Designwizards

When the several news agencies under the self proclaimed leadership of News Corp raised their voice against Google's authority to publish their news without their consent, I really gave it a thought that 'is Google really going a bit too far to please it's users?'

Google now has gone one up over yahoo in the domain of music search with their newly announced “One Box” venture. It also marks the beginning of a new journey by Google in an arena once overlooked by them. And here they have done almost a catching up job by embedding this new music search feature. But as they say, its always better late than never! Though Google was lethargic to react, still when they came up, they came up with a feature that is much superior to the one already in motion by yahoo. While Yahoo’s music search only returns live playable music results for the artists name only, Google’s will return results for album and songs name also along with the traditional artist name results.

Turning down the speculations thrown out by the media that this music search results will come up with links to purchase the songs, Google’s RJ Pittman said that, they have no intention to give a commercial touch to this search feature, at least at this point of time. But going by the past records, one can easily assume that this option is always on the cards. Any ways, who cares, at least I’d care the least even if they had embedded it with commerciality.

Google has tied up with online music majors like, Lala, iLike, Pandora and Myspace for this venture. And depending upon the availability, viewers will be able to listen to the songs live, provided by these content partners.

If the current development tracks are maintained, we are not really far from celebrating the true advent of the 'Real time Search Experience'. In a win win deal proceeding Microsoft defeated Google by roping in Twitter in a dramatic table turn. Just when it seemed that the Search Emperor was going to get hold of the most promising and talented kid in the block, Microsoft flown in to the picture and snatched the prey to sport the last laugh.

After seeing that all their suggestions regarding the ineffectiveness of page ranks in deciding a page’s true quality falling in the deaf ears, Google finally decides to drop the page rank statistics from Google Webmaster Tools. Google has been saying discouraging things regarding page rank’s authenticity for long now. But it seemed like a rather contradictory policy on their side as they kept providing page rank statistics in their Webmaster Tools. So finally Google has sealed their thoughts on page ranks with this move, that got reflected in their recently released Webmaster Tools Lab.

The obsession over the little green bar among the webmasters community was like insane. Though many of them admit that it has very little significance while judging a page’s quality, still they simply couldn’t stop themselves from giving a glare at the little green devil. Many a time I wondered how on the Earth Google could give a vulgarly high pr to some pages that simply looked like craps!

It was Susan Moskwa from Google Webmaster Central team who came out explaining the exclusion as a reminder from their end to the webmasters community about their dangerous liaison with the green bar.

At last we got to take a peek at the first glance of Google Chrome OS, and that too strangely enough came not from the Google’s end. And although it has come with loads of bugs and

problems in it, still it has already succeeded to generate enough curiosity among enthusiasts. You can now easily download the raw or unstable version as it is named. Google is definitely not happy about this. And they have already started an internal investigation to find out the source of this leak. I’ve here also posted some screen shots that were originally posted by Jonathan Frederickson of Techcrunch, who was actually the first person to find this out.

To 'Deal' with the competition thrown by the heavy weights like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, Ask has introduced a new service or feature, 'Ask Deal'. It is almost in the same line as 'yahoo Deal'. Using its decent enough search technology Ask promises to churn out more than 1 million discount deals available in the web that covers offers from both the national and local merchants.

Microsoft's recent urge to it's IE8 users regarding the usage of Google Chrome Frame has not gone down well with the web community. According to a Microsoft representative who spoke with ars technica said;

"With Internet Explorer 8, we made significant advancements and updates to make the browser safer for our customers. Given the security issues with plugins in general and Google Chrome in particular, Google Chrome Frame running as a plugin has doubled the attach area for malware and malicious scripts. This is not a risk we would recommend our friends and families take."

And that at least to me sounded really fishy. To me it was just a reflection of Microsoft's growing anxiety regarding Google. Yes,There were security issues with Chrome at it's nascent stage, but they have sorted it out now. And the most funny thing was that why they are only concerned about the IE8 version! And that too when the version still could not achieve the success that it was meant to. Isn't it a fact that more people use IE than Chrome and so the hackers also mainly target IE rather than Chrome. So their concerns in the security issue looked more of a protective grudge to me.

In a surprisingly fast development, Adobe has announced that it will take over web analytic software company 'Omniture'. This take over will be costing them about $1.8 billion. This buy by Adobe will definitely force Google to revise its strategies for the web analytic market. Many are thinking that Google might come out with an 'Enterprise' version of their web analytics service.

Adobe Systems Inc. said Tuesday it will buy the Web analytic software company Omniture for about $1.8 billion, giving the maker of content-creation software a way to let marketers monitor the effectiveness of such content.

San Jose, Calif.-based Adobe Systems Inc. said it will buy Omniture Inc. for $21.50 per share in cash, a premium of 24 percent over Omniture’s closing stock price Tuesday.

The announcement came as Adobe said it earned $136 million, or 26 cents per share, in the fiscal third quarter that ended in August, down 29 percent from the same time a year earlier.

Excluding one-time items, Adobe earned a profit of 35 cents per share, a penny above what analysts polled by Thomson Reuters were expecting. The maker of Photoshop, Flash and Acrobat software says its revenue fell 21 percent to $697.5 million.

As nobody was expecting the entry of Adobe in the web analytics market, and that too so early, it will take some time for the web geeks to come out with their own versions and thoughts regarding this development. This has already started showing its effect in their shares(NASDAQ:OMTR), as it has pushed Omniture shares up $4.43 a share, while Adobe's share went down about 4% to $34.10.
According to Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayan, this was an important game changer for both Adobe and their customers. He has also said that this 'Omniture take over' wil enable advertisers, media organizations and e-tailers to realize the full value of their digital assets.

Just when everything seemed to be going alright for Google, they recieved a very disguised jolt from the Google china's head Kai-Fu Lee, as he left Google to nourish his own venture, 'Innovation Works'. It was on the cards according to many. Kai-Fu Lee has served Google for four years. And just when every one was sensing that Google might at last take a bite of it's share off the China's search engine market, that is one sidedly dominated by 'Baidu', the cards fell down. Though it might seem from the surface that it's just another job switch of a high profile Googler, there's more in to it. Google had started to penetrate the Chinese 'Oasis' search engine market after years long try and the timing could not be worse. Though Kai-Fu Lee has said that he for the time being will get fully absorbed into his venture which is about helping young and talented Chinese engineers and entrepreneurs to develop fresh internet and mobile computing technology. This new endeavor, 'Innovation Works' will hire the budding talents from China and nurture them for one year and then finally let them go open.
This is no doubt a very noble initiative and quite appreciable, but what if Kai-Fu Lee thinks of building a new Chinese search engine by mobilising these pool of talents. And with the invaluable Google experience that's definitely quite viable. No matter if it does not succeed to overpower 'Baidu', even a decent attempt can bid Google's Chinese search market dream a premature good bye forever. And that is definitely the last thing Google wants.
My assumption got closer to get transfared into belief after talking to several fellow web wizards. Now it will be really interesting to see, how Google reacts to this, what strategy they incorporate to enforce their Chinese crusade, who replaces Kai-Fu Lee and what vibe he spreads.

After five long years of legal procedures Google finally got hold of the patent to its very simple yet so powerful homepage design. So any one from now on, trying to take a piece out of its design could very well be dragged into legal trouble. Many Search engines who either consciously or subconsciously got influenced in their design aspect by Google, have definitely not accepted this patent episode in open minds. They are fearing a possible Google lash out from legal grounds sooner or later. They are thinking that with this new found ammunition, Google might go for the kill to extend its monopoly by finishing off the smaller rivals. And with the merging of Yahoo and MSN search technologies, it definitely looks quite a decent possiblity to clarify their no-fuss stand.

After achieving fair success in the Portuguese and Spanish versions, Yahoo is getting ready to launch the English version of its microblogging platform 'meme'. From the recent developments it gets quite vivid that yahoo is playing all its cards to impress 'Twitter'. But may be acknowledging the huge competition its now concentrating upon developing its own 'twitter' version. The Portuguese version was shown the daylight earlier this year and they soon followed it up with a Spanish version. This service comes with almost all the features that could be found in twitter. It provides the scope for sharing photos and videos with fellow users. It also dishes out the option of reposting the messages of other users. I, like many other over enthusiastic net freak waiting eagerly for this service to get launched. It will be really interesting to see how yahoo tries to elbow out twitter on their very own ground.