Google seems to be countering the threats from News Corp‘s Rupert Murdoch, and Microsoft’s Bing by evolution, rather than revolution. First of all there is the change to allowing five page views from a subscription site in 24 hours, rather than the previous “first click” principle (where the first click is free, you have to subscribe to the rest… unless you do a new search). Now, they’ve launched a revamped front page. Well, revamped by Google’s minimalist standards, anyway. (more…)

Google’s little marketing comic for Chrome has proved a goldmine for satirists, as The Register shows…

(In case you’re wondering, I’m still using Firefox thanks.  Yes, it’s fast but I’ve too many Firefox plugins to switch.  Hmm – is there an article in that somewhere?)

Google have finally done what a few people said they would a while ago – launched a new web browser called Chrome.

It’s got some very interesting concepts behind it.  First of all, of course, it’s completely open source (more…)

The new search engine Cuil looks great. It’s created by a number of ex-Google engineers, and returns search results in kind of a more newspaper style.

It’s intriguing that it seems to search as many, or more, pages than Google already. It looks rather cute, and even has its own “add to firefox” plugin (in Firefox 3, drop down the list of search engines and at the bottom you’ll see “add ‘Cuil’” on the list.)

Did a search on my own name and found what I expected – the British ambassador to Qatar and the editor of Motor Boat Monthly – and it looks pretty clever. I note that esotechnica doesn’t find this blog, but references to it. Well, maybe they’ve still got some crawling left to do, after all.

Well, that’s the view this lunchtime. Back to work…

Don’t know whether you use Google Mail or not, but there’s a few interesting things been going on with it.

First of all was the new interface, which didn’t seem much different to the old as far as I could tell, but was likely a rewrite to make the code more modular.  And now, lo and behold, GMail (I hate the term GoogleMail, but for legal reasons Google have to use it in the UK, due to a trademark dispute) has launched GoogleMail Labs.

There are several experimental modules you can plug in:

• Custom date formats – incredibly useful for those of use who are accustomed to putting the day first, then the month, and get confused by dates like 6/9/8 being the 9th of June, rather than the 6th of September (what – someone sent me email back in time?  Freaky!)
• Superstars - using star icons to “rank my friends” doesn’t appeal to me.  The ability to use an icon to distinguish between home and work email addresses, however, is indispensable.
• Fixed width font – ever tried to read a table that looks fine in a fixed width font in Times New Roman?  If you haven’t, lucky you.  If you have – this feature, like all the rest, can be found on the “Labs” tab in “Settings”.

Oh, and it turns out that new interface had a whole ream of new features too:

• You can now have a custom “from:” address.  Not just great news for spammers and other scam artists (I jest…), but useful for ordinary people too – especially as you can now retrieve email from other accounts and answer it inside Google Mail, essentially turning Google Mail into a portal to your corporate email while you’re on the road.  Or your ordinary ISP account while you’re sunning yourself abroad.
• Google Documents increases its usefulness too, adding a “view as slideshow” module to allow you to look at those pesky PowerPoint presentation attachments without client side software.  Classy.
• Auto-save.  Personally I thought it was there already – but then Firefox doesn’t tend to crash on me that often, even if I am using beta 3 release candidate 2.
• Virus scanning.  Yes, Google now thoughtfully virus-scan your incoming email for you.

There’s heaps more, and I’ve probably missed the plugin or new feature you’ll find most useful – feel free to praise it to the skies in a comment.

But before I go…  my favourite of all has to be the old school snakes game!!!  Reminds me of the Sharp MZ-700 and Snake & Snake.  Ah, such memories…