This week in search 3/25/11

This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs on Fridays. Look for the label "This week in search" and subscribe to the series. - Ed.Time is a precious commodity for most of us. To save you more precious seconds as you search, we’ve introduced Google Instant in Places [...]

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Google search now supports Cherokee ()

With the help of Cherokee Nation staff and community members, we’ve added Cherokee () as an interface language on Google, making a small contribution towards preserving one of the world’s endangered languages. You can now select Cherokee as your default from the Language Tools page (available from the right of the search box), and [...]

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This week in search 3/11/11

This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs on Fridays. Look for the label "This week in search" and subscribe to the series. - Ed.When searching, sometimes you have a pretty good idea of what you want to see and what you don’t. With features like Google Instant [...]

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Hide sites to find more of what you want

Over the years we’ve experimented with a number of ways to help you personalize the results you find on Google, from SearchWiki to stars in search to location settings. Now there’s yet another way to find more of what you want on Google by blocking the sites you don’t want to see.You’ve probably had [...]

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Instant Previews now available on mobile

(Cross-posted from the Mobile Blog)Instant Previews provides a fast and interactive way to evaluate search results. Starting today, Google Instant Previews is available on mobile for Android (2.2+) and iOS (4.0+) devices across 38 languages. Similar to the desktop version of Instant Previews, you can visually compare search results from webpage snapshots, making it easier to [...]

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Patents and innovation

News from Google Comments (0)

The tech world has recently seen an explosion in patent litigation, often involving low-quality software patents, which threatens to stifle innovation. Some of these lawsuits have been filed by people or companies that have never actually created anything; others are motivated by a desire to block competing products or profit from the success of a rival’s new technology. The patent system should reward those who create the most useful innovations for society, not those who stake bogus claims or file dubious lawsuits. It's for these reasons that Google has long argued in favor of real patent reform, which we believe will benefit users and the U.S. economy as a whole.
But as things stand today, one of a company’s best defenses against this kind of litigation is (ironically) to have a formidable patent portfolio, as this helps maintain your freedom to develop new products and services. Google is a relatively young company, and although we have a growing number of patents, many of our competitors have larger portfolios given their longer histories.

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published @ April 5, 2011

This week in search 4/1/11

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This is part of a regular series of posts on search experience updates that runs on Fridays. Look for the label "This week in search" and subscribe to the series. - Ed.
This week we made a few updates to help people around the world access relevant information. We introduced a new +1 button to help you and your friends find the right results at the right time, enhanced financial search results on your mobile phone, added local domains in new countries and introduced Voice Search in new languages.

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published @ April 2, 2011

+1’s: the right recommendations right when you want them—in your search results

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Our goal at Google is to get you the most relevant results as quickly as possible. But relevance is about relationships as well as words on webpages. That’s why we recently started to include more information from people you know—stuff they’ve shared on Twitter, Flickr and other sites—in Google search results.
Today we’re taking that a step further, enabling you to share recommendations with the world right in Google’s search results. It’s called +1—the digital shorthand for “this is pretty cool.” To recommend something, all you have to do is click +1 on a webpage or ad you find useful. These +1’s will then start appearing in Google’s search results.

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published @ March 31, 2011