Twitter Engineering reveals how they ensure short term spikes in search lead to qualified content. Pretty awesome. The new news.
Google Zeitgeist 2010: Year in Review
Bing Bang Boom
So I tried Microsoft’s Bing search … meh. It’s a nicer page than Google, but the results were less than expected and it feels like a rebadged Live Search page – which it probably is regardless of the new search algorithm.
The biggest gap for me though is the sheer lack of mobile access. I’ve tried to view Bing on my E75 twice today and instead of a simple mobile search page ala Google, I got the full web site instead. This is a total waste of bandwidth the time spent loading does not pay off on a site that’s easy to manage on the small screen. It’s 2009 Microsoft, the PC is just one of many things we use to connect.
BTW – Yes I know you can load m.bing.com to get the mobile site, but Microsoft should be redirecting automatically. Get serious about the fight and do the right things to earn customer attention!
Psion is really working hard to keep netbook for themselves
jkOnTheRun reports on how Google is now honoring Psion’s trademark of Netbook effectively killing the search term for anyone else. If this pushes further we are likely to see devices currently called netbooks go through a rebranding.
What’s strange about this is that Psion has effectively been a dead company for years and has no active product in the market – even if they did in fact invent one called a netbook though it was discontinued in 2003 – long before the notion of low cost computers we now know as netbooks came around.
Why now? What are they cooking here? There’s no known effort underway that would require Psion to protect the term so their device alone could be marketed that way … and it’s not looking lie a legal battle is mounting to do anything other than stop people from saying netbook.
Sites like netbooknews apparently get 50% of their earned ad revenue from the term netbook and this change is going to sting initially for sure. I’ve been debating removing the sticker on my NC10 which reads Netbook for Mobile Internet but now I might just have to keep it there out of spite.
Google takes Quicksilver Pro … I hope it’s coming to Windows!
Google has launched a new Mac application based on Quicksilver called Google Quick Search Box. At first I missed why I would want a quick Google search on my desktop, but when I read this lifehacker post on the topic it became clear this was really Quicksilver reborn as a Google product.
I’ve used Quicksilver for years and there are some awesome extensions to make your life easier and productive without ever touching the mouse. On the PC, I use Launchy though it pales in comparison to the functionality in Quicksilver (macros and application plug-ins come to mind). I really hope this one makes it over to the PC side so I can use it across all my systems.