The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘mobile-makeover’

Suggesting queries is becoming a pretty standard practice on search engines these days. You know, those drop-down menus that are populated as you type with things you likely mean. They’re useful, but Google just made them more useful.

Previously, when you types a query into Google’s search box, the menu would drop down giving you a range of possible search terms and how many results each would return if you select that one. Clicking on any of those would take you to a results page. Starting today, when you start typing in the search box, the suggest drop down is populated with a number of interesting things including direct links to pages, personalized results and even sponsored ads.

For example, if you start typing “TechCrunch” into Google with this feature enabled, you’ll see the first result in the drop-down menu is an actual link to our site. That cuts out the results page middle-man and saves time. There won’t be hyperlinks populated for all queries, but ones where Google is pretty sure they know what you’re looking for, you should see them on, we’re told.

That’s a great feature — but it also opens the door for Google to do something potentially much more interesting. With hyperlinks now in Suggest results, Google can also start serving ads in the results drop-down. And it’s already experimenting with it for a limited number of sponsored links.

This is Google serving you ads before you’ve even done a full query — just based on what you’re typing. And it’s pretty genius because presumably, companies would bid to get placed in these drop-downs just as they do for search result pages. And the click-through on these things must be massive.

But that’s getting ahead of ourselves. Google is very much downplaying that aspect right now, only saying that its experimenting with a limited number of sponsored links and that the feature is not open to new advertisers at this time. But you can bet it will be one day, and it can do nothing but help Google’s ad click-through rates.

[Above: What Suggest previously looked like.]

Another nice feature new to the drop-downs is personalized results. If you use Google’s history feature, you can see sites or results that you’ve used in the past get populated at the top of the drop-down. And if those aren’t actually relevant to what you’re looking for, there’s a “Remove” link to kill them.

Something else useful that Google is doing with Suggest is that even when you’re on a search results page now, you can use Suggest to further tailor a search. What I mean by this is, say your first search was for “roller coaster,” when you get to the results page, if you start typing in the search box again, you’ll get results based around that original query. So if you were to type “biggest,” Suggest would give you a drop down with “biggest roller coasters” suggested. It’s a subtle feature, but nice.

A final small feature is that the “Google Search” and “I’m Feeling Lucky” buttons have been placed in the drop down as well. Previously, the drop down obscured the view of these. And as you’ll notice in the screenshots, Google removed those silly tallies telling you how many results each query had. Most people were just confused by them, and it’s not like they helped rank the results in the drop down, Google says.

Yesterday, I gave Yahoo some grief over their search product on the consumer end after a lackluster state of search event. This is the type of stuff I like to see — just small, little useful features. They don’t necessarily have to be game-changers — at least not until Google starts selling those sponsored links in the drop-downs.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

T-Mobile USA announced today a new campaign dedicated to helping people save money on their wireless service, and the carrier is not only using the lovely Catherine Zeta-Jones as the face of the campaign again, they’re also giving a huge vote of confidence and a heap of exposure to Redwood City, CA-based startup BillShrink.

BillShrink launched in April 2008 as a way for people to compare the value they are getting with their current wireless provider against other national carriers. It has since raised an additional $8 million on top of a $1 million round it secured back in 2007 and expanded its technology to other products and services, like helping you find the cheapest gas in your neighborhood or the ideal credit card based on your profile.

People can now visit the T-Mobile website or one of its retail stores for a so-called “Mobile Makeover”: free, unbiased and personalized savings recommendations for wireless plans, powered by BillShrink. That’s a big boost for the fledgling company, especially considering the first television spot featuring Zeta-Jones will air tonight during the American Idol season finale on FOX (that’s a lot of eyeballs). It’s also a bit of a risk for T-Mobile, although they seem pretty confident of the outcome of the comparison engine:

“Providing great wireless coverage at a great price is at the heart of what T-Mobile offers,” said Denny Marie Post, chief marketing officer, T-Mobile USA, Inc. “We’re so confident that T-Mobile provides the best overall experience for a majority of Americans, we’re willing to put our value to the test by pointing people to an independent source. And while we may not come out on top each and every time, we believe a majority of people will see T-Mobile offers them the value they want, and the best experience in wireless.”

Billshrink is headed by CEO Peter Pham, a former Photobucket executive who joined the company in February last year.

(Via Trading Markets)

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Open source developer Bruno Lowagie is about to set a remarkable precedent in the F/OSS world by restricting any government body in his and my home country, Belgium, to use any product that makes use of technology originally developed by him. More specifically, this concerns iText, a free and open source library for creating and manipulating PDF, RTF, and HTML files in Java (also ported to the .NET Framework under the name iTextSharp). iText is embedded in many products and services, including Eclipse BIRT, Jasper Reports, Red Hat JBoss Seam, Windward Reports, etc. and used by major companies like IBM, Adobe and Google.

iText is distributed under the Mozilla Public License with the LGPL as an alternative license, but it is also available through a commercial license, distributed by iText Software. Pretty soon, these licenses will be updated, and Lowagie is now pondering about adding an additional restriction of usage for the product referred to as ‘The Belgian Restriction’ (Dutch): no official government-related institution in Belgium will be allowed to use iText in any of its applications and systems for any version after iText 2.2.0.

The restriction would include any third-party application that makes use of iText too, which means there are a lot of government bodies who would be forced to rewrite or downright replace essential systems to keep on functioning properly (from a technical standpoint, that is). On the other hand, it could also lead to iText being barred from future Linux distributions because of the built-in restriction.

The reason for all this ruckus? Apparently, Lowagie has been forced to cough up nearly 10,000 € over the past few years simply because he’s running been Google AdSense ads on his personal website, which the government erroneously classified as income from corporate activities. He’s been fighting over this for quite a while, but the situation hasn’t been resolved yet so this is another way for him to draw attention to the whole thing. Lowagie points out that iText will still be available under MPL and claims he would be willing to lift the restriction if the dispute were resolved in due time. He added that he’s not only doing this for personal attention but also to poke third-party developers who (ab)use the iText license in dubious ways.

Some commentators are pointing out that this restriction threat sends out the wrong message about the concept of open source, and that this could actually lead to less trust in F/OSS technology from both governments and corporations. I can’t say I disagree with that, but it proves how desperately Lowagie is trying to reverse the decision made by the local IRS, and I happen to have a thing for people who stand up for something.

What do you think?

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

There are not many startups that set out to save peoples lives - unless you count the generic use of things like Twitter to get the word out fast about an earthquake or some other life-threatening event. But then again there aren’t that many aiming for the extreme niche of mountain rescue teams. But Decisions For Heroes, which just launched, is aiming to do just that, and it just goes to show how far the application of social data to a problem can reach.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.