Last week at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Google’s Marissa Mayer took the stage for two reasons. The first was to formally announce the Google/Twitter search deal, but the second was the show off a new product: Google Social Search. The on-stage demonstration was interesting, but left a lot of questions unanswered. Today, the Google Labs experiment goes live, and we’ll get those… → Read More
By now you may have heard that Google indexed quite a few user’s Google Voice voicemail messages, and these were showing up in search results. Despite earlier speculation, this actually wasn’t an error, Google was doing this on purpose for users who had chosen to share their voicemails somewhere on the web.
Following the hubbub over this, the company has decided to change its policy and not index… → Read More
It’s mildly annoying when I’m searching for something specific and Google returns results that are led by a huge overview page like the ones found on Wikipedia. I usually just use the Cached option to locate the information that I’m looking for, since that highlights the keywords in the resulting page. But now Google has a better option.
A new feature in Google Search results lets you jump right… → Read More
Google is continually updating its search experience via the algorithms and the way results are displayed. But when it comes to the search box itself, it has largely left it alone. Sure, it has added drop downs for suggested results, but the box itself has stayed a thin input field. But now it looks like Google may be thinking about a change.
Today, while using the Safari browser, we noticed that… → Read More
Since February, Google has been quietly testing a new type of search functionality: AJAX search. Basically, Google uses more advanced JavaScript to make search result pages load even faster by only loading new information as needed on new queries. And while it doesn’t appear to be rolling out on a large scale yet, more users are starting to notice it.
One such user is Mike Stoppelman, a software… → Read More
New stats from monitoring service StatCounter suggest that for the second time since its launch, Microsoft’s Bing has surpassed Yahoo Search as the second most used search engine in the United States. Shortly after publicly debuting the new service, Bing already jumped over Yahoo Search – if only for one day – which many attributed to the launch momentum. But Bing has proven to be a very solid… → Read More
Different markets have different needs for marketing products or services. We all know that much. But that doesn’t take away the weirdness of a company like Google advertising its core product (online search) by using ink that was printed on paper.
Guilty of this hideous crime (I kid, I kid) is Google India, who apparently ordered some targeted quarter-page advertisements to appear in a variety… → Read More
That was fast. Irish programmer and SEO specialist Paul Savage has made this very basic web service, which lists all results for search queries on Google and Bing side by side so you can compare which one produces the best results for the keywords you enter on one single page. We’ve played around with it a bit and found that the tool proves that the user experience for both search engines really… → Read More
Suggesting queries is becoming a pretty standard practice on search engines these days. You know, those drop-down menus that are populated as you type with things you likely mean. They’re useful, but Google just made them more useful.
Previously, when you types a query into Google’s search box, the menu would drop down giving you a range of possible search terms and how many results each would… → Read More
Today saw the launch of two new real-time search engines, from OneRiot and Tweetmeme. While the two are slightly different in ways that I went into earlier, all that really matters are the results you get. So I put those two to the test along with Twitter Search, Google Search, FriendFeed and the recently launched Scoopler. To see which would give the best results based on a current event.
One… → Read More
Yesterday, Google unveiled its new Google Similar Images search feature under Google Labs. The product is nice, and works very well. But, Microsoft was doing the same thing with Live Search — over 4 months ago.
A lot of commenters pointed it out to us yesterday, and naturally, Microsoft reached out today to let us know the same thing with what might as well have been a big, loud “FIRST!” But… → Read More
Notice that title tag for my Twitter profile page?
It reads “Robin Wauters (robinwauters) on Twitter” where it used to say “Twitter / robinwauters”. For the TechCrunch Twitter account, it used to read “Twitter / TechCrunch” (only the username) instead of now “Michael Arrington (TechCrunch) on Twitter” (full name + username).
Minor tweak, you say? Mundane change? Perhaps, but with an undeniably… → Read More
We’re not quite sure what’s going on, but a couple of minutes ago any search result from Google started being flagged as malware with a message stating “This site may harm your computer”.
Twitter is abuzz with people reporting the massive error (also look for tags #googmayharm or #googmayhem), and it’s clear that this is happening around the world. Apparently, it’s happening with any browser on… → Read More
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