What would we do without Google?
While I was searching for something to write about I found quite a few topics of interest and not surprisingly they revolved around Google in one way or another. From new enhancements to their famous search engine to new data that their Android platform is leading the charge of the smartphone boom. They are also making news over a little quibble they have with social giant Facebook.
It is easy to have a love affair over what Google has to offer; a whole damn lot to think and talk about. Heck Leo Laporte and his Twit network have a This Week in Google show.
First news is following the instant search they implemented in the Google engine they have now released instant preview. Ever since I saw Viewzi a few years back I wondered if a major search engine like Google will add this type of functionality. I really like that they have added it to the engine.
I personally am torn about what to open up to run my searches these days. I like Blekko, Dogpile, Google, Viewzi and am still trying to give Duck Duck Go a try. Each of them have a specific reason to use them I guess.
Blekko with their slashtag idea is a specific narrowed search and curated by actual humans that can decipher more intelligently what you would be looking for than Mr. Binary.
Dogpile is the opposite where I want to open up to even more results because it is a meta search engine that pulls results from a lot of the major search engines.
Viewzi is a way to search your pages in full preview prior to having to click away from your search results. It is just a much more visually appealing engine to use as well.
DuckDuckGo is a simple engine. It has some nice features like zero click information and privacy of your search results (basically it doesn’t track what you are searching for like Google does).
Every time there is new comScore data on the mobile phone market is released Android shows it plans to continue its meteoric rise. The new data can be found here Android is up another 6.5% and is now only 3.9% behind the iPhone. The real news out of the data is that smartphone sales have nearly doubled over the same period since last year. Watch out dumb phones the smarties are on a rapid rise.
In related news that broke in most publications on the 3rd, Europe is clutching to Symbian. If you missed that news: Symbian gets a 22 million Euro boost and the Symbian blog. I love how it says in there that Symbian is a platform technology that is vital to the growth of Euro-centric mobile software development.
Another piece of Google news that Michael Arrington of Techrunch has called a slapfest between Google and Facebook. I will share this article from search engine land with you because it wraps up the back and forth and points out a discrepancy over Facebook’s said exporting policy. Pretty amusing petty and oh-so-fun to talk about stuff.
Lastly on an even more oh-so-fun to talk about Google related stuff was the invasion of Costa Rica by Nicaragua and then blamed Google. Like Nicaragua didn’t know what the border was and did a search on Google maps to confirm or disprove which land was actually theirs. More like they wanted some Costa Rican land and after doing a search had an A-ha we can blame this on an American company moment. “Not our fault, we just took the land that Google provided for us.” sigh… really?
So what would we do without Google? Well at least for this week+; Apple wouldn’t have a real competitor for best smartphone, Facebook would continue on its merry way of pillaging information unnoticed, Nicaragua would have to declare war to invade and claim land they wish was theirs, and search would probably be just fine with all the great alternatives out there.
