Powerful structures for product-driven organisations
Again, with suprisingly little fanfare, Google recently launches a free, automated (i.e. computer voice recognition) 118-style service - currently only in the US. Phone the free-phone number, tell it you want a pizza (or something else in rare circumstances) and you'll get regular-quality google information straight down your phone. If this really works; really is free to the… Continue reading 11 Google 11 Google
With suprisingly little fanfare, Google has added another feature to their maps platform. A few months back the listings were enlarged to include more structured information like pictures and published reviews. Now customers can directly review any item which gets listed, straight on the page. Given the effect that sites like Trip Advisor have… Continue reading Star performance
After all the nonsense of Information Revolution, it's great to see Ask.com doing some actually worthwhile stuff to try and improve their search engine. A lot of the front-end changes may owe a fair amount to the big G and emerging trends in the marketplace (including "suggests" style prompting) but there's some nice new stuff in… Continue reading Not a lot to Ask
The site that promised to measure the size of the internet has failed dismally. It failed for the same reason that "viral" campaigns fail on the internet and in the real world - because the message or motivation wasn't strong enough. But this shouldn't be suprising, messages that captivate everyone are incredibly rare. Advertising people… Continue reading Size matters
A small but significant UI change in Google shows how they plan to go about world domination. Lovely simple cross selling of their services and building a suite almost as if they could hear this excellent interview with Jakob Neilsen when he compares them to Yahoo! At the same time, they're pushing out the personalised search. For… Continue reading Better than you know yourself
I see from the fact that it is still everywhere that Ask.com is not taking a great deal of notice of the massive amount of negative feedback to its truly awful information revolution campaign. Well, aside from the fact it doesn't make a whole lot of sense, I'd think it's important we dig down into… Continue reading Can I count the ways
Go to maps.google.co.uk and click on the direction tab. Do the search from Southwark Bridge, London to New York, New York. Point 31: Swim across the Atlantic Ocean, 3462 miles. Ho ho. But that's not the end of the merriment. Look, they make you go to France first.
This is what 'old fashioned' banner advertising people call an MPU or L-rec advertising format. This particular bit of creative is running on high-traffic generic sites (like the front page of national newspaper websites). These formats will soon be made redundant by relevance-targeted keyword advertising because they're not effective. Or so we thought!
This April 1, Google announces Google TiSP beta. A free at home "commode-based" broadband system.
Turn your back on the big G for two seconds and look what they go and do. First of all they added cool skins to Personalised home page which reflect what time of day it is where you are: And then in gmaps, the integration of pictures and extended related search pannels. You start to… Continue reading Interesting search engine things
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