The official description from that site:

Google Instant is a new search enhancement that shows results as you type. We are pushing the limits of our technology and infrastructure to help you get better search results, faster. Our key technical insight was that people type slowly, but read quickly, typically taking 300 milliseconds between keystrokes, but only 30 milliseconds (a tenth of the time!) to glance at another part of the page. This means that you can scan a results page while you type.

The most obvious change is that you get to the right content much faster than before because you don’t have to finish typing your full search term, or even press “search.” Another shift is that seeing results as you type helps you formulate a better search term by providing instant feedback. You can now adapt your search on the fly until the results match exactly what you want. In time, we may wonder how search ever worked in any other way.

It’s starting out only in the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Russia. It is compatible with Chrome v5/6, Firefox v3, Safari v5 for Mac and Internet Explorer v8.

Mayer finally announced the feature. The official blog post for it is up now too.

It has a scroll to search feature that lets you scroll through predictions and see results instantly for each as you scroll down.

Mayer says its not “search as you type”. It’s actually “search before you type” because it’s predicting results. “There’s even a psychic element to it,” she says. She recalls an old Google April Fools day joke about a similar product.

Google Instant will be rolling out over the course of today in the U.S. Over the next week, the other countries mentioned will start getting it (for users signed in).

The Google Instant team says its great for weather, because you can just press “w” to get local weather results.

“It’s possible that this feature may increase or decrease your overall impression levels,” says Google’s Dan Friedman. “However, Google Instant may ultimately improve the quality of your clicks since it helps users type queries that more directly connect them with the answers they need.”

There is also a post on Google’s Webmaster Central blog, which webmasters should read. Impressions are measured in three ways, it says: the traditional way, when a user clicks on a link that appears as they begin to type, and when a user stops typing, and the results are displayed for a minimum of 3 seconds.

During the presentation, Google says Google Instant will “enrich your life” and help you learn more while you search. They say it will seem so obvious in retrospect.

I must have missed this in the announcement, but Google will reportedly hide explicit search results in instant results.

Google is working on implementing the feature in browser search boxes (possibly in the next few months).

AndroidGuys points to a way you can use Google Instant on mobile already (as opposed to waiting a few months). Hat tip to Michael Martin for that.

Original Article: Google’s event is about to happen, but the company has already uploaded the following videos of the product: Google Instant. The videos confirm speculation about the announcements being based on “streaming search results”.

Here’s another video Google has uploaded about the testers:

And yet another video Google has uploaded:

“Where is that presentation? Was it attached to an email? Or in Google Docs? If you’re not sure, you may end up searching several places with the same query in order to find it. With the new ‘Apps Search’ lab, we just made that all a bit simpler,” writes Google software engineer Bram Moolenaar.

“You may notice that mail results show up just as fast as before while non-mail results may take a tiny bit longer. That way, if you’re just looking for an email, having this lab enabled won’t slow you down,” adds Moolenaar.

The feature also comes with “did you mean?” suggestions.

Given that the feature is a Gmail Labs experiment, it is subject to bugs, so keep this in mind if you turn it on. The feature can be turned on by going to Gmail settings, and clicking the “labs” tab. From there find “Apps Search”.

Update: Microsoft announced that the “King of Bing Maps” contest is now closed. They will determine the winner soon.

Original Article: Bing has announced that it’s searching for “someone to worship.” By this, they mean lead the way in Bing Map App development. So naturally, they’ve launched a contest.

The contest is called the “King of Bing Maps Challenge,” and the winner gets a $1,000 Bing Travel gift card. 2nd prize gets a $500 card and 3rd gets a $250 card.

Winners, selected by a panel of industry experts, will be announced August 20.

Bing requires applicants submit their map app by July 25th. The official rules can be found here. Bing’s Chris Pendelton cites the following steps:

1. Read about the King of Bing Maps contest at www.KingOfBingMaps.com.
2. Download the Bing Map App SDK (Live ID required). If you don’t know anything about it or if you haven’t read my blog post, read my post about the launch of the Bing Map App SDK – “Announcing the Bing Map App SDK…and 3 New Bing Map Apps”.
3. Start with the template provided in the SDK. The template is our Hello World for Bing Map Apps. Visual Studio 2010 and Silverlight 4 SDK required.
4. Build a sick ass application. I mean disgusting.
5. Submit your application to the Bing Maps Portal.
6. Wait for the judges to determine your fate.

The contest is no doubt designed to generate more interest in the creation of Bing Maps Apps, one feature that sets it apart from other search engine maps.

The company says this is an effort to increase transparency, and will display the revenue shares right in the AdSense interface sometime within the next few months. While that may take a little time, they’ve still revealed the percentages as they stand right now.

“AdSense for content publishers, who make up the vast majority of our AdSense publishers, earn a 68% revenue share worldwide,” says Neal Mohan VP, Product Management. “This means we pay 68% of the revenue that we collect from advertisers for AdSense for content ads that appear on your sites. The remaining portion that we keep reflects Google’s costs for our continued investment in AdSense — including the development of new technologies, products and features that help maximize the earnings you generate from these ads. It also reflects the costs we incur in building products and features that enable our AdWords advertisers to serve ads on our AdSense partner sites. Since launching AdSense for content in 2003, this revenue share has never changed.”

“We pay our AdSense for search partners a 51% revenue share, worldwide, for the search ads that appear through their implementations,” adds Mohan. “As with AdSense for content, the proportion of revenue that we keep reflects our costs, including the significant expense, research and development involved in building and enhancing our core search and AdWords technologies. The AdSense for search revenue share has remained the same since 2005, when we increased it.”

At this point, Google is still not disclosing its revenue shares for AdSense for mobile applications, feeds, or games. The reason for this the company gives, is that these are still evolving, and they’re still learning about the costs associated with supporting them.

Google also says that revenue shares for AdSense for content and search can vary for major publishers with whom the company negotiates individual contracts. In addition, the revenue shares may change in the future, but they don’t have any changes planned yet.

“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.

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.

The company said they would only be used in place of some URLs, mainly ones that don’t give the added context of a link the way that breadcrumbs do. Interestingly, there seems to be an incentive for those who go the breadcrumb route because of the multiple links that you just don’t get with regular search results.

Google’s move was generally well received. For example, a commenter going by the handle Stupidscript said, “It’s definitely a good time to start wrapping your head around the notion of ‘providing context’, because the web is heading into its “semantic” period … where each link will be more or less valuable based on its relationships with and context to information found behind other links.”

Google’s use of breadcrumbs in search results is the focus of a recently submitted question to the Google Webmaster Central team. The question was, “Google is showing breadcrumb URLs in SERPs now. Does the kind of delimiter matter? Is there any best practice? What character to use is best? > or | or / or???” Google’s Matt Cutts responded:

Matt says you should have a set of delimited links on your site that accurately reflect your site’s hierarchy. He also notes, however, that it is still in the “early days” for breadcrumbs.

“Think about the situation with sitelinks,” he says. “Whenever we started out with sitelinks, it took a while before…for example, we added the ability in Google Webmaster Tools where you could remove a sitelink that you didn’t like or that you thought was bad. So we started out, and we did a lot of experiments, and we’ve changed the way that sitelinks look several times. And we have different types of sitelinks (within a page, and the standard ones you’re familiar with). So we’ve iterated over time.”

In this same way, he says, Google is in the early stage with breadcrumbs and he has seen different experiments with them. For example, there have been prototypes where the breadcrumbs were in the rich snippet gray line, above the regular snippet. “Having it in the URL is kind of nice, but it could still change over time,” he says.

He says the best advice he can give is to make sure you have a set of delimited links that accurately reflect your site’s hierarchy, and that will give you the best chance of getting breadcrumbs to show up in Google, but Google will continue to work on ways to improve breadcrumbs. He says any new announcements about it will likely be made on the Google Webmaster blog.

While Matt doesn’t exactly lean toward one way or another with regards to which character to use as asked about in the submitted question, all of the examples I have seen highlighted show the “>” used. That includes examples from Google’s original announcement on the inclusion of breadcrumbs (if you see other ways, please point them out in the comments). Based on that, if I were going to choose one, I’d go with that.

When Caffeine was introduced, so was a sandbox, where people could play around with Caffeine based search results, and get a look at how rankings were altered (if at all), and try to get a feel for how it was going to go. Now that sandbox has closed up shop, it looks like the Caffeine update will be live in Google search before too long. It will start after the holidays at least though.

“I know that webmasters can get anxious around this time of year, so I wanted to reassure site owners that the full Caffeine roll out will happen after the holidays,” says Cutts on his blog. “Caffeine will go live at one data center so that we can continue to collect data and improve the technology, but I don’t expect Caffeine to go live at additional data centers until after the holidays are over. Most searchers wouldn’t immediately notice any changes with Caffeine, but going slowly not only gives us time to collect feedback and improve, but will also minimize the stress on webmasters during the holidays.”

The announcement at what used to be the Caffeine sandbox reads:

We appreciate all the feedback from people who searched on our Caffeine sandbox.

Based on the success we’ve seen, we believe Caffeine is ready for a larger audience. Soon we will activate Caffeine more widely, beginning with one data center. This sandbox is no longer necessary and has been retired, but we appreciate the testing and positive input that webmasters and publishers have given.

Categories covered on the site include technology, consumer trends, media consumption, media landscape, and macro economic trends. Each of these has several sub-categories. For technology, you can see data on broadband, devices, mobile, and speed. For consumer trends, you can look at data for community, entertainment, information, and eCommerce. For media consumption, you can look at changes in media usage, demographic usage, media consumption rates, media multi-tasking, personalized media, and experiences. For media landscape you can look at either all media or just online, and for macro economic trends you can look at the UK or the rest of the world.

The site is only available in English, and covers mostly UK statistics at this point. Google says the information will be updated regularly though, and users can submit stats.

The site uses data provided by: B2Bonline.com, BARB, BusinessWeek, Coke, Commission of the European Communities, Comscore, Core Metrics, Datamonitor, Deloitte, The Economist, eMarketer, Enders Analysis, Eurostat, Film Distributors Association, Financial Times, Forrester, GFK, Google Insights for Search, Greenbee.com, Guardian, HarvardBusiness.org, Hitwise, IAB, IFPI, IMF, Internet Retailing, Internetworldstats.com, JP Morgan, KMPG, Media & Marketing, Mediascope Europe, Mindshare, Motorola, Net Imperative, New York Magazine, Nielsen, NMA, Ofcom, Ipsos MediaCT, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, QuickPlay Media Inc., Retail Week, Reuters, TGI Net, Times Online, TNS, Verdict Research, Wall Street Journal, WARC, YouTube, ZenithOptimedia, and GM.

“The new page is designed to help you easily find and explore the things that matter most to you. The Yahoo! Search team is delighted to demonstrate our commitment to innovate in search technology and deliver an amazing user experience,” says Larry Cornett, Vice President, Consumer Products, Yahoo Search.

Yahoo names the following as key highlights of the new Yahoo Search:

Intelligent Search Results – Allows you to explore results from key sites and narrow results using different types of SearchMonkey structured data. Over the past few months, even more enhanced results for product, local, entertainment, reference, social, and tech sites have been displayed automatically. With the new search page design, we have made it easier to see these riche results from an increasing number of sites.

Feature-Rich Experience – Provides quick access to search features that make people’s online lives safer and easier, including Search Scan/SafeSearch (which helps protect you from viruses, spyware, and spam while you search) and Search Pad. Now it will be even easier to return to the research documents you have created while searching.

Search Assist Expansion – With the new design, our powerful query assistance is still available directly below the search box, but we’ve also incorporated it into the left-hand column for quick access lower on the page, even when the Search Assist layer is hidden. You can use this column to easily explore and discover concepts related to your query. We have added Search Assist to the search box on every Yahoo! page in the U.S. with the launch of a new universal header.

Along with the change to Yahoo Search itself, comes a “revamping” of Yahoo’s image search and video search results pages. In the left-hand columns on these, you wil get links to related categories.

“Rather than building this new experience on top of our existing front-end technology, our talented engineering and design teams rebuilt much of the foundational markup/CSS/JavaScript for the SRP design and core functionality completely from scratch,” says Cornett. “This allowed us to get rid of old cruft and take advantage of quite a few new techniques and best practices, reducing core page weight and render complexity in the process.”