Only £2.99, but only for a limited time. This app, which puts Google Earth on your iPhone, usually costs $10. Now I have to admit it’s pretty impressive; touch screen control of Google Earth and integration into the iPhones GPS makes this application a must have - even if only for the ‘look at me’ factor!

Other nice little features include highlight locations with Wikipedia information and Flickr phont’s, where provided. You can even take photos of locations visited and add them to the Earthscape database. This images can then be presented to other users with geotags attached.

Admittedly, Google Earth is free but the level of integration in EarthScape puts makes it worth every penny.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Google Dominates

We all know that Google pretty much owns search, for now. One day, a new competitor will capture users imagination and knock Google of the perch but in the meantime the search giant is building up its empire. A report from comScore yesterday revealed the latest figures for online video viewing - guess what? Yeah, Googles YouTube won. Sorry, did I say ‘won’? I meant annihilated the competition! Nearly half of all the video views were served by Google.

In July, figures show that over 11 billion videos were watched online with Google accounting for 5 billion of those views. Googles closest rival was Fox Interactive (think MySpace TV) with only 445 million views. Microsoft trailed into third place with almost 283 million videos.

The figures for unique visits were equally impressive: Google with 92 million unique viewers in July, Fox Interactive on nearly 55 million viewers, and Yahoo in third position with 32 million unique viewers.

The current expectations are that Google will win everytime, but not to this extent. These figures are real slap in the face, especially for Fox Interactive who forked out $580 million dollars for MySpace. Time for a new plan of attack from Fox, Microsoft and Yahoo before it gets too embarassing.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Alongside contextual ads, of course!

Google announced yesterday that they are expanding historical newspaper archives that users can search online. Google will scanning the archives of a number of partnering newspapers then making the results available on Google’s News Archive Search.

The technology uses optical character recognition to scan and distinguish between headlines and text - basically, it’s an extension of Googles book scanning technolgies.

Unsurprisingly, the news archives results will run contextual ads from Google AdSense with click revenue will being shared with the original publishers. The service will initially launch with millions of articles which will extended in due course.

An interesting point to come out of this technology is Googles hope that the new offering will drive print subscriptions:

“This is built on scanning technology we built for Google Books, but with some new features.

We’ve already started this with books and maps, now we will do it with newspapers. Viewers will see it in their original context, can pan around and search. We will widen the user base and readership of news archives.

We already have News Archive search. You will see an interface similar to Google Books search. But our engineers have built in new algorithms to figure out [things like] what is a headline. As I mouse over the page, headlines are highlighted in blue, indicatingtheir clickability. When you click on something, it centers the story, and zooms in. You can do a snapback to the original article. In the sidebar, in addition to sponsored links we have related articles you can click on.”

Looks like another massive money spinner for the kings of search!

Popularity: 4% [?]

The end of tagging by hand

Looking back, it would seem that Picasa was just left hanging by Google. That’s all set to change on Monday with the launch of facial recognition which should you identify friends and family in your pictures without requiring you to tag them by-hand each time you see them.

The new feature works by suggesting tags for people based on the similarity between their face in the picture and the tags you already put in place for them. This new technology is courtesy of Googles acquistion of Neven Vision, a company specialising in matching facial details with images already stored in a central database.

As yet there’s no guarantee the tech will work but there is a setback - the system works best when users directly face the camera but has problems if they’re not.

It’s a start, now let’s see who gets matched to my ‘horses arse’ photo!

Popularity: 5% [?]

..in Japan.

Figures from Nielson Japan show that Yahoo took 76% of the 350 billion-ish search engine and portal-related pageviews leaving Google trailing far behind with about 5.4%. he figures translate to 21.9 billion pageviews for Yahoo and 2.2 billion for Google. That’s some catching up to do.

To most of us, it might not seem like a big thing until you find out that Japan has one of  the highest levels of internet penetration in the world (about 74%). This makes the Japanese market a key battleground for ad revenue. So how does Google beat Yahoo?

Mobile Web! By targetting Japanese mobile phone companies Google is seeking to sneak in the back door via pre-installed apps on handsets. Docomo and KDDI have integrated Google Search into their start menus which means users get content from mobile and web sites (plus ads, of course!).

Japanese users can also access Google Calendar, Youtube and other Google services. Some Docomo handsets are even being shipped with Google Maps pre-installed.

The question is, ‘Will it be enough?’. I’m not sure,  Internet portals are still big business in Japan and Yahoo caters to that need. Looks like Google are trying to ignore this and draw in users of mobile web apps. It may be successful but only if Google manage to persuade a whole nation of users that the Google way is best.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Another 3 years in the love shack.

That’s right, you can expect to see Google as the default search option inside Firefox for another 3 years or so. The original deal was originally supposed to expire in 2006 but the two internet darlings tied up for another two years. The latest deal should run until 2011.

The Mozilla foundation does well out of this deal - to the tune of $57 million in 2006. That’s in the region of 85% of Mozillas total revenue! Don’t jump the gun; this money allows Mozilla to pay for further development of the Firefox browser, bandwidth and infrastructure services. There is one downside - Mozilla is almost totally reliant on Googles money. Without it we might now see the polished product that Firefox currently is.

Makes me wonder why Goolge haven’t bought Mozilla yet, just think of the potential - a Firefox derivative to replace the traditional OS.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Gunning for Apple?

Based on the answer given at the Android Fireside, I’d say ‘Yes’. During the discussion, one of the audience members threw up this quesition; ‘Will there be technology provided to support content distribution?’.

The answer…

“We’ve thought about it. It would be a great benefit to the Android community if there’s a place people can go to safely and securely download their content and have a billing system so that developers can get paid for their effort, and I have nothing to announce today, we’ve thought of it…We wouldn’t have done our job if we didn’t provide something that helps developers get distribution.” –Andy Rubin

There you have it. Looks like Googles Android shotgun has both barrels aimed squarely at Apple!

Is it just me, or can you feel a Google monopoly growing here?

Popularity: 4% [?]

…after 4 years

Firstly, Google Suggest is an auto-complete tool for searches on Googles homepage. The service will allow users to see the most commonly searched phrases after they’ve typed in the first few letters of query. A little like Firefox does when you use the Google builtin search bar.

The service isn’t live just yet but should be with us in a week or so. If you’re interested in trying it out now here’s the link - Google Suggest.

Although the Suggest feature was started back in 2004 it’s already been incorporated into Google Labs, Toolbar, Firefox, Maps and web based search (for a select group of countries) and YouTube.

This should make searching simpler and cut down on the number of spelling mistakes made by searchers (is this the end of making bank on adsense using typos?) but is by no means original. Yahoo have had this feature for some as has Cuil. Let’s see if Microsoft joing the party?

Popularity: 3% [?]

Outage dampens enthusiasm for Google Mail service

Internet darling Google has publicly apologised to users for an outage that prevented users from accessing free and paid services. On the Google blog, the company has promised to carry out a review to see what went wrong and implement processes to ensure it doesn’t happen again. No money back for paid subscribers?

The Gmail problems follow Google Docs and Spreadsheets access problems in July when customers were locked out of their cloud-based applications for over an hour.

Google really can’t afford problems like this to happen again. Microsoft is preparing to launch a rival to the Gmail and Apps services in 2009 which could leech customers away from the Goog.

The Microsoft offering, Business Productivity Suite (do they really pay someone to think of these names?) will offer customers a subscription service. A range of Microsoft software will be available to customers, including Exchange, Dynamics, and Office SharePoint, Communications and Meeting for around £90. Hmm, time for Google to sort their house out!

Popularity: 4% [?]

Not a scratch on Google…

…but what do you really expect? Ok, the founders of Cuil are ex-Google employees but remember ther early days of Google search results? I do - they were crap!

I’ve had a look at Cuil and all I can say right now is that it’s ‘ok’ - not great but I’m sure that a little more time and money may just make this a real competitor for the Goog!

As a search technology, the Cuil results don’t really match up to Google or even Yahoo in some respects - there’s no image search for a start and I REALLY like pictures, so much easier than reading! However, Cuil do state that they have indexed over 120 billion web pages which leaves Google trailing on a paltry 40 billion. I’ve done some testing here and I would like to know where those pages are coming from as I searched for a couple of well known sites that have a high number of inbound links using a specific anchor text….err, nothing! I’m not suggesting that the Cuil front page is lying but I’d expect to see at least a couple of hits for the searches I entered.

Ok, so Cuil could eventually knock Google of the search top spot but they some serious cash injections if they are to catch up in other areas i.e GMail, Google Apps, YouTube, Knol…. the list goes on.

All interesting news, I’ll leave you with a well thought out and deliverd quote echoed by many of the search engine users community, “…it’s crap.”

Popularity: 6% [?]