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Sergey Brin Off to Space

Posted @ 11:22 am on June 12th, 2008
Categories: Uncategorized

Wouldn’t it be nice to be super rich like Google co-founder Sergey Brin? Space Adventures, a company that sells out of the world trips to tourists who are looking for a far out time, announced that Brin purchased a $35 Million dollar seat for a trip. Space Adventures has sent 5 people in orbit so far and will send their latest person up in October.

1 in 5 Google Users Using iGoogle Service

Posted @ 2:29 pm on May 7th, 2008
Categories: Uncategorized

Do you iGoogle? According to a Time Magazine article 20% of Google users now use iGoogle as their homepage. The article states:

I asked Google how much traffic the chrome tulips drove to iGoogle, but a company spokesperson declined to comment, saying only that Google had received “positive feedback” from users. She said that iGoogle currently accounts for 20 percent of visits to Google’s home page — a proportion, I bet, that Google would love to reverse. The spokesperson also declined to address any link between iGoogle and OpenSocial, noting only that “we recently launched an iGoogle sandbox to developers, which gives developers the ability to build more interactive gadgets that can incorporate OpenSocial.” Indeed, you can find more than 75,000 “gadgets” to hang on your iGoogle page these days. (Click on the tab next to Themes.)

I personally like the plain old Google page compared to the Yahooesque version of iGoogle. I know there are a lot of handy things you can do with the feature of iGoogle but when I want to search for something, which happens to be part of my profession, I don’t need the distraction that those features provide.

Google Develops “Pagerank” for Pictures

Posted @ 12:02 pm on April 29th, 2008
Categories: Uncategorized

One of the problems that search engines have had is its ability to give good results when users search for a specific picture. The folks over at Google think that they may have solved this with a new algorithm. Much like their pagerank system, ranking the name given to Google’s method of ranking pages according to a number of factors such as link popularity, their new image search looks to provide users the best possible results.

The Register Writes about the update in image searching

Last week, at the International World Wide Web Conference in Beijing, two Google-affiliated researchers presented a paper called “PageRank for Product Image Search,” trumpeting a fledging algorithm that overhauls the primitive text-based methods used by the company’s current image search technologies.

“Our experiment results show significant improvement, in terms of user satisfaction and relevancy, in comparison to the most recent Google Image Search results,” Shumeet Baluja and Yushi Jing tell the world from the pages of their research paper, available here.

Looks like Google has found yet another way to make our jobs as information professionals easier.

Google Product Search Gets an Upgrade

Posted @ 9:05 am on April 26th, 2008
Categories: Uncategorized

Google Product Search, formerly known (which Google shouldn’t have changed) as Froogle, has experienced a significant upgrade. The folks over at Google Operating System noticed that that the search engine now detects multiple products, and also lets you read reviews about the products. The moral of the story is that you will no longer have to head to Amazon to see what other people are saying about the product before you pay your hard earned money for something using their site.

Google Celebrates Halloween - Makes Scary Stories Searchable

Posted @ 5:16 pm on October 26th, 2006
Categories: Uncategorized

Google gives the world a little Halloween treat this year by making classic scary stories searchable online. They’ve gathered a number of spooky classic tales, including Dr. Jecklyl and Mr. Hyde, as well as Dracula, The Legend of Sleepy Hallow, Frankenstein and more, and put them all up on a special page for easy access.

Just go to www.google.com/scarystories, where you will find 26 classic scary titles. Here you are able to search and view the full-text of these stories. Additionally, a number of stories with a little “download” button next to them will allow you to download a PDF version of the book so that you can print it out and read it at your own leisure.

If you find a title that you’d like to buy, Google Books makes it easy for you to find available hard copies.

Google Tells its Engineers to Slow Down

Posted @ 8:46 am on October 21st, 2006
Categories: Uncategorized

Over the past few years, Google has been pumping out product after product, most of which are still in “Beta” stage at the time they are released. Eric Schmidt admits that Google has been so aggressive in introducing “a blizzard” of new products that “it’s confusing to almost everyone.”

Google co-founder Sergey Brin is leading an initiative to see fewer products launched, but with more features. The concern is that with so many new offerings, “You’ll have to search for our products before you can find them,” Brin said.

Could this mean that Google will start releasing things NOT in Beta stage, but rather in a final fully functional version? I’d say, don’t count on it just yet. While they may slow down the release of new products, they’ll probably still be Beta products.

Personally, I think this is a good move by them, and it shows that they are maturing as a company. Many people don’t know even half of Google’s product offerings, and they could afford to spend more time getting the word out about them to people other than just us techies and librarians.


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