Google launches real-time search
Google announced Monday the fruits of its earlier deal with Twitter, showing off how it has decided to present real-time Internet content within search results.
Amit Singhal, Google fellow, introduced the real-time section during an event at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. “We are here today to announce Google real-time search,” Singhal said, calling it “Google relevance technology meets the real-time Web.”
Twitter search will show the latest matches for a particular search term, but Google wants to do more than sort results by time. “Relevance is the foundation of this product,” Singhal said. “It’s relevance, relevance, relevance.”
Google will build a section called “latest results” into the regular Google search results page that automatically refreshes Internet content from sources like Twitter. Singhal showed off how a search for “Obama” would bring up tweets, Web pages, and other Internet content related to the president as it was generated. At the Web 2.0 conference in October, Google struck a deal with Twitter to get access to the service’s “firehose” of tweets.
From CNET.com
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Acer: We’ll have the first Chrome OS Netbook
The world’s second-largest PC maker has designs on being the first to offer a Chrome OS Netbook.
Acer Chairman J.T. Wang said in an interview with Digitimes that he’s “confident” his company will be first out of the gate with Google’s open-source operating system pre-installed.
The earliest it would be available is mid-2010, according to Digitimes’ unnamed sources.
Acer was just one of several hardware makers previously announced to be working with Google on implementing Chrome OS, along with Asus, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, and Toshiba. Dell, which hasn’t committed to it fully yet, has released an experimental version of Chrome OS based on the source code that will work on the Dell Mini 10v Netbook, though it’s not an official product.
Though Wang didn’t offer details or specifications for Acer’s Chrome OS Netbook, the guys behind Chrome OS have already let on what they’re expecting.
At the OS’s first public demonstration last month, Google said its vision includes slightly larger keyboards and screens than what’s currently available, x86 or ARM processors, solid-state drives, and 802.11(n) Wi-Fi chips.
Bing Maps Beta: Very cool, but limited
SAN FRANCISCO–Microsoft’s Bing took a major step forward Wednesday in adding rich mapping and image data to its search engine, but until it assembles more data, pretty pictures aren’t enough to beat the Google Maps juggernaut.
Bing Maps Beta was released during a presentation at Microsoft’s offices here. It’s a Silverlight-based application that runs inside Bing Maps and adds Microsoft’s version of Google Street View–called Streetside–to Bing Maps, as well as enhanced “bird’s eye” images that let you swoop over cities.
I spent some quality time Wednesday afternoon with the new Bing Maps Beta, zooming through the streets of San Francisco and New York and testing out various searches. The best part about Bing Maps Beta–by far–are the rich transitions between high-resolution street-level or bird’s-eye view photos as you move around a city, making it feel like you’re actually driving down the road.
Unfortunately, that’s also the worst part; you’ll have to download Microsoft Silverlight to make the rich imagery come alive (although you can still use Bing Maps without it), and 10 minutes of poking around with the application put a noticeable drain on system resources. If I left the window open, but didn’t do anything in Bing Maps, my activity monitor dropped back to a moderate pace, only to max out again once I started playing with the Streetside feature or scrolling around a map.
But what Microsoft has assembled is impressive. The images are high-quality, and the location fixes are quite precise. The bird’s-eye views have been improved with more perspective on roads hidden by buildings and name prominent buildings right on the map.
Scrolling around a city in bird’s-eye view also allows you to view geotagged picture galleries created with Microsoft Photosynth. Click the little blue Streetside man (Google’s little Street View man is orange) to choose between Streetside or Photosynth views, and if you click on a green icon in a given location, you are presented with photo galleries shot of the location. You can check out exhibits in museums such as New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, for example, zooming into the building from the bird’s-eye view.
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