All Google Feeds

Google has an image crisis

Marc Chacksfield — 1210930740

We all remember the guy in orange hilariously guiding us through Google’s new-fangled Street View, but if seeing a man in a skin-tight leotard wasn’t controversial enough, the app may run into trouble if it’s officially released in the EU.

Points of View

The US has pretty much embraced the program that allows users to view street level photographs, take virtual walks through 30 US cities and find various shops, hotels etc. Basically it’s a more interactive form of Google Maps. It’s not just an app for agoraphobics, though, as drivers have also been using it to get a feel for a place before they visit.

The EU data protection agency has raised concerns about the app, if it is ever – and it most likely will be – launched here.

Speaking about Street View, Peter Hustinx, the European Union Data Protection Supervisor, commented that “making pictures everywhere is certainly going to create some problems.”

It is essentially Hustinx job to make sure that the 27 countries that make up the EU are consistent on their laws on privacy.

Bit of a blur

Street View has been criticised in the past for breaching privacy in the US. Google has gone some way to stop this by recently blurring close-up images of people on the street to protect their privacy. Though it is in the testing stage, the automatic face detection, and eventual face blurring, will come into force as Google makes Street View’s imagery clearer.

Billionaire looking to replace Yahoo board

Patrick Goss — 1210845263

A billionaire has indicated that he will offer alternative directors to the entire Yahoo board, following the controversial decision to oppose a takeover by Microsoft.

Microsoft’s decision to walk away from a massive $47.5 billion (£24bn) bid for its rival prompted anger from shareholders, and Carl Icahn has subsequently bought 50 million shares and has reportedly suggested that he may look to oust the board.

Icahn haz cheesburger?

Icahn, a billionaire with plenty of experience at massive corporate takeovers, has until May 15 to nominate potential new board members for the shareholder meeting on July3.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and departing supremo Bill Gates have both now indicated that they will concentrate on firming up their own online presence rather than continuing with the Yahoo takeover – but that could change if a new board is in place.

The Redmond-based company is keen to compete with internet giant Google, which has quickly become the most identifiable brand in the world, and although an amalgamation with Yahoo would far from guarantee parity, it would create a fearsome virtual internet duopoly.

Google's Friend Connect enters its preview stage

Marc Chacksfield — 1210782780

The much-anticipated rival to MySpace’s data availability project has entered its preview stage allowing site owners to sign up to the venture.

A Friend Connect preview portal has been launched and is focusing very much on helping webmasters to build up traffic by adding “just a few snippets of code” to their existing websites.

Google gadgets

Sign up to the site and Google promises a number of things. Adding Friend Connect on to your site and you can: attract more viewers, enrich your site with social features, and it all involves no programming whatsoever.

It’s the social features that seem to be the main focus of Friend Connect, though. These social gadgets will help with member management, message board, reviews, and picture-sharing.

The main gadget Google cites as providing social features is the members gadget. This will enable users of sites signed up to Google Friend to:

Sign-in with their existing Google, Yahoo, AIM, or OpenID account
Invite and show activity to existing friends from social networks such as Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, orkut, Plaxo, and more
Browse member profiles across social networks
Connect with new friends on your site

Who has signed up?

Google has added four examples of sites that have signed up to the project. They are: My Latest Piece, a filmmaker’s website; Guacamole, a cooking site based around the dip; Ingrid Michaelson, an independent musician’s portal; and BibleApps, an open source developer.

There’s no information as of yet when Friend Connect will be available to the general public.

The US goes internet video crazy

Marc Chacksfield — 1210765080

Google’s rule over the goggle box seems to be tightening after a US study by comScore reveals that over 11 billion people watched internet video in the month of March, 64 per cent more than the same month just a year ago.

YouTube dominates

Not surprisingly, YouTube was the most-watched video site accounting for a massive 98 per cent of Google video traffic. The search engine itself garnered a total of 4.3 billion video views, 38 per cent of all video traffic.

This dominance shows in the rest of the study’s figures, with second place in the rankings Fox Interactive Media notching up just 4.2 per cent of the online video market share.

Three a day

Those who ‘tuned in’ to YouTube on average watched 83 videos a month, equating to around three a day. What’s surprising is that the average total length of daily video watched was just 2.8 minutes, showing what we already knew that online video watchers prefer their visual info in bite-size chunks.

Google wants some friends

Marc Chacksfield — 1210590960

There’s rumblings everywhere web-wise – with Techcrunch being the epicentre – that Google is set to announce a rival to MySpace’s Data Availability project today.

The more user-friendly named Friend Connect sees the search engine giant tread a similar path to MySpace and its signed-up partner Yahoo. Friend Connect will essentially allow user information, such as profile data and status updates, to be synchronised across whichever third-party apps that sign up.

Data difference

The big problem that Google will come across is that the pool of information it has to delve into is a lot shallower compared to the like of MySpace that has millions of users’ details already on-hand.

Techradar.com has yet to hear back from Google regarding the impending launch but as soon as we hear something, as always you will be the first to know.

16 tips for advanced Google searches

Tanya Combrinck — 1210149671

There’s a lot more to the Google search box than meets the eye.

For those in the know, it’s a currency converter, a dictionary, a thesaurus and a calculator, and the techniques for getting Google to perform these tricks are simple and memorable.

We’ll show you how to get Google to instantly tell you what the weather is like is a certain place, what the time is in another country and when a film is showing in a cinema near you. And we'll reveal how to retrieve pages from Google’s cache, and even how to see what a particular page was like many months or even years ago.

1. Use the Google search bar as a dictionary

Find definitions for words using the define: operator in the Google search bar. For example, type define: verisimilitude to obtain 10 different definitions from various sources.

It’s also useful if you’re not sure of the spelling of a word, because Google will show you the correct spelling if you get it wrong.

2. Check the time in other countries

Google can tell you what time it is in other countries, right from the search bar. Type 'time Paris', for example, to find out what time it is in Paris right now.

3. Universal converter

Undoubtedly the quickest way to convert currencies, weights and measures and the like is to use the Google search bar.

The super thing about it is that you don’t have to learn any special syntax because it understands plain English.

So use phrases such as "half ounce in tablespoons" or "12 ounces in cups" when you’re cooking; "500 Hong Kong dollars in British pounds" to convert currencies or "20c in f" to convert Celsius to Fahrenheit.

If you don’t know a currency, you can even type things of the form “currency of India in Australian money”.

4. Calculator

The Google search bar is much better than the Calculator application that comes with Windows. Enter a sum using the numerical keypad and it’ll tell you the answer.

All the normal operators apply: * means multiply and / means divide. For example, (845+62+31)/5 means add up all the numbers inside the parentheses and divide the result by five.

It will also find percentages for you: 63% of 995 tells you the value that’s 63% of 995.

5. Scientific calculator

Google being Google, the search bar is replete with mathematical capabilities. Type in any mathematical construct and the search bar will evaluate it for you.

You can use the trigonometric functions (sin, cos and tan), the ^ symbol to raise something to a power (so 2 squared is written as 2^2), sqrt for square root and log and ln.

Full instructions for using the search bar as a scientific calculator can be found at http://tinyurl.com/366cco.

6. Finding MP3s

There’s a special trick you can use with Google to find music files that people have left lying around on their web space but that aren’t necessarily linked to on any web page.

Here’s what you need to type, substituting for the artist that you’re interested in: -inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:”index of” +”last modified” +”parent directory” +description +size +(wma|mp3) “BAND OF INTEREST”.

This uses the inurl: operator with a minus sign in front of it to specify that you don’t want any URLs containing HTM, HTML or PHP – that is, you don’t want any Web pages.

The intitle: operator is used to single out file listings, then keywords for the artist or title are at the end. You can also use the audio search at www. altavista.com.

7. Retrieve unavailable pages

If a Google search result won’t load, notice that underneath the listing there’s a link that says “cached”.

This takes you to the version of the page that’s stored in Google’s cache, so you can read it even if the site is down. Sometimes you can use the Google cache to view pages that have been blocked by network administrators. To do this, type cache:site.com into the search bar.

This won’t always work, because the Google cache is sometimes blocked as well to scupper the technique. A further reason why you might like to use the Google cache is if you click through to a long document and can’t see where your search keywords appear.

You can hit [Ctrl] + [F] to do a search of the page, but you might prefer to see all the terms highlighted. If so, go to the cached version and each instance of a keyword is highlighted with a different colour for each one.

8. Find show times for films

Type into Google movie: followed by the film name to bring up the times when it is showing in cinemas near you (Google knows where you are).

Much quicker than tracking down the Web sites for cinemas individually. You can also click through to a list of reviews of the film. In a similar vein, if you want to find out the weather forecast you can enter weather followed by the place name.

9. Site-specific searching

Sometimes you know that the page you’re after is on a certain site, but it doesn’t come up when you use the site’s search box.

Often the search facilities within a site are below par, but fortunately you can use Google to run a search of the site instead. To run a Google search of just one site, use site: followed by the URL.

Another useful tool is the link: operator, which shows you which sites link to the URL you specify. If you have your own Web site or blog, this is useful for finding out who’s recommending you.

10. Carry out a book search

An amazing thing that’s possible with Google is searching the text of books. Google has digitised an enormous number of books and you can search the full text of them.

If a book is out of copyright you can see the whole things online. Many books that are still within copyright can be searched, but you can only see a few pages surrounding the part that contains your keywords.

This is an excellent resource because it enables you to search books based on their whole content, not just the title. Go to books.google.com to try it out.

11. Retrieve old Web pages

The Internet Archive makes regular snapshots of the Internet, so if you need to see what a Web page was like last month or last year you can use their Way Back Machine.

Go to www.archive. org and enter the URL in the search box. You’ll see a listing of all the past dates at which you can see what that page was like. It’s really useful for retrieving an old, broken link.

12. Google Experimental search

Go to www.google.com/ experimental/ to try out some of Google’s new features that are still being tested. The most interesting new feature is the timeline, which places your search results in date order.

13. Better people search

If you’re searching for data about a person, try using Pipl (http://pipl.com) instead of a normal search engine. Pipl finds data inside online databases, the content of which isn’t crawled by most search engines.

It looks inside personal profiles, member directories, scientific publications, court records and other such sources to find much more of any information about a person that’s online.

Other people search engines you can try are www. spock.com, www.yoname.com and http://wink.com.

14. Access the Deep Web

When you run a search, you’re only searching a tiny proportion of what’s really out there. This searchable portion is known as the Surface Web, and the rest of the information is known as the Deep or Invisible Web.

There are some alternative search engines that use special techniques to give you a degree of access to the Deep Web. The kinds of documents hidden in the Deep Web are often of a high quality, such as academic publications and information stored inside databases.

Depending on what type of information you’re after, there are various resources you can try. The Open Archives Initiative at www.oaister. org is a metadata harvester that works by amassing the descriptive data about Web sites.

Scientific information from US government agencies can be searched at www.science.gov. Also try Complete Planet (www. completeplanet.com), Mamma (www.mamma.com) and Intute (www.intute.ac.uk).

15. Protect your privacy

Search engines keep a log of everything that’s typed into them.

Each entry is associated with a unique identifier, so if there were a data breach it could be possible for someone to string together your search history.

To keep things private, you need to log out of your Google account when conducting sensitive searches. You can also delete your cookies, but this will mean that sites that usually identify you, such as Amazon and iGoogle, will fail to do so.

A good resource is Scroogle, which enables you to conduct a Google search without having it linked back to you (http://scroogle.org).

16. Search for videos

We all think of YouTube when searching for videos, but Google Video is sometimes a better option because it’ll search YouTube as well as all its own content.

Furthermore, it doesn’t have the ten-minute time limit, so you’ll often be able to stream entire documentaries. Find out more at video.google.com.

Another useful video search engine is Blinkx at www. blinkx.com.

iGoogle given art overhaul

Patrick Goss — 1209555739

Google has attempted to jazz up its iGoogle service – allowing users to put designs by the likes of Jeff Koons, the band Coldplay and, in a (brush) stroke of genius, Rolf Harris on their personal homepages.

iGoogle allows people to customise a page with gadgets and RSS feeds, but the relative paucity of designs has never truly endeared it to the masses.

Two little boys...

But can any man resist the lure of having a Marc Ekko exclusive, or better still Rolf’s landscapes draped across their browser?

We think not.

Anne Geddes famous baby photos make an appearance, Dolce & Gabbana provide a leopard skin (we assume it’s fake) and Kwon Ki Soon’s efforts are, well, colourful.

Check them out at http://www.google.com/help/ig/art.

One third of all UK traffic goes to Google

Patrick Goss — 1209456963

One third of all UK internet traffic is on Google sites and services – according to Hitwise.

A huge 35.5 per cent of all upstream traffic is captured by the internet giant, with the company’s UK and international search engines taking the top two spots. Video site YouTube – owned by Google – is its third most visited site.

Big companies

"A custom category consisting of the 100 most visited web properties in the UK that are owned by Google Inc accounted for 36.55 per cent of upstream traffic to all categories of websites in the UK during March 2008, up from 30.19 per cent in March 2007," said Hitwise.

The UK’s internet traffic is still dominated by big companies, with Microsoft’s MSN and Yahoo also reaching a huge percentage of the UK audience.

Social networking sites such as MySpace, Bebo and Facebook are also heavily used, as well as online shops and auction sites such as eBay, Amazon and Play.

Google boss hits out at comScore

Patrick Goss — 1208792211

So who watches the watchmen? Google’s Eric Schmidt whose pointed comments on comScore’s dire predictions about advertising revenue is obviously unsure, and the internet giant’s results have left confidence in internet traffic reports at a low ebb.

ComScore’s prediction of just a two per cent rise in clicks on paid-for advertising was in stark contrast to Google’s announcement of a 20 per cent rise – leading to Schmidt commenting that "paid click growth was much higher than has been speculated by third parties."

Accuracy

This, in turn, left comScore’s share price down as the industry ruminated on the long held doubts that companies such as comScore were providing accurate measure of true internet traffic.

However, comScore’s data was US based and Google’s measurement worldwide, and although their figure was low, it did show the right trend in terms of click growth beginning to fall.

Magid Abraham, the chief executive of comScore insisted that their data is meant for analysts who know the limitations of the collection, telling the International Herald Tribune: "At the end of the day, our data is really only one element for predicting profit and loss, but people become overly focused on it."

Traffic police

Internet traffic prediction is an imprecise science, with panels and samples used to extrapolate total figures, in much the same way as television audience is predicted in the UK.

However, the figures are then used extensively within the industry in the selling of adverts across sites, meaning that accuracy can be a make or break factor for companies.

Google is still world's biggest brand

1208771792

It’s been a good old weekend for Google, with the news that it has topped a list of the world’s most powerful brands, and that its shares have spiked as investors realised that it has not been as affected by the global economic crunch as first feared.

Google has been valued at $86bn (£43bn) by research company Millward Brown – which has the internet giant at the top of its list for the second consecutive year.

GEe whizz

The company created by Sergey Brin and Larry Page a decade ago keeps General Electric in second place and technology rival Microsoft trailing in third.

Apple also made it into the top ten for the first time, moving up into seventh place, just one behind IBM.

iPhone impact

"Google's rank has been driven by fantastic financial performance and equity value," said Millward Brown’s global account director of the BrandZ research.

"Apple's 123 per cent rise has proved to be from a mix of a slue of innovative products such as the iTouch, iPhone, Leopard and computers for which consumers have given the brand a lot of credit."