Google launches faster Google variant

Google has begun testing a new engine for its search product code named "Caffeine". According to Google it is designed to “push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.”

Available here, the new product looks just like the old. A few informal tests indicate it may be a bit faster (but Google is already so fast it is really hard to tell), and basic searches seem to have more results in its index than regular Google.

Google quadruples newspaper offerings

Google has updated its index, quadrupling the number of articles included in News Archive Search. It now includes articles from several new publications, including the Halifax Gazette, Sydney Morning Herald, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and the Village Voice. They have also added new international publications such as the Manila Standard, The Nation from Thailand, and many others.

To showcase their offerings Google points us to the complete June 2, 1753 edition of the Halifax Gazette, one of the oldest newspapers digitized to date.

Google reserves 1 million Level 3 phone numbers

Google Voice promises to give you one number for all your phones - includng voicemail that is as easy as email, and many enhanced calling features like call blocking and screening, voicemail transcripts, call conferencing, international calls, and more. The service is currently available for GrandCentral users only, but will be open to new users soon. And in anticipation of that - and apparently in anticipation of mass acceptance (highly likely) Google has reserved 1 million phone numbers with Level 3, signaling indicating that it may finally be ready to roll out the service. Google last month reserved 1 million phone numbers with Level 3, signaling that it may finally be ready to roll out its long-anticipated Google Voice service.

The free service, announced in March, lets users unify their phone numbers, allowing them to have a single number through Google Voice that rings a call through to all their phones.
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Sources could not say when the 1 million numbers may be assigned. Level 3 has been supplying Google with phone numbers since the introduction of Google Voice, so the 1 million numbers are an indication Google is close to adding a significant amount of users.

Google Voice has a number of unique features including call transfer between a user's devices, multi-party conferencing, conversion of voice calls to text messages, cut-rate international calling, and call transcription.

Google also has integrated the Voice service with Gmail contact lists. But the gem is the fact that a user can have one phone number people can dial to reach them regardless of where they are located, either home or mobile. Google Voice uses VoIP to link collections of phone numbers.

Google adds Farsi to its Google Translate service

Google announced today it has added Farsi to the list of languages Google Translate can convert automatically to English. Persian was already on the list of languages Google hoped to include on Google Translate, but political upheaval in Iran and the resulting media crackdown has made the Internet a key source of information coming into and out of that country. Facebook also rushed a beta translation of its site in Farsi into production, hoping more people will use the site to communicate current events coming out of Iran.

From The New York Times

Beyond Google?

Wolfram Alpha, the invention of Dr Stephen Wolfram, has been demo'd at Harvard and had the Twitterspher atwitter for days. In this ten minute video, you can get a sense of what makes it different and more useful than Google. It's hard to see the screen and results, but the audio alone makes it clear that Wolfram Alpha is a different way of searching the Internet. Here's more information from The Independent.

The Independent says, "Wolfram Alpha will not only give a straight answer to questions such as "how high is Mount Everest?", but it will also produce a neat page of related information – all properly sourced – such as geographical location and nearby towns, and other mountains, complete with graphs and charts...If you ask it to compare the height of Mount Everest to the length of the Golden Gate Bridge, it will tell you. Or ask what the weather was like in London on the day John F Kennedy was assassinated, it will cross-check and provide the answer. Ask it about D sharp major, it will play the scale. Type in "10 flips for four heads" and it will guess that you need to know the probability of coin-tossing. If you want to know when the next solar eclipse over Chicago is, or the exact current location of the International Space Station, it can work it out."

It's to be released sometime this month.

Search millions of Life Magazine's historic photos

Search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1850s to today. Most were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of LIFE and Google.

google newsletter returns

After many posts on many lists about whether or not librarians had been used and dissed (
http://tinyurl.com/59cklf) the Google Newsletter is back. Coincidence or not, it's nice to have it back again. Here's a
link to the newsletter.