It looks like the people in charge of Gmail Labs have decided to do a little spring (or more accurately, late winter) cleaning.  They’ve removed a full 11 experimental features from Labs, with six of the bunch becoming regular Gmail features and the other five failing to make the cut.

Many of the "graduated" features are ones you’re probably familiar with, or can at least guess the functions of.  Forgotten Attachment Detector, YouTube Previews, Custom Label Colors, and Vacation Dates all fall under this heading.

The last two approved features are Search Autocomplete and Go To Label, and a post on the Official Gmail Blog covers the only tricky parts, explaining, "If you have keyboard shortcuts turned on, type ‘g’ then ‘l’ and instead of getting the old ‘Go to label’ pop-up, you’ll be in the search box with the ‘label:’ operator filled in for you.  Start typing the label you want to go to, and autocomplete will take it from there.  All you have to do is hit enter.  If you want to send your cursor to the blank search field, the keyboard shortcut ‘/’ will do it."

As for the experimental features that’ve been dropped, they’re called Muzzle, Fixed Width Font, Email Addict, Location in Signature, and Random Signature.  And a lack of popularity is the main reason they didn’t make it further, in case you were wondering.

Anyway, Google’s likely to introduce more Gmail Labs features to replace all of this stuff before long.

Last year, Google released a Gmail Labs feature that added a search box for regular Google Search within Gmail. The lab is simply called Google search. However, it didn’t provide all of the features that the real Google search does. They have now taken steps to improve the feature’s capabilities in the following areas:

- Dictionary definitions
- Spelling corrections
- Calculations
- Local results
- Weather
- News

You can now enter "define" and a word in the search box to retrieve a definition. If you spell something wrong, it will ask you if you meant something else. If you type in a math expression, you’ll get the calculation. You can search for a specific place or for things near a specific place and get map results (although Google said this feature will become available in a few weeks). It will also show you the More Info link, which will take you to a place page.

You can type "weather" followed by your city and state (or country) or zip code and get local weather results not unlike what you would get in a regular Google search. If your query matches something in the news, you may get some news results.

The new features are available in all languages that Gmail supports. They have also added a search button to the toolbar when you compose a message. With this, you can select text, click the button, and it will search for that. If you don’t select text, it will just bring up a search box.

Related Articles:

> Gmail and Picasa Storage Can Be Used for Any File

> Gmail Switches to Default Https Encryption Following Attack

> Google Adds Way to Easily Merge Duplicate Contacts in Gmail

Yesterday, Wolfram Research shut down the iPhone-optimized version of Wolfram Alpha, the company’s “computational knowledge engine.” Many pundits speculated that Wolfram decided to shutter the mobile site in order to drive more users to the company’s $50 iPhone app. Earlier this morning, we got a chance to talk to Schoeller Porter, Wolfram’s product manager for the iPhone app. According to Schoeller, the reason for killing the mobile site was simple: not enough people were using it.

Sponsor

It is important to remember that while Wolfram offered an iPhone optimized landing page, the actual results pages were always identical to those of the regular web version. All Wolfram did was shut down this landing page. According to Porter, users can still get the same result pages by entering their queries into the search box on the default Wolfram Alpha website. Porter argues that nothing of substance was actually removed.

Why Did Wolfram Kill the Mobile Landing Page?

In our conversation, Schoeller Porter pointed out that this landing page was only meant to be a test, and traffic to the site had decreased to the point where the company simply decided to pull the plug.

It’s not surprising that Porter would defend Wolfram’s decision to shut down the mobile site as a traffic issue, and not as a ploy to sell more of the company’s pricey mobile app. According to Porter, users can still choose to get a good mobile experience through the website and those users who need a mobile experience can always get the mobile app. Until now, though, the mobile landing page offered a happy medium between the regular desktop website and the mobile app.

Currently, the team wants to focus on enhancing the experience on the default website and the mobile app; Wolfram is also thinking about mobile apps for Android and BlackBerry.

Why Not Just Keep the Mobile Site Up?

One could argue, however, that it really wouldn’t have cost Wolfram a lot of money or manpower to keep the mobile landing page up for the time being. The company also didn’t help itself by killing the mobile site without any explanation on its blog. The fact that the mobile site now features a big add for the iPhone app only helped to fuel the speculation about Wolfram’s intentions.

Discuss

Google has launched its new homepage, which looks generally the same, but removes everything but the logo, search box, and two buttons until the user moves the mouse. Google says most people go to the Google home page to search, and they wanted to remove the other distractions, unless users specifically want to see them.

This is an interesting philosophy, because it certainly grabs your attention when you move the mouse and and a bunch of new stuff appears. Perhaps, the move is really designed to draw attention to Google’s other services.

"Since most users who are interested in clicking over to a different application generally do move the mouse when they arrive, the ‘fade in’ is an elegant solution that provides options to those who want them, but removes distractions for the user intent on searching," Google says.

Google has been testing similar designs for several months. The company explains:

All in all, we ran approximately 10 variants of the fade-in. Some of the experiments hindered the user experience: for example, the variants of the homepage that hid the search buttons until after the fade performed the worst in terms of user happiness metrics. Other variants of the experiment produced humorous outcomes when combined with our doodles — the barcode doodle combined with the fade was particularly ironic in its overstated minimalism . However, in the end, the variant of the homepage we are launching today was positive or neutral on all key metrics, except one: time to first action. At first, this worried us a bit: Google is all about getting you where you are going faster — how could we launch something that potentially slowed users down? Then, we realized: we want users to notice this change… and it does take time to notice something (though in this case, only milliseconds!). Our goal then became to understand whether or not over time the users began to use the homepage even more efficiently than the control group and, sure enough, that was the trend we observed.

Judging from conversation on Twitter, opinions of the new page are pretty evenly mixed. Some think it’s "snazzy," while others feel it’s distracting." Some don’t like that you have to move the mouse to know where specific links are.

As with any design change to a popular site, there are going to be critics and supporters. The Google home page affects a great deal of web users. What is your opinion of the new change? Share your thoughts.

Related Articles:

> Google Testing a Revamp of the Search Results Page

> Facebook Tests "Many" New Design Changes

> Microsoft Unveils Big Redesign of MSN

Last night we told you about the launch of Twitter’s new homepage. The revamped design sports a sleek look that is pretty easy on the eye. But, once you get past the pleasing aesthetics, you’ll also see that Twitter has added a search capability and popular topics, which in turn could mean an influx of Twitterers.

It should be noted that most Twitterers won’t ever see the new homepage, unless they logout of course. But, the new layout isn’t for the "everyday Twitter user", it’s meant for the non-tweeting crowd, or those that don’t see the use for it. Recently, WebProNews featured an article, "The Average American Still Unfamiliar With Twitter", which discussed this very topic. It seems as though Twitter hopes the new homepage will help herd in some of the non-Twitter users.

Do you think the new homepage will help get new users? Tell us.

Twitter Search – Is Twitter competing with search engines now?

With Twitter’s inclusion of search, on the homepage, they’ve now made Twitter useful… even for those who refuse to tweet. WebProNews’ Chris Crum wrote an article about this very topic, and here’s his take on what might happen with Twitter search:

"When a new user comes along to discover Twitter for the first (or even second or third) time, they’ll see that search box. They’ll say to themselves, "What is this? I thought Twitter was just some pointless way to tell people what I am having for breakfast. It’s a search engine now?" Then they will start to understand that there is more to gain from Twitter than what they previously thought."

You might be asking, "What is the big advantage to a Twitter search versus, let’s say Google?" The answer is simple. With Twitter, you get real-time results (which is the next big thing in search). Twitter even highlights this aspect on the new homepage with the following header:

But, don’t think for a second that Google doesn’t know they’re late to the party, in regards to real-time search. Google’s own Larry Page has even stated:

"I have always thought we needed to index the web every second to allow real-time search.  At first, my team laughed and did not believe me.  With Twitter, now they know they have to do it.  Not everybody needs sub-second indexing but people are getting pretty excited about real-time."

Will Twitter be able to lure some searchers away from Google? Let us know what you think.

Trending Topics… umm… I mean Popular Topics

By now you’ve probably noticed that Twitter has added "popular topics" to the homepage. But, these aren’t your everyday, profile page, trending topics. With these you can now see what’s popular right now, today and this week.

If you’re still unclear what the popular topics are about, Twitter offers the following description :

"Twitter looks at every incoming tweet, then ranks the popularity of certain words or phrases in real time. Click any of the popular topics below to see what people are saying about them right now."

The new popular topics, coupled with search, seems to be a strategy that Twitter is employing hoping it leads to new users. @Biz had the following to say about this on the Twitter blog:

"…demonstrating the power of Twitter as a discovery engine for what is happening right now through our Search and Trends often awakens a sense of wonder which inevitably leads to a much more compelling question, "How do I get involved?""

What are your thoughts about the new "Popular Topics"? Tell us.

Popular Topics / Search Results Pages

Let’s say you want to see why "Apple Claims New" is a popular topic, so you click it. You’re then taken to a re-vamped results page, with an added element. Twitter now displays a description of why the topic is popular.

This new description will come in very handy when those odd terms creep up into the popular topics. Below, you can read Twitter’s description of this new addition:

"Twitter looks at every incoming tweet, then ranks the popularity of certain words or phrases in real time. Click any of the popular topics below to see what people are saying about them right now. Some topic descriptions are sourced from What The Trend."

Besides the new description, the results pages are pretty much the same… but they do sport the new updated design. I do wish Twitter would’ve incorporated the FriendFeed sort of ajax auto-refreshing thing they do, that could be turned off and on, of course. (It should be noted that the search results pages look identical.)

Do you find the new descriptions helpful, or distracting? Let us know.

Twitter’s New Search Tips

Upon clicking a popular topic, or doing a search, you’ll notice a new feature in the column, a "Search Tip". Sure, these tips aren’t anything to write home about, but they do highlight some of the underused search operators. I’ve included a few examples of them below:

"Use source: immediately before a particular Twitter source (like a desktop or mobile app) to find tweets posted via that client. Example: weather source:tweetie will find tweets containing "weather" and entered via Tweetie."

"Use until: immediately before a specific date to find tweets sent before and until that date. Example: ftw until:2009-07-16 will find tweets containing "ftw" and sent until date "2009-07-16" (year-month-day)."

Do you currently use any Twitter search operators? Tell us.

Twitter’s Sign up Page

Twitter’s sign up page is probably my biggest complaint with the new design. Why didn’t Twitter update the sign up page with the new look? Isn’t this page the most important to them? It’s the one that brings in the new users.

The sign up page seems very dull and boring when you compare it with the new look. They could’ve at least changed the color scheme to match, but maybe since this page is working well for them, they didn’t want to change it. Personally for me, it feels very disconnected from the new modern look they got going on.

Should Twitter update the design of the sign up page? Tell us.

More Work Ahead

Even though the new Twitter homepage looks great, @Biz is quick to add that they still have a lot of work to do:

"We have a lot of work to do when it comes to the quality of our search results and trend analysis but repositioning the product to focus more on discovery is an important first step in presenting Twitter to a wider audience of folks around the world who are eager to start engaging with new people, ideas, opinions, events, and sources of information.

We’ll likely continue to make changes to the Twitter home page as we respond to feedback and ideas. We’re eager to see if encouraging a sense of wonder and discovery leads to a better first impression of Twitter."

What are some changes you would recommend for the Twitter homepage? Let us know.

Since Bing’s launch, the search engine has garnered quite a bit of attention. This is no surprise since Microsoft invested so much money into marketing it. It may still be too early to tell, but it seems to be paying off so far. Bing’s numbers have edged up since its launch.

While Google still dominates the search market share by a very wide margin, the company does appear to view Bing as a legitimate competitor, and while not marketing on the scale that Microsoft is, the company has been quick to highlight some of its own search features that might appeal to those infatuated with Bing’s "decision engine" functionality.

Last month, Google put up a page, highlighting some of the special searches you can perform on Google to get your answers right in the results. These included things like weather, movie times, dictionary, calculator, sports scores, stock quotes, etc. There was even a link to this page right on the Google homepage under the search box (although it no longer appears there now). The move seemed to say, "Hey everybody, Bing’s cool, but you know we already have this stuff right?"

Now Google has quietly added a minor feature to its image search that might look familiar to Bing users. You know how Bing has the little menu under the search box, where you can pick what kind of filter you want on your results? Google is now including a similar feature.

Perhaps Google saw that Bing users liked this feature and added it themselves. It makes you wonder what other ideas Google might get from Bing. I’m not saying that they need to get too many ideas from Bing. Google is clearly the leader of the market right now, and the company got there by doing something right. I am also not suggesting that Google is going to start copying everything Bing does. But, if there is a little feature (such as the above example) here and there that can enhance the usability of Google and its search products, perhaps the entire search industry can benefit.

The concept is nothing new. Search engines have been getting ideas from each other for years. It’s how they stay competitive. Really what the above example illustrates is how competition makes the entire industry better. You can see this illustrated in the social media space as well, as Facebook adopts more Twitter-like features, while maintaining most of what people like about Facebook at the same time.

Google recently acknowledged that it has plenty of competition. The company says it must keep innovating to stay on top. Adjusting products to accommodate less innovative, but popular features is a good way to do it too. That seems to be the way major Internet players think.

The image filter feature is a small thing, but it reflects a bigger picture. The more competitive the industry is, the better it is likely to become for us users.

Since Bing’s launch, the search engine has garnered quite a bit of attention. This is no surprise since Microsoft invested so much money into marketing it. It may still be too early to tell, but it seems to be paying off so far. Bing’s numbers have edged up since its launch.

While Google still dominates the search market share by a very wide margin, the company does appear to view Bing as a legitimate competitor, and while not marketing on the scale that Microsoft is, the company has been quick to highlight some of its own search features that might appeal to those infatuated with Bing’s "decision engine" functionality.

Last month, Google put up a page, highlighting some of the special searches you can perform on Google to get your answers right in the results. These included things like weather, movie times, dictionary, calculator, sports scores, stock quotes, etc. There was even a link to this page right on the Google homepage under the search box (although it no longer appears there now). The move seemed to say, "Hey everybody, Bing’s cool, but you know we already have this stuff right?"

Now Google has quietly added a minor feature to its image search that might look familiar to Bing users. You know how Bing has the little menu under the search box, where you can pick what kind of filter you want on your results? Google is now including a similar feature.

Perhaps Google saw that Bing users liked this feature and added it themselves. It makes you wonder what other ideas Google might get from Bing. I’m not saying that they need to get too many ideas from Bing. Google is clearly the leader of the market right now, and the company got there by doing something right. I am also not suggesting that Google is going to start copying everything Bing does. But, if there is a little feature (such as the above example) here and there that can enhance the usability of Google and its search products, perhaps the entire search industry can benefit.

The concept is nothing new. Search engines have been getting ideas from each other for years. It’s how they stay competitive. Really what the above example illustrates is how competition makes the entire industry better. You can see this illustrated in the social media space as well, as Facebook adopts more Twitter-like features, while maintaining most of what people like about Facebook at the same time.

Google recently acknowledged that it has plenty of competition. The company says it must keep innovating to stay on top. Adjusting products to accommodate less innovative, but popular features is a good way to do it too. That seems to be the way major Internet players think.

The image filter feature is a small thing, but it reflects a bigger picture. The more competitive the industry is, the better it is likely to become for us users.

Update: YouTube has made an official blog post saying they’re ready to start rolling out the new channels design. Here’s a new video about the redesign.
 

YouTube also says that all existing channels will change over to the new design on July 15.

Original Article: Earlier this year, it was discovered that YouTube was "secretly" testing a new design for channels. While there is no official date yet for when this will launch for all users, YouTube says the time is getting closer.

Since the cat escaped the bag, hundreds of thousands of users have managed to find their way to using the new design, the company says. That of course means tons of feedback.

Tons of feedback means that there have been quite a few features added and/or changed. Here is a big list of those features:

- You can now have the full range of ads on your channel

- Sort controls – sort by most viewed, date added, or highest rated

- Ratings stars can now be clicked

- Counts for the number of videos in each section (when in "all" view)

- When playing a video, the video title now links to the non-channel video watch page

- View a small number of video comments as well as leave a quick comment – just click the comments tab when watching any video

- Font size is now larger when browsing through videos

- You can make the list of your playlists your features content set (like the new White House Channel)

- New share controls underneath the video

- Endless loading circles should now be gone

- No more channels with messed up layouts

- Search box when looking at uploads

- Honors are back

- Video thumbnails are now larger

- More interaction options under the video player

- You can now feature a video by URL

- The subscribe button is yellow again

- You can choose a featured video

- You can link directly to a specific video and a specific playlist on your channel

- You can rearrange boxes on your channel with little arrows

- You can message users

- You can delete recent activity items

- Subscribe button appears when you’re looking at your own channel

- UI improvements

- Tons of bug fixes

These are most of the updates that have been made since April. There are still more to go though. A few things YouTube says they’re still looking at include:

- The ability to reorder your uploads, or your lists of playlists

- Making URL autolink (in both the video description, plus the channel profile area)

- Showing the upload date in the video description

- More bug fixes

- And more

There seems to be plenty of feedback flowing, and YouTube is clearly taking it all into consideration and applying changes, where it sees fit. They’ve gotten a lot accomplished in the last couple months, and from the sound of it, it won’t be long until all YouTube users will get to experience the new channels redesign without having to go out of their way to do so.

 What are your thoughts on the new YouTube Channels design? Share.

Earlier this year, it was discovered that YouTube was "secretly" testing a new design for channels. While there is no official date yet for when this will launch for all users, YouTube says the time is getting closer.

Since the cat escaped the bag, hundreds of thousands of users have managed to find their way to using the new design, the company says. That of course means tons of feedback.

Tons of feedback means that there have been quite a few features added and/or changed. Here is a big list of those features:

- You can now have the full range of ads on your channel

- Sort controls – sort by most viewed, date added, or highest rated

- Ratings stars can now be clicked

- Counts for the number of videos in each section (when in "all" view)

- When playing a video, the video title now links to the non-channel video watch page

- View a small number of video comments as well as leave a quick comment – just click the comments tab when watching any video

- Font size is now larger when browsing through videos

- You can make the list of your playlists your features content set (like the new White House Channel)

- New share controls underneath the video

- Endless loading circles should now be gone

- No more channels with messed up layouts

- Search box when looking at uploads

- Honors are back

- Video thumbnails are now larger

- More interaction options under the video player

- You can now feature a video by URL

- The subscribe button is yellow again

- You can choose a featured video

- You can link directly to a specific video and a specific playlist on your channel

- You can rearrange boxes on your channel with little arrows

- You can message users

- You can delete recent activity items

- Subscribe button appears when you’re looking at your own channel

- UI improvements

- Tons of bug fixes

These are most of the updates that have been made since April. There are still more to go though. A few things YouTube says they’re still looking at include:

- The ability to reorder your uploads, or your lists of playlists

- Making URL autolink (in both the video description, plus the channel profile area)

- Showing the upload date in the video description

- More bug fixes

- And more

There seems to be plenty of feedback flowing, and YouTube is clearly taking it all into consideration and applying changes, where it sees fit. They’ve gotten a lot accomplished in the last couple months, and from the sound of it, it won’t be long until all YouTube users will get to experience the new channels redesign without having to go out of their way to do so.

 What are your thoughts on the new YouTube Channels design? Share.

Earlier in the year, Google gave developers a preview of a new open-source quick search box for Mac outside of the browser. The company has now made this available to everyone.

The Google Quick Search Box comes equipped with search suggestions as you would expect. These suggestions range from apps and local files on your computer to web search and navigational suggestsions, as wel las items from your browser history, and contacts. Google says more types of results will become available in time.

"Once you’ve found the result you want, we wanted you to be able to DO something with it," Product Managers Ryan Tabone and KarenGrünberg explain. "To find out what you can do, select a result and press the tab key or the right arrow on the keyboard. Some examples of actions include instant messaging friends, playing a song, or emailing a URL. Just like the data you can search over, the list of actions you can perform will grow over time!"

To access he Quick Search Box, users simply need to push control+spacebar or Command twice. Shortcuts can be customized in the preferences panel.

"As you use the Google Quick Search Box more, it will learn which results you are likely to want," the product managers say. "The goal here is that we get you to what you’re looking for as quickly as possible. In the above example, if you chose Google Calendar, the next time you search for "cal", Google QSB will reorder the results so that you don’t have to arrow down to your desired choice. Instead, you can just type "cal" and press enter."

The beauty of the Quick Search Box being open source is that plug-ins can be created to improve features and functionality on a potentially massive scale. In fact, there is already a Twitter plug-in, that many users are likely to find helpful.

A new dictionary site called Wordnik was launched today, although even the creators had to settle for the "dictionary" description for lack of a better word. I would call it some kind of a definition search engine. It was founded by lexicographer Erin McKean.

You may be thinking, why do we need another dictionary site when we have sites like Dictionary.com or Google (the "define:" search operator has long been my preferred method of retrieving definitions). To answer your question, Wordnik delivers more than just definitions.

It delivers a combination of definitions, examples, real time (via Twitter) results, related words, images, and a lot more all on one page. For example, if I search for "cup" I am presented with a list of seventeen straight definitions:

In the Examples section, I am presented with several different passages showing the use of the word "cup" in different sentences:

Below that are the latest tweets with the word "cup," a related words area, images from Flickr, and a "fun and games" section, which tells me the word "cup" is worth 7 points in Scrabble.

Beyond these things are stats, tags, etymologies, pronunciations (including audio, which is very cool, and you can even record your own), and word families. Each main section allows you to expand it and get more results. For example, while I may only see a couple of tweets from the Real Time section, I can simply quick on the Real Time From Twitter heading and get a whole slew of recent tweets.

Worknik is currently in beta, and is actually open to other descriptions for the site beyond "dictionary" if you have any ideas. Users are also encouraged to contribute to the site, so it will continue to grow. Browsing it for a few minutes, I have to say it’s an interesting take on definitions. I may just have to add it to my search box menu in Firefox.

Here are several fixes you can do that will make your video readable by the search engines. Search engine crawlers read html very well, but not your video.

At the present time, Google’s freshbot crawler cannot read inside a video. You will need to help that little freshbot.

Consider these factors:

1. Make sure that you tag your video with keyword tags. Keyword tags is what you type into the search box to find what you need. The keywords might be “how to”, “video”, “strawberry rhubarb”, “baking”, “pie” if you did a video on how to make a strawberry rhubarb pie. You would not use the quotes around the keywords, however.

2. You have to give the search engines enough of a description to help them to determine what is in the video. Keywords must be used in this text. The crawlers can read html code extremely well, so tell them what the video says. Do a good job of summarizing the content of the video in a paragraph or more. It wouldn’t hurt if you printed out the text that you used to record the video, assuming that you didn’t free-wheel it. Surround your video with the text which is keyword rich.

3. Inbound links to your videos: Be sure to use keywords in your anchor text.

4. The title of your video is very important. Do some research. Look for a keyword phrase that has a small number of searches per day…about 3,000 to 5,000 searches per day. If you use those keywords in your title, you will probably rank very well.

5. Submit your video to Digg and Mixx which are social sites. Make sure that you check the box that says that this is a video.

6. Submit your video to RSS feeds. A good one to use is rssfeedsubmit. There are many others to choose from. Simply type in “rss feeds” into your search box. A number of choices will show up.

7. Another trick you need to do is add your full URL in the description area of your video. Make sure that you precede your description with your full URL when you type in your keyword rich description in to the video sharing site. Your full URL includes the http:// This allows people to go directly to your site if they find that they liked your video and want to see more of what you have to offer.

Video optimization has become more and more important as video becomes mainstream. You need to change the way you publish your video if you want to experience the full, search engine optimization, (SEO), effect of your video production. Consider what the web crawlers can read and adapt your publication accordingly.

Source: http://www.submityourarticle.com

Permalink: http://www.submityourarticle.com/a.php?a=57927

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Seven Reasons Google Did Not Find Your Video

A new dictionary site called Wordnik was launched today, although even the creators had to settle for the "dictionary" description for lack of a better word. I would call it some kind of a definition search engine. It was founded by lexicographer Erin McKean.

You may be thinking, why do we need another dictionary site when we have sites like Dictionary.com or Google (the "define:" search operator has long been my preferred method of retrieving definitions). To answer your question, Wordnik delivers more than just definitions.

It delivers a combination of definitions, examples, real time (via Twitter) results, related words, images, and a lot more all on one page. For example, if I search for "cup" I am presented with a list of seventeen straight definitions:

In the Examples section, I am presented with several different passages showing the use of the word "cup" in different sentences:

Below that are the latest tweets with the word "cup," a related words area, images from Flickr, and a "fun and games" section, which tells me the word "cup" is worth 7 points in Scrabble.

Beyond these things are stats, tags, etymologies, pronunciations (including audio, which is very cool, and you can even record your own), and word families. Each main section allows you to expand it and get more results. For example, while I may only see a couple of tweets from the Real Time section, I can simply quick on the Real Time From Twitter heading and get a whole slew of recent tweets.

Worknik is currently in beta, and is actually open to other descriptions for the site beyond "dictionary" if you have any ideas. Users are also encouraged to contribute to the site, so it will continue to grow. Browsing it for a few minutes, I have to say it’s an interesting take on definitions. I may just have to add it to my search box menu in Firefox.

There is still a lot to learn about Bing of course. Microsoft’s new search engine hasn’t been live that long. After reading the back and forth of Matt Cutts and Bing, I started wondering how Bing and Google were treating each other’s results.

Come to find out, that if you search Google (or other search engines) on Bing, you typically get a single "best match" result, with sub-results underneath it. You then get a link that says "search for other results containing…" When you click on that link, you get a regular SERP.  Perhaps even more interesting, underneath the sub-results, there is a search box that lets you search using Google (or whatever search engine the query was for…yahoo, ask, etc.).

Now the results from a search with that box aren’t displayed within Bing. I doubt they could get away with that. Although they do allow you to play videos from within a video search results page with a simple mouseover.

I do find it somewhat interesting that they are making it easier for users to search with their competitors’ search engines by providing the search box right in the SERP. It is perhaps fitting though, considering "Google" was the most-searched term on Microsoft’s Live Search.

It’s not just queries for search engines that give you the one-result-SERP, though. Social networks appear to do the same, though not all of them. Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Bebo all do it, but Twitter gives you a full-blow SERP.

There are variations on the formula too. A query for MySpace will give you the one-result-SERP, and a searchable box, just like the search engine queries, but Facebook doesn’t deliver the search box, but instead a customer support phone number. Twitter doesn’t deliver the one-result-SERP, but still includes the searchable box in the top result.

On a sidenote, Bing has some major relevancy issues with video search  (at least with a query for Google or Yahoo). On the first SERP here, I’m only seeing one result that has anything to do with Google whatsoever, apart from the fact that every video on the SERP comes from Google-owned YouTube. I mean seriously…the second result is a Britney Spears video. A Yahoo search brings up nothing about Yahoo, but a bunch of results from Yahoo.

Make of all of this what you will. There are still no doubt plenty of tweaks to be made. After all, Bing isn’t even supposed to be launched yet.