It's been a pretty cool last two weeks. A lot of Google innovations have been made public, and I for sure am impressed, albeit frightened when Google comes with a truck photographing my backyard.
Yes, you heard that right. Google has launched a pretty nifty street maps photography 
feature. Barry captured a video of how far this photography feature goes in New York: just blocks shy of our office. We also covered the street maps feature this morning.
Another nifty addition to Google is the ability to restrict image results to faces . That means Rebecca's complaint about the ineffectiveness of Google Image Search might no longer hold true. Well, with most of these other results, maybe not. Guess she's right about MSN Search, but it's a good start. (The results for Jordin Sparks was actually better without the special "face" restriction in the URL. But, moving on...)
As we covered, Google launched a new universal search platform . The response was overwhelming, and Diggers ate up that story: it hit the top 10 news stories on Digg for a few hours when it first came out. I feel special.
Other neat developments include Google's addendum of hot trends. On a very similar note, Barry decided to post his search trends. This helps Google collect its data.
Innovation doesn't only sit online. Google needs to hire its engineers and staff through innovative methods. They've been holding contests, games, Sudoku challenges, and the like to look for the best talent. I want to play all day. I guess I'm lucky we have this instead.
Danny shared a pretty cool link via Google Experimental . Some features include timeline views, keyword shortcuts, left-hand search navigation, and right-hand contextual search navigation.
Oh, but Google is not a flawless beast. Numerous Google properties have been hacked in the past. Cool. In #5 of these security breaches, we see that "Googlified discovered a fault in Gmail that allowed a user's contact list to be stolen via JavaScript." This week, there was a JavaScript finding via Ionut Alex Chitu and Danny Sullivan. If you have JavaScript turned off, Google is not navigable. Um, oops?
In the social search sphere, outside of Digg, we have Technorati, one of the foremost blog search engines, which came out with a redesign that broadens search capabilities . From the blog, "Overall the changes make Technorati somewhat easier to grok and move the site away from just blog searches to a wider view of what might be best termed time sensitive searches." Good stuff all around.
Let me see some more Digg love from you guys!
