Conversationalize

The complaint on misleading ads has always existed. Some ads are formatted in such a way that it will provide real information only to find out that it leads to a useless website. This happens when the titles and descriptions of ads are misleading and the owner of the website advertised is merely concerned about hits.

With this concern, a member of Webmasterworld thought about having information show up as a person hovers over the text link. This will give the person enough time to think if the site is really worth the visit.

My problem with that is that advertising is meant to lure or bait people. Not in a bad way, but the idea is to create interest and then have people take a look. Words are formatted in such a way as to encourage interest. If more information about the site is going to be shown in the mouse over, it will only be formatted in such a way as to reinforce the original ad. So it is a pretty useless idea if you will ask me.

As Bing has been developing some new ways to capture the audience, Google will not be left behind. They are also working in their rooms to create new applications that will capture their market. One such application is Google Wave.

In this age, multitasking has been second nature to us. In fact, having all things in one secure place is better than having them in multiple areas. This is what Google Wave will do. They will integrate all the important communication and documents in one place.

When I saw the preview, it reminds me a lot of Google apps. It is like creating a place in your browser where everything is integrated. But Google Wave is so much more. It can let people communicate and work together while sharing important texts, photos, videos and more.

The goal of Google wave is common workspace. Online jobs are normal nowadays and projects must be collaborated on an online setting. Google wave does just that. But this does not mean that you should also be online for the wave can rewind back so you can see what has happened. Like Google Docs, editing is done in real time so participants can easily communicate and tell the others what they think. It is a very convenient tools for different types of projects.

Google is making a stronger backbone for all of its services such as Search, Gmail, YouTube and Wave. According to The Register, Google is working on version of two of its current Google File System (GFS). This new version will replace GFS after ten years of being of service to Google.

This new system is absolutely different with Google’s release of Caffeine which will be the testing ground for a new Google Search.

One of the primary reason why Google decided to improve the current GFS is that its first version doesn’t handle operations with other Google products including Gmail and YouTube. Originally, it was made to power Google’s search queries and right now, as the company grows bigger, it is being asked to do more. The second version of GFS will handle all Google services and related applications.

Since the release of the Google Caffeine, some are comparing the results of the new search engine with the old Google search engine architecture.

It takes time and effort for someone to click back and forth just to compare the two search engines. For less than a week, there are some online practitioners and experts who are making some studies and experiments for this new Google service.

To make your studies a little less effort, there are some useful tools to get your comparison a bit faster than doing the manual comparison with the two sites.

First, try using Facesearch Caffeine
Compare where you can check the results of the same subject in side-by-side frames. In here, it’s easier to compare since you both check the results of Caffeine and the old Google search on the same monitor.

Another one is Google Caffeine Bookmarklet, a recently released browser bookmarklet from The Google Tutor blog. In here, you just have to do your search on Google then after getting the results, click for the bookmarklet and it will automatically search for the same topic on Google Caffeine.

For sure, as the experimenting continues, there will be more applications and tools available to help testers compare the two search engines.

If Microsoft was able to re-launched their search engine as Bing nowadays which is most likely to be user-interface related in most of its changes, Google announced its ‘secret project’ Caffeine which includes infrastructure-related changes but no user-interface. In a way, Caffeine affected Google’s user-interface as its infrastructure is new.

This Caffeine is considered to be the ‘next-generation architecture for Google’s web search.’ It includes changes in crawling, indexing and ranking pages though Google says that the new architecture is primarily changed based in how they index.

Google said that they are not trying to integrate this new architecture on the current one; this is a developer preview where webmasters and power searchers can experiment and provide some feedbacks. But compared to the defunct Google’s SearchMash which was also intended for experiments, Caffeine will soon replace the existing Google architecture.

With the billions of cellphones with cameras being sold every year, pictures are considered today no longer as something nice to have but a must to have. People eventually consider these pictures as important information same to documents. And today, with the evolution of technology on various camera-enabled phones, pictures have to be in good quality.

Two of the top internet leaders – Google and Microsoft – agreed in their studies that images take an important part in search engine nowadays as more and more consumers rely on pictures when doing their searches online.

With the result of the study, Google started to rank images according to their quality. This will help searchers find an accurate image of what they’re looking for. Also, Google considers this step as a tool in building next-generation websites.

Due to some conflicts of interest as Google is entering Apple’s line of business, Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, resigned for being one of Apple’s board of directors as Apple, Inc. announced on August 3, 2009.

According to the statement released by Apple, Inc., ‘Eric has been an excellent Board member for Apple’ but since Google is doing direct competition with Apple’s main business, ‘Eric’s effectiveness as board member will be significantly diminished.’ Adding that, ‘we have mutually decided that now is the right time for Eric to resign his position on Apple’s Board.’

We all know that recently, Google released its own operating system for mobile – the Android, and then the browser and the PC operating system, these new products of Google directly affects Apple’s own products. Thus, Eric’s resignation to Apple is just the right thing for can’t handle two different companies that are rivals in nature.

Google is in the process of developing more its Google Map. With its recent improvement, users can now have easier access to a certain neighbourhood to know what are the nearest establishments.

Google LatLong Blog announced on August 4, 2009 that they have added ‘icons and labels of prominent business and places of interest’ on the map itself aside from the new dedicated Street View site. Without using the search box, users can find the establishments that they are looking for on nearer places. This service is also available to mobile users of Google Maps.

Google Maps use different kinds of icons to correspond specific types of establishments. With this, it will not be a surprise if Google Map will come up with a list of categories available in the future which can be easily used to reveal businesses under these certain categories.

Google also introduced ‘Places Directory’, an Android-application available for mobile users. This application is similar to other mobile applications used in finding categories of businesses but it with this, browsing is important compared to searching. This feature is the same with the improved icons on Google Maps.