Google Is More Than Search

John Dovan from ABC News interviewed Marissa Mayer, Google's Vice President. The interview doesn't include novel facts, but it's interesting to see Google saying that the search was just the initial step in their evolution. Now Google means more than search: Google Books, Google Earth.

"It's really amazing how fast change happens, because as recently as a year ago, Google Earth didn't exist," Marissa Mayer says. "Now it's become a standard thing that people just expect." But before Google Earth exist, there was Keyhole, a company founded in 2001 and bought by Google in October 2004.

Marissa also says that Google was thinking about book search and satellite imagery back in 1999, which is kind of hard to believe if you take a step back and look at Google's homepage from 1999.

Valleywag notices another contradiction: "We've never been outwardly focused on competitors," says the lady who accused Microsoft of unfair practices yesterday.

Overall, Google wants to be perceived as a company that delivers more than web search and will probably focus on that in the months to come.

A Button For You

If you use Google Toolbar 4 (my review), you can add buttons for your favorite feeds. The feature is similar to Firefox's live bookmarks but it's better implemented: the button alerts you if there is a new post (the icon changes) and if you rest the mouse over an item, you can read the first phrases as a tooltip. Plus you can search the blog directly from the search box.

Now you can add Google Operating System to your toolbar. I've tested the button for the last month and now that Google put it on its gallery I wanted to share this with you.

* Google Toolbar 4 is available for Internet Explorer 6/7 on Windows 2000/XP

Chinese Don't Like Google's New Name

Chinese fans of Google created an online petition to determine Google to change its new Chinese name: Guge. Here are some adjectives Chinese bloggers use to describe Guge name:
* weird
* unsophisticated
* fool
* funny
* traditional

Guge means "harvesting song" or "Valley song" and was intended to be a metaphor that describes how Google crawls the web harvesting for information. Another reason to change Google brand in China was that more than half of China's internet users couldn't spell Google, informs AsiaMedia.

Also view:
Google vs Baidu video (Baidu is the most used search engine in China, followed by Google)

Google vs. Microsoft

New York Times is certain that the competition between Google and Microsoft is much more fierce than we might think.

"A measure of how seriously Microsoft takes the challenge came last Thursday when it announced that its spending would rise sharply next year, about $2 billion higher than previous estimates. Much of the extra money, analysts say, is going to meet the threat from companies offering advertising-supported Internet services and software, led by Google."

"How far Google can eat into Microsoft's software franchise is uncertain. But Microsoft fears that Google could become a kind of operating system of the Internet in the same way that Windows is the dominant operating system of personal computing."

Google has a great advantage in front of Microsoft: all their products are free, up-to-date (because they are online) and easy to use. But the transition between desktop software and online applications won't be easy for most users. So it's hard to imagine Writely as a competition to Microsoft Word.

Microsoft has the advantage of the operating system monopoly and of a large conservative user base. After losing the search war, the next battle for Microsoft is internet advertising.

Related:
The battle for IE7 searchbox
Amazon drops Google from A9 and Alexa
Next challenges for Microsoft in 2006

Sphere - Blog Search With Style

Sphere is a new blog search engine that has many interesting features. You can find the most relevant blogs for a search, not just the most relevant post using "Featured Blogs". And because the featured blogs are determined algorithmically you won't find sponsored listings.

You can search blog posts written in a custom period of time or even in the last hour. For every blog, there is a profile that lists some statistics: average posts/week, average words/post, average links/post, number of posts in the last week, number of backlinks.

Sphere has a nice bookmarklet you can drag to your browser's toolbar: Sphere it and that helps you find blog posts that match the subject of the article you were reading.

Unfortunately, the relevance of standard search isn't that good. In a search for [internet explorer 7], the third result was the first relevant to the search, the first two being a collection of links to other posts. Sphere ranks high archives and pages that contain all the post with a tag, but this will probably be fixed. Another problem is that only the last four months of posts are searchable.

"Sphere, a San Francisco- search engine company that specializes in searching blogs, for relevant information has closed a $3.75 million in fresh capital from Hearst Publishing, Trident Capital and About.com founder Scott Kurnit." says GigaOM. So Sphere has the money and the potential to become a great blog search engine.

Google Analytics Hack: Edit Your Stats

Google Analytics has an easter egg: most labels from the reports can be edited. You can't modify the graphs or the numbers, but you can produce fake statistics that show your site was both digged and slashdotted in the same week. The links from the chart are real, but are somehow verbose.

For a video that shows this feature, check Google Blogoscoped.

Google Doesn't Want MSN As Default Search Engine In IE7

New York Times reports that Google talked with the Justice Department and the European Commission about Microsoft's decision to put MSN Search as default search engine in Internet Explorer 7. "The market favors open choice for search, and companies should compete for users based on the quality of their search services," said Marissa Mayer, the vice president for search products at Google. "We don't think it's right for Microsoft to just set the default to MSN. We believe users should choose."

And it's not difficult to choose. Internet Explorer 7 lets you add another search engines easily and if you visit google.com with IE 7, Google will ask you if you want to choose Google as default search engine.

"The typical default when users install IE7 on their Windows XP machines will most likely be their usual search engine." claims IE Blog.

Firefox, Opera and Safari use Google as default search engine and don't include MSN Search as an option. Most Google software (Google Toolbar, GTalk, Google Desktop, Google Earth, Google Video Player) has a default option in the setup to set Google as default search provider. While the battle for Windows XP was won by Google, the battle for Windows Vista seems fierce.

More:
Explorer 7 review
IE7 standalone (no install required)
How Google used to promote its search engine
Google promotes Firefox on the homepage