I search a lot and therefore made Google my home page. And if over 70% of the worlds internet traffic is going via Google, why not make it a destination rather than a launch platform?  Maybe it’s just my natural curiosity to click on links and maybe the general internet user has been spammed and virus’ed to death and that’s why they don’t explore more.  I also was quite tired of bouncing between all my favourite sites getting my daily dose of news, weather, fun and more. So one day I clicked on iGoogle and my life was changed forever.

You too can have a home page like this

I now choose Themes to suit my mood, I choose content from all my favourite sites to satisfy all my daily requirements, including Facebook and direct access to my Gmail account. I even have a virtual Koi pond filled with fish (that I feed when I remember).  It’s easy, it’s fun, it’s iGoogle.  Go do it now and impress your friends.

So at who’s expense i this growth coming from AOL seems to be one of the big losers down an undisclosed amount to just 3%. Google fans however seem to have remained loyal, with Google losing only  0.1% of its market share.

Neilson however reported that Bing had grown its share by 22.1% to give it a total market share of 10.7%, surprisingly though it showed Google growth of 2.6 % to a total of 64.6%.

Either way the message is the same Bing is to be taken seriously and want to take market share away from Google. Product differentiators are arising for example Bing recently launched Visual Search which allows users to browse search results as images as opposed to text.

Perhaps most the most interesting development is Microsoft’s continued courting of Yahoo. Microsoft has proposed that Bing be the default search in Yahoo. This would dramatically change the competitive landscape but will have to pass anti-trust and competition regulators first. Such a combined force may just be needed to really compete. Google however is aware of this threat and will no doubt not taking it lying down. According to New York Post Google has in response assembled a small team of top engineers led by Sergey Brin himself to try determine how Bing search algorithm differs from Google’s. Google clearly follows the activities of its competitors as the launch of Google Squared in response to Wolfram Alpha shows. Google squared shows the search results in a spread sheet format.

Being a Microsoft product I was averse to Bing, but having tested it a little must admit it’s not actually all that bad. See one of our previous articles here, shows you how to do a blind test and compare the results of the three big search engine. My scores where Google (6) Bing (4) Yahoo (2).

Anyway, thanks to Daytum designer Nicholas Felton, I’m told the meaning of life is within my grasp… Felton first started discovering who he was using personal infographics in 2005 when he issued his first Annual Report. He tracked his time spent working, the countries he’d visited, his favourite books, his favourite refreshment, creating a life report that was a mix of pie charts, bar graphs and lifestyle-based statistics. Today, this has morphed into a bigger community site for the masses, in an attempt to help the rest of us restless souls track our own day-to-day data and discover what it is that makes each of us unique.

“There is a lot of honesty in data,” explains Felton of his tool, “and better tools for recording and displaying information help everyone. This may be a greater knowledge of self and an accurate image of habits (good and bad), a more nuanced portrait of a person, or a macro-image of an event or issue. There is much to be gained from this transparency.” Try it out for free here.

Of course, if you don’t trust the data and still don’t know who you are, what you like and if you’re hot or not, you can always just fake it. Most people do anyway. Trusty old Google to the rescue to help you with that even – check out Google Trends.

As Mashable.com puts it: “With millions of Google searches performed every day, it makes sense that what people are searching for can be a good indicator of what has captured the interest of the US and the rest of the world” (ie. anyone and everyone cooler than ourselves). And this is what Google Trends does: “tells you what’s currently popular on the search engine via its Hot Trends feature, which displays how popular the search is and graphs out the volume of searches over time.” Hot Trends also gives you upfront the most-searched trends/topics each day.

Google has also just announced that it has now integrated Google Trends in actual Google Search results – but as far as we can tell this has only been rolled out in the US and Japan so far. What you can expect though is that now when you search a hot trend, you will find the trend and its graph at the bottom of the search engine results page. Whatever you search for, you will also find its hotness, how it ranks in the top 100 most popular searches, and the search volume graph.

Simple but pretty cool. (Do we still say ‘cool’? Hot or not?)

Fortunately, some clever web techies have lazy surfers like me sussed and have come up with an alternative to sites promising to keep my pulse on the buzz of what’s happening on the web, and then bombarding me with a constant stream of nothing even vaguely interesting. Like SwingVine.

Similar to sites like StumbleUpon, iLike, and others helping us surf addicts find specific, personalized content on the web that may be appealing, with the emphasis on may, SwingVine manages to turn ‘may’ into ‘likely’.

How? According to TechCrunch (the most patient web surfers we know – they’ll wade through everything!) SwingVine can bring you the most relevant and interesting stuff on the web – according to your interests – by “aggregating data and news from across the web, analyzing the volume of online buzz, the reputation of various sources, user interactions on the site itself, and other information to surface the most popular and noteworthy content on the web.” Categories include music, movies, TV, tech, books, fashion, taste, contests, forming what they call “a hybrid of an aggregator of information on pop culture and news and an analytics site that actually measures what people are looking for on the web.”

The site itself is pretty cool. Whenever you scroll over any headline, a titbit of info pops up on that story, either enticing you to click and find out more or move on in a hurry. Then, when you click on a recent story, or album or movie, you will be led to a page that includes a detailed description of the subject, related media, video and images, and a RSS feed of blogs and news sites that have written about the topic.

Of course, if you’re really lazy (I’m not saying I am, I’m just putting it out there…), you can always resort to Lazyfeed. Using Lazyfeed, keeping up with all your favourite topics is, apparently, now “as easy as checking your instant messenger.” Put simply, as they do on their home page, Lazyfeed works something like this:
“Save and forget: Save any topic on Lazyfeed and forget about it. Lazyfeed’s live update feed will let you know when there’s new content about the topic.
Never miss out: The most recently updated topics will rise to the top in real time feed, keeping you always updated.
Get recommended topics: Connect with social networking sites or blogs you read. Lazyfeed will extract topics from the contents and deliver them to you automatically.”

Some of us would actually call this practical rather than lazy.

The first one is something the clever crunchers at TechCrunch.com found, which may just put my Google days behind me. Well, for the next week anyway until the novelty wears off. Blind Search is a search tool that provides results to any search you type in from Google, Bing and Yahoo all on one page in three neat columns… but doesn’t tell you which column belongs to which. You then get to compare results side by side and vote for which one you think gave the best results. Once you’ve voted, the name of each search engine pops up at the top of each column.

Funnily enough, after a few test searches, Google kept losing to either Bing or Yahoo. Out of five completely different searches I never once voted for the answers from Google… interesting… Do I just use Google because it’s, well, Google? And this question is really the point of Blind Search, according to its creator Michael Kordahi: “The goal of this site is simple, we want to see what happens when you remove the branding from search engines. How differently will you perceive the results?” Most importantly though, well for me who doesn’t really care too much about all the politics of branding and being clever and important, the site is just a fun experiment and a novel way of searching for things online. Love it.

On the topic of novel ideas, I’m also loving TheBigPicture right now. A free online organiser, TheBigPicture is, to use the words of MakeUseOf.com because they said it so perfectly, an “innovative project management tool which combines things like tasks, to-dos, calendar and other project management related features into an intuitive mind map style interface.” Basically it’s a bunch of pretty coloured circles mapping out your life.

So, quickly, the big features of TheBigPicture are:
* Online organizer and project manager.
* Quickly use drag-and-drop mind map interface to create projects.
* Add tasks, move them and rearrange them.
* Associate tasks with the calendar dates easily.
* Free and simple to use.
* Pretty colours.

I have to be honest though and admit that the REAL reason I love TheBigPicture so much is the demo video, which sounds like it’s being narrated by a vaguely excited Arnold Schwarzenegger, to the soundtrack of some late night Saturday E-TV soft porn set in Bangkok. I’m just saying.

* Picture via http://patenteux.com/

On Monday we covered Bing - which is proving to be a very exciting search tool with nice integration options….today Google Squared started bubbling in the labs so we’ve given that a whirl.

Google Squared takes extracts data from Web pages and presents them in search results as squares in an online spreadsheet. It looks like a homework dream and for most of us it having many related search results on one page will save time and add information context. You can also start with a blank screen and build your own search spreadsheet….the applications are pretty powerful.

I searched ‘Romantic Movies’ as an example….

Read the comprehensive TechCrunch review also which includes a video demo.

Of course, there’s always a pre-meeting/date Google to be done. But sometimes Google is just not, well, nerdy enough. We’re talking stats, facts and figures at a glance here. No wading through scrolls and scrolls of questionable Wikipedia facts or pages and pages of completely unrelated rubbish (read porn – yes, it even sometimes comes up when you type in ‘economy’… Really, it happens.) Which is where Wolfram Alpha comes in.

Wolfram Alpha has been hailed as a “computational knowledge engine” by British founder Stephen Wolfram (possibly a geek himself?), which in normal person speak means it’s an answer-engine that uses an actual “curated knowledge base of data” (okay, that’s kinda nerdy speak but you know what we mean) – more than 10 trillion pieces of data and over 50 000 algorithms – rather than rounding up websites based on keywords, to give you answers.

In every day terms, Wolfram Alpha is good for when you’re looking for statistical facts like population sizes, country stats, mathematical equations, historical dates and other, erm, clever stuff, but when it comes to the stuff we usually tend to Google – like whizzy new design ideas and your ex’s name – it’s not the best.

Anyway, potayto, potarto, Google, Wolfram… you don’t have to choose here. You can use Google and Wolfram at the same time (gasp) and all on the same search page, thanks to a Firefox extension that allows Wolfram to search at the same time as your Google search. Wolfram Alpha results, which take a little bit longer to come up, are pasted JavaScript-style into the right-hand side of your Google search results page. To download it, you can just go here or download it direct on the Wolfram downloads page.

Have to admit we quite like this Wolf-thing. And it’s not quite so geeky when you add a wolf howl every time you say it.

Take a look at the Google search alternative, Keyboardr. Keyboardr takes all of the behind the scenes Google search results and displays them in real-time on your screen. As you type in your search query the display below dynamically changes to display Google results.

So when compared to Google Suggest, as opposed to displaying suggested results in real-time, Keyboardr displays the actual results in real-time.

The name Keyboardr comes from the fact that they have implemented the ability to navigate the results through your keyboard – using your arrow keys to jump from result to result and selecting your choice by pressing enter.

Along with getting Google search results, you will also see results from Wikipedia, YouTube and Google Images.

Check it out here.

Originally spotted by MakeUseOf.com

Web 1.0 was based on the read-only environment, where what you saw is what you got, very much information based, and then all of a sudden people/geeks started getting clever with this whole thing and said “hey! Why not give the users of the websites the option to comment or to put up their own content instead of the boring over read single user type information. Then bang!…..Web2.0 the read-write environment. From this we had an explosion of websites, with a lot of dudes making a hell of a lot of money.

Posting images, videos, commenting and blogging became a craze. People couldn’t get enough of this… American kids got fatter, Australian kids got lazier, England kids became cheekier. And African kids well they, they just carried on as normal because they didn’t have the internet.

So now we on the verge of what some experts would like to call web 3.0. The so called read-write-execute environment. So what does this mean for us simple minded end users? To be honest, no one really knows, but what seems to be popping up around the internet is the use of web based applications, basically meaning that there might be a trend towards downloadable apps for specific use….or not, it’s up to debate.

Another thing that might come out this, is intelligent based web searches, i.e. artificial intelligence, AI as they call it……wooooo, so what the hell does this really mean, It means that when you search for something it won’t bring up a (keyword search vs most visited) results, what this means is that your search engine will reason with your input in a “quasi-human fashion” so it will try and understand what you are looking for and not just spit out any keyword/tag related results. It will direct you to hopefully exactly what you’re looking for. All the more functionality to sift through some billions of WebPages out there. Anyway that’s a small bit of info about this hiding giant, so I will let you ponder more on that. So let’s wait and see what happens in the next year or so.

One last quote from Google CEO Eric Schmidt – “Web 3.0 will be applications which are pieced together – relatively small, the data is in the cloud, can run on any device (PC or mobile), very fast, very customizable, and distributed virally (social networks, email, etc).”  - Thanks Eric

Image sourced from weblogs.elearning.ubc.ca

Tests of the new system by the Google’s Philanthropy unit have so far suggested that the system may be able to detect regional outbreaks 7 to 10 days before they are reported, allowing the vulnerable and weak to be inoculated before the levels of risk become too high. This could really save lives and stop the spread of disease.