google

Blended searches for cavemen

Search is a constantly evolving and changing entity, and this year has certainly seen more than its fair share of change. Possibly highest on the list has been the move to blended or universal results. Much of the focus and discussion has revolved around Google Universal, but they aren't the only game in town and all the majors have now entered into blended results to some extent or another.

This presents interesting opportunities and challenges. Those who focus on developing a fuller and broader Web presence, adding video, news, blogs, images, local content and social media to the mix, … Read more

Episode 579: New rule: All music on floppies

Amnesty Hypercube now does Facebook too

Amnesty Hypercube, which is probably the best name I've seen this year, has a new Facebook app that's pretty handy if you're a user of their desktop application. Like its other "Amnesty" services, the new app from the folks at Mesa Dynamics takes pretty much any widget code you can throw at it, and runs it in Facebook. In turn, it syncs up with Amnesty's desktop widget app, meaning any widgets you add at home will be available without having to re-add them.

There are several reasons why this is useful. One is for … Read more

Google to open source Orkut?

Barry Summerlin is reporting that Google plans to open source its Orkut social networking code to go after Facebook.

Orkut has been around since early 2004, though you'd have trouble finding any users among your own friends. However, the site does a mean, market-leading business in Asia and Latin America, particularly Brazil (Orkut's forums are nearly dominated by Portuguese). If you believe the chatter, Google will make Orkut's source code available to outside programmers, duplicating the third-party-widget blueprint largely fueling the ascension of privately-held Facebook.

Does it matter? This is not too dissimilar from proprietary companies seeking … Read more

Google Enterprise Search gets social

Google's Enterprise Search Appliance customers are being notified of a free upgrade that's now available. It adds new features to the buttoned-down, behind-the-firewall search appliance designed for giant companies and their IT departments.

But the product now has an unbuttoned, free-for-all aspect that admins can turn on, that allows end users to stuff search results into the engine for other users at their company. Called KeyMatch, this feature lets users create specific results for search terms. For example, a user could add a search result for "picnic" that points to an intranet page about the company … Read more

Analyst: Now that Google has Jaiku, is Yahoo after Twitter?

Earlier today, my colleague Elinor Mills covered the announcement that Google had purchased the Helsinki, Finland-based microblogging company Jaiku. It's the third oddball move in the mobile (or semi-mobile, as microblogging is) social-networking space that Google's made in the past few years, with its reported acquisition of Zingku late last month and the ill-fated buy of Dodgeball in 2005.

RedMonk analyst James Governor thinks this may not be the last microblog acquisition we'll see. In fact, he said, Google rival Yahoo may be after Jaiku rival Twitter, the company that put "microblog" in everybody's … Read more

Google adds six new cities to Street View

Google has added six new cities to its Google Maps Street View, as well as the ability to pan to the top of skyscrapers.

The new cities with the 360-degree view are: Chicago, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland and Tucson. And the images in Phoenix, Tucson and parts of Chicago are in high resolution, like those in San Francisco and San Diego, according to Google's Lat Long Blog. There's also a dorky video about it on YouTube.

The images in the new cities were captured by Google's own camera-equipped cars since its contract with Canada-based Immersive Media expires … Read more

Google to buy Twitter rival Jaiku

Google is acquiring Helsinki, Finland-based mobile social-networking provider Jaiku, also known as Twitter's competitor.

The news was announced on Jaiku's Web site:

"Exciting news: Jaiku is joining Google! While it's too soon to comment on specific plans, we look forward to working with our new friends at Google over the coming months to expand in ways we hope you'll find interesting and useful. Our engineers are excited to be working together, and enthusiastic developers lead to great innovation. We look forward to accomplishing great things together. In order to focus on innovation instead of scaling, … Read more

The future is here: Google Earth meets virtual worlds

When Google first announced in 2006 that it had purchased @Last Software, and its Sketchup 3D modeling tool, there were few people more excited than Jerry Paffendorf.

Paffendorf was at that time the futurist-in-residence at The Electric Sheep Co., as well as one of the people behind the Accelerating Studies Foundation's Metaverse Roadmap project.

And he saw, even early last year, that folding Sketchup into Google could mean magic for virtual world developers, since it meant there was a high probability of a 3D, social virtual environment built around Google Earth.

As a futurist, Paffendorf was spot on: Virtual … Read more

Google's new gPhone goes open source

The New York Times is reporting that Google's "gPhone" is coming soon, will be advertising-supported, and will run Linux. None of these should be surprising to any who have kept tabs on Google over the years. Not to state it too bluntly, but Google is essentially a massive, heavily modified Linux server farm. So, it's no small surprise that Google is opting for Linux on its mobile phone, as well.

Whatever Google has been to open source on the server, it seems ready to "play ball" with open source on its mobile clients:… Read more