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.

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.

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, 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.