Chrome review part 2

Having started using Chrome again, there remain a few of irritations.

- The first and perhaps most annoying is that the mouse-pan doesn't work in Chrome.

- A more minor irritaiton for those of us that use multiple browsers is the order of the right-mouse menu bar with 'new tab' and 'new window' swapping positions. More logical in Chrome.

- Finally on an old PC where memory is a constant problem is that processes still run after the browser is closed

Chrome shows promise

After an initial underwhelming test of Google's Chrome browser, memory issues with other browsers have forced me back for a second look. There are now workarounds to adding the likes of Delicious buttons (simple bookmarks do fine), but the main attractions are the load speed of pages and the independent tabs which can crash in isolation.

The result - less 'not responding' errors, a quicker browser and once you get used to the UI a compelling competitor. 

I'm still sticking with Firefox in the main, but will certainly be making more and more use of Chrome.

Searching in colour

Google is adding colour filters to its image search. To use it look for the 'all colors' bar underneath the search box in image search and click on your colour.

The colour palette available is pretty limited, so it's questionable just how useful this is when you could add colour into your search term in the first place. For some, however, it could be a good way to filter your results quickly when trying to find the best colour of an object.

Either way it's a small step towards visual search, such a challenge in search where the search engine will analyse an object for its meaning beyond the metadata available (e.g. photo of red car only tagged as 'car').

Speaking Google's language

There's a good chance you will now with the announcement that the Google homepage now appears in over 100 languages.

Interesting to read in the story of adding Maori to the list of languages that it takes more than 1,600 phrases to translate Google's search interface - 'search'; 'I'm feeling lucky' that's two, how many more do you need! It's been a labour of love to add Maori to the list and there is no doubt considerable pride that it is now added to the list.

Mini Adventure

Google has released several updates to their enterprise search product, Google Mini. More details are available on a post on their blog, but essentially it involves the ability to search in shared drives, weight documents by date or value and comes with support for six new languages.

Shared drives support is the big one given the number of documents stored in this locations in corporate environments.

More details on the enterprise blog.

A year on

Embarrassingly it's been a year since my original experiment in blogging was updated. In fairness, I now edit two other sites and this mixture of tests, comment and even analysis has fallen behind in terms of priority.

The site still gets a regular stream of traffic from some of the better pieces in terms of content and SEO practice, so rather than kill it off I'm going to remind Google and co that it still exists.

I may well continue to do the odd update from time to time on topics outside of my current web publishing interests, so keep subscribed to the RSS feed and hopefully good things will come to those that wait.

Where's Germany? Why, it's right here

According to Google, it's right here on this blog. A quick look (UK settings) shows Netcoms Dot Com as the number two result for 'Where's Germany'.

I was surprised to see the amount of traffic coming through for this term after this post started the ball rolling. No doubt a mixture of a recent post, plus the keywords in the title tag. Let's see how long it lasts.

Double Trouble

There's an excellent history of the online advertising industry, as part of Google's explanation of why they bought DoubleClick, essentially adding their ad sales network to DoubleClick's ad serving network.

As well as giving Google a significant foothold in another key area of the online ad industry, it also gives them access to DoubleClick's agency relationships, to capture both the short and the long tail of the ad industry. Smart move.

Google warming

Laudable initiatives from Google at ensuring that they become a carbon neutral company and beyond. Let's hope that this becomes a template for the corporate world.

Will be interesting to see how much their use their existing destinations as a way of campaigning online, as there are some topics where you shouldn't remain neutral...

Where's Germany?

So, YouTube is going international with sites in nine different major markets. However, the one surprising omission is Germany.

While Germany has Sevenload.com, this is still a huge digital market and a quick search shows plenty of German content already on YouTube. What will the locals make of the apparent snub? Maybe the German reaction to alleged Flickr censorship and the legal issues at the core played a factor in the delay...

Time to update the blogger templates

This blog has had the same template for a couple of years now, after I decided to take it out of the pre-2000 design phase and bring it up-to-date. As ever, internet design moves fast and it's already looking dated.

So, I decided to check out the available blogger templates having expectations of at least some of the open-source creativity you get with Wordpress. However, the templates were lacking in number and excitement so I'll stick with this for now.

Time to create a few more?