Posts Tagged ‘search’

G.Co: Google Has a New URL Shortener

Published by pratyushkp on July 19th, 2011 - in Social, Technology
Image representing Google as depicted in Crunc...

Image via CrunchBase

Google has unveiled g.co, a new URL shortener that will link only to Google products and websites.

The search giant already owns goo.gl, a URL shortener it launched in 2009. Unlike g.co, the goo.gl URL shortener can be used for any link on the web via the Google Toolbar.

“We’ll only use g.co to send you to webpages that are owned by Google, and only we can create g.co shortcuts,” Google VP of Consumer Marketing Gary Briggs stated on the company’s blog. “That means you can visit a g.co shortcut confident you will always end up at a page for a Google product or service.”

The tech titan, which has been using the goo.gl URL shortener for its products until now, clearly wants to limit the confusion about where its goo.gl links lead to. Separating Google products from goo.gl should go a long way to solving that problem.

Google isn’t the only company to use .co as its official URL shortener. Twitter obtained t.co last year to improve how links are shared and secured on its platform.

Source :- http://mashable.com

  • G.Co: Google Has a New URL Shortener (mashable.com)
  • Google Launches G.Co, Url Shortener For Internal Pages (ghacks.net)
  • Google Introduces an Official URL Shortener for Google Pages Only [In Brief] (lifehacker.com)
  • Google acquires G.co for URL shortening its own services (geek.com)
  • g.co, the official URL shortcut for Google websites (googleblog.blogspot.com)
  • Google’s New Official Google Only Short URL: g.co (searchengineland.com)
Tags: G.Co, goo.gl, , , , , , URL shortener,

Google Starts Adding Flight Schedules And Airline Routes In Search

Published by pratyushkp on May 30th, 2011 - in Social, Technology


We know that Google has big ambitions for flight search, as the search giant dropped $700 million on travel search software developer ITA Software. Today, the company just announced a few new flight search features that have been integrated into search (but do not use ITA’s technology….yet).

Now, when you search for a destination on Google, you can see which airlines serve that specific route and when they fly. For example, if you search for flights from ‘New York to Chicago,’ you’ll see schedules of all the non-stop flights that serve that route, which airlines fly, and times. You can access the full timetable by clicking on “Schedule of non-stop flights.”

You can also see all the destinations with non-stop flights from a particular airport. So if you are in Chicago, you can search for ‘flights from Chicago’ and Google will show you a number of routes from Chicago’s airports and which airlines fly from the airport. Similar to the schedule feature, if you click “Show all non-stop routes,” you can get the full list of destinations and from there, you can click to get more flight details.

In the post, Google software engineer Petter Wedum writes that the company is ‘eager to begin developing new flight search tools’ that are integrated with ITA’s software. Of course, the DOJ has mandated a number of conditions that Google has to abide by with regard to ITA’s presence and integration into the search company. It should be interesting to see what Google has up its sleeve for travel and flight search.

Source : – http://techcrunch.com

  • Google Starts Adding Flight Schedules And Airline Routes In Search (techcrunch.com)
  • Google starts adding flight schedules in search results (lookatvietnam.com)
  • Google Launches Flight Search Feature (Not Powered by ITA) (webpronews.com)
  • Google Adds Flight Schedules to Search Results [In Brief] (lifehacker.com)
  • Google Unveils New Travel Search Feature, Does Not Include ITA Features (nytimes.com)

‘Traditional Search Is Failing’ – Bing Director Stefan Weitz

Published by pratyushkp on May 20th, 2011 - in Social, Technology

Image via CrunchBase

Most people think about search as a simple series of actions: type in a phrase, cross your fingers it brings up what you need, and then click around a page of blue links till you get what you were looking for.

But Stefan Weitz, director of Microsoft‘s search engine Bing, says that we should expect more out of our search experience. He criticizes “traditional” search engines — namely, web giant Google, Bing’s main competitor — for failing to keep up with the changing needs of users by sticking with the the search model they’ve always used, which is based on an algorithm measuring the strength of backlinks.

“When Google launched, they wanted to organize the world’s information, that was their mantra — it still is,” Weitz said in an interview. “It was a great vision that assumed really the web of yore, which is a web of documents, literally pages and the connections. Google’s whole mission was to leverage those connections and say, ‘Okay, I can see that the connection between these two pages is almost as important as the page content itself in defining what these things are about’ — it was a brilliant, brilliant model.”

But what worked ten years ago doesn’t work as well anymore, Weitz said, noting that the amount of information available online today, and the range of activities people seek to do there, have made the simple search that currently exists less effective.

“Search itself hasn’t changed fundamentally in the past 12 years,” he said. “Traditional search is failing. The standard notion of search … looking at the texts in the page, the backlinks, all that stuff doesn’t work
anymore.”

Yet for all the flaws Weitz might find with Google, Bing offers a similar set of features, such as searches keyed to news, images, and maps, as well as the ability to calculate sums, define words, and check the weather. Moreover, Google has maintained its dominance in the search market. It claims 65 percent market share to Bing’s 14 percent — a dominant position that has attracted scrutiny from government regulators, who are investigating whether Google’s search dominance is anti-competitive. Microsoft, itself convicted of antitrust abuses, has supported regulators’ investigation of Google in Europe, and Weitz added that in his estimation, the government probe into Google’s activities is understandable, given Google’s power in the area.

“I think whenever you have a player who has, depending on who you’re looking at, two-thirds of the market, it’s natural for regulators to look into this,” he said. “In Germany they have 98 percent share. It’s natural for folks to just look into what’s going on there. This is a place that controls so many people’s livelihoods, you want to make sure its a level playing field.”

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Google has started to include social results in its search in an attempt to make searches more relevant to users. Its new +1 feature lets users “like” results in search and see when friends and other users have “liked” that result as well. But Weitz said he didn’t think the feature was particularly useful.

“+1 today is only on search results,” he said. “I don’t really like search results very often. I like the sites, but I don’t like the result itself. I don’t know how helpful it is, frankly, to like the results.”

Bing is attempting to get a leg up on Google with its own take on social search results. The company recently unveiled a feature that pulls information from Facebook to show what sites, articles and other content Facebook friends have “liked.”

Bing’s approach to social data is to focus on delivering what it believes will characterize search in the future: An engine that anticipates a user’s needs and helps make decisions, finding the most relevant information without the user having to put in an undue amount of effort. But whether it will be able to distinguish itself from Google’s efforts to go social remains to be seen.

“Our mission is literally to deliver knowledge by understanding intent. What that implies is that we understand the web as this digital representation of the real world,” Weitz said. “We’ve now mapped almost every single square inch of the planet, we know where buildings are, we know who the people are, we know what tasks people are accomplishing — we are literally creating a semantic model, or a model, for everything in the world.”

Source :- http://www.huffingtonpost.com

  • Bing head says ‘traditional search’ is dying (news.cnet.com)
  • Bing’s Stefan Weitz: A Web of Verbs, Not Nouns! (stonetemple.com)
  • Is Traditional Search Passé? (technologizer.com)
  • Bing head says ‘traditional search’ is dying (news.cnet.com)
  • Bing Increases Facebook Integration to Outsocial Google (wired.com)
  • Bing Gets Friendlier with Facebook (technologyreview.in)
  • Bing Makes Facebook Data To Use, Personalized Bing Results By Facebook (seroundtable.com)
  • Bing’s Social Search Won’t Always Rely On Facebook “Likes” (fastcompany.com)
  • Why Bing Could Beat Google in Social Search (readwriteweb.com)
  • Bing Taps Facebook Data for Fight With Google (bits.blogs.nytimes.com)

Google Unveils +1 Button For Third Party Websites

Published by pratyushkp on May 17th, 2011 - in Social, Technology

Image via CrunchBase

It is just like Facebook Like , but can do more

After unveiling the +1 button in March, Google has started rolling out the button for third party websites. Google previewed this button, which works like the Facebook Like button, at the Google I/O conference and confirmed that this button will be launched within this week.

The +1 buttons will be in different sizes – Small, Medium, Standard and Tall, with and without the +1 counter, and websites can tie the buttons into their own site logon systems to know which pages are accessed more by users, to keep a record of this. After sufficient number of people have the +1 page on their website, users can view different data such as age and sex of people who recommend those particular pages. This can be done using Google s Analytics system.
Is Google stepping up its social networking strategy? Yes, it is doing it steadily and surely. They tried it with Buzz, not long ago, and it didn t quite succeed. Now they are trying other ways to step up to Facebook in Facebook s backyard. Will they succeed? Only time will tell.

Source :- http://www.techtree.com

  • Google +1 for Websites Nears Launch (mashable.com)
  • The Week We Searched For- May 13, 2011 (thesearchagents.com)
  • Google’s +1 Button Expanding Around the Web Soon (slashgear.com)
  • How and why Google is taking on Facebook (thenextweb.com)
  • Here Comes The Google Version Of Facebook “Likes” (GOOG) (businessinsider.com)
  • Just Weeks Away, A Preview Of The Google +1 Button For Websites (searchengineland.com)
  • Bing Search Results Showing Facebook Like Out of Context (lockergnome.com)
  • Google Unveils +1 Button For Third Party Websites (blogoholic.in)
  • Google’s +1 Button takes on Facebook’s Like (pratyushkp.wordpress.com)
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