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Filed under: Search

Filed under: Design, Internet, Features, Microsoft, Search

MSN.com gets its first major redesign in a decade

MSN.com, Microsoft's search, news and services portal page, hasn't weathered the years well. Tweaking the same basic design for a decade left it far behind the times in terms of design and usability. With today's clean, whitespace-friendly, reimagining of MSN.com, Microsoft ditches the spectre of MSN search and delivers a site that's a little more worthy of showcasing the company's new search hotness, Bing.

A prettier, less cluttered layout and a prominent Bing search bar aren't the only upgrades to the homepage. In a touch that says Microsoft actually knows what year it is after all, you can add your Facebook newsfeed and your Twitter stream to an area on the right side of the page. The news is still there, but it's more customizable, and the layout presents fewer stories at a time than the cluttered old MSN.com did. There's also a local focus, with local weather and a Bing-powered local news widget at the bottom left.

I have to say that, compared to the MSN of old, this new design looks attractive and functional. Speaking of comparisons, though, have a look at our gallery of MSN.com designs since 2001. Looking at how slowly the site changed over the years only underlines how much it just changed overnight.


Filed under: Internet, Google, Search

That annoying site-preview thing on Wordpress blogs -- now also on Google searches!

... but, in true Google fashion, it's less annoying and invasive! Hooray!

Google keeps rolling out the big guns to their search service -- which is good, as people might've been beginning to think that Google has their attention on other things. But no, Google has their attention on everything. Fingers in every pie.

Today, if you're in a subset of Google's users, you can now choose even more ways to display your search results. You've probably noticed that 'More Options' button in the top left corner -- well now, at the bottom of that list, there are now the following options:
  • More text -- you can get a good 50-100 words from each page now, without having to click through!
  • Images from the page -- this option shows you a couple of images from each search result. I'm sure there's a good use for this, I just haven't worked it out yet.
  • Page previews -- the big one! Now you get a little thumbnail showing you what the target page looks like.
And that's about it. Some of you will have none of the above options -- and if you're like me, I have all of the options on my laptop, but only two of them on my desktop. I have no idea why -- I guess they are all being gradually unfurled.

Filed under: Internet, News, Mozilla, Holiday Gift Guide, Search, Browsers, Web

Track Black Friday prices with Invisible Hand add on for Firefox

We've covered Invisible Hand, the discreet shopping comparison add on for Firefox, which displays prices on items you are searching on the web. Just in time for Black Friday, the hand has trotted out a new add on which along with other improvements, incorporates Google search results.

Now, you can get your price results in real time so you know you're getting the best deal. My test drive of the hand went smooth, the results loaded up within a second or two and updates were very discreet. This is a real time saver for getting price results.

The add on will be officially released to the Mozilla site within a few weeks, but the first 200 Download Squad readers can download the beta version. Just click on the link below and key in invisibleDLS for the access code.

http://preview.getinvisiblehand.com/




Filed under: Internet, Google, Search

Don't stop believing. ANOTHER Google search enhancement -- music this time!

Courtesy of Google
Did you know that 'lyrics' is the most searched term on Google in the last five years? Lyrics! Of all things! Not porn, not news, not even games -- but lyrics. And Google, de facto masters of search, know that there's more to search than merely quality or quantity or veracity -- it's about getting the results, when you want them -- i.e. right now. They call it 'time to result': How long does it take to find what you're looking for? If you search for 'Journey', there's a fairly good chance that you're looking for a Journey video or lyrics, and not a journey-planning site -- and that's what their latest search feature brings you.


You don't even need to know the song title -- if Google can match your lyric fragment against a song, it'll pop up at the top of your search results. Neat.

Courtesy of Google
Google might've been developing this one for some time, but instead of implementing their own library of music and needlessly repeating a vast wealth of data already out there on the Internet, Google have partnered with Pandora, imeem and Rhapsody to give you direct links to the songs and artists you're searching for. Rejoice! No longer are we limited to shoddy-quality live videos on YouTube! But how long will it be before Google sets its sights on the music equivalent of YouTube? Lee called this one a yawner -- but I think this might be the best of Google's newly-released features.

Filed under: Photo, Web services, Google, Search

Similar Images feature emerges from Google Labs

Google Labs has been putting together some great new search technology lately. They just introduced Social Search, and now the Similar Images feature has graduated from Labs and become a permanent part of Google Image Search. When you search for an image, you'll see "find similar images" links below most of the results: clicking it gives you a pretty accurate collection of images of the same subject.

I tested out similar images on some easy stuff (umbrellas) and some tougher stuff (celebrities), and found that it worked really well. Similar Images is good at matching backgrounds, and even manages to find similarly-posed photos if you're searching for an animal or a person. It obviously doesn't do as well when the subject is obscure or abstract, or there aren't a lot of photos of it in the database. In cases like that, it'll be more likely to match your image's color scheme than to find a picture of the same person or thing.

Similar Images isn't made to find identical images hosted on different sites. If you're trying to determine where an image came from, try putting it into TinEye instead.

Filed under: Google, Social Software, Search, web 2.0

Google's Social Search is now live

Last week, at the Web2.0 Expo, Google demoed a new Social Search feature that delivers targeted search results based on your social circle. Now, this feature is available in Google Labs, so anyone with a Google account can try it out. When social search gives you "results from your social circle," who does it mean? Google looks at your Gmail chat buddies and contacts, as well as your Twitter and FriendFeed buddies and your Google Reader subscriptions to find relevant results. So far, it doesn't seem like Social Search is for everyone, but you should definitely give it a look if you're a social networking junkie.

Social Search results show you which of your connections a particular result came from, and how you're connected to that person. For example, I searched for Download Squad, and found a blog post from fellow Squadder Nik Fletcher, who I follow on Twitter. Results aren't limited to direct connections, though, Social Search also finds more obscure stuff, like your friends-of-friends on Flickr. It's clearly still a work in progress, but right now it's great for finding blog posts by people you know, and keeping up with your friends across the various networks they're signed up for.





Filed under: Audio, Beta, Search, Web

Blinkx launches a mediocre music search engine

Blinkx Music
Online video site Blinkx is branching out into music with the launch of Blinkx Music Beta, a search engine for online music videos. The front page is simple enough. You're greeted with a search box, a list of top artists, and the ability to click a letter to see results starting with A through Z. You can search for artists, albums, or songs.

Unfortunately, the search index is pretty sparse. There are a number of songs, artists, and albums that return no results. And the search engine's not that intelligent. While a search for Coldplay returns a fair number of results, searching for Cold Play or Caldplay results in a "no results matching your query" message. So you'd better not include a typo or not know the proper phrasing of your favorite band name. Heck, on a whim, I tried searching for Hootie and the Blowfish and got zero results, which normally wouldn't upset me in the least. But Hootie & The Blowfish actually did return results.

Blinkx doesn't host the videos on its own site. Instead, when you click on a song you'll be taken to the page where the video rests, whether it be on YouTube, Last.fm, or another site. A Blinkx toolbar hangs out at the top of the screen to take you back to where you started or let you begin another search.

A fairly large number of videos I did find were cellphone recordings shot at concerts rather than professional music videos.

That's the bad news. Here's the good news: the Blinkbox online video service keeps getting better. I got an email today letting me know that Blinkbox had added a number of BBC TV shows which are now available to watch for free including episodes from the first two seasons of the original (William Hartnell) Doctor Who as well as episodes of The Young Ones, Hustle, and The League of Gentlemen. Update: It's just been pointed out to me that Blinkbox (which I mistakenly referred to as Blinkxbox at first) is not actually related to Blinkx. I'm still excited about the BBC content though.

[via VentureBeat]

Filed under: Search, Microblogging

Twitter takes deleted tweets out of search results

Even before Twitter purchased Summize and turned it into Twitter Search, users started to realize that a deleted tweet was never truly deleted. If you knew what it said, you could easily find it by searching for some of the words, and even if you didn't, you could see someone's deleted tweets in the results for "from:username." M.G. Siegler over at TechCrunch noticed that after Twitter made high-profile search deals with Google and Microsoft, they also decided to clean up the problem and stop indexing deleted tweets.

This is a big win for personal privacy, because although Twitter Search is relatively low-volume and you'd have to know where to look to find a deleted tweet, the sheer number of Google searches that happen every day would inevitably result in people seeing tweets they weren't meant to. I think it's great that Twitter has closed this privacy loophole, but it's also important to think before you post anything, because with retweets, third-party aggregators and the like, your tweets aren't always going to be isolated to your Twitter page. Treating them as public, Google-indexable info is probably the best policy.

Filed under: Google, Search

It's not just Bing - Google makes Twitter search deal, too

When Microsoft partnered with Twitter to allow its Bing search engine to index tweets in real time, it looked like they had finally gotten the jump on Google at something. Just hours later, Google VP Marissa Mayer announced that the big G had made a Twitter deal, too. Although Bing's Twitter product is out today, Google's won't be too far behind.

It looks like Google intends to use tweets to augment search results for up-to-the-minute data. In the official Google blog post on the subject, Mayer gives the example of weather conditions at a ski resort. Getting access to tweets is good for Google, but Bing still has the advantage of being the first to snag the Facebook deal. How long until Google gets one of those, as well?

Filed under: Business, Web services, Search, Microblogging

Bing makes search deals with Facebook and Twitter

With so much hype about real-time as the future of search, it makes sense that the major players in search would make moves to partner up with real-time networks like Facebook and Twitter. What's surprising is that the first big move is coming from Microsoft Bing, and not from Google. At today's Web 2.0 summit, Bing announced deals with Twitter and Facebook, which will allow Bing to start searching those sites' status updates. The Twitter search was demonstrated at the conference, and you should be able to play with it later today at bing.com/twitter. The Facebook product isn't due out until later, but it will give Bing access to all Facebook's public status updates.

Bing showed off some impressive features of its Twitter search product at the conference, including filtering of duplicate tweets and adult content. It also expands bit.ly URLs, so you know where those shortlinks lead. Unlike Twitter's own search, Bing's product attempts to deliver not just the most recent tweets, but the most relevant.

Apparently, both Twitter and Facebook have been talking to Google as well, but Bing is first to make a deal. The two deals are separate and non-exclusive, meaning that Twitter and Facebook aren't getting into bed together (yet) and that there's still room for Google to make a play like the one Microsoft just pulled off.

[via CNET]

Filed under: Google, VoIP, Search

Google Voice messages start showing up in search results, Google responds

Google Voice search results
Google Voice is an internet service that lets people make, receive private phone calls. Google.com is a search engine that makes it easy for users to find just about anything stored on the internet. See how these two things might possibly not play well together?

Earlier today Boy Genius Report noticed that if you did a search for site:https://www.google.com/voice/fm/* on Google, you found a few dozen Google Voice messages. As of this afternoon you can still find those search results. Click on them and you can listen to voicemail messages or read the automated transcripts.

It turns out things weren't quite as bad as they may have looked at first. Google wasn't including all Google Voice messages in its public search index. But the company was crawling messages that users had posted publicly on the web.

But after this information became public today Google told Boy Genius Report that it would begin restricting crawling of even these messages, allowing users to post their voicemail messages on personal blogs without worrying quite so much about the whole world finding them (although if you're posting it on the internet maybe you should expect the whole world to be able to find it).

Filed under: Productivity, iPhone, Search

Wolfram Alpha for iPhone packs big features and a big $50 pricetag

When Wolfram Alpha, the (don't call it a search engine!) computation knowledge engine, announced an iPhone app, I assumed it would just be a nice front end for the website. I also figured it would be free. Surprise! The Wolfram Alpha app does a lot more than expected, and it also carries a hefty $50 price tag. This might not be the smartest business decision for Wolfram, considering that App Store reviewers are notorious for complaining that even $10 is too much to pay for any iPhone app.

On the other hand, the app does the kind of high-level math that would make Texas Instruments weep. If you're a student or someone in a math-intensive technical field, it might rock your world. Integrals, derivatives, differential equations, and all of the other stuff I've forgotten from years of math classes? Look no further than Wolfram Alpha. It's more than just a graph generator and equation-solver, though. Wolfram Alpha offers data on everything from finances to books, movies and music, and it's often quicker than the equivalent Google Search.

Is it worth $50? That depends on what you intend to use it for, but it's certainly less expensive (and less bulky) than a graphing calculator.

[via Mashable]

Filed under: Developer, Web services, Search

Wolfram Alpha gets an iPhone app and a developer API

Wolfram Alpha was hyped as better than Google for finding certain info, especially in the areas of math and science computation, but the hype died down a bit when people realized that it was finicky and a bit tricky to use. Wolfram Alpha hasn't gone away, though. In fact, they've just announced an API for developers and a new iPhone app. It's quite possible that third-party applications harnessing the power of Wolfram Alpha might prove more popular than the engine itself.

The iPhone app, due to be released soon, is sort of a demonstration of what developers can do with the API. It should be a big improvement on the iPhone-optimized version of the Wolfram Alpha site. It will be interesting to see what uses developers find for Wolfram Alpha, because the problem with the site is that it requires more specific, more complex search queries than most users are going to bother with. Third-party apps could narrow those queries down, and direct users toward some of the things Wolfram Alpha does really well.

[via Mashable]

Filed under: Productivity, Search

SearchTabs uses Xmarks bookmark data for better Google results

SearchTabs is a Firefox add-on from the makers of cross-browser bookmarking syncing utility Xmarks. Xmarks has a database of over a billion bookmarks, and SearchTabs puts that to work to get you better search results. When you Google something with SearchTabs installed, you'll see tabs with related terms. Clicking on one gives you a list of the most-bookmarked sites for that term, which usually looks quite a bit different from the Google results.

SearchTabs also adds additional info to the Google results themselves, displaying badges next to various results to indicate how they rank on Xmarks for a given search term. For example, if you Google "Download Squad," you'll see a badge indicating that we're #3 on Foxmarks for "tech software internet blogs." Some suggested terms are more helpful than others, though: Google "software blogs" and you'll see tabs for blogging software and CMS. Close, but not quite.

Filed under: Google, Search, Mobile

Google launches Search Options for Mobile ... but not Windows Mobile

Searching Google from your mobile browser just got a little bit easier, as long as you're an iPhone, Android or Palm device. Windows Mobile and Blackberry users are left out of Google's new Search Options for Mobile feature, and they're complaining about it in the comments of the Google Search blog. The thing is, they're not really missing much. Search Options for Mobile is marginally useful, but I suspect most users will never realize it's there.

Search Options lets you switch from a general web search to forums or reviews only, which I suppose is useful if you need reviews on the go. You can also filter your results by date, which is useful, but certainly not essential. Finally, there are two new ways to view search results: with images from the pages, or with longer snippets. It's nice that this stuff is there, but we've all lived without it since May, when it was first introduced to the non-mobile version of Google. WinMo and Blackberry users hardly have anything to cry about here – except how woefully inadequate their browsers are.

[via Daring Fireball]

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