All about google!

I just found a new super cool Google feature; it's called zeitgeist. It gives the most popular google searches for the last week. You can also look at archives for any month since 2001, or yearly archives as well. It even gives year-end top 10’s for categories, such as women, men, movies, tv shows, new products, music groups, retailers, news sources, etc... I looked up zeitgeist because I had no idea what it was. Apparently it is a noun, “The spirit of the time; the taste and outlook characteristic of a period or generation.” Anyways, I would highly recommend playing around with this feature, it’s pretty interesting to see what people were googling in the last few years. Example, in 2001 Nostradamus and Osama Bin Laden were the top two men to be googled.

Also, I found a really excellent resource that goes along with what we’ve been learning about Google. The address is http://www.creativeconfusion.net/search_engines/google-commands.html
It gives all sorts of commands to use in the Google search. For example, did you know that Google does math? Type 49/7 or some other arithmetic problem in the bar and click search, the first result will be your answer. One more really interesting site that I found this week is http://searchenginewatch.com/. It has news and other noteworthy features about what else, search engines! I found a good article about yahoo renewing a contract with Google to use some of their search results. It made me wonder why Yahoo can’t get the same results on their own. If anyone is interested, the article is available at http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/article.php/2165081
The two companies seem to use different methods to get their results…“In a unique twist, Yahoo didn't simply renew the deal for Google to be its "backup" partner, used only when Yahoo itself doesn't have an answer. Instead, the company has embraced Google's results even more tightly. Unveiled to the general public today is a new Yahoo search results page, where there is no longer a separation between Yahoo's own human-powered listings and Google's crawler-based results. Instead, the two are blended together.”
Speaking of Yahoo, I showed a few of my friends my “Google My Way” page. They all liked it more than the current version of Google. I told them it was an attempt to take the best of Google and Yahoo and combine it and they thought it was a great idea. Two of the four friends were Yahoo users and they said they went to Yahoo because they like being able to glance over the latest news and easily find stories of interest. I think it would be good for Google if they made it easier for people to customize their own Google pages. Like Gmail, I don’t think they are doing a very good job of publicizing a service that a lot more people would be interested in.
Note on googlebombing: one of my favorite site, wikipedia, has a really good article about googlebombing, included in the article is a link to the article on Google’s pagerank algorithm. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb