Sydney Web Design

A new release of Google Chrome is out and there are quite a few features you’ll want to know about.

First up, it’s faster. When you open a new page while other pages are loading, Chrome prioritizes requests for the new page. (I usually want the older pages to load first, but whatev.) DNS caching, more efficient DOM bindings and using V* or proxy auto-config should also contribute to a quicker browsing experience.

You can customize your New Tab Page to set which sites you would like quick access to. Drag website thumbnails to give them a spot on the page. The change will remain permanent no matter what your browsing habits are.

The Omnibox, which provides suggestions based on keystrokes is optimized to help distinguish between keyword searches and websites. New themes let you dress up your browser, and HTML 5 capabilites are being built into the beta.

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Google has added a Creative Commons filter to Image Search. In order to use the filter, you’ll need to use the Advanced Search option in Google Image Search.

Once on the Advanced Search page, look for the “Usage Rights” option, which is the second from the bottom. You won’t see “Creative Commons” listed as an option. Instead, you’ll see options for:

• labeled for reuse
• labeled for commercial reuse
• labeled for reuse with modification
• labeled for commercial reuse with modification

Google’s not the first to do this. Of course, Flickr has had Creative Commons search for a long time. Yahoo! added a Creative Commons filter to its Image Search last May.

For its part, Google added Creative Commons filtering options to Custom Search plus YouTube began offering Creative Commons licensing this past February. However, YouTube doesn’t yet offer Creative Commons search in its Advanced Search yet.

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StatCounter made news fast and furious in Bing’s first week when they offered up data showing Bing had surpassed Yahoo! in search. And now they’re making a splash again by quickly releasing data for the whole month of June.

Overall, things are relatively steady, but there’s an ever-so-slight increase in Microsoft search share.

The data shows Bing gaining .5% search share in June compared to May. But Live Search had gained about .5% in May over April.

One percent growth over the last two months may not seem significant, but it could be the beginning of momentum.

“At first sight, a 1% increase in market share does not appear to be a huge return on the investment Microsoft has made in Bing but the underlying trend appears positive,” commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter. “Steady if not spectacular might be the best way to describe performance to date.”

Plus, the 1% growth has come at the expense of Google. The search mammoth saw its search engine share according to StatCounter decline by 79.07% in April to 78.48% in June.

By the way, despite that first week of traffic for Bing, Yahoo! still retained its second place status for the entire month of June. Yahoo!’s traffic has remained fairly steady over the past three months in StatCounter data.

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Early stats from Statcounter show Bing taking off in a big way in the United States. As of yesterday, Bing was at 16.28% marketshare while Yahoo! hung out at 10.22% marketshare.

Meanwhile, Google’s market share has dropped about 6 points from 78.07% to 71.99%.

Of course, Bing has only been live since Monday. It could just be curiosity. But if people are truly liking Bing, these numbers will be corroborated by comScore and Nielsen data. If that’s the case, Bing may be a decision Microsoft got really, really right.

h/t TechCrunch

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Google has released a new version of its AdWords Editor and there are some new features to look forward to.

CSV import has been added. Google says this was requested by many advetisers. Making changes on a spreadsheet or custom app can now be imported.

Next is the ability to download selected campaigns. You no longer have to endure long waits while your entire account downloads. Just select the campaigns you wish to download and go about your business.

The Keyword Opportunities feature has been updated. You can now sort by topical category. Also, when you export or copy keywords, the Keywords Opportunity column is now included.

Sort data by up to 3 columns.

A new Keyword Count column allows you to sort by number of keywords.

Resume account download prevents download progress from being lost is a download is interrupted for some reason.

A progress bar will let you know where you are at in the process of a given task in AdWords Editor.

You can select duplicates in order of appearance.

Usage tracking gives you the opportunity to share anonymous data in order to improve AdWords Editor.

New languages in this version include:

• Thai
• Arabic
• Romanian
• Hungarian
• Indonesian
• Greek
• Vietnamese
• Bulgarian
• Croatian
• Lithuanian
• Estonian
• Slovak
• Filipino
• Slovenian
• Serbian
• Catalan
• Latvian
• Ukranian
• Hindi

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Seems the Chinese government is not a fan of Twitter. Access to the social media site has been blocked in China, according to ASSME.

Free speech is not an option in China and the blocking of Twitter is another instance of this. One wonders what impact this will have on the user numbers globally. Over a third of the world’s population lives in China and they represent a major growth area for the internet.

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Google employees get 20% of their time to work on non-assigned projects. Sometimes when they do, the result is some pretty cool stuff that Google adds to its products.

This time, Google has announced that two 20% projects have made their way into Google Labs (aka Google’s experimental playground). The two projects are “Similar Images” and “Google News Timeline.”

Last week, we brought you word that Google News had introduced a “Timeline of Articles.” This new timeline that’s launching in Labs is different.

The Labs timeline looks like a calendar with a bunch of news stories. An on-site scrollbar helps users find more stories for a given day:

Meanwhile, Similar Images does pretty much what the name implies. Start off by searching for an image. In this case, I typed in the name of one of my favorite shows on TV, Chuck (starring Zachary Levi, don’t cancel it, NBC, don’t!):

In the results, I look for an image I’m interested in and click the blue link underneath that says “Similar Images”

As you can see, the results are really good!

You may remember that recently the official Google Image search recently added a color filter. It works quite good as well. It’s nice to see these advances in image search from the Google team.

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Google Scholar – in beta since 2004 – epitomizes the problems of the internet. It provides easy access to advanced research that can be used by students – but whether it is used for citations or to plagiarize is the deeper problem.

The site uses an academic approach to ranking. “Google Scholar aims to sort articles the way researchers do, weighing the full text of each article, the author, the publication in which the article appears, and how often the piece has been cited in other scholarly literature. The most relevant results will always appear on the first page.”

What plagiarists must know is that professors know how to use it as well to check if they are cheating. There are even sites like turnitin.com where teachers can submit papers and have them checked for originality.

Without a doubt Google Scholar helps improve access to academic research for students, and students are becoming well aware that teachers are tech savvy as well. If used properly it is a great example of the benefits the web provides.

Google Scholar has even released a toolbar plug in for Firefox browsers.

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After months of rumors, Google Health finally launched last May, promising to store our medical records in a secure way that is more accessible, easier to understand, and useful than traditional paper records. Since then we haven’t heard too much about the service, which isn’t particularly surprising given the sensitive nature of the information involved (this isn’t a space where Google is going to take new feature additions lightly). Today, Google has announced that it has launched a significant new feature, giving users the ability to share their medical records with designated family or close friends.

The general idea behind the feature is that oftentimes during emergencies family members may not know the details of your medical history, like medical allergies. Such information can be lifesaving, but sharing extremely personal medical information is not something that should be taken lightly. Google is taking lengthy measures to ensure the security of the data, associating invite links to specific Email addresses and allowing users to track who has viewed their records. All shared records are also read-only.

One security measure that I don’t understand is the 30 day expiration Google Health is placing on each Shared link. Unless users resend their link every month, it sounds like this feature would be effectively useless in the event of an emergency. I’d prefer a system that allowed me grant permanent access to a close family member, which I could revoke at any time.

For those users who’d prefer to go the low-tech route, the site is also launching a new feature that makes it easy to print out wallet-sized snapshots of your medical profile, which you can distribute to close family or perhaps just keep in your own wallet. The site is also launching a new graphing feature, allowing users to visualize the progress of health-related metrics like their blood pressure or cholesterol.

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Here’s a clean look at the upcoming Facebook homepage redesign that will go live next week. The new design will give users the ability to easily feed the news stream by friend type and network, and gives users a much easier way to post links, photos and videos. The news feed will also begin updating in real time without page refreshes. See more here. CEO Mark Zuckerberg also wrote a blog post summarizing the changes here.

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