Google Bing “Kitchen” Introduced Social Search

In November launched the social revolution for search. Microsoft’s Bing fired the first shot by announcing search deals with Twitter and Facebook and, at the Web 2.0 Summit, launching its Twitter integration. Google fired back almost immediately though, completing its own deal with Twitter and, perhaps more importantly, announcing a new feature: Social Search.

Social search, demoed at the Web 2.0 Summit by Google’s VP of Search Marissa Mayer, combines results from your friend’s blogs, Flickr, Twitter, FriendFeed, and a wide variety of other social media sites (so long as your friends have connected their social accounts to their Google profiles) with Google’s regular search results. The feature will go live this afternoon, and can be found within Google Labs.

The experimental feature, once activated, will display relevant search results from your social circle at the bottom of the search results page. This could be travel photos from your friends, a recent blog post, a set of status updates, or other information Google pulls.

Google’s gurus Amit Singhal, Matt Cutts, and Murali Viswanathan admitted that they have been playing with the feature for several months, and it has been an eye-opening experience. Just imagine searching for pictures of Thailand and getting a set of photos from your best friend from last summer. It just means more.

For now, the feature is opt-in, only affects certain searches, and appear at the bottom of the search results page. However, we won’t be surprised if Social Search results start blending into regular search higher up the page. After all, your social circle is often far more relevant than even the top Wikipedia article on a subject. Google seems to betting on it in a big way.

Here’s a demo of social search from Google:

Source: Mashable

Google new Browser enters Battlefield

Browsers War is not over yet. Now, the new push for the competition is caused for the new entrant on the market - Google Chrome. Google Blog has officially announced the Google Chrome yesterday, with link to a comic book to introduce Google Chrome. And today Google is officially releasing Google Chrome Beta for free download by everybody. The news has also been announced on Google Blog.

Multiple attempts, more or less successful, have been made over the years to challenge the ultimate lead of the Microsoft Internet Explorer on the market. However, browser, introduced by Google, should be taken pretty seriously. So, what does the new browser look like? Pretty much exactly what you would expect from Google: it is a browser with very simplistic interface. Google chose to use the open-source WebKit browser as the basis for Chrome. For now, only a Windows version of Chrome is currently available, even though WebKit is the basis for the Safari search engine on the Mac operating system.

During the install process, Google Chrome asks to import your bookmarks, browsing history, and passwords. This allows you to switch to using Chrome almost instantly. The interface for Google Chrome is light, with browser tabs at the top of the window rather than underneath the other browser elements such as the address bar. The tabs look like traditional file folder tabs, rising vertically above the window, and they can be reordered by simple dragging. New tabs open instantly, and rather than being greeted by a blank window you are given a quick launch window showing your most frequently visited sites.

The new feature introduced to the browsing is a New Incognito Window option. As it is described by developers, “pages you view in this window won’t appear in your browser history or search history, and they won’t leave other traces, like cookies, on your computer after you close the incognito window”.

The software opens a new front in Google’s fight with Microsoft, whose Internet Explorer controls more than 70 percent of the browser market. Google is trying to parlay its success over Microsoft in online searches into an effort to court users who want e-mail, calendars and word processing through a browser instead of products such as Microsoft’s Word and Excel. However, Google said today it’s not going after Windows. ``I would not call Chrome the operating system of Web apps,’’ co-founder Sergey Brin told reporters today. ``It is a very basic, fast engine to run web apps.’’

Learn more on the new browser features on the Google Website: http://www.google.com/chrome