published @ November 15, 2010 # No Comment Yet
Every year retailers start the holiday shopping season earlier and earlier—and still I procrastinate until late December before getting started. This year I've already made my list and I’m ready to go.I usually get my holiday shopping done in two ways: online (e-commerce) and offline (“brick and mortar” stores). I’ve found [...]
published @ November 9, 2010 # No Comment Yet
With Google Instant you get results as fast as you type, but your search doesn’t stop there. Once you get results back, you choose a site to visit based on the information in each result—like the title, a snippet of text and the URL. Overtimewe’vemadesteadyimprovementstoour searchresultsandsnippetstohelpyoupickagreatpage. Now we’re making a leap to image-based snapshots—a [...]
published @ November 6, 2010 # No Comment Yet
This is one of a regular series of posts on search experience updates. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed.As the leaves turn here in Mountain View, we’re reminded again about the importance of time. On the search team, we work every day to save you precious [...]
published @ November 4, 2010 # No Comment Yet
(Cross-posted on the Mobile Blog)Google Instant makes search faster by displaying not just predictions but actual search results as you type. This saves valuable time on a desktop browser, but wouldn’t it be great to have Google Instant on mobile devices, where each keystroke and page load is much slower and you frequently have just [...]
published @ November 3, 2010 # No Comment Yet
As Election Day went on, people continued to come to Google for information and, importantly, updates on results. Starting around 8pm PT yesterday, Nov 2, and continuing throughout the night and into the morning, more than half the terms in Hot Trends were related to the election. People searched for [live election coverage] as [...]
published @ November 3, 2010 # No Comment Yet
Election Day is finally here in the U.S., and many people are turning to the web to get information before heading out to vote. On Hot Trends at 1pm PT today, 13 of the top 20 searches were election-related, most of which had to do with figuring out where to vote. Terms like [polling [...]
published @ October 30, 2010 # No Comment Yet
This is one of a regular series of posts on search experience updates. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed.This week we’ve overhauled local search and made other tweaks to help you find the places, products and people you’re looking for. As you plan for the World [...]
published @ October 30, 2010 # No Comment Yet
Every October, it seems like every third question you hear is “What are you going to dress up as for Halloween?” We see this question reflected annually in Google searches, as millions of people turn to the Internet to help them prepare for this creepy-crawliest of holidays. Searches for “costume” have steadily risen since [...]
published @ October 28, 2010 # No Comment Yet
With less than a week left until the U.S. 2010 midterm elections, interest is heating up around the country—in polling places, close races and hot political issues. We thought we’d peek into the search data to see what we could find about what kinds of info people are looking for as they get ready [...]
published @ October 28, 2010 # No Comment Yet
I love to discover new places, from sandwich shops in my neighborhood to great museums around the globe. When I start looking for something in a new area, like a barbecue restaurant in Austin, I usually do quite a few searches. I might search for a list of restaurants and then search for details [...]
published @ October 27, 2010 # No Comment Yet
(Cross-posted from the YouTube Blog)Earlier this month, a small team from Google and YouTube spent a week in Iraq on a trip arranged by the Department of Defense’s Task Force for Business and Stability Operations (TFBSO). Our goals were to explore opportunities for Google in Iraq, to understand the landscape of Internet access and connectivity [...]
published @ October 19, 2010 # No Comment Yet
We’ve always focused on offering people the most relevant results. Location is one important factor we’ve used for many years to customize the information that you find. For example, if you’re searching for great restaurants, you probably want to find ones near you, so we use location information to show you places nearby.Today we’re [...]
published @ October 18, 2010 # No Comment Yet
(Cross-posted from the Enterprise Blog)In the last year, businesses have started using cloud-based applications from Google and other technology providers at an accelerated rate. While many organizations still have information that resides in on-premise systems, more and more important business information today is living in the cloud, in collaborative tools like Google Apps—now used [...]
published @ October 17, 2010 # No Comment Yet
This is one of a regular series of posts on search experience updates. Look for the label This week in search and subscribe to the series. - Ed.Search is always evolving, and we’re excited to share the latest this week—from Google Autocomplete to our fun homepage doodles—as well as a glimpse at what the U.S. [...]
published @ September 30, 2010 # No Comment Yet
As a young kid, I drew a lot of dinosaurs. My dad would bring home reams of dot matrix printer paper from work, which I'd take, fold into stapled booklets, and then fill with dinosaurs doing what dinosaurs did—eating, leaping about, facing off in epic combat on top of spewing volcanoes. What I didn't [...]