Yahoo and Microsoft want
to keep up with Google - can you? 
Thursday, October 4th,
2007
Both Yahoo! and Microsoft have announced
upgrades to their current online search engines. Yahoo's will
allow users to refine their searches to photos, music, and video, as
Google has for quite some time now. They will be offering
information from their calendar service, Upcoming.org, to show local
events alongside search results. Microsoft's newly improved "Live
Search" will quadruple the amount of searchable webpages its index can
access, draw 3-D maps, and also have image and video searches. It
will also have charts in relevant search results.
The question is: can anyone compete
with Google? These days, Google offers more products than the
above average user can keep up with. Here are just a few of the
latest and greatest:
Alerts. Wondering if
your crazy Uncle Joe will ever make the paper? Or want to know all
of the upcoming stories on a specific topic? Have Google send you
an alert whenever a keyword(s) of your choosing pops up in their search
database. And as of September 25th, Google Alerts has been
offering video
search alerts as
well.
Gmail. Chat right
inside your free Google e-mail account, and save your chats into your
Gmail account, while you're reading your e-mail. In early
2006, they began incorporating their instant message service,
GoogleTalk, with Google e-mail (Gmail). Can you handle
that?
iGoogle: On May 1st, 2007, Google
went live with iGoogle. Your own personalized Google homepage, that
shows you the news on anything you tell it to, that you can design with
quotes, images, videoclips and more daily. Basically you can set
it up to tell you everything you might go checking each day:
horoscopes, news, weather, YouTube stuff, random words or thoughts for
the day, on and on. You can even have it tell you what the newest
articles are on ConnieTalk
by title, since it has
built-in Feed reader capabilities.
Notebook: Clip and collect stuff while
you are surfing the internet. Paste text, links, e-mail addresses,
whatever into the blinking box, and Trash it or Save it for later.
Or share it!
Patent Search:
Seriously search the entire directory of U.S. patents, and the full text
of them. We're talking diagrams, sketches, and explanations of
over 7 million patents.
Sketchup:
Just thought of what your dreamhouse will look like? Go
to Google Sketchup and you'll get 3D modeling software that will design
anything from a shoebox to a skyscraper. And then you can place
them on Google Earth.
Now, if you knew all that, and you're not
in the search engine market, you should be off creating the cure for
cancer. Unless you're reading this in the year 2020, in which case
you will likely will have found it in Google Archives, and
the stuff I've mentioned will be as cute as watching Oregon Trail
in DOS circa 1985.
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