Windows Tips and Tricks

Right now, Google is king of search with Microsoft huffing and puffing in third place trying to make progress in the field. Number two Yahoo, of course, doesn’t seem to know exactly what it wants to do to catch up. BusinessWeek says neither of these Google rivals is the real threat to Google dominance:

No, one of the most formidable challenges facing Google (GOOG) is likely sitting in your pocket or purse. It’s your cell phone, and it will put added pressure on Google and other Internet companies to revamp the way they handle online marketing.

As more people use cell phones and their tiny glass screens to gain access to the Internet, Google and its fellow online advertisers will have less space, or what’s called ad inventory, to place marketing messages for customers. Google makes money selling ad inventory. And its ad inventory is diminished on a cell phone.

The news has been full of stories about the withdrawal of Microsoft’s attempt to buy Yahoo. Now that a couple of days have passed and the initial shockwave is dying down, it’s time to begin an assessment of whatever implications there are. For one thing, Yahoo’s stock price will take a hit. Some Yahoo shareholders will almost surely sue. But what long-term results might there be? Was Ballmer’s walk wise or not? Analysis is all over the place. Some say that Ballmer pulled back from a bad decision. For example, long-time Microsoft observer Mary Jo Foley writes:

Some — probably many — are going to portray Microsoft’s decision announced on May 3 to withdraw its Yahoo bid as a victory for Yahoo and a defeat for Microsoft Chairman Steve Ballmer & Co. Me? I see this as the smartest thing Microsoft could do.

On the other hand search engine specialist Danny Sullivan says:

If Microsoft’s walkaway from the Yahoo deal is indeed a ploy to save $5 billion, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer may have proven himself pennywise and pound foolish. He was prepared to spend billions to finally make Microsoft a serious rival to Google. For a bit more, he may have destroyed Microsoft’s chance to get there.

Others say that Ballmer is making a bargaining ploy and that after Yahoo’s stock goes down, he’ll be back with a less generous offer. Meantime, Ballmer’s letter to Yahoo withdrawing the offer is being parsed, dissected, and interpreted by numerous commentators. Whatever develops. neither Ballmer nor Jerry Yang of Yahoo can be proud of the way they have handled the situation. Yang, in particular, is likely to come under heavy attack from disgruntled stock owners.

So, what’s Microsoft’s path now? Steve Lohr at the New York Times writes:

Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive, walked away from a Yahoo deal on Saturday still looking for an answer to his company’s fundamental problem: its time-tested recipe for success isn’t working against Google, the leader in the current wave of Internet computing.

With a bid for Yahoo, Microsoft was trying to buy its way out of the problem. It was a controversial step and a gamble, but at least it was a big move. Now, there is no clear prospect of a quick fix for Microsoft, as the center of gravity in computing continues to move away from the personal computer, Microsoft’s stronghold, and to the Internet.

The real estate market may be having troubles but people are still moving and looking for a place to live. If you are in an area where Google Street View is available, a new mash-up can help you check out homes for sale. Google Lat Long reports:

We’re pleased to announce today that home buyers, owners, and real estate junkies can now find Street View integrated with the real estate listings, recently sold homes, and property records on Trulia. We’re excited to use the new Street View API to add efficiency to the real estate search experience and help home buyers discover more information about particular neighborhoods.

Google is an admirable search engine but the results often contain a lot of spam or other useless sites. According to Search Engine Land, the alternative search engine Hakia is going to try to do better:

The Hakia blog explains how the engine is taking a “quality” approach, trying to assess the credibility of sites in ranking them, together with the help of professional librarians. Hakia specifically discusses this in the context of health-related search and contrasts its approach with that of “popularity,” a general reference to Google’s original PageRank algorithm.

The company says that it will roll out “Quality Search” in a range of verticals — “law, finance, science, and in many other content-rich verticals” — based upon expert sources and librarian-aided indexing.

Google Operating System reports that Google will start to personalize search results based on the previous query or even a number of previous queries. The post reports:

Until now, Google personalized the results based on the search history only for users that were logged in and enabled the Web History service. Google created a profile from your search history and used it to disambiguate your queries and slightly alter the rankings for pages that were likely to match your interests.

The new signal for personalizing results (recent searches) should work without having to log in and could influence the results in a different way. In many cases, people constantly refine their queries by adding or removing keywords, but Google and other search engines don’t use all these refinements to improve the results in real time. By connecting the related searches from a session, Google will understand more from what you intend to find and should deliver better results.

I have always disabled cookies from Google because I am not sure I like the idea of Google tracking all my searches. I’m not sure how that affects this new method.

Incidentally, one of the comments on the post gives a method to find out what Google has as your search history. I have deliberately prevented a search history so I don’t know how well this works but here is the procedure:

You can download your search (web) history as a RSS feed:

http://www.google.com/history/lookup?output=rss&num=100

(replace 100 with the number of items you want in the feed)

To restrict the items to web searches and remove image searches, Google News or the web history, use:

http://www.google.com/history/lookup?st=web&output=rss&num=100

Search Engine Land reports on the latest statistics from Hitwise:

Last week, Hitwise released the latest statistics for search engine share in the United States for March 2008, showing Google at an all-time high while Microsoft and Yahoo hit all-time lows.

The statistics for March show the following figures for a share of searches:

• Google: 67.3%
• Yahoo: 20.3%
• Microsoft: 6.7%

The New York Times and Google Earth have combined to provide a way to get the news appropriate to a particular geographic region. The Google Lat Long blog gives a description:

I read a lot of news by surfing the Internet, as do many of my colleagues and friends, and I’ve always dreamed of a way to browse news based on geography. What’s happening in Paris today? What are the top headlines in Japan?

In collaboration with The New York Times, we’ve come up with a solution: The New York Times offers geo-coded news, and Google Earth offers the platform for reading that news in a 3D browser.

Some details are:

To experience this new way of getting your daily dose of news, launch the latest version of Google Earth and make sure the “Geographic Web” folder is turned on. Click on a New York Times placemark and you will see the latest news and features pertaining to that geographic region. Want to see more than just headlines? Click on the “Show this layer” button at the top of the preview bubble and you’ll get a list of news articles dating back one month.

All the different prices for a plane ticket can bewilder the would-be traveler. AppScout gives some tips on finding the best price.

You may not be a lawyer but you might want to look up a legal point some time. Lawyer or lay person, a new site called justia.com looks like a useful resource. AppScout says:

Legal information can be difficult to find: You have to dig through piles of books, page through thick court decisions, or know a lawyer. Justia is a search engine that can help you find the court decisions and legal rights that matter to you. The service was designed to make digging through complex legal information as easy as a Google search and to open the door to everything from active dockets in front of federal courts to legal blogs and podcasts that might interest you.

I talk about file extensions a lot because understanding them is key to file management. Unfortunately, there are thousands of file extensions. Although most of us encounter only a few of the common ones, there are times when you might need to look up a particular file extension. Because file extensions are so important, the Web is full of lists that explain the many different extensions. Here’s a few (in no particular order):

• FileFormat.info
• Wikipedia
• FileExt
• File.Extensions
• Webopedia