Google has launched a new version of Image Search for Android 2.1 devices and iPhone 3.0+. This version provides a slicker user interface that fits in with how users of these devices would browse native images.

Here’s a demo:

Thumbnails are square, as to maximize the amount of images that can be shown on the screen at once. Users can swipe to see the next/previous page of results, or tap the next/previous page buttons to navigate. Google says it optimized the experience for speed, so images appear quickly as you browse.

When a user actually views an image, they are now displayed as largely as possible with a new special image viewing page. This has a black background to emphasize the image, and the buttons fade out after a few seconds, so you can just look at the image. You can browse through the image results while in this view with a simple swipe, just like the results pages themselves.

Users of compatible devices need only go to google.com on their phones and go to "images". The new version works in 38 languages.

In its continued effort to custom tailor search results and suggest that what your searching for might actually be something else, Google has brought its similar page results onto the front page of your search results.

You’ve likely seen the feature we’re talking about before, but never clicked on it and now you won’t have to, as it will be included directly at the bottom of your first search results page.

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The feature follows along the lines of many other improvements the search engine has made recently, such as localizing its search suggestions list, adding search suggestions to Google Maps and even suggesting a suicide hotline number for select search phrases. While we’ve certainly taken some issue with Google’s personalization of search results, there are obvious benefits to the user experience as a whole. The difference here is that Google is not, it would seem, making these suggestions as a result of studying your surfing history and personal habits, but instead by analyzing linking structures.

Google offers an example of how this new feature could prove to be handy to its users:

For example, with the recent earthquakes around the world, many of us have been looking for international relief organizations. We knew that Direct Relief International has been actively involved in Haiti, so we started off by searching for [direct relief international]. The first result on the page linked us to the Direct Relief website, where we found many ways to help in Haiti. But what if one wants to support several organizations? If you click the “Similar” link that’s on the same line as the “www.directrelief.org/” URL, you’ll find other nonprofits that are also involved in relief efforts.

The feature seems to be rolling out in waves, so don’t worry if you don’t see it yet, it will be there soon.

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Google is retiring the Google Advertising Professionals (GAP) program, and replacing it with the new Google AdWords Certification program.

"We’ve had a lot of great feedback from agencies and today we’re announcing changes designed to offer them better training and more rigorous certification in AdWords proficiency, and to lower costs for those who help advertisers get the most out of AdWords," says Penry Price, Vice President, Global Agency Development at Google. "We’re also making it easier for advertisers to find certified agency partners to work with them on digital advertising."

Features of the new training program include:

- New training materials to help agencies better understand recent changes in search marketing and AdWords functionality, available via webinar series, learning center, or on-site training at Google

- A redesigned Certified Partner badge, which includes a “Click to Verify” element so advertisers can view the partner’s profile page for additional information.

Google has also launched Google Partner Search, which a directory that pairs advertisers with Certified Partners, as well as new AdWords API pricing.

Today Google announced new preferred AdWords API pricing.  Qualified AdWords Certified Partners who manage client AdWords accounts get free use of the API based on managed client spend.

"The Google AdWords API allows developers to build applications that interact directly with the AdWords platform," explains Penry Price, Vice President, Global Agency Development at Google. "Agencies and developers of search engine marketing tools use these applications to manage large AdWords campaigns more efficiently and creatively."

Agencies must have an active agency profile page to apply for preferred API pricing. To qualify, they must meet the following criteria:

• Your company is a Google AdWords Certified Partner.
• You use the AdWords API to manage your customers’ AdWords campaigns (e.g. you are an agency or develop search engine marketing tools).
• Your AdWords API-based tools remain in compliance with the AdWords API terms and conditions, including the required minimum functionality.

"We hope preferred AdWords API pricing will encourage agencies and developers to experiment with new strategies, expand the functionality of their tools, and build more comprehensive client campaigns without worrying about increased costs," says Price.

Google will begin accepting applications on May 26.

Google also dropped its Google Advertising Professionals (GAP) program, and replaced it with the new Google AdWords Certification program, while launching a directory for agencies and advertisers to connect. This is called Google Partner Search.

If you want to map a locale or score some directions but want to avoid driving into a pole, you can now use your pipes. Google Maps now recognizes Search by Voice on Windows Mobile and Symbian S60 phones.

Google introduced Search by Voice in 2008 and has been rolling that functionality out into different parts of the Googlesphere since. Now Google Maps 4.1 comes with voice search.

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The categories of search that Maps will now recognize vocally includes the full spectrum of search fields already enabled for mobile.

• business name
• business category
• city, state
• ZIP code
• postal address
• intersection, city, state
• airport code
• latitude longitude

Hands-free it is not, however. To start the search you still need to open Google Maps and hit “call” prior to making your search.

The install is available on qualifying phones at m.google.com/maps.

An interesting aspect of the language settings the ability to select not just your language but, if it’s English, the accent you use. I wonder if this functionality will be available to Spanish-speakers or whether the different accents within Yue Chinese will eventually be recognized.

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Social commerce applications provider Bazaarvoice has partnered with Google to share product reviews in Google searches and advertisements.

Retailers and manufacturers using Bazaarvoice can use their product review content to drive more traffic from Google as well as provide brand exposure to shoppers.

Consumers will be able to access opinions from other customers as they research and complete purchases, adding more relevance to the process. Google says the program will feature full-length product reviews and user ratings from retailers and manufacturers to help with the shopping experience.

"In the past four years, there has been a tremendous change in consumer shopping behavior as people increasingly rely on information from their friends and peers to make purchase decisions," said Brett Hurt, founder and CEO of Bazaarvoice.

"Our clients’ innovative use of the voice of the customer has helped Bazaarvoice become one of the fastest growing technology companies today. Now, Google is affirming the power of social commerce with this partnership to integrate Bazaarvoice reviews content into Google.com – the heart of its business – as well as throughout product search and advertising vehicles. It is a big honor to be Google’s partner in this industry first, and this will be transformational for our retail clients and their suppliers."

On Google Product Search, Google will feature a brands logo beside reviews from the brands website with the goal of increasing both exposure and conversions.

Some of Bazaarvoice’s clients include Best Buy, Costco, Dell, Macy’s, Proctor & Gamble and QVC.
 

People who – deep breath – live in the UK or Ireland, don’t like to get lost, can tolerate beta software, and own a new-ish Android phone are in luck.  An unfinished version of Google Maps Navigation has been made available in the UK and Ireland for Android devices 1.6 and higher.

Google’s idea here is to simplify the task of driving around.  A post on the Google Mobile Blog explained, "Like other satnav devices, Navigation includes 3D views, turn-by-turn voice guidance, and automatic rerouting.  But because Google Maps Navigation is connected to the Internet, it also features powerful functionality you can’t get from other satnav services, including the most up to date map, business, and traffic data, access to satellite and street views, and of course, search."

And Google Maps Navigation offers voice search, too, perhaps making the tool safer to use than some alternatives.

Of course, this rollout isn’t exactly huge.  However, the release of something in the UK has often represented the start of a domino effect, with Google offering it in several other countries soon after.

We’ll see what happens.  At any rate, there’s at least a certain segment of the population that should appreciate this development, and Google’s shown it remains interested in the mobile market.

When you’re hungry, don’t feel like cooking and have some cash in your pocket, what’s the first thing you do? Likely type “pizza delivery” into Google’s search bar and see what comes up. But sometimes, this hunt for a pizza place can turn into an annoying goose chase for both some place that doesn’t have a name like “Pizza Express” and one that is close enough to deliver.

Google has announced today a solution to this problem, along with several other new features, under the umbrella title of Google Places.

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According to Google, one out of five searches on the search engine are related to location and so the company is taking a step further in that direction. Google Places is primarily a merging of its Local Business Center with its Place Pages, of which there are more than 50 million.

And as for that pizza delivery? Google will be offering businesses the abillity to define their service areas, allowing them to show customers which geographic areas they serve. That, coupled with real-time updates, should allow for some interesting uses of Google with not only delivery services, but completely mobile vendors and other such businesses.

Our other favorite new feature offered by Google Places is its customized QR codes, which allows businesses to download and share QR codes in any number of ways. When someone scans one of these codes with their phone, they’ll immediately be taken to the mobile Place Page for that business.

In addition to these new features, Google will continue taking its Street View into stores and sending out window decals to “Favorite Places”. It is also expanding its Tags advertising program to three new cities – Austin, Atlanta and Washington, D.C.

And finally, Google is offering a reporting dashboard to help businesses find out how their customers are finding them on the web. Not only does it provide standard analytics, but it shows where the searches are originating from, which may be the best part yet. Our favorite part out of all of this, however, has to be the service areas and the QR codes. With these two tools, a mobile business can constantly keep in touch with its customers and appear in searches as it moves about the country.

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Google has announced that it’s expanded its Services for Websites program in which hosting companies integrate Google services into their platforms, to include Parallels, a provider of control panel software for hosting companies. Parallels will integrate Google Services for Websites into the new version of its Plesk Panel, a platform Google says millions of site-owners use to manage their sites.

This may work to get a lot of site-owners using Google products that they weren’t necessarily using before, and in theory could help their visibility, traffic, and revenue in the long run.

"Website owners generate more traffic to their websites by optimizing them using Webmaster Tools," says Google Search Group Product Manager Rajat Mukherjee. "They can engage their users with inline Web Elements, including maps, news, videos and conversations. Custom Search and Site Search provide Google-quality search on their websites for better user retention. AdSense helps website owners monetize their sites with relevant advertising. And besides providing these valuable services to millions of customers, hosting companies can also generate additional revenues through referral programs."

This also marks the first commercial control panel to offer Google Services for Websites, allowing the hosting companies to monetize the services, according to Parallels. "These significant updates enable shared hosting companies to generate new revenue streams and deliver better services to their small business customers," says Parallels President Jack Zubarev.

Google Services for Websites was announced last year. Other partners include DomainHost, GoDaddy, FatCow, Aplus.net, and about 15 others. Such partnerships provide hosting providers with a few bells and whistles to offer their customers.

Google has launched a very interesting new search option, with its Twitter archive. What this does is let users search for a topic, and look at all available tweets about that topic in chronological order. If you want to see tweets about President Obama for example, you can do so by going to any year, month, or day and seeing what was said about him on Twitter. Google can do this since it has access to Twitter’s info, which allows Google to index its real-time Twitter results. A Google spokesperson tells WebProNews it would be possible to do something similar with other sites through PuSH.

To me, while this is an interesting way of searching Twitter (in fact, I called it what Twtiter search should be), it gets even more interesting if you consider that Google is developing a system for sites to push content to Google in real-time, via PubSubHubbub (or PuSH). Google’s Matt Cutts spoke with WebProNews about potential PuSH integration recently (read about it more here):

Will Google make it an option to browse entire archives of sites in a similar fashion to what it is doing with Twitter? This could be a quite useful feature, and it would certainly fall along the lines of "organizing the world’s information." Let’s say I remember reading a New York Times article several months back that I’d like to reference in one of my own articles, but I can’t remember what it was called exactly, and I have a hard time finding it through a traditional web search. Being able to drill down into the archives in this way could make the search process much more helpful – a better user experience.

Of course most content sites have their own search features (sometimes even provided by Google), and you could try using that, but quite frankly these site search features aren’t always that great. In fact, they’re very often terrible. Google knows search, and it is still the most dominant search destination. It would make a ton of sense for such an option to be available.

I reached out to Google to see if this was a potential option. "The scenario described is indeed possible but we don’t have anything to announce today," a Google spokesperson tells me. To be clear, when he says "possible," he’s referring to the technology making such a scenario possible. As he said, there’s no announcement, and this may not even be on Google’s list of things to do. But, you never know. 

Google Labs already has a timeline feature for news.

Would you like to see Google offer timeline-like archives of site updates? Tell us what you think.

Uh-oh, Google Doc’s offline mode is going…well…offline. Starting May 3rd, offline access for Google Docs, the Internet search giant’s web office suite, home to an online document editor, spreadsheet editor and slideshow creator, will be disabled. Previously, users had been able to take advantage of the offline functionality provided by Google Gears, an open source browser extension which allowed for both the viewing and editing of files when an Internet connection was not present. Soon, the Gears-enabled feature will be no more. But have no fear – this setback is only temporary..at least that’s what a company blog post says.

In the plugin’s place, there will be a “new and improved” HTML5-based offline option which will replace the former solution, but its exact launch date is still unknown.

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Considering all the new features that arrived in Google Docs on Monday, including things like real-time edits, faster performance, collaborative drawing tools and improved document fidelity, it’s no surprise that the mention of the improved offline mode (way down at the bottom of the post) was a bit glossed over in the rush by news editors to detail all of Docs’ new functionality.

However, it’s the introduction of HTML5 offline mode that may be the biggest and most important change of them all.

From Plugins to Web Standards

To understand why, you have to first look at how Google handles offline access now, a feature also found in Gmail and Google Calendar in addition to Docs. At the moment, these web apps go offline if and only if you’ve installed the Google Gears browser plugin. Unfortunately, not all browsers can properly run this plugin. For example, Mac’s Snow Leopard OS and Safari 4 web browser introduced some features which were incompatible with Gears on newer Mac computers. Internet Explorer users could never view spreadsheets offline and users of “alternative” browsers, like the Mozilla-based Flock for example, had to jump through hoops to make it work. And Google Gears on the iPhone? Forget about it.

A better solution is HTML5, the next revision to the markup language used to code the web. The benefit to making this switch is obvious: HTML5 is a web standard, not a browser plugin. That means it will be supported across web browsers and operating systems, assuming users have updated to a modern browser instead of continuing to run IE6 (who are you people, anyway?!) It also means that Apple can’t kick it off the iPhone and iPad the way they did with Adobe’s Flash plugin. In fact, it means that Google doesn’t have to worry about Apple’s restrictions at all, the way iPhone and iPad application developers do. Google just has to build a mobile-friendly website using standards-based technology. The end result will be an Internet-based document creation tool and editor that can work anywhere, anytime, even when the Internet doesn’t.

And that, in a nutshell, is the future of the web. Mobilized applications that behave like desktop apps, available with or without an Internet connection and that work on any device. Even the iPad. We can’t wait to try it out.

No word yet on how long, exactly, we’ll have to go without offline access in Docs before the HTML5 solution is ready, but Google’s hosting a webinar next week to share more. Hopefully, further details will arrive then.

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Google has launched a new search option that allows users to look at an archive of tweets on any given topic in a timeline format. Users can essentially "replay" the public Twitter conversation in th order in which it each piece occurred.

To utilize the feature, users can go to "show options" on a search results page, and select "updates". There’s a chart at the top of the page that lets you select the year, month, or day, or click any point to view tweets from that time period.

"With the advent of blogs and micro-blogs, there’s a constant online conversation about breaking news, people and places — some famous and some local," says Dylan Casey, Google’s Product Manager for Real-Time Search. "Tweets and other short-form updates create a history of commentary that can provide valuable insights into what’s happened and how people have reacted. We want to give you a way to search across this information and make it useful."

The chart also lets you see how much Twitter activity took place around that topic at any given time. Naturally, you’re more likely to get more information during these spikes.

"By replaying tweets, you can explore any topic that people have discussed on Twitter," says Casey. "Want to know how the news broke about health care legislation in Congress, what people were saying about Justice Paul Stevens’ retirement or what people were tweeting during your own marathon run? These are the kinds of things you can explore with the new updates mode."

"All of us are just beginning to understand the many ways real-time information and short-form web content will be useful in the future, and we think being able to make use of historical information is an important part of that," he adds.

The feature is in the process of rolling out. It will be available around the world in the next few days. If you can’t wait, you can check it out here.

Google has acquired the UK-based visual search engine company Plink, which makes PlinkArt, a mobile app that lets users take a picture with their phone and identify paintings and artworks. Google is adding Plink to work on its Google Goggles project.

Google introduced Goggles as a Google Labs project back in December. It was cool from the get go, but the potential it displayed was far greater than the actual functionality. The addition of Plink will allow Google to expand on that functionality. Google Goggles lets you search Google using pictures from your camera phone. They take an image as input, and using "several image recognition backends," such as object recognition, OCR, face matching, etc. Goggles returns relevant results (at least in theory). It even lets users get local business information without even taking a picture. For that, it uses GPS and compass data.

"We started Plink to bring the power of visual search to everyone, and we’re delighted to be taking a big step towards that goal today," say founders Mark Cummins and James Philbin. "Google has already shown that it’s serious about investing in this space with Google Goggles, and for the Plink team the opportunity to take our algorithms to Google-scale was just too exciting to pass up."

"The visual search engines of today can do some pretty cool things, but they still have a long long way to go," the pair add. "We’re looking forward to helping the Goggles team build a visual search engine that works not just for paintings or book covers, but for everything you see around you. There are beautiful things to be done with computer vision – it’s going to be a lot of fun!"

PlinkArt will still be available for download and will continue to work, but the company will no longer be updating it. They will instead focus all thier efforts on Google Goggles.

Financial terms of the Plink acquisition have not been disclosed.

Google has acquired the UK-based visual search engine company Plink, which makes PlinkArt, a mobile app that lets users take a picture with their phone and identify paintings and artworks. Google is adding Plink to work on its Google Goggles project.

Google introduced Goggles as a Google Labs project back in December. It was cool from the get go, but the potential it displayed was far greater than the actual functionality. The addition of Plink will allow Google to expand on that functionality. Google Goggles lets you search Google using pictures from your camera phone. They take an image as input, and using "several image recognition backends," such as object recognition, OCR, face matching, etc. Goggles returns relevant results (at least in theory). It even lets users get local business information without even taking a picture. For that, it uses GPS and compass data.

"We started Plink to bring the power of visual search to everyone, and we’re delighted to be taking a big step towards that goal today," say founders Mark Cummins and James Philbin. "Google has already shown that it’s serious about investing in this space with Google Goggles, and for the Plink team the opportunity to take our algorithms to Google-scale was just too exciting to pass up."

"The visual search engines of today can do some pretty cool things, but they still have a long long way to go," the pair add. "We’re looking forward to helping the Goggles team build a visual search engine that works not just for paintings or book covers, but for everything you see around you. There are beautiful things to be done with computer vision – it’s going to be a lot of fun!"

PlinkArt will still be available for download and will continue to work, but the company will no longer be updating it. They will instead focus all thier efforts on Google Goggles.

Financial terms of the Plink acquisition have not been disclosed.