Intuitive Mobile Search

Image licensed as Creative Commons Attribution by Mac Funamizu.

Mac Funamizu imagines a more intuitive way to search by just pointing at objects or selecting text. An Internet-enabled mobile device that incorporates a camera, scanner, GPS could make use of services like Google Maps or an improved image search to recognize objects and deliver useful information about them.

"You can use it when you want to know a car model, an insect name, what kind of food is served at a restaurant and how much, who built a bridge, etc. etc. But as a designer myself, I hope it's able to tell me a name of a font of the type I see, the size, color (in RGB), and so on," explains Mac.

There are already commercial applications like GeoVector 3D Search that let users access data about some points of interest, but this could be extended to non-local search. GeoVector "currently provides products and services which significantly simplify local searches, allowing users to point their mobile device toward objects of interest to access information about them. Users can point and click with their mobile phone the way a computer user navigates using a mouse," according to a press release.

Google tests introducing barcodes in print ads to increase their accountability. "2D barcodes (...) allow readers to click on interesting print ads with their cellphones and seamlessly connect to relevant online content." A barcode could encode URLs or any other short text. "When you capture a picture of it with your cellphone, special decoding software reads the encoded information, and prompts your phone's browser to visit a URL." Barcodes are very popular in Japan, where a lot of mobile phones include decoding software. "Japan, the first country with a highly developed 3G network and high usage of the mobile internet, was also the country where telecoms like NTTDoCoMo and KDDI achieved a breakthrough by bringing QR code readers to mobile phones. Today QR Codes are so pervasive in Japan that it's almost impossible without seeing one. You can find them in advertisements, mobile campaigns, on maps, in magazines, on billboards etc. and nobody want to miss them anymore."

Point-and-click is an intuitive way to interact with objects and obtain information from search engines, but it's necessary to be able to analyze images and recognize objects, the same way barcode decoders transform codes into text. Google's acquisition of Neven Vision is a step in this direction.

Google Shows the Indexing Date for Each Search Result

If you use Google's advanced options to restrict the search results to a certain period of time, you'll find that Google shows the date when each web page has been first indexed (in many cases, this is a good approximation of the date when a web page has been created).


As previously mentioned, you can edit Google's URL to customize how fresh the search results should be. For example, if you append &as_qdr=y9 to Google's search URL, you'll restrict the results to web pages first indexed by Google in the last 9 years. Since this restriction should include all web pages from Google's index, you can use it to display the timestamp next to each search result (e.g.: a search for iPod).

Maybe in the future Google will display the date next to each search result, it will try to approximate the date when a page has been created, allow users to filter results from certain periods and sort the results by date.

Interesting Results from Google Blog Search

Even it still has problems with duplicate content and spam, Google Blog Search has an important advantage over other blog search engines: it actually finds the most important search results. This is the default option for displaying results and it's recommended to use it even if you only want to read fresh news, as you can change the time interval to "last hour" or "last 12 hours".

Google's blog search engine lacks a homepage that displays the most important posts from the blogosphere, but there's a way to find interesting posts without entering a query. For some strange reason, if you search for [label:keyword] or [view:keyword] (keyword can be anything you like), Google ignores your query and displays a list of blog posts. We can assume it's a list of blog posts relevant for any query.


Related:
How Google Blog Search ranks results

Finding Places of Interest in Google Maps

Google Maps has a very useful mapplet (what's a mapplet?) that shows places of interest from a list of categories. You can select the mapplet by going to the My Maps tab and clicking on Featured content > Places of interest.

Instead of searching for bars, restaurants, hospitals, shopping malls, you can select these categories in the left sidebar and see all the places that match your selection. Unlike the standard search results, the mapplet shows many more places and you can use it to see the picture: for example, to estimate the distribution of restaurants in a certain area. Google Maps lets you select more than one mapplet, so you can also activate the distance measurement tool, the Panoramio layer with beautiful photos or the popular community maps.

Google Goes to Disneyland

This year, Google's employees didn't go on the traditional ski trip due to the size of the company, so they went to Disneyland for three days, from 4 to 6 February. Here's how Googlers described the trip:

"Monday through Wednesday, Googlers from the West Coast offices headed down to Anaheim for a visit to place of a 'million dreams.' Suffice it to say, it was an incredible experience. I got to go on rides I had gone on over 10 years ago - including Space Mountain, Matterhorn, and Star Tours. And, I got to ride the new rides - California Soarin', California Screamin', Buzz Lightyear, and Indiana Jones. From 8pm-1am, the park was open only to Googlers, with our very own fireworks show and no waits in the lines." (Reid)

"Tomorrow I'll be on my way (...) to LAX and then to Anaheim for Google's yearly ski-trip! Oh wait. There's no skiing in Anaheim. So what's this all about? Well it turns out that Google with its 16,805 employees is now so big that we cannot by any means rent enough rooms in Tahoe, so it was decided to give us a choice this year: Camping at the Pinnacles National Monument south of Salinas, CA (bring your own tent!) or Disneyland! Google's got the whole park just for Googlers after 8pm on Tuesday [February 5th]", writes Ulf Waschbusch.

"One of the things I can most prominently remember about my childhood is Disney cartoons. There was a stage when Mickey, Donald, Pluto, Goofy meant more in life than probably computers mean today. I visited Disneyland at Anaheim near Los Angeles. Many thanks to Google for the company trip. (...) Disneyland is a childhood dream come true. One less thing left to do in life." (Nirnimesh, a Googler from Hyderabad, India)


"Absolutely amazing time. The organization of the trip was second-to-none... pretty much what you'd expect from Google. I couldn't even imagine what a logistical nightmare organizing something like this must have been. They flew about 5,000 people down from three different airports in the bay area, to three different airports in Los Angeles area. Shuttles were organized to take us from those three airports to about 10 different hotels where the Googlers were staying. At the airports, for most of us who only had carry-on luggage, we were handed our boarding passes after showing ID and went straight to security (after waiting on a Google line for a quite some time but what would you expect?!). When we arrived at the airport (going down and coming back), there wasn't a single moment where the Googlers weren't informed where we were supposed to go to catch our shuttle. (...) There's definitely a reason why Google's the number one employer to work for. This was the most fun I've had since I moved out here." (Billy)



More photos of Google's trip to Disneyland: Arturo, Ana, Rosalie, Cynthia, Michael, Tessa, Gregory.

iGoogle's Settings Page

Google's personalized homepage (a.k.a. iGoogle) has a settings page where you can change the language, your location and some things related to tabs (name, theme, layout). You still can't reorder the tabs or make some special changes that aren't available in the main interface.

The settings page would probably be more useful if it had support for batch operations like deleting multiple gadgets or moving all the gadgets that contain "Google" in the title to a new tab.

Local Sections in Google News

There's a new type of section you can add to Google News: the local section. Type your location (or any other location) and Google will show you the most relevant news related to your location. Until now, you could create a custom section that showed the most important news that contained your terms, but the new location does a better job at identifying locations.

"While we're not the first news site to aggregate local news, we're doing it a bit differently -- we're able to create a local section for any city, state or country in the world and include thousands of sources. We're not simply looking at the byline or the source, but instead we analyze every word in every story to understand what location the news is about and where the source is located," mentions Google News Blog.


You can create as many local sections as you want by clicking on "Edit this personalized page" and selecting "Add a local section". It would be nice if Google News adds the layout options from iGoogle and makes it easier to rearrange the sections and add new content. Google could also display a lot of interesting content about a location (popular videos, photos, blog posts, events, community maps) in a special iGoogle tab.