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.

At the Bits Blog of the New York Times, Saul Hansell says that Google was instrumental in derailing the Microsoft effort to buy Yahoo:

As it turned out, Google was very much the spoiler in the deal. But its most effective weapon was not threats or coercion, but its very effective, and unconventional, use of its own checkbook.

Google has agreed to sell some search advertising for Yahoo. And since Google earns far more on every search than its rivals do, this will mean an immediate increase in Yahoo’s profits.

Microsoft’s chief executive, Steven A. Ballmer, said the prospect of such a deal that could deprive Microsoft of being able to sell all Yahoo’s search ads made proceeding with a hostile takeover less attractive. And Yahoo hopes the promise of a big check each quarter from Google will placate enough shareholders to head off a revolt over its decision to turn down Microsoft’s offer of $33 per share.

Do you use one or more of the various Google Web applications? Here’s a link to get help files for a variety of Google services.

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

Google keeps working on Google Earth. Here’s the latest:

• New navigation - We’ve improved the zoom control so you can swoop down from outer space to street level in a single seamless motion. And with the addition of the “look” joystick, you can look up at buildings or across a mountain range.
• More, faster 3D buildings - It’s more fun to navigate through a lot of new 3D content. Besides adding thousands of buildings contributed by people around the world, we’ve added dozens of photo-textured cities and towns in the U.S. and elsewhere.
• Street View - The popular Google Maps feature makes its Google Earth debut.
• Sunlight feature - Never seen the sunrise over the Alps? Now you can.
• New languages - There are 12 new languages, including Danish, English (UK), Spanish (Latin American), Finnish, Hebrew, Indonesian, Norwegian, Portuguese (PT), Romanian, Swedish, Thai, and Turkish.

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%

Google is constantly experimenting and trying new features. Not all are a success and some of them come and then go. Google Blogoscoped discusses The Lost Features of Google.

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.