Results tagged “google”

Pimp your maps with the newly introduced “Labs” feature. Add a latitude/longitude tooltip, drag to zoom, aerial imagery, and – why not? – turn it upside down.

I love that a multibillion dollar company, employing the world’s greatest minds, still writes code that’s too lazy to distinguish between singular and plurals:

This page was visited 2 times via 1 network locations

(From Google Anayltics.)

A research video from Google that servers as a great reminder that the vast majority of people have no idea what a “browser” is.

Via B3ta.

Press fewer keys! Gmail has added autocomplete to Gmail Labs, works with your contact list right out of the box. It even includes advanced searches … type ph, and the autocomplete popup suggests “has photos”. If you select that, it expands to filename:(jpg OR jpeg OR png). Zap.

More about this feature (and how to activate it) here.

So, advertising behemoth The Google* will start showing ads targeted at you. Up until now, ads placed by Google reflected the content of the page they were in – if you visited a page about the history of the pogo stick, you’d be greeted with ads for pogo sticks. That, however, is about to change. If you’ve been visiting a bunch of sites regarding deep-sea diving, then visit a page about pogo sticks, Google will figure “this potential ad-viewer is into deep-sea diving”, and show you ads related to decompression chambers instead of pogo sticks. That is, they’ll collect information about your browsing habits, and advertise accordingly.

It’s a smart move, and so far they’ve gone about it the right way. They’ve been transparent, and you’ll be able to opt-out – and even access the information they’ve collated on you. If the advertising truly is relevant, it won’t be irritating; it’ll be helpful.

(I’m hoping it might actually bring in a few bucks for my humble attempt at online advertising. So far the ads on the Ease and Wizz page have earned me the jaw-droppingly insignificant sum of one cent.)

* “The Google” is how a former managing director I worked with referred to the world’s preeminent search engine. My colleagues and I enjoyed this immensely.

Always fascinating: Google Zeitgeist 2008.

I’m delighted to see that “large hadron collider” made it on to New Zealand’s top ten fastest rising queries (but only just).

An interesting article by Amit Singhal of Google, explaining the technology that figures out what you mean, as opposed to what you say.

Most users have used our spelling suggestion system at one time or another. It knows that someone searching for [kofee annan] is really searching for Mr. Kofi Annan, and is prompted: Did you mean: kofi annan; whereas someone searching for [kofee beans] is actually looking for coffee beans. Doing this internationally with very high accuracy is hard, and we do it well.

I’ve just discovered this, and I love it. On Google Maps, there’s now a “More…” button next to the regular choices of Map, Satellite, and Terrain. Roll over it to reveal two additional choices: photos, and Wikipedia content. Turn on the latter and little “W” buttons appear. Clicking them will pop up a speech bubble of geographically relevant content, with a link back to the full article.