Google‘s recent movie turn in The Internship must have put employees in a Hollywood state of mind.

With the Oscar’s around the corner — the 85th Academy Awards will air on Sunday Feb. 24 — Google has made its own predictions of the winners on a new destination website.

According to TheNextWeb, Google analysed search volume based on how many queries were run two weeks prior to the film being released, and up to three months after. It did not include sentiment — so even if you searched “Les Miserables sucks,” it wouldn’t affect the rankings.

On the new site, Google shows off all its consumer products, including its Knowledge Graph, Google Maps, YouTube, and even Google+ Hangouts.

Scroll the drop-down list to view the projected winners in the Best Director, Best Actor / Actress, Best Supporting Actor / Actress, and Best Picture categories.

Just for fun, Google also revealed the most-searched red carpet looks from 2012: no surprise, Angelina Jolie’s #planked #leg #pose made the top list (and earned its own meme).

Google hangout fans are encouraged to stream a fake acceptance speech, and there is even an interactive map to help you find out where Oscar-nominated films will be playing near you.

This isn’t the first time that the search behemoth has released a data-filled custom website to coincide with a major event: Google unveiled its “flu trends” site in the height of the sniffly season, and in the run-up to the Presidential election, it released a political channel with news and video highlights.

Do you agree or disagree with Google’s predictions predictions? 

photo credit: grebo guru via photopin cc

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Google has updated its field trial of new search features with further Gmail integration: Those who’ve signed up for the experimental features can now search for their online purchases (along with tracking packages), reservations, and events right from within the standard Google search.

Google first announced the search field trial in August, when it debuted basic Gmail integration for email, Google Drive documents, and flights. If you’re interested in testing out the new features, you can sign up for the trial here.

“To build the search engine I dream of, we need to make it truly universal,” Google’s search engine chief Amit Singhal told us back in August, “so you can do things that are not possible today.”

Now, instead of sifting through their Gmail messages, trial users can search for “my reservations” or “my purchases” to find relevant information.

While the more pronounced Gmail integration will certainly rile privacy advocates, it’s clear that Google eventually wants to make its search engine about more than just what’s on the web. With Google Now on Android devices, Google is bringing similar integration to its mobile devices — Google Now learns your habits to warn you about potential traffic delays, and it automatically tracks packages for you.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google has taken inspiration from Apple’s Passbook to give its Android customers a more instantaneous way to pull up their boarding passes with Google Now.

Google Now is a personal assistant app for Android devices that aims to surface the information you want, when you need it: optimal driving route, weather, sports scores, and nearby restaurant options. Google Now also accepts voice commands, making it Google’s answer to Apple’s Siri virtual assistant. Today, the app is starting to act like another one of Apple’s interesting apps: Passbook.

Wednesday, Google refreshed its Search application for Android. Version 4.1 comes with a few handy-dandy travel additions to Now, including a new card that automatically surfaces your electronic boarding passes from your Gmail account and shows them to you when you’re at the airport.

Sounds familiar, right? Essentially, what we have here is a Passbook feature-clone, but a pretty clever one at that. Why use a separate app when Google can connect the dots between Gmail and Now to find your boarding passes for you? For comparison, iPhone users add their boarding passes to Passbook from the vendor’s Passbook-enabled application.

Google said the boarding pass card is launching shortly for United Airlines, but will work with other airline’s in the future.

Travelers may also appreciate the addition of Google Now cards that display the weather of your destination city and highlight events happening nearby. Google Search for Android now comes up with other Google Now cards, including one for birthday reminders and one for using your camera to search when at a museum.

Photo credit: Wayan Vota/Flickr

With Bing largely failing to undercut Google’s marketshare, Microsoft is now looking to undercut something else: Google’s credibility.

To that end, Microsoft is launching”Scroggled”, its latest attack on Google’s search dominance and proof that it’s not above fighting dirty .

“Can you spot the ads in the Google Shopping search results? It’s easy: They are all ads,” Microsoft says in the Scoogled campaign video.

Microsoft’s claim is this: Because Google Shopping’s search results are determined by how much companies are willing to pay for them, they’re unavoidably inaccurate. “They Scroogle you by defining relevance by how much they’re getting paid,” Microsoft says.

Predictably, Microsoft’s solution to the problem is to use Bing, which promises a more honest search. “We won’t let who pays us for ads or other services affect what you see in your search results. Search results are one thing; ads are another,” Bing VP Mike Nichols said on the Bing blog.

While the campaign is effective and impeccably-timed, it fails to address one major reality: The core Bing search product is still pretty bad. Bing has been my default browser for a few months now (for Science!) but I find myself almost always reverting to Google when Bing fails to give me useful results. That’s not the way a search engine should work.

So for Microsoft, the path forward is clear: Focus less on Google and more on Bing.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Unwitting Windows RT Bing users: Google has heard your cries.

In an effort to counter the Bing threat, Google is rolling out its own search app for Windows RT. Similar to its counterparts on other platforms, the Google Search app for Windows RT offers voice search, instant results, and perhaps, best of all, Google doodles. It’s all fairly self-explanatory.

The app joins the identical one Google released for Windows 8 in October. And like that app, Google Search for Windows RT offers a bit more than what its name suggests. With the app installed, users are taps away from a variety of Google products, including Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Maps.

Judging by the app, it’s clear that Google is serious about letting Windows RT users know that they still have access to Google’s services even while inside Microsoft’s own ecosystem. While that may seem like a bad thing for Microsoft, it’s actually exactly what the company wants: The more apps available for Windows 8 and Windows RT, the more attractive the platforms become for potential customers.

So what’s next for Google and Windows RT? Hopefully a native version of Chrome, which is will be key if Google wants to offer an alternative to Internet Explorer 10.

Sticking to a less is more ideology, Google today stripped off the sidebar from its extremely popular search results page.

The very noticeable tweak is meant to keep your eyes on what matters most and to make the company’s search experience consistent across web and mobile environments.

“You’ll notice a new simpler, cleaner design on the search results page,” Google search lead designer Jon Wiley wrote in a blog post. “With the new design, there’s a bit more breathing room, and more focus on the answers you’re looking for, whether from web results or from a feature like the Knowledge Graph.”

Google has pared down the search results page so that there’s more white space surrounding results. The menu of “web,” “images,” “maps,” and other search options, previously contained in the left-hand sidebar, has been minimized and repositioned above results (as pictured below). More specific filters are now accessible from a “Search tools” button, which reveals on-click advanced search options around time, results, and place in drop-down menus, as opposed to forcing the searcher to scroll down to view all options in the soon-to-be retired sidebar.

Google said the sidebar-less search results page is being rolled out now to Google.com users in the U.S.

Search photo via Shutterstock

Siri is an idiot savante, sometimes more savante, and sometimes more idiot: she didn’t know where Washington DC is. Google, on the other hand, seems to have a bigger brain.

Siri does have two advantages. First, she has deep knowledge in a few select areas. And second, she remembers history, so she evaluates current questions in context. (That can be a good thing and a bad thing, as I found when I asked about traffic conditions to Vancouver, BC. I had previously asked about things to do in Vancouver, and to this traffic question Siri told me that the Canucks-Red Wings game had been cancelled.)

Google seems to be smarter, to know more.

Part of that might be because when Google doesn’t have the answer and it defaults to a web search, that seems very normal, versus when Siri defaults to web search (errr … Wolfram Alpha search) it seems like an option of last resort. But part of that is that Google just knows more — its massive knowledge graph is a cumulative result of 15 years of data gained from countless trillions of search queries in an effort to essentially emulate a Star Trek artificial intelligence experience.

Both fared well on some standard factual questions, in a sense. But oddly, Siri picked out the British version of The Office, while Google selected the U.S. version:

Source: John Koetsier

Siri vs Google: the cast of The Office

Another simple one: the time in a different time zone. Both answer correctly, with Siri adding a little more personality, and possibly, the start of a contextual conversation:

Source: John Koetsier

Siri vs Google: the time somewhere else

Google, with the wealth of data riding on its shoulders, is fairly confident when it gives you results. The results may sometimes not be extremely helpful, though they usually are, but they are always delivered definitively.

Siri, on the other hand, is sort of like an unsure teenager, who ends every sentence trailing up in tone, transmuting statements into questions. When Siri isn’t sure, she checks Wolfram Alpha and gives you an answer with a conditional: this “might” answer your question:

Source: John Koetsier

What is a curveball? Both have the answer, though Siri’s not too sure …

In other cases, Siri is more idiot than savante, it must be said. For instance, any app purporting to help users search and navigate the world of information should know what Washington DC is, and how to find it.

Google does, and provides a map with directions. Siri, unfortunately, is painfully clueless:

Source: John Koetsier

How could you not know where Washington, DC is, Siri?

Siri’s lack of real, deep knowledge about the world is evident in other typically search-engine-style questions about companies and people.

In this case, Siri does not know who the CEO of Apple is, and rather schoolmarmishly tells me that everything I need to know about Apple is at Apple’s website. (As a journalist who focuses on Apple coverage, I just might beg to differ a little.)

Source: John Koetsier

Siri, you should really know the CEO of the company you work for …

But in areas where Siri has been directly connected to a deep source of specific data on a certain set of questions, she shines, giving detailed, information-rich, even visual answers.

Such as stock quotes:

Source: John Koetsier

A little insider tip, please …

That includes Yelp-assisted categories such as local search, where Siri has access to rich and detailed information on local restaurants, events, and entertainment. Google, on the other hand, is unhelpfully responding to a search by giving me more search options to continue search in. Sorry, I’m searching to find, not searching to search.

(Note the vestiges of skeuomorphic design in Siri’s answer.)

Source: John Koetsier

Thanks for giving me search engines in response to a search, Google

One key difference where Siri has the potential to shine: context. Siri knows what you’ve just asked, and so you can build a chain of searches and steps to accomplish a task.

For example, you can ask Siri to send an email, and she’ll ask for the name of the recipient, and, in a subsequent step, the message itself, meaning that you can accomplish a complex series of actions without feeling like you need to do it all at once. Google can’t help you at all with those sorts of tasks at the moment, although apps like Edwin, Vlingo, Speaktoit, and Samsung’s S Voice can accomplish various parts of what Siri does.

In search, context helps too (even if Siri doesn’t always do the right thing with it):

Source: John Koetsier

Context helps … but that’s not the Four Seasons I was thinking of

This is of course not an exhaustive list … but it does highlight some of the differences.

Based on the results, and my preconceptions and prejudices, if I had to pick a personal assistant to help me do things on my phone, I’d pick Siri, of course. But if I had to pick one app for web search and information retrieval, I’d have to go with Google.

And frankly, given the data that Google has at its disposal, it’s hard to see how Apple can win this one.

I think if Apple was completely cold-blooded and logical about this, they’d partner with Google for search results in Siri, not Wofram Alpha, and they’d focus Apple-specific Siri enhancements on strong vertical partnerships with services like Yelp and OpenTable and airline reservations, as well as specifically phone control tasks.

That would, of course, be a seriously naive strategy. Which doesn’t mean it would be wrong.

photo credit: Funky64 (www.lucarossato.com) via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Pose a fact-based question to Google from your favorite mobile device, be it phone or tablet, and the search leader can now better understand what you want and provide you with a pretty-to-look-at answer posthaste.

“Quick answers,” as they’re called, are Google’s instant search results for queries with answers that the search company can calculate or determine on the fly. Google has long been able to show you the weather forecast, provide you with a stock quote, solve an equation, and do your pounds-to-kilograms conversions on the web, but Thursday it’s updating its handy-dandy instant results and making them more attractive, more engaging, and more readily available on mobile.

“Search has always been about getting you the answers you need as quickly as possible,” Google user experience designer  Jeromy Henry said in a blog post. ”Today, when you search on mobile or tablet, you’ll see some more improvements in the way we provide these quick answers, including better understanding what information you need and surfacing the most relevant information for you.”

Check on a friend’s flight status on your phone, for instance, and you’ll now see a progress indicator, along with bigger arrival and departure times so you can better glean the most important information right away.

The update also applies to finance-related queries, currency conversions, unit conversions, dictionary definitions, local time checks, and holiday and sunrise times, the company said.

The changes are currently being rolled out to the English version of Google on mobile devices.

Photo credit: designsstock/Shutterstock

Google surprised a lot of people last fall when it announced that it was buying restaurant ratings company Zagat. Now, Google is finally making some moves with the buy via Google+ Local, an overhaul of Google’s local search.

With the revamp, Zagat reviews are now a key part of Google+ Local. The new local search adds restaurant ratings to Google Search, Maps, and as a new tab in Google+. Google will also be updating its Google Maps app for Android and iOS to add in new Google+ Local results.

As for the design, you’ll notice that Google’s five-star reviews are gone and replaced with Zagat’s 30-point scale. On the Google+ side, the Zagat reviews are joined by personal recommendations of connected Google+ users, which adds another layer of relevancy to search results and reviews. Clearly, Google is still serious about integrating all of its services into one cohesive whole.

All in all, it appears that Zagat is finally justifying the $151 million that Google paid for it. At the time of the acquisition, Google said that the Zagat reviews would become a cornerstone of its local offerings. Judging by the recent shifts and changes, its clear that that’s still true.

You can see a video detailing Google+ Local below:

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google released an update to its Google Search iPhone app today, adding a few small features and tweaks that should make searching faster and more intuitive. Let’s take a visual tour of what’s new in the app by searching for my favorite animal, the angora rabbit.

Cleaner design

The new app greets you with a clean search bar and just three buttons: Apps (promotes Google’s other web and iOS apps), Voice (speak your search term), and Goggles (the still wonky search-by-photo feature that only seems to recognize brand logos). Today’s Google doodle, an amazing working moog synthesizer in honor of Robert Moog’s 78th birthday, makes an appearance on the app version as an image, but unfortunately you cannot use it to make beautiful music. At the bottom of search results page is a scrollable bar listing all the available types of search, such as Places, News, Blogs, and Discussions.

Image results go big, beautiful

Grids of different-sized images are all the rage. The image results in the app fill up your iPhone screen completely (just start scrolling to lose the controls), so you can enjoy them without any pesky user interface getting in the way. Tap to open an image (pictured at the top of this article) and swipe left or right to flip through the other image search results. Tap to save an image directly to your camera roll or share it, but check the image rights before going too crazy.

Speedy and slidey

The improvement that does the most to make search faster in my opinion is the new slider. Open a search result and tabs appear at the top of the page. You can slide left to right to get back to your search results. If you want to find a specific word on a page, tap the little magnifying glass in the lower right corner. Google also says auto-compelete and page-load times are faster, but I wasn’t able to test the updated app side by side with the older version to check.

But wait, there’s more

Finally, Google is putting promotion of its other apps front and center, adding an Apps button to the main screen. Tap to bring up a list of Google’s available web and iOS apps. The web apps will open directly in the Google Search app, not Safari.

Google is planning to roll out several changes to its search engine over the next few months that will give people more than just the standard list of links and supplemental media, according to top Google Search executive Amit Singhal.

Singhal told the Wall Street Journal that results will now contain more semantic search information — meaning Google will be able to understand the true meaning of your queries, rather than simply relying on its current method of returning results of the most linked/trafficked sources across the web. The semantic results will allow search queries to better identify people, places, and specific things.

Basically, you’ll soon be able to type in a question to the Google search bar  and get a relatively intelligent response, if all things go according to plan. For example, typing in “What are Nashville, Tennessee’s largest public parks?” would bring up a list of the parks, instead of just a link to a website that contained the same information. The company already offers this for simple search queries, but the practice will gain more of a spotlight in the coming months.

The search changes will be some of the biggest the company has ever implemented, and will likely affect search engine optimization techniques.

The company also recently rolled out a social search option, which returns results for queries based on your circle of friends from Google+. The option can be toggled off, much to the delight of annoyed web users everywhere. Google is also experimenting with a new “sources” feature, which spits out a side bar of relevant information for some people, places and events.

Then this post is for you. We’re going to take you through the steps of turning off Google+ results in your web searches. We’re also going to show you how to turn them back on, in case you change your mind.

First, open up your normal Google.com search page. Go ahead and search for something. If you’re a Google+ user and you’re logged in, you might see something like this:

All those colorful arrows are pointing to the Google+ search results that you so detest — the personal profiles, the Google+ posts, the links shared on G+, and even images posted to Google+.

Here’s how you get rid of them.

See that two-button toggle switch at the top right side of the search results? The two buttons that look like a silhouetted Lego man and a picture of Earth?

If you’re seeing Google+ results in your web search, the Lego man button will be shaded. Click on the Earth button.

Google+ social search results will be turned off. You will now be returned to your regularly scheduled web searches — no socially shared links, no long-winded Google+ posts, no pictures of your neighbor’s kids, just the pure and simple web links you’ve come to expect from Google.

If you change your mind later and decide to give Google+ search results a second shot, just click the Lego man icon.

That’s it. One click on one of two buttons. You don’t have to muddle around in your personal profile settings or look up some obscure Help page. You don’t have to sign a petition. Just point and click.

Aren’t you glad Google made it easy?

That trick right there will turn off personal results for your current search session. If you want to turn off personal search indefinitely, click the gear in the top right corner of the search results page, select “Search settings,” and in the “Search plus Your World” section, select “Do not use personal results.”

Also, you can eliminate personal results by logging out of Google services, in which case you’ll only see general web search results.

Finally, the best way to ensure you never see anything Google+-related in your Google web searches is to not have a Google+ account in the first place. Works like a charm.

Well, it’s finally happened. Google web search has been Google-Plus-ified.

Today, Google is bringing some specific new features to Google web search, its flagship and most widely used product. In addition to the usual assortment of links, pictures, news items and shopping results you’d see in a typical Google search results page, logged-in Google+ users will now also find several kinds of Google+ content sprinkled in among the normal search results. There are even promoted Google+ profiles and pages — an attempt to compete with Facebook’s highly successful social ads, we’re betting.

We’ve been telling you this was coming for ages, so we hope you’re not too surprised. Eventually, Google+ will be part of everything Google does on the web and mobile.

Yesterday, VentureBeat spoke at length with Jack Menzel, Google’s web search product management director, about the newest changes.

“This isn’t the entire Internet, it’s your entire Internet,” he told us. “With Google+, we understand who people are, and we use that.”

This Google+-powered approach assumes certain ties between relevance and personal connections. Links shared by your G+ connections are given more weight and will show up in the first page of web search results with a person icon on the left.

You will also be able to see Google+ posts in search results based on keyword relevance. Basically, Google+ posts are seemingly indexed just like every other page on the web, but they’ll only show up in your search results if the poster is connected to you on Google+.

Photos posted to Google+ will show up in web and image search results — again, only to searchers who are connected to the original person who posted the photo in question.

Finally, you’ll also be able to search for specific people who have Google+ profiles using a Facebook-like people search tool.

The Google+ links, posts and pictures that will appear in your searches are from you, from your friends, and from persons of note (broadly speaking). Mostly, said Menzel, you’ll only see content from people you’re connected to.

For every piece of social content that shows up in a web search, you’ll be able to see who it’s from, with whom it’s shared and why it’s appearing. “Everything we show you, we label that very clearly and explain why that’s showing up,” said Menzel.

“Security, transparency and control are of paramount importance,” he said. “When we’re returning these personal results, it really is between you and Google … We’re using secure code.”

These social search integrations, which Google is calling “search plus your world,” can be toggled on and off by using the “person” and “world” icons in the top right corner of search results. It’s so easy it takes just one click to disable or enable the new features.

And of course, there are promoted Google+ accounts. On the right side of the results page, you’ll see featured profiles and pages, along with a link reading “Learn how you could appear here too.” While these promoted accounts are currently algorithmically determined, we’re seeing this real estate and approach to Google+ page promotion as eventual competition with Facebook’s highly successful social ads; as such, it might be the most important part of today’s announcement.

The business and financial dynamics between Google and Facebook have many points of conflict, but none is greater than the fact that Facebook has for some time been stealing Google’s ad revenue due to its ability to serve highly targeted ads based on social graph data. With Google+, Google is making a bid to acquire and build a social graph just as rich as Facebook’s — richer, in fact. So seeing Google+-related ads is one signal that Google is ready to start putting its social tools to work.

While we struggle to think of a scenario in which our friends might know more about any given topic than the Internet does, we’ll give Google the benefit of the doubt for now. But Menzel said that the judicious addition of a smattering of social media can amplify without overwhelming.

“It usually isn’t the case where you’re making a binary decision of using only personal results or only general results,” he said. “When you’re looking for something new, it’s the mix of those results that’s the most powerful and the most useful.”

And, as Menzel told us, “The more information you have associated with your Google+ profile, the better it gets.”

Google+ results are coming today to web search, and although the company can’t talk timelines for future rollouts, we fully expect to see Google+ results in Google News, Google Maps, Google Shopping and other search properties soon.

“For this launch, we’re just talking about web search and image search,” said Menzel, “but I wouldn’t rule out improvements to those other products.”

If you, like your curmudgeonly correspondent here, bristle at the thought of yet another change to what was once a simple, beautiful product, remember that short months and years ago, image and shopping and news results were not included in the basic web search, either. Eventually, Google+ will be a ubiquitous part of the woodwork — just as Google has planned all along.

As we relayed to you lo these many months ago, Googlers see Google+ as “more than a social network or a collection of communication tools; it’s Google’s plan to bring social information into everything you do on the web, from shopping to search to email and beyond,” in the words of a team member working on building and marketing Google+.

In the end, Google+ is the new mode of Google usage. It’s a unifying umbrella for a diverse network of web and mobile apps. It’s the company’s plan for a stable financial future. Google+ is, in fact, not a mere social network.

Google competed in an aggressive auction with Microsoft and Yahoo to maintain its place as the default search engine on Firefox, according to AllThingsD. It successfully renewed a three-year deal, but the placement came with a massive markup and will now cost the company $300 million a year.

That’s one heck of a price jump. In 2010, Google contributed 84 percent of Mozilla’s $123 million total revenue. In 2012, Google will give Mozilla three times that amount.

So is it worth it? Most likely.

Microsoft, hungry to buy Bing more exposure, salivated over the search spot like a ravenous wolf, and was said to have competed ferociously to oust Google from the Firefox throne. The company, which produces the most-popular browser, Internet Explorer, is a distant second in the search market. It would have likely benefited greatly, to Google’s detriment, from additional default queries originating via Firefox.

Meanwhile, the pricey deal comes as Chrome and Firefox duke it out for second place in the browser competition. Perhaps the almost $1 billion in funds will help Mozilla, a non-profit organization that heavily relies on the search deal for revenues, ease the pain as it continues to lose browser market share to Google’s Chrome.

Google declined to comment on the specific terms of its deal with Mozilla.

[Image via bionicteaching/Flickr]

Leave it to Google to dispel the myth that one shouldn’t wear white after Labor Day. The search giant and social network contender has stripped off the ominous, horizontal black bar hovering atop its pages to reveal a milky-fresh new hue for each of its web-based products.

The new Google bar occupies the same space as the Google logo and search box in most products and now provides people with one- or two-click access to its other services via a drop-down menu. It has started appearing on some users’ accounts already and will soon be coming to all accounts.

Essentially, that tacked-on navigation-meets-notification bar that debuted with Google+ is no more. What’s left in its wake is a bar-like experience that’s better woven into the essence of each product through the Google logo.

“We’re now ready for the next stage of our redesign — a new Google bar that will enable you to navigate quickly between our services, as well as share the right stuff with the right people easily on Google+,” technical lead Eddie Kessler said. “Instead of the horizontal black bar at the top of the page, you’ll now find links to your services in a new drop-down Google menu nested under the Google logo.”

The bar introduces a space-saving, polished style to Google products, but it also dramatically alters the way people engage with and navigate to Google entities like Gmail, Docs and Reader. Will web denizens find Google’s new look to be a fashion do or don’t? We’re still waiting for the bare bar to hit our browsers before we cast our vote.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Chinese search giant Baidu announced on Monday that it would add English results from Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, to its own search engine.

The results from Baidu are currently primarily in Chinese. That includes search queries that users type in English. For example, typing in “Last.fm” will deliver search results in Chinese, even if the link in the search results points to the English version of Last.fm.

The new deal will give Microsoft a foothold in China, where it has a very small portion of the search engine market share. Google was the former largest U.S.-based search engine in China, but the company pulled out of the country. That has left Baidu virtually unchallenged by an American search provider in one of the largest markets in the world.

Google has a rocky relationship with China. The search giant sparred with the country over censorship concerns in January last year. That caused Google to drop its Chinese search website, Google.cn, and redirect users to its Hong Kong-based search website. Google also said the Chinese government was meddling with the Gmail accounts of some users earlier this year.

Baidu is the dominant search engine in China. The company’s chief executive officer Robin Li said 99 percent of China’s 420 million people surfing the Internet use Baidu over other search engines.

Wdyl.com essentially takes a search request and turns it into a comic book-looking page of relevant results. You get the results after entering a term and then clicking on an adorable heart-shaped button.* The search results are then shown across Google’s products. You see Picasa, Sketchup, Translate, Voice, Books, Trends, and YouTube results … all on one page. Some are calling it a “cute gimmick,” while others are seeing it as a showcase of what Google is capable of.

Well, since I love myself, I entered my name, clicked the heart and, voila! There are my Picasa pictures. Neat. I can also setup Alerts about myself (I swear I haven’t done it yet.). I’m disappointed by the lack of Regina Sinsky products available (zero). My popularity on Trends is simply depressing.

Then it gets a bit eery. There’s the embarrassing video of me as a 1st grader saying I want to work at the San Diego zoo. The page offers viewers a chance to “Explore Regina Sinsky in 3D” with SketchUp and the ability to “Scour the earth for Regina Sinsky” with Earth. Yikes!

The bottom line is, Google already knows what you love and it loves to show it. What do you think about it?

* Will someone on Etsy please make me a necklace featuring this button?

Google is looking to acquire the flight data provider for around $700 million to improve results for Web users making travel plans. The deal seems innocuous enough — Google said it had no plans to sell plane tickets and would direct Google search users to other sites to purchase tickets. Still, a number of companies including travel search company Expedia and Microsoft, which runs search rival Bing, have launched the Fair Search Coalition to try to stop the acquisition.

Keeping Web surfers on search sites for as long as possible has become the new game for search providers like Microsoft and Google. Google’s added a lot of functions to the search engine that offer direct answers. Searchers can drop in simple mathematical equations and questions about things like sports scores and get direct answers on Google’s search page. Google also already embeds some flight data in its search engine, as does Bing.

The acquisition of ITA promises to make Google’s data more accurate and up to date than it already is. That can prove to be the deciding factor that keeps a search user on the page long enough to leave an impression and generate some ad revenue. Multiply that by the number of people who use Google search on a daily basis, and it adds up to a ton of additional revenue for Google. So it makes sense why Google is paying $700 million for the data, and why Microsoft would love to stop the deal and get a slice of that information.

The coalition argues that it would increase prices and drive down competition and business innovation, but it really all boils down to advertising revenue. Travel is a huge part of e-commerce — worth around $80 billion a year, according to the Wall Street Journal report. ITA’s software handles around 65 percent of all e-commerce flight bookings, and travel advertising accounted for about 6 percent of all online advertising revenue, according to the coalition’s website, FairSearch.org. Stealing just a small slice of that — which Google probably already owns a large part of — represents a significant financial gain.

Semantifi is one of 70 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2010 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After our selection, the companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

Google and other popular search engines only search about 1 percent of the Web, according to research data from UC Berkeley. That just isn’t enough for deep-Web crawler Semantifi, which launched its new search engine at DEMO Fall 2010.

Semantifi offers users a way to search for specific data through a search engine powered by user-created apps. One example: searching for U.S. population numbers separated into age and gender. It uses the “deep Web,” where information is stored in databases and is not immediately accessible through traditional search engines that just search the text and images of websites. The technology to power Semantifi has been in development for 5 years.

Wolfram Research’s Wolfram Alpha, as well as some other data-powered search engines, also provide “answers” for searches on the Internet, such as a mathematical problem or what the national bird of Sweden is, but Semantifi offers users a chance to power the search with their own sets of data.

The Stamford, Conn.-based company is currently run by a team of 30, and has raised $3.5 million in one fundraising round in September 2008 from Connecticut Innovations and Launch Capital, as well as some individual investors.

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Marissa Mayer, Google’s top search executive, announced a “fundamental shift” in how search operates with the launch of Google Instant at a press event in San Francisco Wednesday morning.

Google Instant still looks like the search engine’s home page people are accustomed to, but the results begin streaming in real time as a user starts typing out a search. When a user types in “SFM,” a search result for SFMOMA — the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where the event is being held — appears before the full search query is even typed.

A Google engineer later showed search results for local weather appearing after typing just the letter “W”.

Clicking on the search button or hitting “Enter” makes Google Search behave the way it always has — it brings up search results for your specific request.

Mayer said Google has spent a lot of time optimizing search on Google’s servers, bringing response time down to about 300 milliseconds, and on the network, though the latter  depends on individual Internet connections.

But that’s just one second typically. Humans take 9 seconds to enter a search query and 15 seconds to select a result — that’s 24 out of the 25 seconds spent o the average search. So, Google has been focusing on how to optimize the “physical” aspects of search — the typing and the thinking that a user does when searching. She said she expects users to save anywhere from 2 to 5 seconds per search.

“We want to make search fast, fun and interactive,” Mayer said.

Google Instant will be rolling out starting today for Safari, Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer 8. The service will roll out internationally throughout the week.

Google Instant will roll out on mobile devices later this year.

You can find a demo of the service below.

Schmidt announced yesterday that Google was going to make a push into automated searches that dynamically provide results of what readers might want to see, not just what they are searching for. Based on Schmidt’s Tweet, it’s possible the announcement by Google today in San Francisco will just be a rehash of the announcement in Berlin on Tuesday.

Autonomous search isn’t really search as we think of it — a user querying a massive database to get a result. Schmidt likened it to telling a user what he or she didn’t know, but was probably interested in seeing.

Google already sees more than a billion searches cross their servers daily, and providing an automated process that is constantly providing search data can only boost those numbers. With 96 percent of their revenue coming from advertising in the first half of 2010, there’s a lot of potential advertising revenue in an automated search engine.

Some are reporting seeing faster, “streaming” search results already. Here’s a video:

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that the future of search was blazing-fast, “autonomous” searching that constantly provides users with results. He made the comments at a keynote speech at the German IFA home electronics event in Berlin Tuesday.

But autonomous search isn’t really search as we think of it — a user querying a massive database to get a result. Schmidt likened it to telling a user what he or she didn’t know, but was probably interested in seeing. Google already sees more than a billion searches cross their servers daily, and providing an automated process that is constantly providing search data can only boost those numbers.

That means more potential ad revenue from Google’s advertisements running with searches. Advertising made up about 96 percent of Google’s revenue in the first six months of 2010, according to company financials. Try as it might to diversify away from that revenue stream, for now, search-linked advertising is Google’s highly lucrative trick.

The company brought in $6.8 billion for the quarter ending June 30. Improving that by even a small percentage could bring a huge payout for Google.

For now, old-fashioned search is growing quickly on mobile. Google said about 33 percent of mobile searches related to users’ location, and mobile search grew by 50 percent, and searches on Google’s Android mobile operating system tripled, in the first half of 2010. But tech pundits theorize that users will increasingly use task-specific apps to find what they need rather than perform general searches.

The autonomous approach faces risks, from provoking a privacy backlash to draining users’ batteries through constant queries. But the biggest risk is that mobile users will drift away from Google, which has become all but synonymous with search on computers.

[Photo: dannysullivan]