Google wants to be more than your search central. It wants to be your communication hub, becoming your one-stop place for interaction with friends and colleagues. This is why it launched Google Buzz, a kind of Facebook/Twitter social web tool based on your Google email account, and this is why it now attacks VoIP phone service Skype by turning Gmail into a regular phone.

All you have to do is to install a voice and video chat plug-in, and you can use your computer’s microphone, loudspeaker and — if needed — video camera to communicate. And yes, a dedicated head set with mike is useful.

Now, Google’s voice and video chat has been around for a while, but its usefulness has been limited. You could only connect with others having a Gmail account. Now US users of Gmail can call anyone with a phone anywhere in the world.

The Google Blog says:

“Calls to the U.S. and Canada will be free for at least the rest of the year and calls to other countries will be billed at our very low rates. We worked hard to make these rates really cheap (see comparison table) with calls to the U.K., France, Germany, China, Japan—and many more countries—for as little as $0.02 per minute.”

So far Google Buzz hasn’t made much of an impact on the Facebook crowd. May the Gmail phone make Skype users switch to Google? We doubt it, but Gmail users who have not been using Voice over Internet services before, may start using Gmail Phone, and that will tie them even closer to Gmail as their default communication tool. That would in itself be a success for Google.

Google reported that they had clocked 1 million calls made through Gmail during the first 24 hours.

SMX West: March 2-4
Go to California!

This week the world lost another search engine giant. Yahoo! in the US and Canada has switched over to using the Bing database, and the rest of the world will soon follow. This means that the North American market is now totally dominated by Google and Bing.

This does not mean that Google and Microsoft have achieved global domination, though. Yandex is, for instance, the big player in Russia and Baidu is dominating the Chinese market.

Still, this does not bode well for search engine innovation in what we used to call the Western Hemisphere. There are no alternative big search engine players left in Europe any more.

Here are some other search engine headlines we have found interesting this week:

Google Adds A Filter For Finding Blogs SE Land
New Awesome Ways to Search within Current Site (Using Google’s site operator) SE Journal
Has Google Purged Places Of Yelp? All Signs Point To Yes TechCrunch
Google Realtime Search Gets Home Page, Conversation View, Alerts & Geosearch SE Land
Google News Changes Again, Adds Collapsible Right Side SE Roundtable
Bing’s Market Share Up 51% In Past 12 Months SE Land
Google’s Latest Buy – Like.com Confirmed! PageTraffic
Yahoo! Transitions Organic Search Back-End to Microsoft Platform Yahoo! switches over to Bing search results in the US and Canada.
Twitter hashtags: quick guide Phil Bradley
4 Cool New Gmail Features You Should Know Search mail and docs, sign into multiple accounts, and more; Google Tutor

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Google Replay was Google’s attempt at presenting Twitter search results in a new fashion, giving you a time-line graph. By clicking on the time-line you could select the year, month or day, or click any point to view the tweets from one specific time period.

The service soon disappeared, but has now reappeared at a new Google Realtime Search page.

You can also find this microblog search tool by doing a regular Google search and then click on “More” and “Updates” in the left hand column of the search result page.

Resourceshelf reports that the “Updates” database contains content from Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, and Google Buzz. Only Twitter is covered by the Replay tool, and then only back to February this year. The idea is to expand the historical Twitter database back to 2006.

You can narrow searches by clicking on the time-line (to select a month or a date) or by selecting “location” in the left hand column. A link to “Updates with Images” give you the same results with image thumbnails fetched from the blog or the page the microblog entries are linking to.

In the right hand column you will find links to the most popular web site links at the time of your search query.

Finally, Google may also add a link to the full conversation leading up to a tweet or update if possible.

Is this and important upgrade for Google?

We think so, as Twitter and other social web sites contain a lot of interesting references to online resources that will be of use to journalists, librarians, researchers and other investigators. Remember that Twitter & Co is much more than senseless chatter about making dinner and going to bed. People use this services to look for information, and by using Google Realtime you can tap into those searches.

Google Realtime can also be used to research trends and retrace the development of a particular happening, let’s say a natural disaster or a political scandal.

See also Google Tutor: Google Increases Focus On Realtime With Realtime Search Page

A World of Friends!

SMX East: NYC Oct 5-7
Click Here for Agenda!

Pandia Shopping Search has three parts. The first part is a list of shopping search engines and online malls. There are separate sections for comparison shopping, customer information, shopping trends and more.

The second part contains links to selected online stores in 16 categories. Find established online shopping sites for home & garden, food & drink, gifts & flowers and much more.

The third part is a collection of links to shopping sites listed in our own Pandia Plus Directory. This part contains links to some 40 categories each containing hand picked links to quality sites. Give it a try to find quality shopping web sites!

photo credit: jk+too

A World of Friends!

SMX East: NYC Oct 5-7
Click Here for Agenda!

There are all kinds of search engines out there, searching the real time web. Some search a particular channel, like Twitter or Flickr. Others search for particular media, like images or video. These five search engines all search several sources and present results in several kinds of media.

Collecta

My personal favorite is Collecta. This is a powerful search tool, yet it is easy to figure out and navigate. The front page holds boxes, each containing a hot topic represented with both images and text, so you have a feeling of reading a real time newspaper.

When you do a search, the screen is split into three columns: The main column shows a live stream of fresh items matching your query. These are updated in real time and the stream can be paused if you want a closer look. The stream contains:

• Microblog updates from Twitter, Jaiku and Identica
• Blog posts and blog comments
• Photos from Flickr, TwitPic and yFrog
• Videos from YouTube and Ustream

When you select an item, it expands in the right column, where you can get a closer look at it. Unfortunately, there is no way to play videos on the results page, you have to click through to the source, e.g. YouTube.

In the left column, you can sort your results by type (updates, images, stories etc.). In the same menu, you can share the results: You can send them directly to Facebook, Twitter, Mixx, Delicious, Reddit or StumbleUpon or you can grab the URL to the page or the feed.

Topsy

Topsy has no fancy front page like Collecta, but the search results page holds plenty of options. By default, the results include news, tweets and photos (no videos). You can sort the results by type in the left menu. You can also sort by time: Choose between news from the last hour, day, week or month, or see all hits for your query from Topsy’s index.

Experts is a feature unique to Topsy. Click this link and Topsy will present you with a list of people on Twitter who appear to be authorities on your query. This can be very useful for research purposes or when you seek to expand your Twitter network.

Topsy’s sharing options include Twitter, Facebook, RSS and email alerts.

48ers

48ers is a new contestant in the real time search race. The search results display hits from Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz, Digg, and Delicious. A tiny icon next to each result shows the source. If you want to see the results for each network separately, you can filter the results from a menu on the left.

I love that 48ers search Delicious. This is my most indesposable web tool. I use it not only for storing bookmarks, but for finding vetted web resources and sharing them with others.

There is no RSS, but a button at the top of the search results list lets you share your search with friends through a large number of channels or networks (choose from a list of 287).

There are links to trending topics and a list of recommended searches help you make the most of your search.

Leapfish

Leapfish is a search destination with a lot to offer. If you log in, you can customize the front page to display your favorite news sources (you can log in with your Twitter or Facebook ID). And Leapfish is both a regular search engine and a real time search engine. Enter your query and choose the Real Time button.

The main column displays the results. LeapFish does a good job of sorting and presenting them: The latest from the news corporations tops the list. Then comes the most tweeted links related to your query. Below this is a list of the latest related tweets. To the right are boxes for video and image results.

On the far right there is a set of links that lets you do your search on a sub set of the index: Images, videos, news and blogs along with options for web search and shopping search. Very convenient. There are also links to related searches and trending topics.

Scoopler

Scoopler is a powerful search tool. The front page displays top stories, top videos and hot searches to give you a feeling of what’s going on. There are also links that give you one click access to popular categories: entertainment, technology, sports, world, science, gaming, and politics.

The search results page holds a lot of information. The main list of results contains the most relevant stories from all the sources. A menu on the left lets you sort them to display links, images or videos. You can play the videos without leaving your search results. On the right you can see new tweets matching your query and the list is updated in real time.

The only option for sharing is through RSS.

I also want to mention Sency

Sency is not among the top 5 because it doesn’t meet all the criteria for our list. It only searches microblog updates and displays no videos or images. Still, I want to draw your attention to this swiss army knife of Twitter search. The list of features include local search for a number of US cities and some international destinations, search in French, Spanish, Italian and German, and an easy option to respond to tweets in your search results + much more.

A World of Friends!

SMX West: March 2-4
Go to California!

If you are an avid user of social networks or if you want to monitor the hive mind for news about, say, a brand, a sports team or a celebrity, you know it can be hard to keep up across the different networks. Here’s a solution.

48ers is a new search engine in public beta. It lets you search Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz, Digg, and Delicious all at once. All you do is enter the search term and hit Search. By default, results from all five networks are displayed. The search results are entire entries (tweets, updates etc). A little logo next to each result lets you know the source. If you want to see the results for each network separately, you can filter the results from a menu on the left.

There is no RSS, but a button to share search results with friends through a large number of channels.

I am particularly happy that Delicious is included among the sources. For years, it has continued to be my most indesposable web tool, not only for storing bookmarks, but for finding vetted web resources and sharing them with others.

(In case you are wondering: The name 48ers refers to the pioneers of the California gold rush.)

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Twitter’s own tools

Searching Twitter became easier once the search box was added to the menu on the right of your tweets. Here you can perform searches and save them for later.

But what if you search results are still not great? Visit Twitter Advanced Search where you can modify your search to bring results in a particular language, from a particular person, reflecting a particular mood and much more.

If you don’t want to leave your Twitter home page to search, many of the options on the Advanced Search page are available as operators that you can add to your search in the regular Twitter search box.

Search Twitter in two languages

2lingual Twitter is a cool tool that lets you search Twitter for information in two languages at the same time. It can also translate your query for you (default setting). At the moment it supports these 21 languages: Arabic, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and Thai. Here is an example search showing results for iPad in English and French.

Find images and videos on Twitter

On Twitcaps, you can search for images shared on Twitter. This is useful in many circumstances, but particularly for breaking news, like this example search for images from the flood in Pakistan.

You can find videos shared on Twitter with Twitmatic. You do your search and a list of tweets appear. When you decide which video you want to watch, click Play Video and the video is displayed inline.

Another great image search engine for Twitter is Twicsy. In addition to searching the index of 140 million pictures, you can filter
search results by date or browse related tags.

Twitter search intro

If you are new to Twitter search, have a look at this short video from CommonCraft that gives a fun and easy introduction to Twitter search:

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Hourly rates $15 to $25.

We have always had a soft spot for the Ask search engine. Throughout the years they have managed to make some serious innovations as regards search technology and the presentation of search results.

For instance: When Google and Bing presents search results in three column table, with results in the center, that is an idea they stole from Ask. But for some peculiar reason Ask seems to lose its direction. Ask abandoned that design for one that looked like the old version of Google before Google and Bing copied them. It is as if Ask lacks the courage to follow its ideas through, and ends up as a bleak copy of its competitors.

Natural language

Ask (or Ask Jeeves as it was called) originally was known as the natural language search engine. The idea was that you could enter a regular question in the search field: “Who is the president of the USA?”, instead of the queries we all use now: “president USA”. Ask Jeeves had a database of such questions, where the results were hand picked by human editors. If a relevant response could not be found in the search engine fetched results from its regular search index.

It turned out that this wasn’t much of a competitive advantage after all, partly because searchers quickly learned the short hand of search engine queries, partly because Google became very good at guessing what you were looking for and partly because it takes a lot of work to manage a human edited database.

A return to answers

Ask has not given up on the idea, though. In 2008 and 2009 it announced that it was going to revive the idea of natural language search, this time base on automated semantic search. It didn’t make much of a difference.

This week Ask (Ask Jeeves in Britain) was relaunched as a natural language search engine again, this time based on a human edited database of responses. Although the search engine will generate automatically produced search results, like Google and Bing, the main focus in on its Q and A feature. It looks a bit like Yahoo! Answers.

The new Ask

On July 26 the Ask Blog announced that they had officially launched the public beta for the new Ask.com

“..which combines our proprietary answers technology (specifically tailored to extract questions and answers from the Web) with the human insight of the thriving Ask.com community drawn from our 87 million monthly uniques. Now available on an invite-only basis …, the capability to pose questions to real people is now possible for those complex, subjective and/or time-sensitive queries that, no matter how advanced, computers simply can’t address.”

The idea is that you may send in a question. Ask will reroute the question to one of many volunteers, who will then send you a response within five to ten minutes. Gradually this will help Ask build up a database with unique content.

Problems

The problem with this approach is twofold. First you need to ensure that your experts really know what they are talking about, and you need some way of controlling the quality of the answers. I guess user comments and voting could help out in that respect.

Second you need some way of updating the database. The world is changing. The web is changing. What was a relevant answer a year ago, may not be so today.

Ask is now displaying its Q and A feature prominently on its front page. The idea is clearly that the featured question will be interesting content for their users regardless of what they have come to search for.

When in Rome

We have not had the time to test the new feature. We have done some searches to see what the database can bring you, though.

A search for “what shall i see in rome?”, for instance, brought up the answer to “What to see in rome?” (fair enough) and that answer was the following sentence:

“Rome is located in Italy. Tis (sic) is one of the most visited city’s. You can see the Colosseum, The Vatican, Piazza Navona and Spanish stairs.”

The next relevant result was a response from another Q & A service, Wiki Answers:

“In Rome you can see many interesting things like:The Colloseum (sic), aqueducts, and other various building remains. ”

Anyone who has been to Rome realize that these are both completely unhelpful answers. A regular web search with a link to a tourist site would be immensely more useful. It should be noted that some of Ask’s responses do include links to relevant sites. When that is the case, a one sentence response may be useful.

One of the questions showcased by Ask is:

“What is Glycogenolysis?”

Again the responses are less than helpful:

“Glycogen is the storage form for glucose in the liver and muscles. Glycogenolysis is the conversion of glycogen into glucose in the liver and in the muscles.”

An alternative answer given is:

“Glycogenolysis is the breakdown of glycogen to glucose for use as metabolic fuel. It maintains the normal blood concentration of glucose in the fasting state.”

These are both correct, but for someone unfamiliar with terms like glucose and metabolic, the answer only leads to new questions. Links to relevant articles (like on the Wikipedia) would have been helpful. But that would, of course, bring up the problem of link rot and the need to update old questions.

The wrong approach to knowledge

These answers remind us of the debate on Wolfram Alpha. Wolfram Alpha believes there is one correct answer to any question. This isn’t the case even for quantitative questions in the natural sciences, let alone for the social and cultural questions Ask tries to answer.

Learning is to look at a large number of sources, changing you whole understanding of the world in the process. This is what regular search engines are good at. They deliver a large number of alternative results, helping you find more extensive information on different sites. If you want to replace those sites with information produced by yourself, you need to deliver more than a “factual” sentence.

The fact is that Ask’s Q & A service is not so much competing with Google, but the Wikipedia. And if that is the march Ask is aiming for they need to gain some weight.

New design

Ask has also presented a new design for the site. It is a bit old fashioned, but simplistic and easy to read. There are now links to alternative search queries, alternative questions and your search history in the right hand column — all very useful features.

See also: Search Engine Land: Ask Comes Full Circle With “Q&A” Offering

SMX West: March 2-4
Go to California!

Covering the search engine scene from outside the US sometimes leads to surprises. Features that are introduced in the US are not found elsewhere. When researching the new Google Image search engine for this post, I suddenly realized that I was not looking at the new one, but the old version.

This is how Google Image search results look in my Firefox browser on our PC:

On the Mac I got the new version, and by opening the Google Images US version in Chrome on the PC I finally managed to see what the search blogs are buzzing about:

The main difference is, as you can see, that the old version gave you thumbnails with image information below the images: the title, size, URL and a link to search results for similar images, like this:

Attractions in Oslo
480 × 348 – 40k – jpg
thebesttraveldestinations…
Find similar images

In the new version, the thumbnails are larger and there is no new information under the images.

However, this is another example of how Google is using new web standards to turn static web pages into a dynamic experience. Hover your cursor over the image and a small window pops up with a larger version of the picture and the same information as above:

You could say it does not make much of a difference, but the larger sizes makes it easier to see what the pictures depict.

If you click on the image, the old version would give you a page consisting of two frames – image information at the top, the original page at the bottom.

The new version makes this a much more aesthetically pleasing experience. In the foreground you get a large version of the image, while the original page is rendered behind it, greyed out. This is another example of what modern browsers can deliver.

A river of results

The old version was based on the paradigm of having several web pages for results. At the bottom of each page there was a next page button that forwarded you to the next set of images. Now all the images are included on the same page. As you scroll downwards Google will add new set of images. This is an idea Google has stolen from the Bing image search engine.

In fact, the new Google Image search is very much like Bing’s solution, although Bing stick to frames when it comes to presenting individual images.

Bing has one very useful feature that Google is lacking: It has a row of buttons that lets you select the sizes of the thumbnails. There is even an option where you can get the file information under each image, as in the old version of Google images.

Both Google and Bing allows for advanced search. Some features are found in the left hand column (Size, Color, Style and People in Bing; Size, Type and Color in Google), and Google has a special advanced search page.

SMX West: March 2-4
Go to California!

Outsource SEO/PPC
$11 – $15 per hour

• Google’s wind power

  Google’s purchase of twenty years worth of renewable energy from an Iowa wind farm (Inside Google July 26 2010)

• What Does Google Read?

  Want to read like a Google exec? Don’t expect any laughs. (Beyond Search July 27 2010)

• Apple Search Engine Lightning Bolt to Strike Google?

  Is Apple working on an app search engine and trying to stop Google from doing the same? (Google Watch July 27 2010)

• Google Images – just like Bing!

  Google Images have had a make over. (P Bradley July 28 2010)

• Can Ask.com's New Search Strategy Work?

  It’s hard not to think of the new Ask.com community search section as a glorified Yahoo Answers (PC World July 28 2010)

• What’s New With Bing & Yahoo Search Alliance

  Yahoo is currently testing Bing powered results on about 25 percent of the traffic. (SE Land July 20 2010)

• Google Images gets major overhaul

  Google tries to ‘get the app out of the way’ (techradar July 2010)

• French Newspapers Partner To Sidestep Google News

  French newspapers is partnering to create an online news site that they hope will be an alternative to Google News. (SE Land July 23 2010)

• How To Hide News Sources in Google News

  Google adds “news settings” or “source preferences” which lets you block some sources (SE Roundtable July 26 2010)

• AOL Keeping Google (And Bing) On Its Toes For Search Deal Pick

  AOL is currently gauging the offers of several companies to power its search (SE Watch July 27 2010)

• Google's Search-Related Music Store Slated For Holiday Season

  Android VP at Google, Andy Rubin, is having “accelerated” talks with music publishing firm Harry Fox (SE Watch July 27 2010)

• Bing Generates More Clicks Than Google

  Google users clicked on ads at a rate of 1.09%, while Bing users clicked on ads 1.67% of the time (SE Land July 27 2010)

• Yahoo Japan Picks Google Search Over Bing

  Yahoo Japan — an independent entity from Yahoo — has decided to forgo the Bing transition (SE Watch July 27 2010)

• See An Offensive Image On Google? Stay Tuned.

  Google’s report offensive image feature is no longer found in the new design. (SE Land July 29 2010)

• The New Ask.com: A Little Bit Search, A Little Bit Answers

  Ask.com is re-launching as a cross between a traditional search engine and the question-and-answer service (SE Land July 27 2010)

• Diller: Ask.com Was The Little Search Engine That Couldn’t

  IAC CEO: “Ask itself is not a large segment of the company.” (SE Land July 29 2010)

• Street Slide: Microsoft’s Next Killer Maps App?

  Next-generation tool for browsing street-level imagery. (SE Land July 29 2010)

• 4 Common SEO Copywriting Techniques That Ruin Your Copy

  Stay on Search: Long outdated SEO techniques based on pure, unadulterated myths. (July 30 2010)

• Google Ordered To Remove Search Results On Sex Charges But Document Still Shows

  The search results were about a sexual harassment case between her and a guy 10 years ago (SE Roundtable July 30 2010)

• Wolfram Alpha Widgets announced

  Beta release for computational engine apps (techradar Jlu 2010)

• Google: The "Last Thing We Want" Is The "Best SEO To Win"

  Jeremy Sussman, a Google Local Product Manager has been pretty frank and clear (SE Roundtable July 30 2010)

• Google With Direct Dictionary Result

  Google now has a onebox of their own immediately offering the definition(s) for certain words you’re searching for. (Blogoscoped July 30 2010)

• Study Calls Google ‘King Of Malware’

  Google has twice as much malware in its search results as Yahoo, Bing, and Twitter combined. (SE Land July 30 2010)

• Google Acquires Metaweb – Smarter Searches?

  Metaweb is a successful and popular semantic search start-up and it will help make Google’s searches a lot more efficient (Google Tutor July 20 2010)

• The Top Ten Alternative Search Engines

  About.com on the top ten alternative/niche search engines out there on the Web. (July 23 2010)

Video of the week:

Google’s Matt Cutts talk about Google and search engine optimization at Search University in Belgium.