Google and Bing Consider a New Search Engine Just for Children
Have you ever stood by a child struggling to get a search going on Google, and itched to tell him what obvious search keywords he was missing, or how he needed to understand the psychology of search differently? Most adults don’t rush to help the children out right away; the only way to learn the mind of a search engine, to learn the way it uses words, is through repeated trial and error. As far as making search engines child-friendly goes, most search engines usually go no farther than to protect them from unsavory content. It may be time for the major search engines to think of the child constituency differently. Children are using the Internet for all kinds of learning, and homework; and they need search engines to be tailored to their level of maturity. The search engines are only just beginning to grasp this; and their programmers are studying usability by children.The problem is, search engines were basically always designed for the adult mind; while they could have seen it coming, the engineers just always assumed from the start that the Internet was for serious pursuits such as research, and that frame of mind has persisted. Children for instance, do not read as effortlessly as adults do. Search engines aimed at children could conceivably make better use of pictures or videos. Children could even use an automated help system with pre-recorded content when they come up against a wall. Google is today considering designing a search engine just for children; and they have a deeper reason to do this then just being nice. They consider it possible that children would just have the same problems that adults have, only amplified. By studying the way children work on Google, adult weaknesses could become easier to notice. Studying children can provide deeper insights into the exact ways in which adults go wrong.
Google has had a Related Searches feature for about two years now. Looking up a phrase like ‘the jungle’on Google could give a child the regular results, but also possible related suggestions, like videos on YouTube, information on the various national parks in the US, and some information about species extinction in the Amazon. Children don’t type really well, and tend to look closely at the keyboard as they go along. The part of the screen closest to the keyboard, at the bottom, is therefore important screen real estate for the search engines. Bing has found a special niche with children. The search engine has especially leaned towards images far more than the others, and it attracts children.
Not to be outdone, Google has had the Wonder Wheel feature turned on for a few months now. You get to it when you press on ‘Show Options’ when you get your search results. A wheel pops up, with spokes pointing you in different desired directions. Search engines don’t understand what exactly you’re asking; they find it hard enough as it is to understand what words you want. Children seem to want to use natural language when dealing with searches. And search engines want to be able to make some sense of natural language questions. The most promising development here so far has to be the Voice Search feature available on the iPhone and Android smartphone operating system. Of course those were developed with business users in mind;children would think it was pretty cool too.
If Facebook were to Pay you to Pick a Lower Privacy Setting, Would you Bite?
Getting anything done on the Internet is all about advertising. As resentful as people are that the advertising that comes at them is constant, is privacy-robbing and obtrusive, it does bankroll the services out there that we use. Today, premier services cost you money; but what if you were given a choice to either pay, or give them enough personal information to allow them to target relevant advertising at you? The advertisers would pay the website for the ability to target advertising at you, because they would have a better chance at making a sale. In the future, privacy will no longer just be a simple box you can casually leave checked by default. It will be something that will end up either saving you money, or costing you. If you choose to have a lot of privacy, the website may well ask you for a $5 subscription. Your privacy or the lack of it, could be your credit card; and your privacy could mean different things, depending on what part of the Internet you were visiting.Social networks always had a hard time trying to protect your privacy while encouraging you to share as much with your online friends at the same time, to make for a more enjoyable social networking experience all around. Protecting your privacy has become more difficult now ever since real-time search entered the Facebook equation.Facebook has tried every kind of balance between privacy and openness, and still doesn’t seem to be quite comfortable.
The policy adopted by Tumblr, Twitter and Yelp over privacy when you are on these networks ask that you only put out anything on the services that you don’t mind having everyone hear about. Location-based apps like Foursquare and Loopt are services that have the luxury of not really needing a formal privacy policy. If you are on these, you’re supposed to want to share freely. Privacy is the currency these services use too; although there is really no need for it. You only get to look into others’ lives, as far as you let them into yours. And everyone is supposed to share freely. Indeed, Foursquare is set to become the Twitter of this year. Twitter got people addicted to sharing the banalities of their everyday lives. Foursquare gets people addicted sharing with everyone the places they’re going to all the time.
The only real guarantee to privacy is not in any policy anymore; it is about self-restraint in curiosity over other people’s private lives. You only need to share anything if you wish to look into other people’s lives yourself. But when the entire point of a service is the fun of giving up any semblance of privacy, why have a privacy policy at all? If it helps everyone save money?
When people in the 90s sat down for the first time to sign up to their first e-mail account, they would typically take the password part of the form either very seriously or completely casually. The very serious would dream up an impossible mish-mash of numbers and letters to keep safe from spies. The more regular types among us would treat the password as a joke – who would it even occur to, to want to hack into our worthless accounts? Why not pick 12345, we would wonder. As people got more and more inured to the dangers of poor security on the Internet, websites and e-mail services began to require that people used six characters at least, with at least one number. So now, Internet security has been raised immeasurably to the use of abc123.
A couple of months ago, a company called RockYou, that makes software for the social networking sites, made a mistake and allowed a hacker to copy and publish their entire database of tens of millions of passwords. It wasn’t online for very long before it was taken down, but lots of people interested in computer security, managed to download a copy. No one has ever had this kind of window into the password habits that people have. You have to be in law enforcement to have access to something like that. As for insight, students and computer antivirus experts pored over the lists – and they quickly found that of all those millions, one in 100 just used 123456 as password, and an equal number did 12345. Lots of people used their girlfriend’s first name, or a popular car model name. There was a collection of 5000 very common passwords that were used by one in five.
All that a hacker would need then is, an automated program that can try the 5000 passwords one by one, until something hits. If making more than three wrong guesses within three minutes locks them out of an account, they’ll have the program just make no more than two attempts at a time, and come back after three minutes. It’s not like they don’t have millions of accounts to try to break into while they’re waiting. People don’t really need to make the best and strongest passwords out there to stay safe; they only need to be somewhat better than people who choose elementary passwords. They only need to stay one step ahead of the simpletons. When there are so many of them to be caught, why would any hacker want to waste his time guessing a slightly more difficult password?
Chrome is Finally Here for the Mac OS, and for Linux
Chrome is Finally Here for the Mac OS, and for Linux. Even if in Beta
Google’s Chrome has delivered what has been promised for months – versions that will run on the Linux and Mac OS. From the looks of it, the Beta Chrome on the Mac is going to be a serious hit, even if it is a few features short. One of the reasons Chrome comes a little lighter than usual is that Google really wanted to not have Mac users enter the new year still waiting, and preparing all the features for Snow Leopard would have taken longer. To begin with one of the most anticipated features on Chrome – the inbuilt App Mode, will be unavailable. Fluid, for example, a program that works on WebKit browsers, will be able to work on Chrome with no modifications; but this will only happen, once the App Mode is enabled.Google Gears and the bookmark synchronizing feature Sync for Mac, are all features that will have to wait a while too. And Oh!, extensions are not fully supported yet either. But let’s look as the cup half-full now. The Bookmark Manager, a feature that everyone missed when Chrome first came to the Mac last month, has just been enabled – on version 4.0.295.0.Google calls it “rudimentary” at this stage, but it seems quite okay. Recognition of input from multi-touch screens and the Mighty Mouse, that was missing a month ago, is back with a bang. Hold down Command, and swipe on the trackpad with three fingers, and you have a new tab. Do the same and swipe left, and you should have a copy of your last tab, and so on.
The entire Chrome experience is so sharp, fast and fuss-free that they can’t stop pointing it out. But Chrome’s speed is impressive only when you compare it with Firefox; compared to Safari, Chrome can seem just a touch slower. Installing updates is pain-free and invisible too. The address bar on Chrome Google calls an Omnibox (perhaps a play on Omnibus). It is an address bar and a Google search box all in one. If you want to change your default search engine, there is no need to go to preferences either. Users begin to type in the name of the alternate search engine and press the tab button, and auto-complete will do the rest for you. Perhaps Chrome doesn’t have Safari’s glossy and colorful user interface; but it could do some things better for you. If you would give it a chance.
Crowdsourcing – Outsourcing to the Cloud
Dubai was reported to be in financial trouble recently; Iceland is practically in hock, and Greece is waiting in line. In all the countries around the world that have fallen to the financial meltdown, getting a regular job at a factory or at a newspaper office, or selling investments, is the dream that is best abandoned at this point. But people in poor countries still can get enough to get by on, if they have a computer connection at home, and don’t mind doing a little online grunt work. It goes by a more printable name, called Crowdsourcing. This is where you take company tasks that you would normally delegate to some tread- upon factotum at your office, and spread the cheer among a hundred unseen factotum across the world. And you would spend pennies on them for an hour of their time.Amazon.com ‘s Mechanical Turk and Live Work websites have been picking up freelance efforts in this way from all around the world for years now. But in the years it’s been around, it’s only lived on the fringes of the outsourcing business. For the last three years, the Californian start up CrowdFlower has really got into this business, to try to make it a regular part of the average major corporation’s outsourcing plan. CrowdFlower allows businesses to use Mechanical Turk and Live Work and allows them to verify the credentials of the online workers they list too;, and it will keep an eye on quality control in addition, in a way that ordinary freelance classifieds like Amazon’s ventures could never do.
This is quite a fascinating way in which to tap human resources. And it is reminiscent of the way cloud computing works too – with the cloud, you are supposed to not actually have any computing resources yourself; nor are you supposed to have resources earmarked for you at a remote location. You’re just supposed to trust that in all the pooled resources, somewhere, will be something for you at the right time. And it still always turns out to work exactly as if you had your own dedicated arrangements. Crowd Flower allows you to switch on or off an entire global army of qualified labor, and leave it to the managing companies to pick up the loose ends. You could hire your own full-time gopher to do your work, and micromanage and pay that person all the time, or you could farm the work out to a dozen people for a fraction of the pay. You get your results in a fraction of the time too. It isn’t just the small Internet businesses trying to make a quick buck that step into crowd sourcing either. Corporations like Microsoft and Oracle have discovered this as a way of simplifying their little jobs too.
At the opposite end of the crowd sourcing spectrum is the way companies try to harness creativity in the crowd. The French company Eyeka does marketing, or consumer engagement, as it is called, in this way. Companies and brands contact Eyeka to have innovative viral advertising campaigns dreamt up for them. Eyeka’s thousands of members pick up assignments they like and create videos or pictures for the project. If they get picked, they get the job. If it happens to be any good, some young kid out there who’s been putting out videos on his personal YouTube clone for free, suddenly gets a couple of hundred thousand dollars for his trouble. From pennies an hour to hundreds of thousands of dollars, crowdsourcing seems to be finding its niche.
How many Viewers do Video Streaming YouTube Clone Sites actually Get?
YouTube is the number one video streaming site out there; and Nielsen estimates that they served 6 billion videos in December. And Hulu at number two, served about a tenth that number. But what if you tried a different polling firm, one like comScore? This company believes that Hulu is at the number two position too; but according to them, Hulu served almost a billion videos last month. Anyone with a little YouTube clone site will be humbled by every number mentioned here; but it makes you wonder still; do these numbers make any sense if they can be so far apart when measured by two different polltakers?Hulu has always been protesting against the way these polls are taken. It isn’t clear whether one Hulu video that runs for an hour, should count just the same as a YouTube video that runs for just three minutes. After all, YouTube mainly streams short files that are user-uploaded, while Hulu only does regular broadcast content and movies – things that last much, much longer. Should only the main program material be counted, or should streaming advertisements count too? What about videos that are watched off-site, on an embedded player elsewhere? Poorly defined standards of measurements like this, can often cause these discrepancies.
Essentially, these numbers are so impressive when reported by comScore, because they include every streamed advertisement run with a program. Nielsen does not include the advertisements. But there is one thing you can trust; both these survey companies do place YouTube and Hulu at the correct relative places: at number one, and number two. Perhaps comScore does this intentionally; if Hulu’s numbers look much more impressive when reported by comScore, they will love how they can get better advertising rates from their partners. It is somewhat possible, that all YouTube clone sites would choose to be rated by comScore and not Nielsen. It makes them look much bigger to the advertiser.
Google Reader Learns an Intriguing New Trick
Google Reader just saw an intriguing update added to its bag of tricks recently. Let’s say, that you visit parts of a website that don’t advertise an RSS feed ability. What would happen if you still insisted on signing up for one? Up until now, you would just have found an error message from Google Reader about how you were mistaken in your impression that the page featured an RSS feed. The updated Google Reader though, will summarily create a custom feed for the page that you are interested in, and send you updates on it, whenever it crawls through. You’ll get a little notification of changes made to the pages you chose. If you happen to have a gossip page you have an eye on, or the latest prices on a product, Google Reader should track it for you. You can actually use any competing feed reader that you like, to access the service too. All you need to do is click on the Show Details link on the new feed. There are other services that allow something of this nature too, Change Detection , being one such example. And It won’t just give you a little snippet of the page in question either, like Google Reader does;there are plenty of details on offer, and an RSS feed of them too.
Why does Chrome give you an AdSense Blocking Add-on?
Google certainly believes that a rising tide lifts all boats up -Google follows an explicit policy of transparency and open industry standards to this end. However, Google’s upstanding principles may be getting it in trouble. Users who browse through Google’s own browser, Chrome, will soon be able to turn off ads: the very source that keeps the entire company afloat. This might seem like professional suicide – or it might seem like Google is showing remarkable restraint, and is sharing its good fortune around. Take for example, the new Extensions scheme in Chrome – their version of Firefox’s Add-ons. Firefox has ad-blocking add-ons, that are widely popular – like Add block Plus. This plug-in,blocks Google-supplied AdSense ads. Independent programmers have been working together on a rudimentary ad-blocker for Chrome too. And Chrome doesn’t seem to be trying remove it from its add-ons page.The Google browser has nearly fifty million users; and that is only a fraction of all Google users on the Internet the world over. Google loses only a small portion of its potential Chrome advertising income, if people download an ad-blocking application. Firefox today has 7 million installations of its ad blocking software. It is not really that likely that ad-blocking will get so popular, that the Internet ad-serving industry should just go bankrupt. Google’s sentiment is that to live in fear of being shut out of its market, is kind of a primitive; to embrace the whole dynamic of the market, is more appropriate of a responsible Internet citizen. Perhaps this will foster creativity, and make people put up more creative, and watchable advertising.
Google is too Big for the Internet
An important part of the success formula at Google involves finding ever larger areas to record, and finding ever deeper access to websites, to index. But the itinerant Google indexer, whichever direction it heads, often these days, finds itself is timed by foreign government regulation. The biggest news in this area that we’ve seen recently, comes from the China-Google conflict. China wants all search engines operating within the country, to not display any results about the 1989 Tiananmen Square conflict or Tibet. Google did used to go along; but this kind of cooperation can’t be taken for granted anymore, now that China has been found out hacking into Google and causing actual damage.Another kind of wall that keeps Google out is one of the copyright variety. Google’s venture, to try to digitize every university library in the world, has been vigorously opposed by authors and publishers. Google has had to work out an understanding with the publishers. It’s only the orphaned old works that Google has been left alone on. But if the barriers keep Google out of some places, and deprived it of ever more material to index, Google does wonder, if it can foster the creation of new content, just to be able to index it.
Large parts of the world remain alienated from the Internet because of poverty and a lack of education; Google is holding a Wikipedia contest in Tanzania to get locals to translate the free online encyclopedia into their native Swahili. They are giving out laptops and networking equipment to the winners; so far, there have been about 900 articles translated. Google even believes that its search algorithms have reached an important stage in their evolution, and that the company needs to find a new direction – somewhere other than search algorithm tweaking, in which to grow. But even translating the Wikipedia is not problem-free. The original authors of the articles they translate, are now coming out to sue for copyright infringement.
Is Facebook Bigger than even Google?
We’ve often heard, that Google and Facebook are seen to be in direct competition. Unless the “direct competition” spoken of refers to the mindspace occupied by the companies, people often wonder how a search company can be in competition with a social media company. But if you think about it, this isn’t really difficult to conceive of.
facebook
It would be difficult for the provider of any online information or service, to top a search engine in user traffic: search engines are our first port of call when we open a browser. For the first time though, social networking sites are pulling in more visitors, then even the search engines. Once an Internet portal has an irresistible product, it brings power that allows it to change the very way the Internet is run. For instance, YouTube has achieved a certain critical mass of videos on such a variety of subjects, and that there are a good number of young people who feel no need to search on Google to read about anything. They just search on YouTube, for a video on the subject they are interested in. In fact, YouTube is now the second largest search engine after Google.
So what happens if the social media sites become so enormously popular, that even search begins to take second place? To begin with, people would be subscribing to updates on Twitter and Facebook, more than RSS ever succeeded in getting us to do. Perhaps the very concept of the browser would be threatened. And just as free access to all the newspapers of the world is driving publishers of physical books and papers to bankruptcy, and throwing up protests of how quality in publishing will suffer, free access to information on people’s Facebook and Twitter feeds, would perhaps send up another wave of protests that there will be no way of determining quality, if people begin to look directly to sharing with Internet friends, as a way to gain basic knowledge. Such a fundamental game changer, would shake up the established business plan that Google controls now.
Chrome Extensions are Finally Here
When Google’s Chrome first came around, Firefox’s fans looked at this new open source attempt with suspicion. Certainly it was anti-Microsoft, and compared to the bloated ponderousness of Firefox, it was sharp, light on its feet and stable. A little on the defensive, they claimed that it was no surprise that Chrome was this fast: it had no add-ons the way Firefox did, to weigh it down. Well, Google has made its source code open for programmers to design extensions and add-ons for, and there are dozens of Chrome extensions available now on third-party sites: and surprise, Chrome does not slow down under the weight of these, and manages extensions which much better ease-of-use than does Firefox. For instance, you don’t need to restart your browser after you import an extension. So what kind of extensions are they that Chrome has, and do they rival Firefox’s considerable range?
Certainly there are not as many extensions available on Chrome yet; but the ones that are available, are pretty good. Here are examples of a few good ones:
Let’s say you are visiting the website of a bank or something, and there is a message at the bottom of the page that claims that the page will only display properly on Internet explorer 6 or better. We have two choices here: you could fire up Internet explorer, copy and paste the web address over there and start all over again. Or else, you could add the IE tab extension to Chrome, and Internet Explorer opens inside it. It is even ready for Windows 7.
Bubble-Translate uses the Google translate, and performs in-line translations from any supported language to yours. You install it, and an icon shows up in the address bar. Anytime you need anything translated on a webpage, all you need to do is highlight it and click the icon. The translation shows up in a tool tip.
Fittr sounds like it was named by the same person who thought of Flickr; Fittr adds features to Flickr; it gives you convenient shortcuts to use on Flickr and has better Autocomplete; and it gives you ready access to EXIF properties. Perhaps the best addition is the way it gives you the URL to any picture, that you can copy and send to someone.
The one thing that Chrome is missing is finally here; this should probably push it over 20% in market share line now.
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