Archive for: google
It has been noted that currently Valve is making more money per employee than the likes of Google or Apple. It is easy to work out how much the publicly traded Google and Apple make per employee, estimating what Valve pulls in is tougher.
Steam is an online video game distribution program owned by Valve; it controls an estimated 50-70% of the $4 billion per year market for downloaded games. Valve’s founder, Gabe Newell, says that the 250-person company brought in “high hundreds of millions of dollars” in 2010. Although, they have not released their financials, over 30 million people using Steam so it’s easy to assume they are doing as well as he says.
[via gamrfeed]
Google has been listening to the community and released a Chrome extension so that people can delete content farms they dont like from search results. If installed, the extension also sends blocked site information to Google, and we will study the resulting feedback and explore using it as a potential ranking signal for our search results.
You can download the extension and start blocking sites now.
Once a user blocks a site the results wont be seen in searches. Users can always revoke a blocked site at the bottom of the search results. You can also edit your list of blocked sites by clicking on the extension’s icon in the top right of the Chrome window.
This early test is available worldwide in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Turkish.
The average person can now influence Google’s search algorithm.
Google has launched the official Google Translate iPhone application. The new app has all of the features of the web app, plus some significant new additions designed to improve your overall translation experience.
Speak to translate – The new app accepts voice input for 15 languages, and—just like the web app—you can translate a word or phrase into one of more than 50 languages. For voice input, just press the microphone icon next to the text box and say what you want to translate.
Listen to your translations – You can also listen to your translations spoken out loud in one of 23 different languages. This feature uses the same new speech synthesizer voices as the desktop version of Google Translate we introduced last month.
Full-screen modeAnother feature that might come in handy is the ability to easily enlarge the translated text to full-screen size. This way, it’s much easier to read the text on the screen, or show the translation to the person you are communicating with. Just tap on the zoom icon to quickly zoom in.
And the app also includes all of the major features of the web app, including the ability to view dictionary results for single words, access your starred translations and translation history even when offline, and support
romanized text like Pinyin and Romaji.
You can download Google Translate now from the App Store globally. The app is available in all iOS supported languages, but you’ll need an iPhone or iPod touch iOS version 3 or later.
Google has released a new Android application for Blogger. Users can use the Android application to publish new posts on their blogs.
The Android app lets you easily switch between multiple blog accounts, take a photo directly from the app to use in your post and share your location.
It’s available for free and works with Androi 2.1 +. According to Blogger’s blog post, work is underway on apps for other smartphone platforms. [Blogger via Google Operating System]
At the moment Google is at the center of the web. Here is a great infographic from Computer School which shows off just how big Google really is.
Blekko is the newest search engine on the block and they have decided to take a step ahead of Google and ban content farms. Blekko has banned the following sites from search results:
ehow.com
experts-exchange.com
naymz.com
activehotels.com
robtex.com
encyclopedia.com
fixya.com
chacha.com
123people.com
download3k.com
petitionspot.com
thefreedictionary.com
networkedblogs.com
buzzillions.com
shopwiki.com
wowxos.com
answerbag.com
allexperts.com
freewebs.com
copygator.com
It will now be interesting to see if Google does the same. This may affect Demand Media’s recent IPO, in which the majority of their revenues come directly from Google.
Without a public notice Google has compiled a seemingly arbitrary list of keywords for which auto-complete is no longer available. Although the impact of this decision does not currently affect full search results, it does send out a strong signal that Google is willing to censor its services proactively, and to an extent that is far greater than many expected.
Among the list of forbidden keywords are “uTorrent”, a hugely popular piece of entirely legal software and “BitTorrent”, a file transfer protocol and the name of San Fransisco based company BitTorrent Inc. As of today, these keywords will no longer be suggested by Google when you type in the first letter, nor will they show up in Google Instant.
To read the rest of the article head over to TorrentFreak.
Glassdoor, company which collects information about employees in different companies anonymously and voluntarily, presented a report saying that people working in Facebook are not only paid more but also the social network offers a better work environment.
Here’s the rating for most important companies salaries in the software engineer category:
Google offers an average annual salary of $98K and Facebook for the same jobs is giving $110K, making this the most important salary around all companies; Cisco, Yahoo and Apple appears right after Facebook.
But that’s not all, work climate is an important factor in every job; and Facebook makes a difference in this area as well.
Based upon a 5-point scale, Facebook scores 4.6 as the top company in work environment; Google appears third with 3.9 (AOL and Apple appear fourth and fifth). And, surprisingly or not, HP offers the “worst” work climate raked with 2.7.
Google just initiated one of the most exciting acquisition ideas: Trying to buy Twitter with the nice amount of $4 billion dollars, says Yahoo Finance.
Google made earlier an initial offer of $2.5 billion to acquire Twitter, but not only the micro-blogging service refused this offer, but also said that the amount suggested was “insulting”. That’s why Google is apparently analyzing to increase the bid up to $4 billion dollars.
According to the report, an important source related to Twitter said that 3 months ago they’ve received a similar offer of $4 billion dollars from an unknown buyer (Microsoft?) but it was rejected.
What do you think? Can any of these big companies actually buy Twitter?
Twitter could resist these kinds of bids, in the same way Facebook did?
Typing Speed Monitor it’s a Google Chrome extension which records your typing speed. This extension also includes some interesting data about your typing.
If you are always looking for a way to improve your typing speed and want to know some of the facts about your daily work with the keyboard, the Typing Speed Monitor should fit perfectly: How long you’ve spent typing, what characters you’ve typed most, and provides you with a keyboard visualization that tells you statistics about each of the keys you’ve typed.
I think this tool to be more useful could include some other data about your typing, for example: words we usually mistype, average speed / average mistyping, or even some exercises about how to improve your speed or accuracy.
