Microsoft announced today that Bing is just now supporting query history in its Autosuggest feature. In other words, if you have your search history enabled, Bing will incorporate past queries you’ve made into the suggestions.
“You are in full control of your query history,” the Bing Team stresses. “We know your privacy is very important to you. You can turn History on or off at any time or selectively remove any portion of your search history using the Manage History option. You will see both of these choices every time you use Autosuggest.”
“Many search tasks span multiple search sessions even days or weeks,” Bing says. “In fact, 44% of non-navigational search sessions last longer than 1 week! Perhaps you need to research the purchase of a new automobile. You might use Bing to find a retail location and to further research online – over many days – to make the best decisions on your big ticket purchase. With history support in Autosuggest, you can restart a previous search session by typing a few characters to see your previous queries and start researching right where you left off. We know from our testing that this makes you more effective at your longer search tasks.”
The suggestions that are based on your search history are listed in purple, to stand out from the other blue suggestions.
At TED, Microsoft unveiled some new features for Bing Maps. “This work builds on the idea of spatial search that Microsoft discussed in December when the company launched its new version of Bing Maps,” a representative for Microsoft tells WebProNews.
Some of the new features are available today, but some you will have to wait on a little bit. Microsoft highlights the following new features:
Streetside Photos application (in technology preview): Available today, this tech preview mines geo-tagged photos from Flickr, and relates them to the Streetside imagery in Bing Maps. As more people contribute and share imagery, we can reunite those photos with the location where they were taken. This application will also enable the layering of historical imagery, so people can go back in time and see a location as it existed decades prior.
World Wide Telescope Integration: We’re not just stopping at the street, and are excited to announce our vision for the initial integration with the World Wide Telescope, a project out of Microsoft Research. Once launched, you will literally be able to “walk” outside in Streetside mode, look up, and see what’s above – way above, with constellations coming to life.
Indoor Panoramas: At the same time as we’re getting more “universal” with World Wide Telescope, we’re also getting more intimate. Today, we’re showing the first results of our indoor panoramas work. This will provide an experience identical to Streetside, but won’t be limited to places you can take a vehicle. Whether you’re exploring Seattle’s Pike Place Market, or your favorite theme park, Bing Maps will give you the most immersive experience of the place.
Video Overlay Technology: MIcrosoft also demonstrated a preview of our new video overlay technology, which enables real-time video to be overlaid seamlessly on street-level imagery, adding another dimension to the mapping experience. In the coming year, we think you will be pleasantly surprised with how far Bing takes this new technology.
Meanwhile, Google has introduced Google Maps Labs, similar to Gmail labs, only for maps. Right now there are only 9 features, which you can enable/disable at anytime, but that list is sure to increase greatly over time. Current features include:
- Drag ‘n’ Zoom
- Aerial imagery
- Back to Beta
- Where in the World game
- Rotatable Maps
- What’s Around here?
- LatLng Tooltip
- LatLng Marker
- Smart Zoom
Click the little green flask icon at the top of Google Maps to access these, and see more details about what each one does.
Google is also just finished pushing out an imagery update for Google Earth and Google Maps. More on that here.
Buzz has gotten off to a great start in terms of attracting users. Google said in a blog post yesterday that over 9 million posts and comments had been created, and they were seeing over 200 posts per minute. Both numbers have likely grown since then.
In the post, Google addresses some of the privacy concerns people have been having, and improvements they’re making based on user feedback.
Google has uploaded the entire Google Buzz launch event. If you are interested in seeing the new product unveiled, you can watch it below:
Article starts: Google held a press event to announce the most “buzzed” topic of the week - Google Buzz. This is Google’s new product, which is being compared to social networks like Twitter and Facebook. It is integrated with Gmail and other Google products, and appears to be one of the missing links in tying Google together as a social network, a concept we’ve discussed repatedly.
Editor’s Note: The bulk of this article was written before the announcement was made and has been adjusted to reflect the announcement itself, after live blogging the press event.
Google says Buzz has five key elements:
1. Auto Following
2. Rich, Fast Sharing experience…
3. Support for public and private sharing….
4. In-box integration
5. Just the good stuff…
Watch the video below to get a general idea of what Buzz does.
Buzz will show a thumbnail of a YouTube video and make it easy to play in line. With photos, they will show thumbnails, but Google built a custom photo viewer, which lets you flip through pictures and see them “big and fast”. If you share links, it will automatically fetch headlines and photos from the post (similar to Facebook). You can “like” and “unlike” stuff, and expand comments. It works with keyword shortcuts from Gmail.
Public/Private sharing – The post box will let you post updates publicly or privately. If it’s public, it will go to your Google profile, and is indexed by Google’s real-time search. You can share privately, and it will let you send to groups and custom groups.
In your in-box, you will see buzz notifications that contain real-time comments. It sits in the same in-box as your regular email, but you can move between your regular in-box and your Buzz stuff. It integrates it right into Gmail.You can also use “@” for replies like with Twitter.
While Google Buzz is presented as a Gmail feature, it goes well beyond Gmail. For one, all public updates you post will be posted to your Google profile page, (which is searchable). In addition, Google launched three new mobile products for Buzz:
1. The ability to use Buzz from www.Google.com on iPhone/Android
2. Brand new app at buzz.google.com
3. Maps Update for Nokia Symbian/ Android.
Mobile could be one of the biggest keys to the success of this product. Google says Google.com is the world’s most popular mobile home page, and Buzz can be accessed from there on iPhone and Android devices. Android’s popularity is growing quickly too.
Buzz will find your location (if you let it) and snap your updates to that location. With the Google Maps feature, you can see what people are saying based on location. You can even use voice recognition to post buzz updates by voice.
When Google announced Google Buzz earlier this week, the company made it abundantly clear that it was interested in Buzz being as open as possible. Looking at the Google Buzz API page, you’ll see that support for Activity Streams, AtomPub, OAuth, PubSubHubbub, Salmon and WebFinger are things that are “coming soon.”
What all of this means is that Google is working to make Buzz content something that can be used in as many services as possible, while letting as many services as possible come into Buzz.
“The idea is that someday, any host on the web should be able to implement these open protocols and send messages back and forth in real time with users from any network, without any one company in the middle,” says Google software engineer DeWitt Clinton. “The web contains the social graph, the protocols are standard web protocols, the messages can contain whatever crazy stuff people think to put in them. Google Buzz will be just another node (a very good node, I hope) among many peers. Users of any two systems should be able to send updates back and forth, federate comments, share photos, send @replies, etc., without needing Google in the middle and without using a Google-specific protocol or format.”
Google has most recently turned on WebFinger in Gmail (via RRW). WebFinger is described as being about making email addresses more valuable, by letting people attach metadata to them. According to the WebFinger page at Google Code, that can include things like:
- public profile data
- pointer to identity provider (e.g. OpenID server)
- a public key
- other services used by that email address (e.g. Flickr, Picasa, Smugmug, Twitter, Facebook, and usernames for each)
- a URL to an avatar
- profile data (nickname, full name, etc)
- whether the email address is also a JID, or explicitly declare that it’s NOT an email, and ONLY a JID, or any combination to disambiguate all the addresses that look like something@somewhere.com
- or even a public declaration that the email address doesn’t have public metadata, but has a pointer to an endpoint that, provided authentication, will tell you some protected metadata, depending on who you authenticate as.
WebFinger is enabled for all Gmail/Google Profiles with public profiles. Google’s Brad Fitzpatrick discusses more technical details about it here.
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