The Thoughtful Geek

from the Google Blog:

Starting today, we’re deploying a new technology that can better understand associations and concepts related to your search, and one of its first applications lets us offer you even more useful related searches (the terms found at the bottom, and sometimes at the top, of the search results page).

When you do a search on Google, each result we give you starts with a dark blue title and is followed by a few lines of text (what we call a “snippet”), which together give you an idea of what each page is about. To give more context, the snippet shows how the words of your query appear on the page by highlighting them in bold.

When you enter a longer query, with more than three words, regular-length snippets may not give you enough information and context. In these situations, we now increase the number of lines in the snippet to provide more information and show more of the words you typed in the context of the page. Below are a couple of examples.

via Techcrunch:

Notice that title tag for my Twitter profile page?

It reads “Robin Wauters (robinwauters) on Twitter” where it used to say “Twitter / robinwauters”. For the TechCrunch Twitter account, it used to read “Twitter / TechCrunch” (only the username) instead of now “Michael Arrington (TechCrunch) on Twitter” (full name + username).

Minor tweak, you say? Mundane change? Perhaps, but with an undeniably big impact on how high Twitter pages will be ranked in search engines from now on.

via TechCrunch:

The iPhone now accounts for 50 percent of mobile Web traffic from smartphones in the U.S., according to an AdMob Mobile Metrics report released this morning. Over the past six months, the iPhone has taken share from Blackberry and Windows Mobile. In August 2008, the iPhone made up only 10 percent of mobile Web traffic from smartphones. During the same time, Blackberry’s share has gone from 32 percent to 21 percent (with the Curve and the Pearl coming in stronger than the Storm), while Windows Mobile has taken an even bigger hit, declining from 30 percent to 13 percent. Palm is also down to 7 percent from 19 percent six months ago.

via Gizmodo:

Leaks suggest that Intel will be dropping a new single-core Z-series Atom proc that will be the first of the family to reach 2GHz.

from jkOnTheRun:

A small but welcome feature should be in the Labs section if you use Google’s Gmail service. It’s called “Undo Send”, or as I like to call it: the “Uh-Oh” function. Once enabled, you’ll have a five-second window to stop a message from leaving after you hit the Send button. I tested it late last night between my two Gmail accounts and it worked flawlessly.

From Gizmodo:

Our beloved Eye-Fis (SD cards that add Wi-Fi to any digital camera) have finally gotten the bump from their 2GB standard. Now Eye-Fi cards hold 4GB of photos and upload videos to YouTube/Flickr.

4GB Explore Video ($100)
automatically geotags photos and videos; also offers hotspot access at more than 10,000+ Wi-Fi locations

4GB Share Video ($80)
sends photo/video to the Web and your home computer

Here it is:

As I noted earlier on Monday, Microsoft plans to start internal testing later this week of Kumo, the rebranded version of Live Search. Now I have a screenshot to share.

Also, here’s the text of an e-mail that search executive Satya Nadella just sent to his staff. Keep in mind, even though he talks about checking out the site, his e-mail is to Microsoft staff with access to it. Us outsiders will have to chew on the screenshot (see below). From this screenshot (and two others I have seen), it appears the biggest change in Kumo is the way that it shows in the first results the query narrowed by a couple of different things the searcher might be looking for.[via Cnet]

These are my links for March 2nd:

• Icons: Icon Grabber Converts Favicons to Image Files – Web application Icon Grabber takes a Favicon, the little icon in the address bar, and saves it to PNG, GIF or JPG format from any web site.
• Kindle 2 Review: Sheeeyah, More Like Kindle 1.5 – After spending a week with Amazon's $360 Kindle 2, I'd like to say we were wrong about it not being a big step forward, but for better or worse, it's the same Kindle as before.

  The annals of gadgetry are littered with revisions that just aren't meaningful, like the 3rd Gen iPod with its solid-state buttons, or the slimmer, lighter but substantially unchanged PSP-2000. But after waiting a year and change for Amazon to get serious about its Kindle platform—serious enough to keep the thing in stock—I was surprised at how banal the modifications were. Why didn't they just lower the price of the $400 original to something like $300 or $250, and build more?

• Twitter CEO Evan Williams Interviewed on Charlie Rose [Video] – Twitter CEO Evan Williams let us know last week that he was making an appearance on Charlie Rose, and today, the video is online.

  In the interview, which lasts about 20 minutes, Williams explains the Twitter phenomenon, some of the applications the service has spawned, and also offers some of the reasons he thinks the company has been so successful. Check it out below:

Finally the new Mac Desktops have arrived.

As expected, Apple announced long-overdue and, in certain places, eagerly-awaited refreshes of its Mac desktop PCs, including the Mac mini, iMac, and Mac Pro. There are two separate announcements–and no special event, as often happens with Apple–one for the consumer Macs, and one for the Mac Pro (which is still a luxury item and not worth discussing).

Here’s the consumer Mac announcement:

Apple today announced updates to its iMac® and Mac® mini desktop lines, including a 24-inch iMac that is priced more affordably than ever before and a Mac mini with powerful new integrated graphics. For the same $1,499 price as the previous generation 20-inch iMac, the new 24-inch iMac delivers a 30 percent larger display, twice the memory and twice the storage. [via the SuperSite for Windows]

Check out these really cool Lego creations.

Link

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