Nine months later the launch of Google Chrome, a search engine, used by more than 30 million persons, the internet giant comes as a bombshell and points its finger at Apple and Microsoft. Indeed Google announced its open-source operating system named Chrome OS. This system is especially dedicated to netbooks. Netbooks are small laptops with fewer performances that’s why they need a lightweight OS to be fast.

Google Chrome is based on Open source system and its code will be opened to public at the year’s end. The operating system was conceived to be light, safe, and fast on the web. Google Chrome OS must be compared to Web OS created for palms.

According to Google Chrome, OS doesn’t compete with Android which was created for smart phones, netbooks, and other devices in mind. Chrome Os is for “people who spend a lot of time in the web”.

A lot of mini-PC’s makers like HP showed interest for Android and waited a lightweight and free OS for web. Its competitors Windows, Linux, and Mac Os created their software before the incredible internet development. So, they stay still complex and heavy.

Google has this “lightweight” advantage to sell advertisings on the web and can distribute Chrome OS for free.

First netbooks compatible with new OS would appear in mid-2010.

What will effects of this little bomb?

On 18th of June, Google added language translation service for Persian. It helps to translate articles, blogs, website content, or anything on translate.google.com, from Persian to English and vice versa.

This translation is not yet perfect. If the Google translation is incorrect, then users can give the correct translation sentence.

Also Google provides a set of translation bookmarklet for many languages. Drag and drop the required languages bookmarklet in to your toolbar for translation. Just clicking on the language bookmarklet, will translate the selected sentence(s) or whole page into the corresponding language.

Google News is an automated news aggregator provided by Google Inc, and Wikipedia is the world’s largest collection of collaboratively-edited information online. Net surfers rely on Wikipedia which became the Internet’s most popular news and information site in 2007, to get information. In the latest test, Google has begun to display relevant Wikipedia page link in the search result pages.

Gabriel Stricker, a spokesman for Google told Zachary M. Seward of Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab that “Currently, we’re showing a small number of users’ links to Wikipedia topic pages that serve as a reference on current events.”

Last month, Google News redesigned its homepage.  It’s more cheerful and visually-rich than the previous design; section pages include more videos and photos, while most of the clutter has been removed.

Google has released a new version of Chrome browser and call it as ‘Google Chrome 2′. In Google’s official blog, they declared that new version speed is increased about 30 %. On Beta news, Google said that “Our adjusted performance score for Chrome 2 on our new platform was 21.4% better than Chrome 1, relative to the performance of Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 on the same system.”

The main notable features in the new release are:

Increased speed: The main area of focus of the Google Chrome team is to increase the browser speed. They have achieved it in this new release through the usage of a new version of WebKit and updated JavaScript engine, V8.

Improved New Tab page – Users can remove thumbnails from the “most viewed pages” section.

Full Screen Mode – It is possible to watch videos in Google Chrome on full screen.

Form Autofill – Filling out information in forms is easy with ‘Autofill’ option. Google chrome 2 will show information that you have previously entered into the same form fields automatically. At any point you can clear that information using the tools menu.

Stability – Fixed over 300 bugs that caused crashes since launch.

In a press event called searchology held at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., Google unveiled its four more search tools. Marissa Mayer who is the vice president of search products and user experience, showcased four new search products that she said would give users a “different way to look at the web.”

Google Squared

Google Squared will extract data from Web pages, and display them in a spreadsheet in ’split seconds’. During the session, they typed in a query “small dog” in the search box. The result popped up in seconds, showing breed name, dogs’ image, their origin, weight and height of small dogs in a clear and simple table layout.

Refine, filter and view

This search tool will allow users to drill down into the results by offering an option for different genres like product reviews, forum posts or videos at the sidebar.

Rich Snippets

Rich Snippets feature returns more information in every search result. For example, users looking for reviews of a new restaurant might get a “rich snippet” of average review scores, number of reviews and the restaurant’s price range.

Sky Map

Sky Map is an Andriod application. By using the smart phone’s GPS capability, it offers the user a dynamic star map that knows where they are standing and which way they are pointing

Deeperweb.com, an innovative search engine tool is integrated into Google web search results to enhance search results. It offers various useful tabs like Deeper cloud, Answers search, Metrics search, Wikipedia search, in a sidebar to help Google users in navigating through search results.

The Deeper cloud reveals tags related to search query for suggesting new keywords to users. Users can add any tag to original search query with a single click, to fetch exact results. With tag clouds, the search results can be restricted to specific phrase, sites and zones.

Apart from the tag cloud, the search tabs like Answers search, Blog search, Metrics search, Wikipedia search and resource search are also available in sidebar. According to DeepCloud’s website, businesses and marketers can also use the tags as a simple, fast, and free means of “identifying main competitors, pinpointing targeted sites for most effective advertisement, and isolating the authoritative websites of a particular topic.”

Postini security and archiving services, acquired by Google in 2007, released Google apps Directory Sync which lets Google App to tap user account information from the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) user directory system like IBM’s Lotus Domino and Microsoft’s Active Directory. With this utility, Google application users can use the user account information already stored within their current LDAP repository.

It has a configuration wizard to customize synchronization and mapping of LDAP user list to Google Apps users, nicknames and groups. In order to ensure correct synchronization, extensive tests and simulations can be performed. It performs a one-way synchronization; hence there is no fear of data alteration on LDAP server.

Additional bonus for Google apps users, Google Apps Directory Sync is available at no additional cost for the users of the Google apps Premier, Education and Partner versions.

Android is a free Linux-based operating system from Google, which is originally designed for cell phones. Now experts are predicting that the open-source operating system can be used on other devices, such as the emerging low-cost laptops known as Netbooks.

Guangzhou Skytone Transmission Technologies have proved this by developing the first Netbook running Android, named as Alpha 680, for the cost of $250. The Alpha 680 is expected to hit the market in the next three months. It uses a 533MHz ARM 11 CPU and sports a 7-inch LCD screen, keyboard, touchpad, and built-in Wi-Fi, according to a Computerworld report. It is powered by 2-cell battery which will last only two to four hours much lower than the expected 12 hours.

Other software giants like Hewlett – Packard, Asustek Computer and Dell have also started using Android. Dell is using the software for its upcoming smartphone.

“Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things.”
- Theodore Levitt

The creative mind of Google people has led to innovation of two more features, Similar Images and Google News Timeline. These two features will enable net surfers to get precise result for their query.

Similar Images

Google’s image search is an effective tool to search images on net. It has added the “Similar Images”, an attractive feature, in the image search page to enable users to find out exact images using the existing image results without refining the search query. When you are searching for images, say for example, watches, images of watches of almost all brands will be displayed. If you want the images of any specific brand, you will reframe the query instead of that you can just click on the ‘similar images’ link given below the corresponding watch brand. Even if you are unaware of the brand name, you can see watches of similar design.

Google News Timeline

This feature will present results from Google News and other data sources including scanned newspapers, magazines, blog posts and sports scores, media like music, movies, books etc, and many more in a well organized manner. Users can set the time line as day, week, month, year or even decades to view news accordingly. Not only news, users can search for news photos, news videos, news quotes, TV shows, artworks etc in specific.

Adgregate Markets has signed a contract with Google DoubleClick to enable visitors to buy products through Adgregate without visiting seller site. It allows consumers to browse, interact and purchase the products through banner ads. Through Adgregate consumers can buy the products on publishers site without moving into the product’s own site.

Adgregate present their technology on September 2008 in-front of the panel members including entrepreneur Marc Andreessen, Chris DeWolfe – Myspace CEO, Marc Benioff – Salesforce founder, Yossi Vardi – Angel investor, Ash Patel – former Yahoo executive VP. The panelists unanimously agreed that Adgregate was a great idea that will make money and address a need in the display ad market.

User can buy a product through a single click on “add to cart” button on the ad widget. Adgregate get share from both DoubleClick and retailer, but publisher can get revenue from the advertisers.