Changing GOOGLE Search Engine

This week in search 10/22/10

Posted: 22 Oct 2010 04:59 PM PDT

This is one of a regular series of posts on search experience updates. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed.

One of our core philosophies has always been launch and iterate. We’ll bring you a useful new feature or product, and then use both data and your feedback to continuously make it better. This week, we’re excited to announce three enhancements to some of the Google tools that have been around a while. So the next time you’re searching for the latest news, traveling abroad or looking for daily updates on a topic of interest—we’ve got you covered. Here are this week’s updates:

Realtime counter in search results
Since Realtime Search launched in December of last year, we’ve steadily updated the feature making it more comprehensive and easier to use. This week we added a Realtime counter underneath the News section of your search results. Now, when people on your favorite social networks are commenting on a particular topic you’ve searched for, you can easily see how many updates have been shared, all in real-time. This makes it easy to see when a news story is popular on the social web. Click the link to see the full Realtime Search results page.


Local flavor of Autocomplete, now international
It’s been more than a year since we launched localized versions of Google Autocomplete (formerly Google Suggest) that offer relevant search predictions tailored for different regions (we’re at 155 domains and growing!) More recently, we took these tailored predictions to a new level in the U.S. by targeting to specific metro areas like San Francisco and Chicago. This week, we extended these hyper-local predictions around the globe to every country that has Autocomplete. This means that the list of predictions beneath the search box will seem more locally relevant than ever.

For example, when you’re in Barcelona, Spain and you start typing [rest] there’s a good chance you’re actually looking for restaurants in Barcelona:

However, if you’re in Madrid, you’ll probably want to check the restaurants there:


Better support for news-lovers in Google Alerts
It might be hard to believe, but Google Alerts have been providing email updates on your topic or query of interest since all the way back in 2003. Over the course of the past few years, we've spent a lot of time improving the way Google Alerts works to handle very specific queries (like a business or hobby), and while we've still got a lot of work to do, we've made steady improvements in the quantity, freshness and relevance of the content that we send you.

However, we’ve found many people are specifying general topics like “finance,” “entertainment” or even simply “news.” Up until this week, Google Alerts would return a long list of content from across the web about these very broad topics. This worked, but we realized it’s probably much more helpful to send you the corresponding section from Google News, since it seems like you’re looking for a digest of the big topics of the day. So we’re now including News sections in Alerts if you enter one of the following terms like: news, world news, business, entertainment, finance, health, science, sports or technology. This allows you to have your favorite part of Google News delivered to your inbox every morning.

The week in searches
In addition to all of these enhancements, are you curious to know what Google searches shot off the charts this week? The Google Beat gives you an inside look into the pulse of U.S. searches. In this week’s edition, we cover everything from BCS Football to Snooki.

We hope you find these updates useful!

Nook Color: Barnes & Noble's $250 Full-Color Tablet With Apps, Mags and Books

Barnes & Noble's touchscreen Nook Color—a reading-centric 7" Android tablet—has arrived, and we're here live with the latest details.

The Hardware

The new Nook sports an LG 7" 1024x600 full-color LCD touchscreen, accelerometer-enabled for both portrait and landscape orientations. The screen sports a laminated coating that should minimize glare. For storage, you'll have 8 GB of internal memory to fill, and a microSD slot for future expansion.

The Interface

The Nook Color is essentially a reading-centric Android tablet with a heavily customized interface. The lower portion of the Nook Color's interface contains swipeable book (or magazine) covers, easily thrown up into the main portion of the screen for reading or sharing online with friends.

The library view categorizes your content into customized shelves (sort your newspapers by themselves, for example), along with personal doc and PDF files.

The Content

• Support for the existing 2 million books in the Barnes & Noble Nook library
• Pandora streaming programming out of the box
• Facebook support
• Conde Nast and Hearst onboard
• First device to offer over 100 color newspapers and magazines (individual issues and subscriptions)
• Barnes & Noble reps are looking to foster a developer community to fill the Nook Color with its own apps
• Music playback, whether stored or streaming, will be possible while reading
• Apps that run on Android will be an "easy port" after optimization for the 7" screen, says a Nook rep, but there will be no access to Google's Android Marketplace
• The Nook Color will play "most" video formats outside of Flash

"Nook Friends" will allow readers to share their thoughts on whatever they're reading through various social networking platforms, including Facebook and Twitter. You'll be able to post your favorite quote from a novel you're reading, for example.

"Nook Kids" will read selected children's books to your kids with the help of professional narrators.

Pricing and Availability

• $250, and they're "not thinking of lowering this price point anytime soon"
• Available "on or around" November 19th
• The Nook Color will be available at Walmart, Best Buy, Books-a-Million, and of course Barnes & Noble locations.

View Full Photo Gallery »

Into the cloud: Virgin America goes Google

Today, we’re excited to announce that Virgin America is the latest company to go Google and switch to Google Apps. Over the next two weeks, all of the airline’s 1,700 employees based across North America will be moving their corporate email to Gmail, and collaborating more efficiently using Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk. Their migration to Gmail will cut Virgin America’s email system costs by about half on an annual basis, in addition to the long-term storage benefits where the move into the Google cloud will save them over 18 terabytes of space as the airline continue to grow and add employees.

Photos of our skywriting this afternoon

To make it easier for Virgin America make the switch, one of ourGoogle Apps Authorized Resellers, SADA Systems, will be helping them deploy Google Apps, implementing single sign-on user access so that users can use one password to log in to multiple applications, integrating with telephony (voicemail) systems and doing custom email configuration.

We asked Ravi Simhambhatla, Chief Information Officer for Virgin America to share his thoughts about why they decided to go Google:

As the only airline based here in Silicon Valley, our goal has always been to use the best in technology and design to reinvent the air travel experience for the better. We’re eager to bring the latest and greatest tech innovations not only to our guests—but also to our teammates. The transition to a cloud-based email system allows us to save costs and increase the speed and efficiency of our platforms, so we can focus on what we do best: elevating the flying experience. Google answers our data and connectivity needs better than any other system. Google Apps allow us to stay ahead of the competition by remaining flexible and efficient since we can upgrade based on the latest technology, and not be confined by budget or staffing to out-of-date systems. Once you have Google Apps, you always have the most recent version.

As a leading airline innovator, Virgin America has had a history of cloud firsts: in November 2008, Virgin America launched in-flight Internet with a first-ever "air-to-ground" video stream to YouTube Live. In June 2009, we collaborated on the Day in the Cloud Challenge, the first online scavenger hunt to be played both in the air and on the ground, and in December 2009 we teamed up to offer free WiFi to holiday travelers. So naturally, we’re thrilled to welcome Virgin America to the cloud as they join more than 3 million companies that have gone Google. To learn more about Google Apps and the companies that have switched, visit www.google.com/gonegoogle.

Accessing Facebook from a Internet cafe can now be done more securely

Facebook Introduces Disposable Passwords:Moving to enhance online security, Facebook on Tuesday said that it will soon offer users the ability to receive one-time passwords on their mobile phones and that it has already enabled the ability to sign out of Facebook remotely.

"[W]e're launching one-time passwords to make it safer to use public computers in places like hotels, cafes or airports," said Facebook product manager Jake Brill in a blog post. "If you have any concerns about security of the computer you're using while accessing Facebook, we can text you a one-time password to use instead of your regular password."

Passwords have long been considered the weak link in computer security, due to widespread disinterest in trying to remember passwords that are long enough and complicated enough to defy brute force attacks. Passwords that are too short or are based on words in dictionaries can generally be defeated by automated guessing attacks.

A survey released on Tuesday by Internet security company Webroot underscores the problems with passwords.

The company found that 47% of Facebook users, among the over 2,500 people surveyed, use their Facebook password for other online sites and 62% of Facebook users never change their passwords. It also found that only 16% of respondents bother to create passwords longer than 10 characters and that 41% of respondents have shared passwords with at least one person over the past year.

Facebook's decision to offer disposable passwords at least provides stronger security for those who want to make the effort. In a few weeks, as part of a gradual roll-out, Facebook users will be able to text "otp" to 32665 on a mobile phone and immediately receive a password that will work one time and will expire in 20 minutes.

This should help ensure that anyone shoulder-surfing while you log in to your Facebook account from a cafe won't be able spy your regular password and later hijack your account.

Facebook is also providing users with an overview of recent login activity under the Account Security section of their Account Settings page. This recent login list offers a way to see whether one's account has been accessed from an unexpected location. It also offers the ability to remotely close sessions that one may have forgotten to terminate, such as when one logs into Facebook through a friend's phone.

Facebook is not alone in addressing cloud security concerns. Google provides users with Gmail session activity information and last month added two-step verification to Google Apps Premiere, Government, and Education edition users.

Twitter Targets 1 Billion Users, Challenging Facebook for Ads

Twitter Inc., the third-largest social-networking site, pledged to boost its membership more than sixfold to 1 billion, helping the microblogging service compete with Facebook Inc. in attracting advertisers.

“Twitter will get to a billion members,” Evan Williams, Twitter’s co-founder and former chief executive officer, said in San Francisco yesterday, echoing a goal set by Facebook. Williams didn’t elaborate on a timeframe.

The company, whose users send more than 100 million short messages daily, said last month that it will seek more advertisers after a successful trial with such brands as Starbucks Corp., ESPN and Coca-Cola Co. Social-networking services, capitalizing on their millions of users, are increasingly targeting ads as a main source of revenue.

“They certainly have defied expectations,” said Greg Sterling, a San Francisco-based Internet consultant. “A lot of people saw them purely as a niche service or dismissed their capacity to have global reach. It’s within the realm of possibility that they will get to a billion users.”

San Francisco-based Twitter started a test this year with 30 advertisers, including major movie studios, Nike Inc. and Best Buy Co. Ads are displayed next to the site’s search results and by the most popular topics on the right side of the Web page. An estimated 9 percent of ads online are “touched” by a user’s mouse for an average of 43 seconds, MediaMind Technologies Inc., a maker of software for digital ad campaigns, said last month.

A Billion Users

The benefit for marketers is instant access to target groups of customers with specific messages, offers and discounts.

Facebook, the world’s most popular social-networking site, has more than 500 million users, compared with 165 million for Twitter. Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerbergsaid earlier this year that reaching a billion members, or about 15 percent of the world’s population, is “almost a guarantee.”

Twitter, founded in 2006, revamped its site last month to make it easier to post photos, video and maps directly on the page. The redesign gives marketers a new way to use multimedia in online promotions.

Twitter now ranks third globally among social-networking sites, topping News Corp.’s MySpace, according to ComScore Inc. in Reston, Virginia. Windows Live Profile is second.

Williams said the company is planning to offer an advertising service to small businesses on the site, which will complement ads it offers to bigger brands.

Mercedes-Benz R class in INDIA

The new Mercedes-Benz R class is on display during a launch function in Mumbai on October 7, 2010. Mercedes-Benz India launched the all new R-class which according to the company combines sedan like performance, all wheel-drive SUV confidence and provides power with a 3498cc V6 petrol engine. (AFP)

Trojans Dominate Malware, Security Firm Reports - PCWorld

More than half (55 percent) of all new malware identified in Q3 of this year were Trojans, said PandaLabs.

The research arm of Panda Security says most of these were banker trojans designed to trick web users into navigating to fake financial sites so cybercriminals can steal login details and passwords.

Artwork: Chip TaylorThe use of e-mail in distributing malware, once the most favored method, has declined. Instead, cybercriminals are resulting to social media-related infections, includingClickjacing attacks on social networks such as Facebookand poisoned search results.

Panda also said 95 percent of all e-mail received during Q3 was spam, and 50 percent of this was sent from just ten countries, which included India, Brazil and Russia. For the first time, the UK has fallen out of the list of the world's biggest spam-producing countries.

The security firm also said over the past three months it has a number of attacks onGoogle Android phones, which could be the beginning of a wave of threats targeting smartphones.

"We are also beginning to see legitimate Android apps compressed with self-extracting files, designed to infect when the application is extracted. In other words, Android apps are being used as bait to infect computers with self-extracting files," PandaLabs said.

Have You Tried Shopping On YouTube? First YouTube Store Launched

UK’s world-renowned fashion retailer, The French Connection, is taking online shopping to a whole new level with the launch of a YouTube boutique. That’s right—The French Connection has launched an online YouTube store, in which viewers can watch fashion videos and click on annotations that lead directly to the French Connection online store where they can actually buy the items in the videos. This is innovating YouTube on so many levels—bringing e-commerce to the video site and providing annotations that actually lead outside of the YouTube site—and fashion divas and shopaholics are sure to fall in love with the whole thing.

The French Connection is calling their YouTube boutique, appropriately, their “YouTique”. In the YouTique you can watch fashion advice videos on all sorts of subjects from how to sparkle at a wedding to how to wow people at work, pack for a perfect weekend away, look elegant every evening and more. Each of the videos in the YouTique showcases items that are now available at the French Connection online shop and at the end of the clip, viewers have the option to click to buy. You can see what it looks like in the screenshot below. Notice the “+Buy” annotations on the video clip. Pretty slick, right?

In addition to incorporating annotations in the videos that lead to the online shop, there are also links in the sidebar of the YouTube channel that lead to the online shop. Viewers (or shoppers) can click to see more dresses, jackets, tops, skirts and knitwear. The links on the YouTube channel page lead straight to the FCUK online shop.

This is the first time a campaign like this has existed on YouTube. Generally annotations are only allowed to links within the YouTube site itself, but now that they have made an exception for the French Connection I will be interested to see how quickly other brands will jump on the YouTube e-commerce bandwagon.

Toshiba shows off glasses-free 3D TVs

Toshiba Regza 20GL1 3D TV.
(Credit: Toshiba)

Toshiba unveiled two 3D TVs today that work without special glasses.

The Regza 20GL1 is a 20-inch flat-panel display with 1,280x720 resolution. The Regza 12GL1 is a 12-inch flat-panel display with 466x350 resolution. Toshiba unveiled the models to coincide with this week's Ceatec electronics show near Tokyo.

Toshiba said that its 3D technology, which is currently best-suited for small displays, provides "nine different perspectives of each single 2D frame." The company added that those perspectives are then "superimposed" by the viewer's brain "to create a three-dimensional impression of the image."

The 3D effect is available within a 40-degree area in front of the set, Toshiba said. According to the Associated Press, viewers must also sit two feet from the 12-inch LCD and three feet from the 20-inch LCD to view 3D content.

The new LCDs are "first step into the 3D future in the consumer home cinema market," Toshiba European marketing chief Sascha Lange said in a statement. "But it will take several years to develop larger 3D TVs without glasses with screen sizes of 40 inches and more at a yet reasonable price point."

The possibility of viewing 3D content sans glasses is something that many consumers will welcome, though.

Last month, a survey about 3D TVs showed that 30 percent of people don't like the need to wear special glasses to view 3D content.

Although Toshiba is trying to make its name in the glasses-free arena, the company is already a player in the 3D TV market. It currently sells the WX800 line of 3D TVs. Both the 46- and 55-inch models of the WX800 require glasses.

Toshiba's 20GL1 and 12GL1, which switch from 3D to 2D mode, are scheduled to be released in Japan later this year. They will retail for about $2,900 and $1,400, respectively. The company has not announced plans for availability outside of Japan.