Search Engines

Google Equals Apple In Value. And Vice Versa!

People often compare market capitalization (current share price times the number of shares outstanding) for public companies as an indicator of success / failure, and one surpassing the other as a sign that one is overtaking the other, regardless of whether they’re actually full-fledged competitors or not.

Google and Apple, for example, have been making headlines when stock transactions move their respective market cap to top the other company’s (see this Bloomberg article from August 2008 or this one from GigaOM from two weeks ago).

So here’s a fun fact to start off the week with: the market cap for both Google and Apple are currently tied at about $170 billion after Friday’s market close.

source: techcrunch Continue Reading

Google Makes Fading Homepage A Little Less Confusing For Unaware Searchers

We first reported on Google’s bucket testing of a new homepage that fades to nothing but its logo and the search box after receiving a tip about it at the beginning of this month. Since then, we’ve been getting more and more incoming tips from people who are starting to see this and haven’t seen our or other reports about the gimmick.

I have yet to see the experimental homepage myself, but judging from our inbox and chatter on Twitter the company does seem to be Continue Reading

Google Maps Navigation: The First Killer App for Android 2.0

Android 2.0 just got its first killer app: Google Maps Navigation. Google Maps Navigation for Android 2.0 will be available for free and will be part of the default Google Maps app on Android 2.0 phones. The service offers all the features that users expect from a modern GPS app, including traffic data, 3D view and turn-by-turn voice guidance. Because it’s connected to the Google cloud, the app can also display street view images, satellite imagery and real-time traffic data. Google also implemented a voice recognition feature.

Disrupting the Mapping Industry One App at a Time

wo weeks ago, Google severed its ties with Tele Atlas and started to display its own mapping data instead. Today’s launch of the Maps Navigation app explains why Continue Reading

Yahoo To Launch Real Time Search, Too

Not wanting to be left completely behind, Yahoo will soon launch their own real time search engine too. But unlike Microsoft and Google, they won’t be partnering with Twitter and Facebook directly for the data (perhaps memories of their ill-fated blog search engine from 2005 linger). Instead, we’ve heard, they’ll work with one of the existing real time search engines. If our source is correct, that partner is OneRiot, and the product will launch very soon.

There isn’t much more to say about this Continue Reading

Google Custom Search Rolls Out Themes, Improved Support For Structured Data, And More

Google has just announced the release of a handful of major new features for its Google Custom Search products, including a new set of themes, improved use of rich snippets in custom search, and a new Wikipedia search. The announcements aren’t especially related, but they’ll be welcome news to the millions of sites that have deployed Custom Search.

For those that don’t know it, Wikipedia’s search is powered by Google Custom Search behind the scenes. Update: Google says that Custom search is actually Continue Reading

Google Expands Going Google Ad Campaign Worldwide

Google continues to hit milestones with Google Apps – 2 million businesses and 20 million users in over 100 countries and 40 languages (up from 1.75 million businesses in June). And they aren’t slowing down the advertising, either.

The Going Google campaign, first launched in August (and spoofed within a day) with billboards that changed messages daily, is expanding.

The target? Microsoft Office/Exchange/Sharepoint. The message? Give your employees shared documents, calendars, email, etc. without the hassles of managing email servers or rolling out Continue Reading

Videos: Google Wave Acts Out Pulp Fiction And Good Will Hunting

Everyone is still searching for what exactly Google Wave’s roll will be in the web going forward. We think it’s still too early to tell, but one man, Joe Sabia, has put together maybe the most impressive Wave demonstration yet. Is he doing something extremely useful? No. He’s using it to reenact scenes from Pulp Fiction and Good Will Hunting. The result is brilliant.

“I used Pulp Fiction to show features, usability, and overall functionality for an audience that has yet to see Google Wave. It’s engaging and fun,” Sabia writes to us. And while he may not be doing something like working or using Wave to replace email, he is showing the potential of using a platform that is very dynamic.

More importantly, it’s hilarious. And it features two excellent scenes Continue Reading

Google Brings Back The Growth In The Third Quarter

After two quarters of flat sales, Google announced a resumption of growth in the third quarter, with revenues up 7 percent to $5.95 billion. Net income was up 27 percent to $1,64 billion, or $5.13 EPS, which was above consensus.

Google generated $1.8 billion for AdSense partner sites, or 30 percent of revenues. Paid clicks on AdSense ads were up 14 percent annually and up 4 percent from the second quarter, but the cost per click (or how much Google and AdSense publishers make from each of those clicks) was down 6 percent annually and 5 percent sequentially.

The earnings call is about to start. My Continue Reading

Back to school with Google Docs

As interns on the Google Docs team this past summer, we were excited to be able to work on making Google Docs that much more useful for students like us. We’ve now added a bunch of back to school features which should help our fellow students make the transition from summer to school that much easier — and we hope they’ll be useful to you non-students as well!

We created an equation editor so you can easily complete problem sets online or write papers that include equations. If you’re taking math, you can now take notes in class or answer questions using Google Docs.

In the same vein, we also added superscripts and subscripts — perfect for expressing chemical compounds or algebraic expressions:

For language Continue Reading

The Google Wave Invites: How To Get Them

Starting Wednesday, September 30 we’ll be sending out more than 100,000 invitations to preview Google Wave to:

• Developers who have been active in the developer preview we started back in June
• The first users who signed up and offered to give feedback on wave.google.com
• Select customers of Google Apps

We’ll ask some of these early users to nominate people they know also to receive early invitations — Google Wave is a lot more useful if your friends, family and colleagues have it too. This, of course, will just be the beginning. If all goes well we will soon be inviting many more to try out Google Continue Reading

With Google Places, Concerns Rise That Google Just Wants To Link To Its Own Content

One of the original goals of Google has always been to help people find the information they are looking for and get out of the way as fast as possible. It was a point of pride, and in fact a design principle, to get people off the search results page to other places on the Internet. Yahoo was the site that tried to keep you from ever leaving, Google was the opposite.

Well, it was easier to send people away when Google was just a search engine. Now it has apps and Gmail and Google Maps and Google Books, and a lot of other reasons to Continue Reading

Google Points At WebFinger. Your Gmail Address Could Soon Be Your ID

There’s some excitement around the web today among a certain group of high profile techies. What are they so excited about? Something called WebFinger, and the fact that Google is apparently getting serious about supporting it. So what is it?

It’s an extension of something called the “finger protocol” that was used in the earlier days of the web to identify people by their email addresses. As the web expanded, the finger protocol faded out, but the idea of needing a unified way to identify yourself has not. That’s why you keep hearing about OpenID and the like all the time.

But those standards, while open, have failed to latch on in a meaningful way with the public at large. One of the holdups is that you have to set up a website or service you use to be your Continue Reading

Google Voice Gives Out Free Business Cards, Makes Switching Numbers Slightly Less Irritating

Over the last few weeks, Google Voice has finally begun sending out invites to the throngs of people who have signed up since the service stopped accepting new users in 2007, following its acquisition. But now that all of these people are beginning to experience the wonders of Google Voice, they’re also running into its biggest roadblock: in order to be effective, you need everyone to start calling your new number. And that means you need to print new business cards. In recognition of this fact, Google is giving away 50,000 sets of 25 free Google Voice business cards, printed by iPrint. If you’ve got a Google Voice account, you can grab a set here.

The multicolored cards are definitely going to catch the eye of anyone you hand them to, and they also do a great job at Continue Reading

Google Announces Plans for PC Operating System

Google announced plans late Tuesday night to develop operating software for personal computers, initially the downsized PCs called Netbooks. An outgrowth of the Internet search giant’s Chrome Web browser, Chrome OS is also Google’s most direct challenge yet to Microsoft, whose Windows operating system dominates the PC world. Chrome OS is expected to be available in the second half of next year.

Predictably, and understandably, blogs and other publications are making the case that this is a new, major assault on Google’s archrival. Perhaps that’s true, but I’m betting that taking on Microsoft isn’t Google’s main aim here. Instead, I think it’s logical to accept its longstanding claim that, with projects like this as well as the Chrome browser itself and its Android Continue Reading