Understanding How Google Works [Infographic]

July 8, 2010 By Leave a Comment

If you’re anything like me then you probably run a handful of searches through Google each day.  Have you ever wondered what happens when you hit “Return” or “Enter” on your keyboard?  The folks over at PPC Blog have created an infographic to help us visualize how many considerations and actions take place in less than a second from when you initiate the search and before that results page loads.

How Does Google Work?

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Google News Refreshed

July 4, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Google News has been my go-to source for news and has served as my homepage since it was released in 2002. I have always liked how Google News allows me to see what’s going on with top stories and then broken out by different interest areas such as Business, Technology, Entertainment, Local, and more. For each story listed, if I’m interested in reading other angles, Google News provides all of the other sources for a given story.

What I like the most about this is that I’m not boxed into a certain opinion just because I like a particular source. For example, when I used to receive the print version of The New York Times and only watched CNN, those were my two main sources for news. While both news sources try to stay in the middle and report the full details of a story, of course, there are other stories, access, and angles that different media sources receive. When Google News debuted, it immediately solved my curiosity to read multiple angles and to consume as much news as I could get my hands on.

Since Google News launched it has only had a few updates to it.  However, the Google News team has just launched a new, refreshed version with the goal of giving users more access to the specific news that is important to them.

The most noticeable aspect of this is when you first log in to the refreshed version, in the “News for You” section, Google asks you to customize your experience by telling them how often you read news from the different sections that Google News provides. Your choices are “Never”, “Sometimes”, or “Always”. You also have the option to provide custom topics that interests you besides the standard topic areas. Once you submit your choices to Google it adapts to your experience to show you news that is curated to your interests.

This is just one of several features of the refreshed Google News. To see all of the new features, check out the video below.

I’m really excited to have seen Google make these updates and I’m looking forward to seeing how well it provides more relevant news based on the ratings and interests I provided.

Do you use Google News? What are your thoughts on the updates? If you’re not a Google News user, how do you receive your news?

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Inside Larry & Sergey’s Brain [Book Review]

June 30, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Imagine if you had been a fly on the wall during the inception of Google straight through to today when they’re one of the most powerful brands in the world.  That is exactly what Inside Larry & Sergey’s Brain (affiliate link) by Richard L. Brandt does.  From the back cover:

Based on interviews with their current and former employees, competitors, professors, and friends, Brandt details their early lives, the origins of their idealism, and the strategies underlying Google’s relentless expansion.  He explores misconceptions about the company’s culture, especially its motto, ‘Don’t be evil,’ and rule number one, ‘Focus on the user and everything else will follow.’

I really enjoyed how Brandt structured the book and I learned a lot about Larry, Sergey and Google that I didn’t previously know.  This book is definitely worth picking up if you’re fascinated with Google, their culture, their growth and the way in which they view the world.

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Sharing Content in Another Stream

January 21, 2010 By 21 Comments

On a daily basis I will generally run through between 400-800+ feeds.  Of those, I share the top posts, usually around 30 or so, that I think will be useful for you.  Realizing that a majority of you don’t follow my Google Reader feed or may use a different feed reader, I wanted to provide another option for you to access those articles.

Sure, I push my Google Reader shared items through FriendFeed and I share a handful of posts daily through my Twitter account.  But, seeing that the majority of my community hangs out in Twitter more often than most other services, I wanted to be able to share with you through there.  Therefore, similar to what Louis Gray (@lgshareditems), Robert Scoble (@scoblemedia) and Chris Brogan (@broganmedia) have done, I have created a new handle on Twitter: @jlevymedia.  This will be, as Chris calls it, a pure stream of the content that I share or produce from around the interwebs.

Besides trying to provide you with, what you will hopefully find as a resource, what I like about having this Twitter account is that it allows me track all of the links that I share through Google Reader in Bit.ly.

While this might not be totally useful as of yet, it will still help me to gauge whether or not the info that I share is useful to you.  As time goes on I will tweak what based on feedback and stats such as Bit.ly clicks, retweets and more.

If you think it will be of interest to you, I hope that you’ll come join me over on @jlevymedia.

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Google and FriendFeed Celebrate the New Year in Style

January 1, 2010 By 1 Comment

By now, we’re used to seeing a new Google logo on holidays or other special occasions.  But today Google has added in an extra treat.  Head over to Google and without anything in the search field, click on the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button.

If that wasn’t enough, visit FriendFeed for another welcome to 2010.  Once you log in to your FriendFeed account a duck celebrating 2010 will begin scrolling across your screen.  Moving your cursor over the duck will bring up cross-hairs allowing to fire a round at the duck.  The duck then flips upside down and falls off of your screen.  It definitely brings back thoughts of long hours spent playing Duck Hunt.

Have you found any other fun surprises across the interwebs today welcoming you into 2010?

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