Google's Awesome Tribute to Agatha Christie On Her 120th B'day

The search engine's multicoloured logo has been replaced with an elaborate scene adapted from one of the crime author's many detective novels.

Each of the logo's letters has been replaced with a character taken from her novels. For example the letter "G" has been designed in the form of her Belgian detective Hercule Poirot.

Google's Tribute to Agatha Christie

It has been created more than 30 years after her death, in January 1976, in Wallingford, Oxon.

The author, who also wrote under the pen name Mary Westmacott, was born in Torquay, Devon on September 15, 1890.

She wrote more than 90 books, mostly detective novels, which have sold an estimated four billion copies worldwide.

Christie is considered the best selling writer of books of all time and is only outsold by the Bible and William Shakespeare.

She also wrote several successful West End performances, including The Mousetrap, the world’s longest running play.

The design is the latest in long line of doodles that celebrate key events or anniversaries.

Last week Google fuelled online speculation by releasing a mysterious new interactive doodle for a second consecutive day. In that doodle users could "type" in the colours of the search engine's logo.

It followed a design the previous day that sparked similar mystery on the web. That design featured dozens of coloured balls amid suggestions the interactive logo was part of its 12th birthday celebrations.

Earlier this month, Google marked the 25th anniversary of the discovery of the "buckyball", a spherical dome of exotic molecules of carbon, with a special moving design. Users could move around an orange sphere using their mouse.

Another interactive Doodle was produced in May, celebrating the 30th birthday of Pac-Man.

That design, which went public on Friday, May 21, 2010, was the first doodle to be fully interactive. The Pac-Man character could be moved by using the arrow keys on the user's keyboard.

Google Doodles have become newsworthy in their own right after the firm started using the customised versions of its logo to mark what it considered significant occasions.

The first of them was used in August 1998 when Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the firm's founders, designed one for the Burning Man Festival.

In October 1999, it produced a Halloween doodle: the first after the firm switched to a new logo.

The first "Christmas card" doodle was presented in 1999, on Christmas Day, featuring a snowman and flakes drifting onto the name.

Mother's and Father's Day doodles appeared in May and June 2000 respectively before the firm started noting more esoteric and, let's face it, interesting occasions.

On October 7, 2009, it did "Google" as a bar code to recognise the anniversary of its invention in 1948 by Bernard Silver, which some saw as a significant shift away from human language and towards machine language.

On Saturday, June 5, 2010, a hologram replaced the logo to honour Dennis Gabor, the inventor of holograms.

Most recently the firm marked the 71st anniversary of the Judy Garland film The Wizard of Oz with a doodle of Dorothy, the Cowardly Lion, the Tin Man and the Scarecrow walking down the Yellow Brick Road towards a landscape with "Google" on it. Perhaps it's a metaphor.

Mary Shelley, the British author of Frankenstein, had the 213th anniversary of her birth celebrated by a spooky Google Doodle late last month.
source: telegraph.co.uk

Google Caffiene Open Up

Google announced  that it has completed its new web indexing system called Caffeine. The company claims it provides 50% fresher results for web searches than the previous index and is the largest collection of web content it's offered. 


"Whether it's a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before," says Google software engineer Carrie Grimes.


"Content on the web is blossoming. It's growing not just in size and numbers but with the advent of video, images, news and real-time updates, the average webpage is richer and more complex. In addition, people's expectations for search are higher than they used to be," adds Grimes. "Searchers want to find the latest relevant content and publishers expect to be found the instant they publish."



With Caffeine, Google says it analyzes the web in small portions and updates its search index on a continuous basis (all around the world). New pages and updates to existing pages are added straight to the index, meaning freshness will be increased.


Caffeine takes up 100 million GB of storage in one database, and adds new info at a rate of hundreds of thousands of gigs per day. 


Caffeine was announced nearly a year ago, when Google's Matt Cutts told us about it at SES San Jose. Now SMX Advanced is going on, and I'd expect to hear more from Matt about it out there (he hinted at it when we talked to him at Google I/O last month).

How to Search Google Caffeine





Step 
1


First, understand what Google Caffeine is. Google Caffeine is Google's newer, faster, and upgraded search engine. It recently got released to the public and is reading for testing.
Step 
2


To access the new Google Caffeine search engine, open up your internet browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, opera, etc).
Step 
3


Next, go to the Google Caffeine website (linked in resources below).
Step 
4


Now enter your search query and try searching Google Caffeine. 


Try a variety of different searches and search types.
Step 
5


Compare the search speed (displayed in how many seconds) to the old google search engine, currently at google.com. Compare search results between both google search engines to check for accuracy of your results. Finally, look to see if Google Caffeine is now indexing more results.

Announcing Google TV: TV meets web. Web meets TV.

 Google is ready to introduce Google TV. Sounding amazing, check it out what Google wrote in their blog.


" If there’s one entertainment device that people know and love, it’s the television. In fact, 4 billion people across the world watch TV and the average American spends five hours per day in front of one*. Recently, however, an increasing amount of our entertainment experience is coming from our phones and computers. One reason is that these devices have something that the TV lacks: the web. With the web, finding and accessing interesting content is fast and often as easy as a search. But the web still lacks many of the great features and the high-quality viewing experience that the TV offers.

So that got us thinking...what if we helped people experience the best of TV and the best of the web in one seamless experience? Imagine turning on the TV and getting all the channels and shows you normally watch and all of the websites you browse all day — including your favorite video, music and photo sites. We’re excited to announce that we’ve done just that.

Google TV is a new experience for television that combines the TV that you already know with the freedom and power of the Internet. With Google Chrome built in, you can access all of your favorite websites and easily move between television and the web. This opens up your TV from a few hundred channels to millions of channels of entertainment across TV and the web. Your television is also no longer confined to showing just video. With the entire Internet in your living room, your TV becomes more than a TV — it can be a photo slideshow viewer, a gaming console, a music player and much more.

Google TV uses search to give you an easy and fast way to navigate to television channels, websites, apps, shows and movies. For example, already know the channel or program you want to watch? Just type in the name and you’re there. Want to check out that funny YouTube video on your 48” flat screen? It’s just a quick search away. If you know what you want to watch, but you’re not sure where to find it, just type in what you’re looking for and Google TV will help you find it on the web or on one of your many TV channels. If you’d rather browse than search, you can use your standard program guide, your DVR or the Google TV home screen, which provides quick access to all of your favorite entertainment so you’re always within reach of the content you love most.

Because Google TV is built on open platforms like Android and Google Chrome, these features are just a fraction of what Google TV can do. In our announcement today at Google I/O, we challenged web developers to start coming up with the next great web and Android apps designed specifically for the TV experience. Developers can start optimizing their websites for Google TV today. Soon after launch, we’ll release the Google TV SDK and web APIs for TV so that developers can build even richer applications and distribute them through Android Market. We've already started building strategic alliances with a number of companies — like Jinni.com and Rovi — at the leading edge of innovation in TV technology. Jinni.com is a next-generation TV application working to provide semantic search, personalized recommendation and social features for Google TV across all sources of premium content available to the user. Rovi is one of the world's leading guide applications. We’re looking forward to seeing all of the ways developers will use this new platform.

We’re working together with Sony and Logitech to put Google TV inside of televisions, Blu-ray players and companion boxes. These devices will go on sale this fall, and will be available atBest Buy stores nationwide. You can sign up here to get updates on Google TV availability.

This is an incredibly exciting time — for TV watchers, for developers and for the entire TV ecosystem. By giving people the power to experience what they love on TV and on the web on a single screen, Google TV turns the living room into a new platform for innovation. We're excited about what’s coming. We hope you are too."