Verecom Web Design Blog

Twitter, a free social network and Microblogging service, has recently added a new search functionality, which the market considers as Google Killer. Google was proposed to acquire rival Twitter, however, CEO Eric Schmidt said there will not be any acquisitions happening in the near future, partly because the rival is too expensive.

Googles new aroused competitor Twitter has become mainstream since last year. Its development speed has far exceeded the response from traditional media. After purchasing Summize search engine last summer, Twitter has gradually become a search engine that contains all users’ profiles.

Apparently, Twitter user’s amount has reached 6 million. According to IT industry, it is estimated that the number of users of Google and Yahoo! are 100 times and 90 times of Twitter respectively. Facebook, founded the same time as Twitter, also has 50 times more users in the network. Although Twitter was said to be only popular within IT industry and media industry, but analyst is optimistic that its users will increase up to 600 million. Last year it was said that Facebook intended to acquire the company with 500 million, but was rejected by Twitter.

According to news report, Google, although has been the leader in search engine industry, has been criticised being too big and too unwieldy. Google can deliver large amount of search result, but users have to attempt the results by clicking in the sequence, and 99% is considered as Spam information.

The new search service launched by Twitter is said to provide more relevant data. By clicking the newly added “Trends” button, 10 most popular results will be displayed in the drop down list, where users could directly select the result. Twitter Community is considered to be the information selected by professional team, users could also choose to establish a profession level community network with the people of the same interest, and then can filter and evaluate websites, logs, videos etc. at any time, without the need to click any links.

Technology blog “TechCrunch” founder Michael Arrington has given it a high rating, saying that Twitter is not only a Microblogging service, but also more likely to turn into a search engine, as a supplement to Google.

Recently British technology news website TechRadar proposed that if Google wants to become more powerful, they have to start acquire six companies including Twitter. Google CEO Eric Schmidt said to the American media on the 6th April, ‘Google is unlikely to buy anything in the near future, partly because the Twitter’s price is too high at present. Eric Schmidt also said “Google still has a lot of funds, but the bad news is we are still looking for the most ideal acquisition and model”.

Edited By Dan Li

Google launched a new search service, which can provide you the relevant search results in accordance with the place where you access the internet.

Before, the user must type the exact location, such as: coffee shop Sydney in the Google search field in order to find out the services or products they needs in right location. From this week, the local search result has become the default function for Google search; regardless of the user whether or not type specific location in the search field.

Google Software Development Engineer Jim Muller and Jenn Taylor said in their blog: we want to do everything we can to provide the easiest way of keyword search, so first we have introduced a map displayed for search results; now with further development, users can also find the desired local information without type the location in the search field. When a users search through Google, we can know the user’ locations, and provide users the closest services.

Google and other Web service providers use the Google users’ IP address to determine their locations. Google also can determine mobile device user’s location through triangulation method from the location of 3 different bases.

Before this, Google used to provide different search results for the mobile device user. For example, the first Google search result for “coffee” by using of iPhone’s Safari mobile browser is “Wikipedia for coffee”, and then following 3 results of local coffee shops. If user type same keyword on Google through the desktop’s Firefox browser, the results will be different, which there are Wikipedia, Starbucks, and CoffeeGeek, followed by the three Google News about coffee, then the local coffee shop.

Google also provides the user with function to change their locations of search result, so that tourists can plan in advance and know the tourism related issues in the particular location.

Of course, through the local search function, this is opportunity for Google to increase Internet advertising revenue, because local store can use this service to increase its local search rank, hence increase their exposure.

Edited By Henry Lu

Recently American Internet search engine giant Google will expand its territory to phone market. They will provide single number service to home phone, office phone, and cell phone. And it can turn the voice messages into e-mail texts.

Google Voice is able to turn voice messages to Email or SMS, and send the texts to the inbox in users computers or mobiles.

In the presentation video which is posted in Google office blog, it declared that : when you receive voice messages, Google Voice will automatically reverse them into texts and let you read the content of this voice message.”

However, the presentation video also pointed out that the texts are rewritten through “fully automatic” speech recognition technology, so it “may contain some errors”.

At this moment, this service is only provided to the current users of GrandCentral, the telephone company run by Google. Google, whose headquarter is located in Mountain View California acquired Grandcentral on July 2007. However, Google also said that in the next few weeks, company will start to provide free services for new users to use Google Voice.

Edited By Vicky Yin

When Google just released their own web browser, the Google Chrome, it received great attention and high expectation from the public and the download rate used to break record. However, through time goes by, other browsers such as Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer and Opera have renewed their software quickly,

this made Google Chrome lose its radiance gradually, Fortunately, Google official blog has announced that recently, they had provided new Google Chrome trial version for web users to download in order to retrieve their reputation.

According to the information provided by Google official site, the best thing for new Google Chrome version is its speed has been increased greatly: compare the speed of new version with the old through V8 benchmark from Google itself, the operation speed of the new version increased 25%; if using Sunspider benchemark to make the comparison, the speed has increased 35% than the old version. The more important fact is that operation speed of new version seems improved nearly one time comparing with the former trial software.

The only one flaw of Google Chrome is, not like Firefox, Opera and Safari which support multi platforms, currently it only support Microsoft Windows Vista or XP SP2+ system. Wish Google Chrome development team won’t let Mac and Linux users wait for to long…

Edited By Vicky Yin

When Yahoo celebrates its 5th anniversary of the birthday, ComScore give Yahoo a gift, that is, the report of rising share of Yahoo search engine.

According to ComScore report, one month later from February 2008, Yahoo search engine market share increased 0.5 percent and reached 21 percent in US.

Not only Yahoo, Microsoft Live search engine share also increased 2.0 percent, and reached 8.5 percent in US market. The same time, Google search engine market share decreased 0.5 percent, and its current market share is 63 percent.

In fact, from December 2008 to January 2009, the 3 mainstream search engines have fairly good growth, but Yahoo and Microsoft’s growth rate was even better. Their search volume growths are 9% and 8%, which are higher than the average growth value 7 percent. And in the United States, the total search volume increased to 135 billion times from 125 billion times.

Edited By Henry Lu