Big G’s Q2 earnings report streets later today, so forgive us if we’ve got a little Google on the brain. Since Yahoo! really got hammered yesterday, we wonder if the reaction to Google’s earnings (whichever way they go) will be as severe. While we wait, here’s a few tidbits of Google news to look at:
Chemical group neutralized A lawsuit leveled against Google in late 2004 has come to a top secret ending, says News.com. The American Chemical Society (ACS) had charged Google with trademark violation and unfair competition over the Google Scholar academic search product, which went head-to-head against ACS’ own SciFinder Scholar service. Telling a court that they’d pay their respective legal fees, the two sides came to a confidential settlement. ACS is “pleased,” Google is “pleased,” and nobody’s sayin’ nothin’. Google Scholar so far appears unchanged (and also still in beta).
Access: granted Google’s going public with another Labs experiment, this one built to “identify and prioritize search results that are more easily usable by blind and visually impaired users.” When returning search results, Google Accessible search (built on Google’s Co-op technology) “tends to favor pages that degrade gracefully – pages with few visual distractions and pages that are likely to render well with images turned off,” according to the FAQ. That’s a different approach to accessible search than Big.com, an Ask.com-powered engine that features very large, high contrast fonts on the engine itself and a plug-in “magnifier” tool for use with external sites. However, Google Accessible does offer less cluttered results than the usual Google search – by using an old page format from the year 2000. Philipp Lenssen has more on the new offering here.
Tools to gratify our ever-shortening attention sp When the Google Video blog leads off an announcement like this… “You’re watching this documentary on monkeys and then halfway through, this monkey does the funniest thing ever” …they’ve definitely got our attention. And rightly so: they’ve got a new feature that allows you to link to exact moments within a Google Video clip. Says, Google, “All you have to do is add the time you’d like to share to the end of a video’s URL. We support hours (h), minutes (m), and seconds (s).” So if the funniest thing ever occurs a minute and a half into a clip, append “#” plus “1m30s” to the end of the URL. A little bit of work, but we’ll get the hang of it.
