The PC Report

It was only a matter of time before a search engine would attempt to bring search-as-you-type results to the world, and it looks like Google is trying to be the first to bring this into the wild. As pointed out by SEO consultant Rob Ousbey, Google has begun testing a live updating results page, as seen in the video above.

As Ousbey enters terms into the search box, the results page is automatically reloaded to reflect the changes in search terms. To reduce server strain and loading, the page only refreshes once the predicted search terms (which are already displayed on Google search pages) change, and it appears to only refresh to the topmost result. Once the predicted terms are exhausted it switches to updating every few characters. Ousbey never needed to manually refresh the page.

This new innovation of Google’s is a very interesting one. Constantly updating searches will enable you to find what you are looking for more quickly and should be well received if Google do decide to release it to the world, however it could actually make searching slower for those who have low bandwidth connections -- more refreshes equals constant loading and this can be annoying on slow connections.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you have recently checked out Google Image Search then you would have immediately noticed the fresh new look given to the image search service. One of the great new features of the image search is the removal of all text below the images, along with adding instant scrolling between pages with no page refreshes in between. This new tiled layout gives it a great fresh new look and provides fantastic ease of use, especially for those with larger monitors.

Google Images now also has larger thumbnail previews, which are activated by mousing over the image for a short period of time. This not only brings up the larger preview, it also brings up the image information in-case you need to know where the image comes from and how big it is. Upon clicking on this thumbnail you are presented with the full image in a pop-up box over the source website. This is a absolutely fantastic way to view the images and greatly improves upon the old way which required several clicks to save images from Images. Read the rest of this entry »

Celebrate the 30th anniversary of the classic game Pacman by playing the game on the Google homepage. The completely playable Pacman Google logo will be available for 2 days only. Go on, you know you want to play it.

Update: Missed out on the action? Pacman continues to live at google.com/pacman

Google today has announced the release of their new and updated interface into the wild. The new interface updates the Google logo to a more modern but much the same logo, adds new buttons to the homepage and adds a new left-hand navigation pane that gives you easy access to other categories and areas of Google that is relevant to your search. The color palette has also been changed to a more vibrant one which gives Google a nicer feel. You may of course remember that similar interface changes were seen late last year in a beta form; today we’re seeing the real deal.

The updates should have begun rolling out already for most users, however remember that there are a lot of databases worldwide that need to update so be patient if the updates haven’t reached you yet. I personally like the interface update – it gives Google a much more modern feel and while the left-hand navigation pane may seem space-wasting at first you do get used to it being there quickly and will begin using it frequently. Feel free to share your opinions below.

Back in January Google got hacked by some Chinese guys and so they decided that they might pull out of China or stop censoring Google.cn – the Chinese version of Google that has been forced to be censored for quite a while by the Chinese government. Well, today Google has killed google.cn, which now redirects to the uncensored Hong Kong Google at google.com.hk.

Google states on their blog that these decisions were made by United States executives, and that while they have closed up Google.cn, they will still be operating in China for R&D work along with keeping a sales presence. It will only be a matter of time before the Chinese government decides that Google has done the wrong thing and blocks access to Google.com.hk for mainland China residents.

Wolfram Alpha is quite possibly the best maths and computational tool available on the internet. The Wolfram|Alpha “Computational Knowledge Engine” is basically an intelligent search engine that instead of outputting sites for you to visit based on search keywords, it works out solutions and answers, and gives information based on what you’ve entered.

For example, enter the parabolic equation y=x^2+3x+5 and it’ll graph it for you. If you enter death michael jackson it will find the date of his death and post information about that date. Enter gdp australia and it will output info about Australia’s GDP. There are so many more uses, you should just try it out for yourself – head over to Wolfram Alpha now.

Haven’t seen it yet or tested it yourself? Well, you can now just by entering this simple Javascript code into your address bar. To get it working, head over to google.com, paste the following code into your address bar when on the Google homepage, press Enter then refresh the page to enjoy the new look search.

javascript:void(document.cookie=”PREF=ID=20b6e4c2f44943bb:U=4bf292d46faad806:TM=1249677602:LM=1257919388:S=odm0Ys-53ZueXfZG;path=/; domain=.google.com”);

Note that it doesn’t work on country-code prefixes of Google, such as .co.uk and .au – you’ll need to head over to the plain google.com to enjoy the new look. Oh, and if your sick of the new look, just find and delete the above from your Google cookies, or just delete all your cookies.

Update: There are reports that this no longer works. However, still try it for yourself.

If you are a regular Bing user, unlike me, then you should be quite happy to hear that Microsoft has begun rolling out the next big update to its search engine that launched in June. One of the major updates to Bing is the partnership with Wolfram Alpha, which should incorporate some of the computational features of Wolfram into the Bing search engine. This inclusion is helped along by the new Wolfram Alpha API that was released recently.

Also in the list of new features in Bing 2.0 are localised results for weather and events, an updated and improved Bing Shopping, and the “next generation” of the Hover Preview features that lets you view snapshots of websites before you actually go to them. While the updates to the servers being today, we may not see any of this new content for a few days, and the Wolfram Alpha feature may not be implemented for a few weeks.

Bing Videos is also getting some spotlight today as it is set to be the replacement for MSN Videos, with all the MSN Video content being slowly incorporated and rebranded into Bing Videos. It aims to be a great video centre for your video content, as videos are retrieved from several well known sites such as YouTube and Hulu as well as the MSN video database. Again, the updates are starting now and will be finished in the near future.

According to a report by Nielson, 10.7% of searches Americans made in August were with Microsoft’s Bing, behind Google (which rose to 64.6%) and Yahoo (which fell to 16%).

The results of Bing’s increase isn’t all too surprising because Microsoft is estimated to have spent $80 to $100 million in advertising since setting up Bing, and it looks like its only set to increase, thanks to the deal between Microsoft and Yahoo where Yahoo’s back-end search will be replaced by Bing and have “powered by Bing” branding.

It’s a shame that Bing only indexes a mere 11 pages of The PC Report, although it’s probably a good thing that Google as some competition to keep it on its toes.

If you’ve been loyal to a single search engine for a long time, perhaps its time to see if you might like the results of another more!

Blindsearch, the “search engine taste test”, allows you to see the results of a query from Google, Yahoo and Bing side-by-side and unlabelled and does not reveal which search engine is which until you vote for your favorite results. You never know – they might surprise you.

As a long-time Google user (18960 searches are logged in my Google web history), I was a little surprised to find that for the first 5 searches I made, I prefer Bing’s results. Still, given the numbers 5 vs 18960, it’s going to take some more convincing. The overall results show that Google still shows the best results by voting percentages:

“Results: Google: 41%, Bing: 31%, Yahoo: 28%. ”

With the experimental nature of the site, the statistics probably aren’t a perfect reflection.

The Blindsearch admin (a Microsoft employee), also mentions the most popular search terms on the post linked above. Surely there must be some other uses for image search.