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Search Engines

Google Introduces New Search Views

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Google announced its experimental search views to add spice to the different ways in which a user could view search results.

Mentioned on the Google blog post are the Map view, the timeline view and the Info-view. Google does seem to be working on the different ways to represent information depending on the context in which the information can be made more jazzy.

An excerpt from Search Engine Journal

Over at Google’s experimental lab, several new views for its search results pages are being tested. Aside from the traditional search results views that we used to get, additional search views might be offered soon – map view, timeline view and information view.

Map view would be great when searching for conferences or places in general, timeline view could be applied to chronological information on any topic while info view gives a quick snippet of a search result based on different parameters.

A UI update was long due since the list order display has not undergone major change since the early days of the engine.

Google and DoCoMo: The Marriage of Mobile Technology and the Internet

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Last January 24, Internet giant Google Inc. and Tokyo-based mobile provider NTT DoCoMo announced a revolutionary partnership where the former would provide web services to the latter’s handsets.

In a joint statement, Google’s search engine results, AdWords advertising platform, along with other search and advertising services, will be available via DoCoMo’s i-mode handsets. This will hopefully aid in the quest for user-friendliness of i-mode handsets.

The Agreement

With Google’s mission of “organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful,” and i-mode being the pioneering mobile Internet service provided by DoCoMo, the companies agreed on collaborating to increase accessibility, user-friendliness, and usefulness of mobile Internet services to the Japanese.

Although i-mode already has its own search service, Google search services and keyword-based, search-related advertisements (via AdWords) will be available to the handset’s users within the first half of 2008. As planned, the search box will be placed on the top of the I-mode portal page for ease of access. Further talks between the companies include planning on having a default pre-loading of Google Maps application on upcoming DoCoMo handsets. Other than that, services like Gmail (e-mail), YouTube (video streaming), and Picasa (photo management) are also taken into consideration. Even later, all upcoming DoCoMo handsets capable of full browsing technology will have Google as the default web page.

Along with innovative marketing services, the study on Android (a revolutionary platform for mobile phones) will also be furthered by the two companies. Sooner or later, Japanese will be seeing Android-capable handsets in their market, all because of the fusion of Google and DoCoMo.

The two companies are both in a win-win situation. With DoCoMo having 51 million subscribers in Japan (apparently amounting to more than half of Japan’s mobile phone subscribers), Google can easily fulfill its mission within the Land of the Rising Sun. It’s simply because 48 million of DoCoMo’s customers are attuned to and utilizing their mobile phone’s Internet capabilities.

On the other hand, DoCoMo will benefit from the vast global experience of Google, that receiving help from the Internet giant can simply mean an edge against DoCoMo’s major rivals. On the down side of things, Google is actually behind Yahoo! Japan with 65 per cent of the search engine market, in terms of the search engine war in the country.

Google Provides Free Storage for Scientific Data

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Under Project Palimpsest, Google will be providing free storage and public access to large scientific data sets in what could be a major data organization challenge.

An excerpt from Wired

The storage would fill a major need for scientists who want to openly share their data, and would allow citizen scientists access to an unprecedented amount of data to explore. For example, two planned datasets are all 120 terabytes of Hubble Space Telescope data and the images from the Archimedes Palimpsest, the 10th century manuscript that inspired the Google dataset storage project.

The challenge would be in the ways in which Google is able to represent the data to the public. Also, the Trendanalyzer acquisition would come really handy here. The data source is open to the public which means that additions can be made to it as well.

There is also a presentation available at SearchEngineJournal on the talk delivered last May. And if you have huge datasets that just won’t get uploaded, Google is providing 3TB disk arrays for shipping them whole file system for the dataset.