Google has announced its intention to release Priority Inbox, a new beta feature aimed at reducing Gmail clutter, irrelevancy and good old fashioned spam. With the modern email user bombarded on a daily basis by messages from friends, colleagues, strangers and automatic robots, organising coherent and applicable responses to the ongoing inbox assault is a neverending task.
Priority Inbox aims to act as a strategtic advisor in the behemoth war of email control, a battle with whom anyone who uses a computer at work is all too familiar. The feature automatically divides a Gmail user’s incoming mail into three sections: “Important and Unread”, “Starred”, and “Everything Else”.
How Priority Inbox will determine the relative importance of each email is based not only on the text contained within the message, but the behavior of the Gmail account user who receives them. For example, if a user regularly sends, receives and replies to emails from someone called Anne, then Priority Inbox will know that an email from Anne is likely to be relevant and worth filtering into the “Important” section.
Better yet, the system remembers and learns from past user behaviour, so the more that someone uses the feature, the better at classification the system becomes. And Gmail users can give it hints on how to improve by clicking plus and negative buttons to indicate the urgency level of each email, as well as set up personalised filters to customise the system to their unique needs.
According to Google, Priority Inbox is scheduled to roll out for testing by all Gmail users within the next two weeks.
Microsoft and Yahoo have announced the merge of their search engines (Yahoo! and Bing) to take on the world’s leading search engine Google.
Microsoft will be powering the Yahoo search capability with their more sophisticated Bing engine, and Yahoo will become the sales force for both companies’ paid search advertisers. The partnership is a 10 year deal, where Yahoo will use Bing’s search technology on its sites, and Microsoft will give Yahoo a percentage of the revenues generated from the paid search results.
Currently Bing is only powering the Yahoo search results in the U.S and Canada, however plans are in the works for other countries.
In June this year, comScare Inc reported the current percentage share of each of the 3 main search engines as follows:
- 64% Google
- 18% Yahoo!
- 12% Bing
With the merge of Yahoo! and Bing, they still will only have less than a third of the search market, so there will be a lot of work and time involved before they stand a chance of toppling Google.
Google launched a new functionality to its Gmail service earlier this week, allowing account holders to make voice calls. Gmail users have been able to voice chat for several years now, and telecommunications service Google Voice was rolled out in the United States last year. Now the two have been merged, allowing users the ability to connect to landlines from within Gmail.
With this latest development, the world’s most popular search engine is set to take on the global leader in VoIP (voice over IP) communications, Skype. The number of people with a Gmail account is reported to be in the hundreds of millions, giving Google a numbers advantage over Skype’s 124 million monthly users. But unlike Skype, Gmail’s voice calling ability does not yet extend to mobile phones.
However, Gmail’s mobile call limitation does not seem to have had an impact on the new feature’s popularity. According to Google’s Twitter stream, over one million calls were placed using the upgraded Gmail platform in the first 24 hours of its release. A far cry from the struggle for recognition experienced by two of the search engine’s previous offerings, Google Wave and Google Buzz.
If the positive response to Google Voice’s reincarnation within Gmail remains strong, it is to be expected that the company will roll out business oriented modifications to target the commercial as well as the private sector of the VoIP market.
Meanwhile, Google aims to consolidate and expand upon its newfound piece of the VoIP consumer base by establishing free Google Voice phone booths in selected American college campuses and airports.
If the service takes off, then Google may also expand its current offering of free calls between national landlines in the US and Canada to other countries.
Google have announced they will be launching a new commercial platform, the Google Chrome Web Store, to target the casual online gaming and web application market.
According to Google, it is very difficult to find quality and entertaining web products amongst the thousands of applications and games available across the Internet. Its new Web Store aims to solve this consumer problem.
Unlike the Apple App Store, Android Market and other mobile application stores which take 30% of developer’s revenue, the Google platform will only charge a 5% processing fee from each transaction. The Web Store will charge a onetime $5 registration fee, and offer free trials and subscriptions to certain games.
The interface will allow users to leave reviews and comments on games, to allow others to judge for themselves before making the commitment to purchase. As with the App Store, some applications will be free.
The apps available (either free of paid) will come in several varieties to suit a range of users. Some will be accessible through websites for smartphone users with full HTML browsers. Others will be specifically tailored for the Google Chrome browser (the Web Store is a Google product, after all). Yet others will be modified web apps that can be downloaded onto a user’s computer or mobile device.
The Chrome Web Store is planning to launch later this year, but developers are able to upload apps now for preview by the Google team. With the company’s traditional emphasis on quality over quantity, we can hope that those which are successful will be truly the best of the web.
Google announced a major overhaul of its Images Search earlier this week, in the first significant revamp since the feature was first introduced in 2001.
With this redesign, Google is keeping true to its ongoing goal of enhancing the online user experience. The new version of Images Search aims to improve user-friendliness and add value by giving more information for less clicks.
One of the changes made to support this objective is the availability of more information about an image on the search results page, without the need to click through to a new page. This is achieved by a user hovering their mouse over a thumbnail image to access a pop-up preview of information such as the URL location of the image.
Another change is the introduction of what Google terms “infinite scroll”: 1000 images are returned to the first results page, so no more clicking through to pages 2, 3 and beyond in order to find the right image. A nifty idea, though to be fair the credit for coming up with it has to go to rival search engine Bing.
The new layout is of particular interest to advertisers with Google AdWords, as text ads on the Images Search results page are now able to include a thumbnail image. As with the images results, users can access a larger version by hovering over ad images.
While only some users are currently able to see the new version of Images Search, Google aims to roll out the update universally by the end of this week.
It has been announced last week that Google has purchased Metaweb in an aim to further improve search, with efforts for rich snippets and search answer such as fact-finding search query answers.
An example provided is if you search [Barack Obama birthday] in the search box. The answer of his birth date is presented at the top of the search results.
Ideally Google would like to see the longer tail search query questions to be generating the relevant answer and information in the above manner.
Metaweb was originally founded in 2005 with the aim for websites to have “richer and more engaging” content and website interaction. Metaweb have an extremely large database with information on over 11 million topics/things such as celebrities, companies, movies, holiday destination providing site owners with third party content access, with theinformation being pulled from a wide variety of content sources.
What is so different to this database of information, is the way it is collaborates and ties together the information.
The idea and utilisation of Metaweb on your website could be extremely beneficial and make the search and collection of available data to present on your site easier and more interactive.
In a recent act of defiance and an attempt to pre-empt the refusal of a search licence, Google (not wanting to be blamed for censored search results) has redirected Chinese users to a Hong Kong based Google server in the hopes of proving that the Chinese Government is censoring results rather than the search engine.
A compromise has been agreed upon between Google and the Chinese Government, which will allow users to search Chinese internet sites via Google.
This licence has since been renewed, and Google will continue to show all Chinese search results through its Hong Kong based server. Unfortunately, this server will run through “the great firewall of China” and many results will load extremely slow, or not at all.
In reflection this is a win for both the Chinese Government and Google.
Google still has a footprint in the search market – although not the biggest, and the Chinese Government has shown both internally and externally that it is willing to balance economic issues and censorship.
Does this mean that the Chinese Government is becoming lenient to outside influences? Or perhaps this is a very clever way to control the flow of information.
Google has been allowed to trade in the Booming Mobile phone industry, but in another slap in the face, the search functionality in its Android based phone has been striped and replaced with the competition – Baidu.
“Many analysts were stunned by the moves and question whether Google was acting prudently in risking its spot in the world’s largest Internet Market”
Australian online retailers are now at an advantage, benefiting from Google’s E-Commerce Search platform. Trailed in the US and UK, and now to be released in Australia. This is a big step forward to sales conversion for larger E-Commerce websites.
Concluded from data released from PayPal, 40% of Australia’s online retail spending is actually thrown overseas, also that online retail spending will increase from $24 billion (2009) to $33.8 billion (2012).
Why is all this revenue being pushed overseas? Google’s head of retail, entertainment and consumer products, William Easton says “less than 50% of the top 50 retailers in Australia don’t have a comprehensive in-site search. We can compare this to walking into a retail store and being ignored by the sales person.”
So what is this? Basically Google’s search algorithm working for you internally, with features that would benefit an E-Commerce store. The search is powered by Google, but the user interface is custom built by the online store owner.
E-Commerce search has many features used to make online shopping easier and quicker for the user, ultimately creating more sales. Filters are available allowing you to refine searchs, and featured products are viewable toward the top of the page, and even Google’s famous spell check it also provides infrastructure for up to 50,000 products!!
This platform has shown success throughout the UK and the US, and is now available in Australia for a small fee: US$25,000. Peanuts in comparison to the potential revenue generated from happy and repeat customers.
“Skippable” ads are being introduced by YouTube later in the year. This new format will enable users to skip the pre-roll ads that are included within the video, whilst advertisers won’t be charged a cent for skipped ads. According to Google’s senior product manager, Baljeet Singh.
YouTube began studying skippable ads late last year. “We’ve been playing around with it for the last three quarters and seeing really great results… skip rates varied dramatically based on the quality of the ads.” Mr. Singh said.
Here is an example of an ad playing and the option to skip on the top right hand side of the video.
Skip Youtube Ads
YouTube also offers users a choice of ads they can see within a video, particularly in longer videos.
Youtube ad selection
Based on strong data correlating skip rates with ad quality, Google will encourage companies to create higher quality ads suited for their audience and hence improve effectiveness by this user option to skip.
However for the moment, Singh says that YouTube is still “experimenting” with more models for YouTube and its focus is still behind advertising.
How do you think this will impact on your viewing experience?
There is a fierce war waging in personal computers: Windows VS Linux, Dell VS HP, Gigabyte VS Asus and now Chrome VS Safari. While the battle is not new, the latest outcome is worthy of note.
It has recently been reported that Apple’s Safari browser is the latest casualty of Google’s ever-increasing world domination. You may not think this is significant, but consider the facts. There are many browsers out there – Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Avant, Comodo Dragon (which looks remarkably like Chrome) – just to name a few. And the new super power has just toppled the reigning 3rd place.
StatCounter released figures showing Google Chrome’s US market share has increased to 8.66% while Safari’s is 8.17% This is an amazing achievement by Google, as it has increase market share from 0% to 10% in just under 2 years. The first release of Chrome was its beta version, and was launched in September 2008. Apple’s Safari Browser was first released on the 7th of January on Mac OS X.
According to the current statistics on StatCounter.com the current market share is as follows:
1st Internet explorer: 53% (US) 50% (Aust) 52% (WW)
2nd Firefox: 28% (US) 30% (Aust) 31% (WW)
3rd Google Chrome: 8.66% (US) 9.49% (Aust) 9.24 (WW)
4th Apple Safari: 8.17% (US) 8.21% (Aust) 4.08% (WW)
