Search

The folks at Google definitely have a sense of humor. Directions on Google Maps from New York City to Paris starts out innocently enough with "Head southwest on Broadway toward Warren St." But once you get on the Massachusetts Turnpike and take a few turns things get a little fishy:

"Turn right at Long Wharf" and then "Swim across the Atlantic Ocean, 3,462 miles, 29 days, 0 hours."

Sure enough, the map shows the route crossing the sea.

Asked for comment on the cross-Atlantic directions, Google spokeswoman Megan Quinn said: "It's … Read more

Used to be that when you wanted your Web site to be indexed in the major search engines you had to submit the Web address and other location information to each of them separately. Now the top four sites are letting you do it in one fell swoop. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft announced in November that they would adopt the same site submission protocol and provide one centralized place for Web site owners to manually feed their pages to the search companies and to check whether their sites have been crawled. Now, Ask has joined the group too. This new &… Read more

Google has quietly launched Google Voice Local Search, an experimental service that allows people to search for local businesses over the phone. There are no ads on the service, which is available only in the U.S. To use it people can dial 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411) from any phone and search for a business by name or category and be connected to the business at no charge. Users can also get the search results and additional details over SMS if they are on a mobile phone.

Microsoft also has local voice search through the TellMe service it bought last month, notes … Read more

Google has a new telephone service in the U.S. called Voice Local Search. It's the equivalent of dialing 411, but free, really fast, and it pulls multiple listings like you'd get from a search in Google local. Mobile phone users can get listings sent to their phone via SMS, including the telephone number and full address. You can also be connected to a business for free, a great feature that got dropped from my previous favorite free 411 service 1-800-Free-411.

The entire service is controlled by computers, and the voice recognition is pretty capable. I tried confusing … Read more

AOL wants advertisers to be able to buy search ads that appear only on the AOL network. So, AOL has made a deal for a Google white-label AOL-branded search advertising service--dubbed AOL Search Marketplace. The service has been in beta with about 30 advertisers since the beginning of the year, but is being expanded to a larger group of chosen advertisers on Monday, AOL says.

The deal is an extension of a partnership between AOL and Google that dates to 2002 and was renewed and expanded in December 2005. As part of the deal, Google invested $1 billion for a … Read more

Blackle is a front end to Google that works exactly like Google, but with one difference: Its home page and its results pages are black. Why? To save the planet. As it says on the about page, "Blackle saves energy because the screen is predominantly black." The page quotes a 2002 report that maintains, "a given monitor requires more power to display a white (or light) screen than a black (or dark) screen."

That makes intuitive sense when you're talking about CRTs, but not LCD monitors or laptops, which power their backlight consistently regardless of … Read more

Yahoo Australia has put up a beta of Alpha (got that?). It's a new, clean, multi-engine search page that people (TechCrunch, MicroPersuasion), are comparing to Google Co-Op, Rollyo, A9, and Netvibes.

It's an interesting experiment. Especially if, as we've been hearing, it represents thinking that's going in to a new version of My Yahoo. I can't see what this site offers over the current My Yahoo, aside from the capability to add custom search engines. However, adding a search engine that's not already supported on the service is hugely difficult. Compare it to adding … Read more

One of the key benefits of using Google Desktop rather than the search functionality that ships with Microsoft Windows XP is its speed and online functionality. Vista has improved the built-in search, but for XP users, Google Desktop is a powerful search tool that does a much better job at helping you find things, even if they're online. This morning, Google released a version of its Desktop search client for the Mac operating system. Sure enough, the release has a lot of people asking why? After all, Macs have been shipping with Spotlight, OS X's built-in system-wide search … Read more

The San Francisco New Tech Meetup is on tonight at CNET headquarters. There are four companies presenting, two of which I have covered before: MerchantCircle and MyThings. That leaves two newbies, both interesting plays that lack only for business models.

Tellfriends is a nicely designed site for social recommendations. You can recommend a favorite local bar or restaurant to the crowd. Other people can vote your recommendation up or down, and you get standing in the community when you make good recommendations. Sounds like Digg, no? Or maybe Yelp? It's a little of both, resulting in a social-bookmarking site … Read more