In another effort to showcase their talent to the digital world, Google have broken the record for sorting 1TB of data using their sorting software MapReduce. The search wizards managed to sort 1TB (stored on the Google File System as 10 billion 100-byte records in uncompressed text files) on 1,000 computers in 68 seconds. By comparison, the previous 1TB sorting record was 209 seconds on 910 computers.

Taking it up a level, the data centers tried the same experiment sorting 1PB (10 trillion 100-byte records) onto 4,000 computers with took six hours and two minutes. Thats quick sorting !

These figures may not mean much to you or I, but think of it this way… the more efficiently search engines can process the data they collate, the quicker we receive our search queries. So come on Google, bring on sub 50 seconds!

There are rumours floating around concerning the impending introduction of an ‘Automatic Matching’ feature within Google Adwords. The beta, which has been in testing since the summer, will broaden the keyword criteria for displaying ads if a search term has been received many page impressions.

A project that will likely be introduced before the lucrative christmas period, seems like a cheeky way for Google to use up Advertisers hard earned cash, with adverts being displayed on potentially irrelevant search terms. Many Adsense marketers may also be heavily affected by this, considering that they make their margins on tight ‘long-tail’ niche keywords for their affiliate/sales pages. Any dilution of this, will sureley affect their bottom line, and may even make adsense unusable.
Hopefully we will see an official release from Adsense regarding this, and more importantly lets hope that this ‘feature’ is optional!

According to Livesearch, the ever-weakening Microsoft Live Search may be considering a rebrand. Rumours are pointing towards a newly registered domain by the Microsoft corp - Kumo.com.

The snappy new domain name, shows a “You don’t have permission to access “http://www.kumo.com/” on this server” message for regular visitors, but is said to give access to an internal portal for Microsoft employees. Perhaps a test area for the newly branded search software?!

It seems that if rumours are true, the former big name in the search industry are pulling out all the stops to regain their waning search marketshare.

Google Mail (lets face it.. its awesome) has gone even quirkier, releasing a bunch of new themes for you to customise your inbox. If you log into your account, you can change the theme in the settings -> themes tab.

There are themes that change with the weather (you input your location and it tracks local weather reports, weird little character ones and some simple colour redesigns for the exisitng blue theme. Plenty to choose from, so get customising your Mail box!

You may remember a post i made some time ago, about the effectiveness of video marketing and Youtube as an advertising platform. I still feel quite confident that videos will gain importance in online marketing in general. Amit over at Labnol strengthens this view, posting a great example of search results going ‘video crazy’. Read the rest of this entry »

According to superblog Techcrunch, there are rumours spreading around that Apple will be attempting to create a search engine. This comes at an interesting time, considering Yahoo and MSNs popularity are steadily on the decline…

We mentioned some while back about a new search engine Cuil, made by former Google employees that seemed promising, but somewhat cumbersome. However, to have one of the coolest, most advanced companies in the world attempting such a feat is pretty exciting stuff! I own a number of Apple products myself, and would think that if anyone can re-invent the wheel (ie:Google) then Apple can.

Struggling search wizards Yahoo have recently seen the resignation of their CEO Jerry Yang. This comes at a crucial time, following Yang’s decision early this year to reject a buyout offer from Microsoft. On top of mounting pressure from the board, and an estimated $30bn of lost share value, experts think it was too little, too late. Read Jerry Yang’s full email that was sent to employees explaining his reasons to step down.

Read the rest of this entry »

According to some recent research over at Google HQ, web users like simplicity when searching the web. After conducting numerous tests on web surfers, which track the eye movements of the surfer on the search results page, the Google team have redesigned the advanced search page to make it more user-friendly.

Armed with this insight from field studies, we redesigned the page, simplifying it by removing terms that were unclear to the average user (the word “occurrences,” for example, just didn’t mean anything to many of the Advanced Search page users), moving rarely used features (numeric range searches, date searches, etc.) into a part of the page that was expandable with a single click. That made them easy to get to for people who knew they wanted to search with those restrictions, but out of the way in a non-threatening way.

One of the other things we noted in the field study was that people often didn’t understand how the Advanced Search page worked. So we added a “visible query builder” region at the top of the page. As you fill in the blanks, the box at the top of the page fills in with the query that you could type into Google. It was our way of making visible the effects of advanced search operators.

It just goes to show how much thought is put into even all aspects of web search. Im sure that by futhering this type of research, we will have a clearer idea of the “perfect website design” from a usability standpoint!

View the full Google report and Eye-tracking video here.

In another staggering attempt to index the worlds information, Google have released their Google Audio Indexing application, codename ‘GAudi’ for Beta testing. The application, found in Google Labs allows users to search through a limited number of Youtube videos by words or sentences contained within those videos. The translation software, still in its infancy, can interpret the audio and convert it to text with is then searchable by its users. Read the rest of this entry »

Microsoft are again dealt another blow to their waning internet presence, as funky web browser Firefox takes a 20% market share. According to the official mozilla blog, the popular browser is, for the first time ever used by 20% of the worlds internet surfers.

It’s hardly suprising, considering that users now have so much choice on how to browse the web and there is no exscuse for buggy, virus prone software! We all love Firefox at Onlineworx, and are hooked by its simplicity and ease of use - Heres to Firefox’s worldwide internet domination!