PC World Magazine, released (quite early I would say) the 100 Best Products of 2005. We’re talking about IT of course. Actually the top is divided in 10 sections: PCs and Peripherals, Monitors and TVs, Office Software, Digital Photography, Security, Printing and Publishing, Storage and Backup, Mobile Tools, Web and Consumer Electronics.

Is interesting to notice that giants as Yahoo didn’t make it in the top 100. It’s true the most talked new Yahoo product (or upgraded) is supposed to come this autumn, and I’m talking about the new Yahoo!Mail here, and this is one of the reasons I say it’s really early to call it the 2005 top. Also Microsoft has only one presence in the top with its Windows Media Player 10 on the 47th place. Dell is leading, in terms of number of presences, with 6 products among the top 100, followed by Apple with 5 products.

Here is the top 10:

1. Mozilla Firefox – Web Browser
2. Google Gmail – Web Mail
3. Apple Mac OS X Version 10.4 (Tiger) – Operating System
4. Belkin Wireless Pre-N Router and Notebook Network Card – Wireless Networking
5. Dell Ultrasharp 2405FPW – 24-Inch Wide-Screen LCD
6. Alienware Aurora 5500 – Performance PC
7. Seagate USB 2.0 Pocket Drive – Portable Hard Drive
8. Skype – VoIP Service
9. Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT – Digital SLR Camera
10. PalmOne Treo 650 – PDA Phone

and some extras:

16.  Google – Search Engine
28.  Mozilla Thunderbird – E-Mail Program
33.  The New York Times on the Web – Web Site
51.  Flickr.com – Photography Site
60.  Wikipedia – Online Resource
88.  Opera 8 – Web Browser

Read the full review article in the PC Magazine: The 100 Best Products of 2005

Tags: 2005 Best Products

Another excellent post on Google Blogoscoped Blog listing up more than 25 tips and tricks on using Google search engine and getting the results to be closer to what you’re searching for and doing it in an easier way:

• A quote/ phrase search can be written with both quotations [“like this”] as well as a minus in-between words, [like-this]
• Google has a lesser known “numrange” operator which can be helpful. Using e.g. [2000..2005] (that’s two dots inbetween two numbers) will find 2000, 2001, 2002 and so on until 2005.
• Google’s define-operator allows you to look up word definitions. For example, [define:css] yields “Short for Cascading Style Sheets” and many more explanations. You can trigger a somewhat “softer” version of the define-operator by entering “what is something”, e.g. [what is css].
• Google has some exciting back-end AI to allow you to find just the facts upong entering simple questions or phrases like [when was Einstein born?] or [einstein birthday] (the answer to both of these queries is “Albert Einstein – Date of Birth: 14 March 1879”)
• You can use the wildcard operator in phrases. This is helpful for finding song texts – let’s say you forgot a word or two, but you remember the gist, as in [“love you twice as much * oh love * *”] – and similar tasks

Check all of them reading the full post.

Technorati tag: Google+Search+Tips

Google turned 7 years old on September 7th, but somehow they decided to celebrate it today. Apparently the date floats around a lot within Google and they’ve now decided to go with this one. Or maybe they want two slices of cake. Or prefer to be a Libra over a Virgo. Or they weren’t ready with the increased index announcement (even though they made the announcement without any actual figures though :P).

Well despite all these confused facts, I thought a “happy birthday” will be ok along with some interesting facts of Google history would be appropiate. Infos were excerpt of a lecture given by Marissa Mayer (Product Manager for Google):

• The prime reason the Google home page is so bare is due to the fact that the founders didn’t know HTML and just wanted a quick interface. Infact it was noted that the submit button was a long time coming and hitting the RETURN key was the only way to burst Google into life.
• Due to the sparseness of the homepage, in early user tests they noted people just sitting looking at the screen. After a minute of nothingness, the tester intervened and asked ‘Whats up?’ to which they replied “We are waiting for the rest of it”. To solve that particular problem the Google Copyright message was inserted to act as a crude end of page marker.
• The infamous “I feel lucky” is nearly never used. However, in trials it was found that removing it would somehow reduce the Google experience. Users wanted it kept. It was a comfort button.
• Google has the largest network of translators in the world.
• The name ‘Google’ was an accident. A spelling mistake made by the original founders who thought they were going for ‘Googol’ (number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros).
• Gmail was used internally for nearly 2years prior to launch to the public.

(via)

More on Google history.

Tags: Google, anniversary

Quite long awaited move, Google steps in the Blog search field with its new Google Blog Search Beta. There is also an “blogger-style interface” of it at http://search.blogger.com. The stated goal of the search engine is:

to include every blog that publishes a site feed (either RSS or Atom). It is not restricted to Blogger blogs, or blogs from any other service.

While its still a beta, will comment only on good stuffs that the new blog search engine is bringing to the market, waiting for the bads (like the size of the index) to be fixed.

A first plus: the speed. If you got used with Technorati (to give the worse example of all) then a query with the new Google search engine is like flying vs. walking. Super-fast.

A second super plus: RSS. At the bottom of each page of search results you can find several links, offering the top 10 or 100 results as either Atom or RSS feeds. Just grab the links from here and subscribe to them in the news aggregator of your choice and you will get updates whenever new posts are made that match your query.

Adding advanced search features like 35 different languages and classic Google operators (link:, site:, intitle:) or new ones (inblogtitle:, inposttitle:, inpostauthor:, blogurl:) really make me think that this should be a serious competitor for Blogpulse, Feedster and similar blog search engines that are on market at the moment. Will see.

Technorati tags: Google Blog Search, Google, Blog Search

Australia’s technology research consortium, Smart Internet Technology CRC, has released some results of an 18-month study examining what the Internet might evolve into by 2010 and the implications for end-users.

The report discuss about specific areas including the Open Source movement, social networks, digital games, voice services, e-health, and mobile devices.

The study points to four types of future, named Schools of Thought – or general scenarios: the Adaptive User Environment, Not The Smart Internet, Rich Media, and Chaos Rules. These scenarios are viewed not as mutually exclusive but as co-existent and to some degree intertwined.

1. Adaptive User Environment
An overriding assumption here in the context of the Internet for 2010 is that those creators, suppliers, and service providers who invest in understanding the complexity of human factors, and who apply their knowledge about the end-user interaction with the Internet, are generally the most likely to succeed. The best new technologies and services will be those that are created, designed, constructed, and marketed in ways that will be highly adaptive to human needs in the Internet environment of 2010.

2. Not The Smart Internet
The proponents of this School of Thought  advocate that a simple, user-friendly, and culturally appropriate Internet is the best option by the year 2010. It may be better in the  future to concentrate on addressing the
shortcomings and problems related to the operation of the present Internet rather than investing in, and building, a new Internet for the elites. We need an Internet that offers basic services for all.

3. Rich Media
is primarily driven by technological innovation in a world where there are a plethora of devices, applications and services feeding off the Internet by 2010. In a rich media environment, more and more people are able, and also can afford, to access the Internet, via a workstation, mobile phone, a PDA, or some other appliance. Therefore, as we approach 2010, more and more people will access a wide array of Internet based services irrespective of their dependence on a particular technology or a certain mode of connectivity.  It’s the ‘any content, any device, any format, anytime’ paradigm for the Internet by 2010.

4. Chaos Rules
Is primarily concerned with an Internet in the future that may be in a
continual state of decay and worsening disorder. Exponents of this School of Thought widely share a sceptical pessimism about the robustness of Internet services that may be ruined by ‘spam’ junk emails, rogue hackers and viruses.  They distrust the utopian visions of a ‘high-tech’ society because an over-reliance on information technology also creates pathologies and vulnerabilities.  Chaos Rules advocates believe Internet futures will be dominated by a negative utopian vision they describe as Digital Dystopia.

Download the full report Smart Internet 2010 (1.25MB, PDF) report or its Executive Summary (816KB, PDF).

Technorati tags: Smart Internet, 2010 Scenarios

The search-engine advertising will be a $22 billion industry worldwide by 2010, up from an estimated $8 billion today, according to Safa Rashtchy, a senior analyst with Piper Jaffray in San Francisco. It’s the reason search has become the most hotly contested field in the world of technology. In this context Time Magazine is publishing an in-depth analysis of the trends in the field.

Picture and video. Now that still and moving images are increasingly digitized, they too can be searched with a click, by looking for their titles and other attached identifying text, known as their metadata.

A more futuristic image search, which can scan and recognize facial images, is being developed by Massachusetts-based Viisage. It focuses on unique marks on the human face and can cross-reference pictures with databases

Cell Phones Mobile search is mostly done today with limited text messaging, but by 2008, when more than 75% of new cell phones globally are expected to be Internet-ready, searching the Web on the go will be standard.

Boston-based Mobot, for example,  has developed technology that maps the features in a picture taken with a cell-phone camera and matches it to a database of images.

Questions and answers Search engines are good at matching words across websites but have struggled with nuance to answer questions in everyday language. Google today can answer basic factual queries. The next step is semantic search–looking for meaning, not just matching key words.

User Generated One of the fastest-growing search techniques is tagging, a grassroots phenomenon whereby users label websites with descriptive tags, building a network of knowledge dubbed folksonomy–a taxonomy of knowledge organized by ordinary folk.

Audio Exactly when in the movie did Clark Gable say, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn”? Blinkx.TV can track down that video clip in a matter of seconds. Speech-recognition technology is improving so rapidly that the company founded by 27-year-old Suranga Chandratillake can capture the audio tracks of videos and turn them into searchable text–making any recorded spoken words immediately searchable.

Satellite Online maps are widely available but now, because pictures are easier to understand than maps, satellites are changing the game. Since buying Keyhole last fall, Google has launched Google Earth, which offers searchable satellite views of the planet. A9.com Amazon’s search subsidiary, sent trucks around 22 U.S. cities with digital cameras linked to laptops to photograph every street. So far it has 35 million pictures, which will be overlaid on maps.

Personalized One of the hottest and most controversial new areas is designing software that will get to know individuals’ interests, mostly through their search history–the clickstream.

ZDNet’s IT Facts blog published the July 2005 data for several battlegrounds of the big internet players: search, web mail and (the new one) instant messaging.

ComScore Networks is quoted in a Reuters article with the data on Web-based e-mail usage. With 221 mln users (35.5%) MSN Hotmail leads the market, followed by Yahoo! Mail with 219 mln users and 35.1% of the market.

On searches Google accounted for 59% of searches in July 2005, (with an incredible 14% Year-to-Year growth). Yahoo! was second with 29% of searches, MSN was third with 5.5%.

On instant messaging AOL IM and ICQ had about 41.6 mln US users, followed by Yahoo! Messenger with 19.1 mln, and MSN Messenger with 14.1 mln. Google just entered the game this month so we’ll probably need to wait for a while until they will appear in the top 5.
Technorati tag: Search Engines, Web Mail, Instant Messaging