Coffee Tables and Sandwiches

01/06/2007

Over to Microsoft's latest offering: how about the buzz about the "surface computing" device that they released? Okay, yes it's just a coffee table that happens to interact with your digital devices such as your camera or mobile. Although it may look cool, it sure isn't cheap - it's expected to cost from £3,000 to £5,000. This and the recent Google Gears launch at gears.google.com - where "Google is pushing the Web into whole new spheres of activity and posing a challenge to rival Microsoft in the desktop software era - were among the "top news items" on Search Account Manager Francesca Gioia's list.

A few other people mentioned the new look of Google in the US, mostly positively. One commented on the recent release of http://www.google.com/experimental/ - which tests various interfaces, saying that students will appreciate the "timeline and mapviews" feature. A lesser known feature mentioned by people both within and outside of the search team (including one of the Account Managers, Malcolm Murdoch) is how Google image search works can be tweaked.

For example this links you to lots of pictures of sandwiches:
http://images.google.co.uk/images?svnum=10&um=1&hl=en&q=Sandwich …while here you can view lots of pictures of people eating sandwiches:
http://images.google.co.uk/images?svnum=10&um=1&hl=en&q=Sandwich&imgtype=face
It turns out that this type of image search functionality may have come from Google's acquisition of a company called Neven Vision in late 2006, announced at
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/08/better-way-to-organize-photos.html
With this, and Microsoft's Photosynth demo available at -
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129 - there seems to be a lot of advances in search coming soon. And we're all waiting to find out what's in store at the upcoming Search Marketing Expo in Seattle, which unfortunately we will not be attending.

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