Chrome’s shine getting lost in translation

Wednesday, February 8th, 2012

Google’s developers might be as smart as a Savile Row suit with a masters degree in quantum physics, but sometimes software makers can be too clever for their own good.

Take Google Chrome, for six years the browser of choice for your correspondent. It’s clean, fast and simple, yet increasingly it tries to second guess how I want to browse the web.

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Can you trust Google sponsored results?

Friday, February 18th, 2011

It’s a simple question, do you trust Google? My confusing answer is yes and no. Yes, I trust Google to find more relevant information in less time than other search engines. No, I don’t trust Google to filter out all the cons and scams.

Indeed, the level of trust that I associate with Google search declines dramatically when it comes to those results that appear at the top and side of the page, you know, the ones with the very light text saying ‘Ads’ next to them. I cannot recall ever clicking on a ’sponsored search result’ for a couple of very good reasons:

1. The whole point of using Google is to uncover information that has been deemed relevant courtesy of the hugely complex algorithm at the heart of the search engine’s success, and not which has been dropped onto the page simply because someone paid for it to be there.

2. The bad guys have, for as long as I can remember, been using such sponsored results to lure people to their sites and whatever nefarious activity lies within.

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Google Goggles for iPhone review: first-look

Wednesday, October 6th, 2010

Google has issued an update for its iPhone app that brings the company’s “Goggles” service to the handset. In addition to using text or voice commands to search Google, Goggles allows you to snap photos using the iPhone’s camera and use these snaps as the basis of your search.

To test the app, I performed a series of nine searches using my iPhone’s camera. You can see the photos, which are stashed in my search history, below:

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Google Instant vs Bing

Friday, September 10th, 2010

In case you haven’t heard the news, Google has radically changed the entire nature of web searching with its new real time and predictive Google Instant service. You can read about it here or see the introductory video or full launch video.

By far the best option is to see it in action yourself. You can do this simply by visiting the main Google.com home page (on google.co.uk you have to sign in to your Google account to switch Instant on) and then starting to type in the search box (assuming that you’re using one of the currently supported browsers: Chrome 5/6, Firefox 3, Safari 5 for Mac and Internet Explorer 8).

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The three reasons why Google interferes with search results

Friday, July 16th, 2010

Google prides itself on the company’s search algorithm and the fact that results are delivered without human intervention or bias.

But at a press conference I attended in London last night, Google fellow Amit Singhal was given a rough ride by a bolshy journalist who demanded to know why the company didn’t intervene more often when search results went awry.

The journalist cited the example of a search for “Martin Luther King”, which apparently returns a “racist” site high in the Google search results – largely because so many people have linked to the site to object to its content, but Google only sees a link as a link, good or bad, and has rewarded the site with perhaps underserved PageRank. He also raised the issue of the infamous chimpanzee “picture” of Michelle Obama, which remains high in the Google Image search rankings today.

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Anglian Windows gets more than it bargained for on Bing

Thursday, January 21st, 2010

By now I expect everyone is familiar with the idea of buying keywords in search engines. Identify a keyword you like, stake your claim to it, and you get a featured listing whenever someone puts that term in the search box.

On Bing, Microsoft’s very handy and super-relevant search engine, it would seem that Anglian Windows has bought a featured spot that pops up to tell you about the new Government scrappage scheme – not the one that applies to cars, the one that applies to double glazing.

Except that “Windows” has to be one of the most frequently searched terms on the web  -  I put it in almost every search because I’m always looking for Network error messages and their fixes, and if I leave “Windows” out then I get five times as many hits about Linux, which I don’t need to see. I am very unlikely to go from my “Windows” search to Anglian for some new double-glazing, so quite why Anglian’s ad appears when I type terms such as “windows trust failure vmware” into Bing is a mystery.

Thank God they only pay when people click on the ad, or the Government may be bailing out another company.

Google Picasa 3.5: First Look – Wow

Wednesday, September 30th, 2009

Hot on the heels of the latest Photoshop Elements 8 (click for full review) comes the new Picasa 3.5.

This adds a few  features across the board, such as a revamp of importing and various interface tweaks, but the clear focus of the new release is on in-depth tagging of images via a new side panel that offers three tabs for applying text-based tags, locational geodata and new face-based tags.

To be honest my heart sank when I heard this – what I’ve always liked about Picasa is that it keeps things simple and doesn’t treat managing your photos as a full-time job. Moreover I’d recently come away less than impressed with Photoshop Elements 8’s new face tagging not so much because the technology doesn’t work (it does though imperfectly), but rather because the gains aren’t worth the effort.

So how does the new Picasa 3.5 shape up? (more…)

9½ things Wolfram Alpha doesn’t know

Monday, May 18th, 2009

So, after months of anticipation, Wolfram Alpha is finally here. And I don’t know about you, but I’ve found it a big disappointment.

I mean, obviously it was never going to slay Google on its first day. But after watching Stephen Wolfram’s pre-launch screencast I did believe it was at least going to be a credible alternative information source, offering authoritative and structured answers in a way no traditional search engine could aspire to.

Sadly, now Wolfram Alpha’s here it turns out that it doesn’t bloody know anything.

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Welcome to the future of search

Monday, March 9th, 2009

A few months ago, I wrote in very vague terms about something wonderful that I had seen. Something incredible, groundbreaking, which tears up all the rules. But I couldn’t tell you anything more about it.

However, I did promise that I would tell you more just as soon as I could.

Well, today is the day. Ignore the bitching on ars technica. Instead, go to Wolfram’s blog – Wolfram|Alpha is coming - and then head to www.wolframalpha.com to sign up.

To quote the blog: “Fifty years ago, when computers were young, people assumed that… one would be able to ask a computer any factual question, and have it compute the answer.

“But it didn’t work out that way. Computers have been able to do many remarkable and unexpected things. But not that.”

We’re still two months away from launch, but when that day happens Wolfram promises us his new search engine will have the answer. So sign up and just wait patiently for a little longer.

Search suggestions: a window on the soul of the net

Friday, February 13th, 2009

You know the little search box in the top-right of the Firefox window? Then you doubtless know that as you type search terms into it, Firefox brings up suggestions as to what it thinks you might be looking for.

You’ve probably never given this feature much thought. I hadn’t, until yesterday when I was searching for some obscure technical fact and (perhaps because we’d just been talking about natural language recognition on this week’s podcast) I absent-mindedly started to phrase my search query as a question. I didn’t get far in – just one word in, in fact – before realising this was unnecessary.

But that one word was enough to give Firefox an idea as to what I might be searching for: immediately it brought up the impressively varied suggestions you see above. (more…)