pakidesigner.com

Come on, it’s Halloween 2009. You know the Google logo is going to recognize the holiday. And sure enough, the Google folks are celebrating Halloween by not only changing their logo (or doodle) but putting up many images to acknowledge All Hallows Eve.

They could have played it many different ways. Perhaps a salute to that terrible Halloween song “Monster Mash.” Or maybe in light of the new mega-movie “Paranormal Activity” they could have made the logo more horrifying.

But instead it’s a straight up nod to the tradition of trick or treating. And they went for the “treat” angle rather than the “trick.” Think candy instead of toilet paper on someone’s house.

Go to Google to check it out. In case you don’t know the URL, just Google Google.

Keep on clickin’

The logo is fairly simple. A ghostly white “G-o-o-g-l” followed by a piece of orange candy with a jack-o-lantern impression. Click it again. Now each letter of the Google logo is displayed with a piece of candy — including our favorite “Smarties.”

Click it yet again. Now it displays how you want your Trick or Treating experience to go — tons of candy and no pretzels, fruit, or anything remotely good for you. The logo isn’t even recognizable anymore but who cares — you scored big.

And finally, if you click it one more time, Halloween’s over. Just wrappers of Halloween candy already eaten. And a few half-eaten pieces of candy. You know, the lousy stuff that you received from the house down the street.

No tribute to Charlie Brown however and his unlucky streak of receiving a rock at every house.

As this is an ultra-politically correct world, the display of trash on the screen might be a bit unsettling to some.

We don’t know if Google is choosing to recycle the candy wrappers. Because if you click on the logo again, it takes you to search results for Halloween 2009. Take heart, Earth-firsters, because we told you yesterday how to celebrate a Green Halloween.

Google logo changes

Google logo changes are nothing new. Sometimes they’re just more unpredictable than others. Earlier this month, for example, the web went crazy trying to understand why Google replaced its logo with a bar code.

Duh! They were celebrating the 57th anniversary of the first bar code patent. The web then went nuts when word spread that you could make your own bar code. We joined into the nuttiness by explaining how to do that.

In mid-September, Google saluted HG Wells’ “War of the Worlds” by swapping out its doodle with a UFO hovering over a bunch of crop circles which spelled the search engine’s name. How is that 1898 novel related to crop circles? OK. We’ll let you in on the secret. And it has nothing to do with that Halo cloud over Moscow that people thought was a UFO.

It doesn’t always have to be something wacky in order for Google to give the event front page love. Earlier this month, Google celebrated the 140th birthday of Mahatma Gandhi by replacing the “G” with a drawing of the Indian leader.

What’s next? Who knows? Google is kinda wacky when it comes to what they want to acknowledge. What do you think?

Android got a boost Tuesday when Google announced its Android SDK now supports version 2.0 of the open-source platform for mobiles.

There’s a whole mess of new features in Android 2.0 (aka “Eclair”) but the big news for Webmonkeys is the enhanced WebKit-powered browser.

The Android browser gets an updated UI — tap the address bar for instant searches, double-tap to zoom in on content wells — and better bookmarks that incorporate thumbnail images of the pages.

Also included is support for several of HTML5’s APIs for building next-gen web apps: the Geolocation API, the Database API for managing client-side SQL databases and data caching support for offline application access.

There’s also support for HTML5’s <video> tag — the browser can play videos in fullscreen mode without plug-ins.

Read about the enhancements at the Android Developers blog, where the Eclair update was announced. There’s also a page listing all the highlights found within.

Google has announced a major update to its Maps service which adds detailed data from several U.S. government databases and improves the system for users to report errors and make corrections.

With this week’s update, Google Maps has added more detailed map information from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service, the U.S. Geological Survey and the Census Bureau to more accurately show map results in non-road areas, including parks, college campuses, hiking trails and bike routes.

Google Maps has also made it easier for its users to report problems, taking a step in the direction of crowdsourced projects like OpenStreetMap. Of course OpenStreetMap, which offers wiki-style, user-editable maps, is well ahead of Google when it comes to letting users to contribute roads, locations, routes, place-names and photos to maps. The new Google Maps feature stops short of allowing you to do the actual editing of street-level data. Rather, it simply gives you a channel through which you can report a problem, which is then edited by someone at Google.

To alert Google of an error or problem on a map, just right-click on the area in question and the drop-down menu will have a new option to “report a problem.” It’s not nearly as slick as OpenStreetMaps, which allows you to simply correct the problem right then and there, but Google does promise to resolve any reported issue within a month.

Far more useful than correcting Google’s mistakes is the additional data that’s been added to the maps, pulling in information on public parks, trails and paths. Even better, the Google Lat/Long blog says the new trails and paths data and the new cycling directions will eventually be added to Google Maps’ route planning features. Google Maps has also added building maps for many college campuses and now offers parcel maps in many U.S. cities.

It’s encouraging to see Google and the U.S. Government collaborating to make Google Maps more complete. But while the new features are incredibly useful in some context — finding all the bike paths in a nearby park, for example — the sheer amount of data being gathered into Google Maps verges on overwhelming.

In fact, that’s one of the primary reasons many developers are turning to solutions like OpenStreetMaps.

While Google’s new features are a welcome addition, the maps offered by Google lack much of the flexibility found in OpenStreetMaps. Unlike Google, which provides all its geographic data in a single layer, which is then displayed on the map, OpenStreetMaps allows you to pick and choose which layers are displayed in your maps. For example, if your map application needs to show trails, you can highlight that layer. If you’re just interested in streets, then you can omit the trail data.

The result is a cleaner, more customizable map that provides only the data that interests your users. The trade-off is a more complex interface, though projects like TileDrawer are helping to make OpenStreetMaps more accessible to developers.

Google Maps has a new trick up its sleeve — a web page for every place on Earth.

The new “Place Pages,” as Google is calling them, are individual web pages designed to give you all the information Google has about a particular place, including geotagged photos and videos, user reviews, popular places and related searches.

Unfortunately, there’s a huge downside to the new Place Pages: They ruin your ability to quickly and easily compare Google Maps search results.

In a blog entry posted Thursday, Google claims it eventually wants to have a web page for every place in the world — businesses, points of interest, transit stations, neighborhoods, landmarks and cities. The new pages are useful if you’re searching for more than just an address, and in fact they make Google Map searches more like browsing a travel guide using than a search tool.

The problem is that Google Maps has changed the behavior of the “more info” links in search results. Previously, a “more info” link would open a bubble on the map with more details about that location or business. Clicking the next “more info” link in your results would re-center the map on the next result, and so on down the list. It was a quick and easy way to, for example, compare customer reviews for multiple locations.However, the new Place Pages have usurped the more info link. Now, if you click “more info,” you leave the search results page behind. The new behavior works well for destinations, but not so well if you’re trying to compare results since you need to keep hitting the back button to get back to the list of results

August 18, 2009
By Kenneth Corbin: More stories by this author:

A new survey has crowned Silicon Valley heavyweights Google and Apple as the respective leaders in customer satisfaction for 2008 in their core businesses.

In the category of portals and search engines, the researchers found that Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) scored 86 on the University of Michigan’s 100-point American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI).

That mark ranked Google 12 percent ahead of its nearest competitor, Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO), which netted an ACSI score of 77. Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) checked in at No. 3 with a score of 75, though the survey was conducted prior to the launch of Bing, the software giant’s revamped search engine.

“Google is unquestionably king of search, so the only competition is for second place,” Larry Freed, president and CEO of ForeSee Results, the research firm that conducted the study, said in a statement. Though Freed noted that the jury is still out on Microsoft’s retooled search engine, he added that “Google’s customers are pretty happy and have little reason to try something new, so Bing has a real uphill battle ahead.”

That analysis meshes with a recent report from online metrics firm comScore, which highlighted the challenge Microsoft will have breaking users of what it referred to as their “Google habit,” the reflexive choice for many Web searchers that has helped turn the company’s name into a verb in common parlance.

Overall satisfaction for the e-business category, which ForeSee defines as search, portals and news and information sites, increased 3 percent over the 2007.

Researchers also applied the ACSI benchmark to several other consumer sectors, including personal computers.

In that category, Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) beat out its nearest competitor, Dell, by the same 12 percent margin.

Apple saw a slight drop from last year to 84 on the ACSI scale, while Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) held steady at 75.

HP’s (NYSE: HPQ) Compaq line saw a 6 percent uptick, boosting its score from 70 to 74, while the firm’s eponymous computer brand inched up a point, also registering a 74.

“The recession has shifted demand toward lower-priced PCs and Hewlett-Packard is taking advantage by rolling out more of its less-expensive Compaq models,” Michigan professor Claes Fornell, who oversees the university’s ACSI project, said in a statement. “Recent sales are up and HP’s share value has more than doubled relative to market since the beginning of the year.”

The two HP lines shared a three-way tie for third place with Gateway’s Acer, which posted a 3 percent increase over the previous year.

From the “Zero to Four Versions in a Year” files:

Google is now out with Chrome 4.0.201.1, introducing browser bookmark syncing, kinda/sorta.

No, that’s not a typo in the version number, either. This is Google Chrome 4, in its dev-channel release format. So for those of you keeping score at home, Google has gone from a pre 1.0 release of Chrome in September of 2008 to Chrome version 4 in less than a year.

I’m not sure if this is a race by Google to try and be at Google Chrome version 9 before Microsoft releases IE 9, but it sure seems that way to me.

Enough about the numbering scheme. Chrome 4 marks the debut of Google’s bookmark synchronization feature, albeit in a very limited way. Simply clicking your Chrome app shortcut (on Windows) to start Chrome 4 will not give you a version of Chrome 4 that will actually start with the bookmark synchronization feature (that would be too easy).

Instead, users must start Chrome at the command line, with the flag –enable-sync to get the sync option.

The actual synchronization capability at this early stage isn’t particularly impressive. In my own limited test on my Windows XP SP3 test box (sync isn’t avail on Linux versions yet, as far as I could tell), the sync actually failed to sync up my bookmarks.

Next page: But it’s still a huge feature for the future of Chrome…
[Continue reading this blog post at Netstat -vat by Sean Michael Kerner]

Google search is holding tight to its top position in the hearts of U.S. consumers, according to a new study.

The annual University of Michigan study, which was conducted by ForeSee Results, shows that for the second year in a row, Google scored a strong 86 out of 100 on a scale of customer satisfaction. That’s nine points higher than the second-place finisher, Yahoo.

The study was conducted before Microsoft’s Bing search service was released earlier this summer. Nevertheless, Larry Freed, president and CEO of ForeSee Results, said that it will be a long uphill climb for Bing to hurt Google’s place among satisfied search users.

“Google is unquestionably king of search, so the only competition is for second place,” said Freed, in a statement. “The research was done before Bing entered the market, so we don’t know what effect its entry will have. But Google’s customers are pretty happy and have little reason to try something new, so Bing has a real uphill battle ahead.”

The university noted that Google, Yahoo, Microsoft (75 for its older search technology) and Ask.com (74) each maintained their ratings from last year year. AOL, with a 1% rise to a 70, was the only portal or search engine to show an increase.

The study is based on responses from 11,000 U.S. computer users surveyed during the second quarter of this year.

The ongoing search battles between Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have intensified this year.

Last month, Microsoft and Yahoo announced that they are partnering up on a search and online advertising deal. The long-anticipated deal will have Microsoft’s Bing search engine powering Yahoo’s sites, while Yahoo sells premium search advertising services for both companies.

The deal is geared to hit Google with a united force much greater than either Microsoft or Yahoo could muster alone. Individually, neither company has much of an effect on Google’s overwhelming search market share. Together, though, they hope to at least make a dent.

But Google hasn’t been sitting on its laurels as its competitors shifted gears.

Last month, Google took the training wheels off several key hosted Google Apps offerings that have spent years in beta-test mode. The beta label came off some main Google Apps services, including Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk and Google Docs. Analysts were quick to note that it’s a move geared to making Google Apps more appealing to enterprise users.

And then earlier this month, Google kicked off a month-long ad campaign for its online suite of enterprise office applications. The campaign will have the search giant leasing billboard space in four major U.S. cities — New York, San Francisco, Chicago and Boston. Each work day will have a different message for commuters to take in.