By Erik Small -

If you’ve been watching the tech news this week, Google announced it will begin including real-time searches into it’s SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). This will be interesting to watch whether this makes the searches more relevant — or just clutters the page with more ’stuff’.

Here’s a screenshot for a search on ‘computers’, and highlighted in red real-time search results:

By admin -

Microsoft is apparently shrugging off the big Chrome OS announcement from last week, which seems a bit silly to me. Considering Google is very big on FREE, a school of which Microsoft does attend – and with years of frustrated MS OS users, I would say that a Google offering will be a very welcome option. Especially being a Linux base – so hey, maybe we won’t need some ungainly antivirus/firewall suite bogging down our systems.. mmm, to dream. Anyway – here’s some more reason MS ought to worry -

Googles got a not-so-secret weapon in its bid to convert the world to applications such as Gmail, Google Docs, Google Talk, Google Sites and, soon, Googles Chrome operating system: the 17 million college students on more than 4,000 campuses across the country.

For more than two years, Google has approached colleges and universities with a near-unbeatable offer: provide unlimited hosted e-mail and other applications, all branded by the institution and delivered free of charge.

via Googles 17 Million Built-in Chrome OS Users GOOG.

By boo -

just how secure.. is your security?

I just figured I’d share with the group some recent data and security breach news stories from the last few days…does it ever end?

• Snooping through the Power Socket (BBC)
• Elance hit by Security Breach (TechCrunch)
• Someone Call Security (Twitter)
• Questions on Cloud Security (Network World)

By pete -

We at FTPlanet have some preferred means of getting the info we need. RSS is clearly a big one, and how to manage those RSS feeds? We use Google Reader. Like many Google products, this one is FANTASTIC – and always improving. Today, even more features have been released to turn this into a beast of a social networking tool. You can now “like” items, and sharing is how busted wide open to anyone. Wonder if Facebook is starting to sweat? Check out the updates from Google Reader’s blog..

When we first started improving our sharing features, our goal was to make sharing as simple and flexible as the rest of Reader. Today, we’re pleased to announce that we’ve made four improvements to give you more sharing control and help you easily find other people’s publicly shared items within Reader.

Find and follow other people

Instead of sharing your items with others and hoping they reciprocate, you can now find people with public shared items and subscribe to their shared items with one click. Use our new people search feature (powered by Google profiles) to look for people who have public shared items. You can browse by name, location, or topic, and start following new people — all from inside Reader… continued at Official Google Reader Blog: Following, liking and people searching.

By c-emmons -

Remember when Google stated that they would be offering a service to let people manage their files online called GDrive?  This has been rumored for years.   Google, however, can’t seem to first tackle the project of giving consumers easy and cheap data backup.  It would be a great idea to get the ball rolling on this project, leading players in the online backup field include Symantec who has more than 8 million customers.  These services are fairly easy to use and not too expensive either. Finding a way for Google to beat that might be what is taking so long but this is a market that is in dire need of a creative alternative since it seems like the technology is not keeping up with the growing demand.  Today, many more average people and not just businesses are dealing with larger files that need to be modified often.  The problem is that backing these files up online currently seems to be a chore.  Nobody knows what the future holds in this  industry but it could use the help of a smart, savvy, and creative vessel like Google.

By Erik Small -

I have to admit it was just a few days ago that I heard about a new search product that some speculate it could rival Google.

Well, here it is folks — it just launched today.

Wolfram Alpha is the name of the service and the internet search world is talking about it.

Check it out for yourself:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/

I’m already reading about how Wolfram Alpha is hitting only a ’niche’. In their own words, this is the goal of the service:

“Wolfram|Alpha’s long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.”

“As of now, Wolfram|Alpha contains 10+ trillion of pieces of data, 50,000+ types of algorithms and models, and linguistic capabilities for 1000+ domains.”

By pete -

LifeHacker gives a nice rundown of the new Google Search Options:

Google’s honchos unveiled the new “Search Options” at a Searchology event, one that coincides with the two year anniversary of the Universal Search unveiling that put brief looks at images, news, and other Google-powered search results on the main page. The new Search Options, along with richer “snippets” underneath results that can show reviews and specially-formatted information, should start showing up for most users immediately, but further down the line are more interesting experiments.

Handy Youtube vid from Google, explaining the new features:

Along with these new options comes talk of Google Squared – which will appear in Google Labs this month. Google’s VP of Search Products notes:

Unlike a normal search engine, Google Squared doesn’t find webpages about your topic – instead, it automatically fetches and organizes facts from across the Internet. We’ll be opening it up to users later this month on Google Labs.

Google Squared sure sounds like a another blow to the coming release of WolframAlpha. Google’s first strike on that was their Public Data in Search Results.

More Search Options and other updates from our Searchology event [Official Google Blog]