Phil Bradley's weblog

Google facts and trivia

This is a fun page from Business Insider: 500M Things Google Has Never Heard Of. It's worth a quick read (it's quite short) but the key elements, if you're looking for ways to spice up a presentation, or amuse your friends with:

• 15 percent of the questions people ask of Google are questions they've never seen before.
• Google says it has found 30 trillion "unique addresses" on the Web, meaning websites, web apps and other stuff connected to the Internet.
• Google crawls 20 billion websites per day.(That's to say visits them, checks for new content and adds it to its index)
• Google processes 100 billion searches each month.
• That's 3.3 billion per day.
• That's about 12,000 per second.

Another reason to use Google+

Google has recently added an extra bit of functionality to Google+ which makes it even more useful - the ability to use a Remote Desktop. It's an app that allows one person to control another persons computer, which is useful for training or troubleshooting. And of course, because it's on a Hangout, you can have face to face video chat with them at the same time. It's easy to get - simply start a new hangout, go to Apps, more Apps and choose Remote desktop. You'll get something like this:

Add that, and then you're pretty much done. There are of course plenty of other tools out there which do the same sort of thing, such as Join.me for example, but this makes the whole process a complete doddle.

Another Google Reader replacement, maybe...

CommaFeed is the latest RSS reader to enter the marketplace to take over from Google Reader, and it's exactly the type that I like - which is to say that it's exactly like Google Reader, with a list of folders and feeds down the left - you click on what you want, and up it pops in minimalistic headline only in the main pane and can be expanded. Signed up, and it imported my Reader feeds instantly. That's all the good news you're getting.

Great so far, except that I can't see any way to delete categories. There were strange half sentances  where there shouldn't be and it was pulling up entries on blogs back to 2005, 2008... very weird. If they get this sorted, it could have the potential to be a nice fast minimalistic news reader. I'm going to keep my fingers crossed and my account active, just to see.

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Create personalised Google Maps

This looks as though it's going to be very useful:

Go to the 'My Places option' and choose to create a map. Give the map a title and a short description, then choose a place. Click on the little tag and choose 'save to map'. You'll then get prompted for the map that you want to save it to, which will be the one that you've just created. That's pretty much all there is to it. You can modify what you've done, and you can also change the icon. You can collaborate with other people, and you can also share your map.

Great for local historians, people who want to list where they've been in the world, libraries that are about to close and so on. Very nice feature indeed.

YouTube adds 'tape mode'

In order to celebrate the 57th birthday of the first commercially available video recorder YouTube has added in a 'tape mode' to some videos (but only a few, it took me a while to track one down) which has the effect of turning a video into what some of us older folk will remember from the early days of VHS. It's grainy and slightly warped, and they have done something very clever on pause - it's just the way that it was. You can check to see if a video does this by clicking on the tape symbol on the bottom right of the screen to the left of all of the icons. Here's an example:

Is YouTube going to go down the Google doodle route? I'm seeing a lot of comment on this - some people are saying it's very funny and clever, while other people are saying things like 'They killed Reader for this?' I have to say that I'm in the latter camp really. They just wasted their time on this - and sure, it's their time to waste, but I'd rather they spent the time improving products to be honest. If you're looking for an example, this is one you can find by searching for Let Go Pat Flynn.

Talkwalker Alerts

A nice, free and easy alternative to Google Alerts . You can monitor the Web for interesting new content about your name, brand, competitors, events or any favourite topic with Talkwalker Alerts! Talkwalker Alerts are an easy and free alerting service that provides email updates of the latest relevant mentions on the Web directly to your email box or RSS feed reader.Well, that's what they say.

I tried it out, and it looks exactly like a Google alert service.

It will create an account for you, so that you go in and change the alerts whenever you need to. There doesn't seem to be a limit on the alerts that you can create, and it's a free service, so you might want to give it a go. It's different to Mention, which I'm still enjoying using since you can really do a precision search - I'm presuming that it pulls its data from Google.

 

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Google results - down to 6 on a page and most of those are wrong!

I'd heard that Google had been experimenting with reducing the number of results to a page, but I hadn't actually seen it for myself. Now however I have - and rather wish that I hadn't. I was looking for a particular software game that was produced years ago, and the graphic shows you the search and the results:

Now, there's a fair amount to be said about this. I'm only getting 4 results that match my query. Actually, it's less than that, because the last result from the 4; 'Green battleground' didn't include the word Talon. Actually, it's less than that, because the third result doesn't contain the word 'battleground'. So out of the 4 results, 50% are incorrect. We then have a line break, with "Results for similar searches" listed for me. Why does Google assume that I'm interested in similar searches? Particularly since the searches they've run for me are not accurate. 'Wargames Empire' and 'Empire war games' are totally different, despite a vague semantic similarity.

What's really annoying is that if I go onto page 2 of the results, I carry on with organic results from my first search, and I do get the information that I was after. So, not only does Google know what I wanted, it retrieves what I wanted, then insists on showing me results that it knows are inaccurate! I am therefore forced onto the second page - where I get shown more adverts!

Now, you might well say 'Use the Verbatim tool'. For those not familiar with it, the verbatim tool tells Google to stop trying to think for itself and do as it's told, by finding all the words on the pages it returns. That doesn't actually work though, because the results that I'm getting back don't include all 3 terms - several pages are missing one of the 3 terms! So that's not something that works either.

This is really the absolute worst that I've seen Google do myself, though I'm familiar with other examples of Google totally messing up a search - who can forget Karen Blakeman's Coots and lions post! I really am almost entirely lost for words - just when you think Google can't get any worse - it does! Well, I shall go back to sensible search engines, and leave this one to fester some more.

Google discontinues another search feature

If we haven't had enough bad news from Google recently, here's a bit more for you. Google has discontinued the ability searchers had of blocking sites. I quote "The Blocked Sites feature is no longer available. To block particular sites from your search results, we recommend the Personal Blocklist Chrome extension from Google. You may also download your existing blocked sites list as a text file."This is from support.google.com so it's official.

You used to be able to block up to 500 sites, and it was a very useful little tool, particularly if there were two very similar versions of a site with confusing names or domains (a common trick that the pornographic sites use), so you could block the results appearing in your results. Now it's gone. No good reason for it either, which is irritating.To be fair, after they introduced it in March 2011 it's never really worked properly, and I think that they've given up trying to make it work properly. Clearly they don't think that it's a feature that is worth spending time and effort on, even if it is a very helpful function that a lot of users liked. Unfortunately it's another example of Google ignoring users; I can't put a positive spin on it for them at all, no matter how hard I try and be fair and even handed about it.

However, I can give you a reason for it, and it's from their own press release; use a feature that works in Chrome. Hey - isn't that a browser that Google owns? Why yes Phil, it is. So by reducing functionality in the search engine, and introducing it in their own browser, is it just possible do you think that Google is trying to put pressure on people to change to that, rather than stick with any opposition browsers, such as Firefox, Internet Explorer and so on? While that's not directly going to make money for them, it's certainly in that ballpark. But maybe I'm just cynical.

Thanks to ResearchBuzz News for the headsup on this one.

 

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Mention - a possible replacement for Google Alerts

There's much concern running around at the moment relating to the inability of Google Alerts to 'do their thing' properly, and people are worrying that they might be on the kill list. It's a reasonable fear, and something that Google is going to have to get used to - with the speed they kill things, plus the fact that it doesn't matter how many people like or rely on something, we've got to get used to alternatives. Ideally, move to them as well I think. Anyway, if you're looking for an alternative to Google Alerts, you could do worse than try Mention. It's a really good tool that comes in a variety of flavours - you can download it and use as a standalone outside of the browser (which quite frankly just feels weird to me), you can run it from within your browser, or you can use it on a smartphone.

The concept is pretty basic - just tell it what you're interested in being kept up to date on. Add words, exclude words, and choose where you want Mention to look - everywhere that it can, or limit it in some way to websites, twitter, comments and so on. Everything is updated in real time - I'm getting used to a little popup appearing on the screen which is very helpful. You can mark stuff as favorites, you can assign a task to any user with whom you've shared this alert. Ask them to read, share or comment on a mention and keep a track of these actions with the task list. You can share your alert with anyone, whether or not they are a user of mention. You can connect any Facebook or Twitter account to an alert and manage multiple accounts. You can also search within your mentions as well, which is very helpful. 

The page looks a bit like this - sorry, it's an alert for my name, but it could be a company name, event, conference - anything you like.

It's very simple to use, and I'm really enjoying it. There are both free and paid accounts, with the freebie limiting you to 500 mentions. If you find that you're running through those quite quickly, simply change what you ask Mention to look for - and cut out maybe something heavy, like Twitter, which you can monitor differently anyway. Give it a go, if you have time - it may change the way that you consider alerts.If you want to try it out, here's an invitation! (It doesn't get you anything extra, but in the interests of transparency, gets me an extra 100 mentions on my free account.)

 

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Google - Internet Stats Source

I was looking for some statistical data about the internet today and found an interesting resource over at Google. It says of itself "This Google resource brings together the latest industry facts and insights. These have been collected from a number of third party sources covering a range of topics from macroscopic economic and media trends to how consumer behaviour and technology are changing over time."

All well and good until I start to go through it, and discover that the data is all fairly elderly, with nothing in 2012, let alone 2013. It's at this point that I notice - almost hidden on the screen - "Last updated: December 12, 2011 2:53:19 PM UTC" Do you think they might have forgotten that it exists? Another one for the chop, I suspect.