6/05/2009

Google Squared - New Search Tool by Google


Google Squared is an experimental search tool by Google that collects facts from the internet and presents them in an organized collection, like a spreadsheet.

Google Squared has been designed to be conversational, enabling users to respond to the initial result and get a better answer.

If there's another row or column users would like to see, they can add it and Google Squared will automatically attempt to fetch and fill in the relevant facts.

As rows and columns are removed by the user, Google Squared will get a fresh idea of what the user is interested in and suggest new rows and columns to add.

Once users get the info square they were looking for, they can save it and come back to it later.

Microsoft Bing - Some Tips and Tricks

1) Use the full version of Bing
If you are using Bing outside North America, chances are that you would be seeing a localized version of Bing that might be missing some features. For example, the Indian version of Bing.com doesn’t have search history.

To explore the full version of Bing, go to this page and set English - US as your default region. You can now enjoy all the Bing features from anywhere.



2)Watch Hulu Video Previews outside US

Hulu hosts some popular popular TV shows but the you can watch these videos only if your computer has US based IP address.

However, Bing lets you watch short previews of Hulu video even outside US. Just search for any TV show episode on Bing Videos (see example) and hover the mouse over any of the video thumbnail to watch a short clip.



3) RSS Feeds of Search Results

Unlike Google or Yahoo, Bing offers RSS feeds for their web search results that you can subscribe to inside any feed reader. Your browser should be able to auto-detect the RSS feed of Bing pages or you can append &format=rss to any Bing search URL and convert it into a feed.

This RSS feature is not available for Image or Video search in Bing.



4) Find Pages That Link to MP3 Files or Documents


Bing (and Live Search) supports a unique "contains" search operator that lets you find web pages that contain links to particular file types.

For instance, a search like susan boyle contains:mp3 will show pages that are about the British singer and that also link to MP3 files. Replace mp3 with doc to search pages that contain links to Word Documents.

Bing Mobile Formats Web Pages for Easy Reading



You can access Microsoft's Bing Search Engine on Mobile at m.bing.com. It will get redirected to the the country specific version Eg:- It redirects to mindia.bing.com. If you want to access the Global Version of bing mobile, go to this link - m.bing.com/?lc=en-us.

Like Google, Bing also formats the web pages to fit the small screen of your mobile screen but it has one more unique feature.

For this, open the search settings on your mobile and turn on the option “format web results to fit on my phone”. Now when you click any of the search results, Bing will create a visual image-map of that web page (see screenshot above) and you can then click the numbered zones to view the corresponding section of that web page.

This solves the problem of scrolling down long web-pages on a mobile phone to good extent.