The Brilliant Bing for iPad

Microsoft has recently released an iPad app for Bing that's really impressive. "Bing for iPad goes beyond the traditional search experience, offering a unique and visually rich way to search the Web. The app is designed from the ground up for touch. You can quickly browse news, movies, Bing homepage images, local business listings and much more – all with the swipe of your finger," informs Bing's blog.

Bing for iPad transforms a bland search engine into a visual application that lets you interact with information. The app is fluid, the integration of all the specialized search engines is almost seamless and there are a lot of small features that make your life easier. For example, you can quickly highlight matches, go to the next image result using gestures and go back to the list of search results using a back swipe.







Unfortunately, Bing's results aren't always great, but they've improved a lot lately. Voice search didn't work well for me and there's no visual search.

Google doesn't have a search app developed specifically for iPad, but there's a universal app for iPhone and iPad that adds features like voice search and visual search to the standard Web interface. The latest version of the app added two gestures that enhance the interface, but many users complain that they slow down the app. While Google's results are still better, Google has a long way to go to catch up when it comes to the user interface.

Google Tests a Search Option for Definitions

Google experiments with a search option that lets you find the definition of a word without using the define: operator or adding "definition" to the query. Selecting the "dictionary" option from the sidebar doesn't restrict the results to sites like Dictionary.com and Answers.com, but shows the information that's available in Google Dictionary. To be fair, Google includes a section called "web definitions" that shows definitions from Wikipedia, WordNet and from different glossaries.


This feature is not yet available to everyone, but you can always install extensions like Google Dictionary for Chrome, Google Dictionary and Google Translate for Firefox or add Google Dictionary to your browser's search engines.

Reading Levels in Google's Sidebar

Google's search options sidebar includes a feature that was only available in the advanced search page: filtering results by reading level. If you enable this feature, Google will classify search results based on the complexity of the text. You can restrict the results to "basic" pages, "intermediate" pages and "advanced" pages, which are mostly scholarly articles.

"Sometimes you may want to limit your search results to a specific reading level. For instance, a junior high school teacher looking for content for her students or a second-language learner might want web pages written at a basic reading level. A scientist searching for the latest findings from the experts may want to limit results to those at advanced reading levels," explains Google.

Gmail Lets You Disable Auto-Adding Contacts

As previously announced, Gmail added a setting that lets you disable automatically saving email addresses to your contacts. Go to the Settings page, find the section "Create contacts for auto-complete" and you'll notice that the following option is enabled by default: "When I send a message to a new person, add them to Other Contacts so that I can auto-complete to them next time". Now you can disable this feature and select "I'll add contacts myself".


This is one of the features from a long changelog of small improvements. "Refresh" is now a button, the keyboard shortcuts guide is now available even if keyboard shortcuts are disabled (just press Shift+?), Gmail shows more useful warnings when you leave out the "." in ".com" from an email address and there are fewer warnings when you reply to a message in the Trash.

Google's Tilted Easter Egg

If you search for [tilt], [tilted] or [askew] on a smartphone using Google, you might notice a strange special effect: Google's search results page is tilted to the right. It's an Easter Egg, just like the "did you mean" link displayed when you search for [recursion].


{ via Search Engine Land }

YouTube's New Search Options Format

YouTube has a new interface for related searches and advanced search options. Now you can select multiple filters from a category and combine related searches. For example, you can find long-form HD videos that are available in the WebM format.

If you click on one of the queries from the "Explore" section, you'll replace the original query. A more interesting option is to mouse over a query and click the "plus" icon: this way, you'll refine your original search.

YouTube adds both filters and refinements to the query and separates them by comma. A search for [slow motion, hd, webm, high speed camera] includes two filters that are treated separately: "hd" and "webm".

You can also add the name of a channel (example: [slow motion, @tpsfilmstudio]) or the name of a category (example: [slow motion, sports]).


The new features were part of an experiment called YouTube Topics that tried to help users find videos. "We know that sometimes people come to YouTube looking for a specific video, but at other times, they have only a rough idea of the kind of videos they want."

Brix, a New Google Docs App

Google Docs code includes references to a new application code-named Brix. The files created using this application are called "Brix documents", so Brix can't be a photo editor or a video editor.



Here's an icon that could be used for Brix documents: it shows some Lego bricks. "Lego consists of colorful interlocking plastic bricks and an accompanying array of gears, minifigures and various other parts. Lego bricks can be assembled and connected in many ways, to construct such objects as vehicles, buildings, and even working robots," informs Wikipedia. Maybe Brix is just a collaborative web application based on SketchUp.


There are also icons for Fusion Table documents and Google Sites, which could be included in Google Docs: