A little bit of Google goodness
I discovered a couple of things that Google can do today that I’d not come across before, and I’m pretty damn sure that at least one of them is new to Google as well as to me.
In my job I have to do a fair amount of work with the Japanese, and as you can imagine the time difference means that there isn’t much of an overlap when both the Japanese and the English are at work. Previously when I’ve wanted to find out what time it is over there I’ve had to do a search on Google for one of the many websites that will tell you what the local time is in a country. Today, however, when I searched for time in japan I was greeted with the local time in Japan. Fantastic!
The second “discovery” I made was another plaintext search - if you search for “Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s birthday” you’ll be given his date of birth above the normal search results. Unfortunately, even though I have two of them (like the queen - although Google believes she only has one), my birthdays aren’t special enough to receive the Google treatment.
But I can hardly hold that against them, can I? I love finding these little extra nuggets of goodness ready to help make simple searches that much simpler, and I’m so very greatful that they’re developed.
Google Pack
On the 6th, the boys (and girls) at Google released the Google Pack, a set of (mostly) free tools that people using the internet should (mostly) have installed. The line-up includes Firefox (with the Google Toolbar pre-installed), Ad-Aware SE…
Google and prefetching
I was certain that I’d blogged about Google prefetching certain search results a couple of months ago, but it turns out that I didn’t. Basically, on some searches, google instructs your web browser to start downloading the top-most search…
Google Local goes Local
Dammit, here I go being Google’s lap-dog again. Well, there’s worse things to be, aren’t there? Today, Google announced that they have introduced Google Local UK and Google Maps UK (in beta, of course!). For those of you who…
Google-X
As reported in the Google weblog, Google have just given us a cutesy little interface which links to all of Google’s services - Google-X. Based on the design of the Mac OSX dock, it’s a nice, compact, and visually…
Google AutoLink creates an AutoStink
Recently, Google released a new beta of their popular Internet Explorer only Google Toolbar. One new feature in this toolbar has received far more press than any other - AutoLink. The AutoLink’s raison d’etre is to alter web pages…
GoogleBot in form filling shocker?
I just noticed in my logs that the GoogleBot has been using the Style Changer on this site! This is certainly not something which I was expecting to happen. Has anyone else had any experience of the GoogleBot selecting…
Google changes definition provider
Just when did google stop using dictionary.com as its definition provider, and start using answers.com? It’s one of the features of google that you hardly ever notice, but once you do it starts to come in handy once in…
rel=’nofollow’
Over the last couple of days, the “Big Three” search engines have all announced that they’re going to start paying attention to a new attribute on <a> tags - rel=’nofollow’. This attribute will essentially state that the marked link…
JavaScript is cool again?
Ever since JavaScript was conceived, there’s always been a stigma attached to using it. The arguments which are thrown around include saying that most people have it turned off, it doesn’t work consistently across browsers, and there are evil…
MSN Search Beta
Following up from this morning’s google entry, I forgot to mention the new MSN Search Beta. Released a couple of days ago, it’s Microsoft’s answer to google. So far, for a beta, if seems pretty decent. It’s got the…
A few google links…
Instead of getting on with a bit of work yesterday afternoon, I decided to take a little bit of time out, and google for stuff about google instead. The first link I came across was actually quite a useful…
Obligatory Firefox Post
Firefox 1.0 Final has been released. Go update yourselves now if you’re already using it, and go give it a download and try it if you aren’t. The site is, understandably, being a little slow at the moment though. Keep…
Search Engine Visualisation
I found a link to a nice useful web page in my email this morning - a collection of visualisations of search engines and their results. Here are my personal highlights from this page: Search Engine Chart (requires Flash)…
Google Fun
Did you know that you can search number ranges with google? Before this morning, I didn’t. Say, for example you wanted to find out which years in the 1960s had a Summer Olympic Games. The way you tell google…
Prog - Google with PageRanks
Prog - PageRank Search Engine I was first told about this re-envisioning of Google’s results a couple of weeks ago on the SearchGuild forums. The premise of the website is that many SEOs like to know what PageRank particular…