11:13:41 +0000

A whopping 67% of us ‘Google’ things. If we want to know something we simply ’Google it’, as it has become known. Like any good online company, their name is also a verb. Just like Twitter with Tweet. They have a hug share of the market – undoubtedly. Now however, they may have their first real competitor in years.

Anyone remember last year when Microsoft was trying to buy Yahoo! for almost 50 Billion dollars? It went down in flames. But the inter-company relationship didn’t end. Now, they’re discussing a possible collaboration between the two search engines –Bing (Microsoft) and Yahoo!.

If this were to go ahead then it would offer a chunk of healthy competition to the dominant Google. The news storyalone would send thousands flocking, to give it a whirl – but Yahoo and Microsoft better be careful.

People like their search engine. For me, its been Yahoo! imply because I like a bit of news before I search and also because it was the first search engine I ever used so I just kind of stuck with it. People don’t like change – and when they do change they don’t want to be insulted by too many sponsored results like over at Ask.com or search results that make them want to ‘Google’ .

It’s impossible to tell what the end result would be from this mutation of search engines. Would it be Yahoo!, powered by Bing or the other way around? They do have a plan to split the revenue between them but what about the work load such as PR, development and staffing the site. Now might not be a good time to invest in any search engine as there’s going to be a war, with casualties. I’ll wait until the final few blows before I put my money on one of them.

Yahoo Engineers Speak About New Yahoo.com Home Page

Steven Finch — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 09:36:21 +0000

Yahoo has been getting a lot bad press lately, but with their recent new home page launch they seem to be slowly getting on the right track. Other positive news coming out of Yahoo is their Microsoft search marketing deal, acquisition of Xoopit, and more. Today we wanted to show you a quick video about what Yahoo! engineers think about their new home page.

Geek speak for what went into our new homepage @ Yahoo! Video

Google Chrome – Heading for Success

Dean — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 16:46:40 +0000

Does anyone remember during the .com boom when everyone was rushing onto the net and the ‘browser wars’ started. This was when loads of companies began making browsers for a share of the growing market. Many perished with IE having much of the spoils given its advantage of being pre-installed on every Windows PC and Mozilla being the browser of choice for the more ‘power user-ish’ people. Well when Google introduced Chrome late last year fuel was pored over the smouldering remains of the browser war and now its back again in all it raging fury.

Chrome now controls 2% of the market which is pretty good for a new comer. However, they’re looking for more as the Chrome team target a more specific section of people – the entertainment junkies. They are creating a new accelerator add-on for the browser that will enhance graphics for things like watching movies, playing games and using applications. I think this is actually a good tactic as browser games, web applications and streaming videos are becoming very popular. Just look at Quake Live.

“The O3D team is working on getting O3D integrated into the Chromium build, and we’re close to being able to complete our first step towards integration,” said programmer Greg Spencer. “I’ll be making the Windows build of Chromium be dependent upon building O3D as part of the build process.”

The upcoming Chrome OS will indeed be much of Linux under the skin however it will also have much of its workload centred on online applications. An improvement in graphics and the power of the Google Chrome Browser can only mean a bright future for the daring Chrome team.

Google Sponsored Satellite Captures First Image

Steven Finch — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 08:20:27 +0000

This bird’s-eye view of Kutztown University in Pennsylvania was the first image ever seen by the GeoEye-1, the world’s highest-resolution commercial satellite sponsored by Google, when it opened its camera door earlier this week.

The 4,300-pound satellite collected the image at noon EDT on Oct. 7 while moving from the north pole to the south pole in a 423-mile-high orbit at 17,000 miles per hour, or 4.5 miles per second. The spacecraft can take photos at a resolution of up to 41 cm – close enough to zoom in on the home plate of a baseball diamond, according to Mark Brender, GeoEye’s vice president of communications and marketing.

Even though the GeoEye-1 satellite sports a colorful Google sticker, its key customer is actually not Google but rather the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, a U.S. government agency that analyzes imagery in support of national security. The NGA is paying for half of the development of the $502 million satellite and has committed to purchasing imagery from it. Google is GeoEye’s second major partner.

“This is the opposite of a spy satellite,” Brender said in a phone interview. “Spies don’t put info on the internet and sell imagery. We’re an Earth-imaging satellite, and we can sell our imagery to customers around the world who have a need to map and measure and monitor things on the ground.”

There’s one catch for Google: While the GeoEye-1 will provide imagery to the NGA at the maximum resolution of 43 cm, Google will only receive images at a 50-cm resolution because of a government restriction, Brender explained. However, Google’s partnership with GeoEye is exclusive, meaning the search-engine giant will be the only online mapping site using the satellite’s photos.

A second satellite, GeoEye-2, slated to launch in 2011 or 2012, will have a resolution of 25 cm, company representatives promised. However, Google’s satellite imagery will not likely get more detailed because of the 50-cm regulation.