ReadWriteWeb

This morning, Google announced that it will now display images next to some local search results. For the last two years, Google generally showed a map as the first item on the search results page whenever a user searched for a location, but now, a grid with six pictures will also appear next to this map as well. These images come right from the Panoramio photo layer in Google Maps, and clicking on it brings up Google Maps with the photo layer.

Omgili, which we reviewed in 2007 as a top alt search engine, has focused on culling results from the weird corners of the web: Forums, boards, discussion groups - basically, anywhere you'd find purely or mostly subjective information. It's the polar opposite of Google search, which is practically a peer-reviewed journal by comparison.

Their latest release, Google@Omgili, features a sweet mashup with Google search, giving users a well-rounded look at the fair-and-balanced web alongside social buzz from and about sources such as blogs, newsgroups, video-sharing sites, forums, discussion boards, Q&A sites, and review sites.

A website (whether a URL, domain, brand, etc.) is a place where the owner, individual visitor, and broader web community come together for a shared purpose. At first, the web adopted a feudal model of "place": owners held all the authority; they depended on the serfs (visitors) to extract value but allowed them no participation in governance, content, or presentation. That model has largely disintegrated.

According to Hitwise, search queries on all the major search engines are starting to get longer and longer (PDF). While the average search query is still around two words long, queries that are longer than four words have become increasingly popular over the last twelve months.

Hitwise's latest data also confirms that Google's market share in the search business is continuing to grow at a steady clip (9% year-over-year). Year-over-year, all of Google's larger competitors lost ground, though at least between December and January, both Yahoo and Ask.com saw a very minor increase in their market share.

Google posted an update about its eye tracking usability studies today. Most of the results are not exactly groundbreaking. It is, for example, no surprise that most users only scan the first couple of search results. Indeed, most Google users don't seem to scan much further than the second result. There are, however, some interesting nuggets of information in this post about how Google uses this data to study every aspect of its search results page.

Alex Chitu from the Google Operating System has found a new experimental feature for Google Search: preferred sites. Thanks to this, you may soon be able to tell Google about your favorite sites and have them appear more often in your search results. If you like to get your movie data from the IMDB, for example, you can tell Google to prefer this site over other movie review services. This feature would also be very useful if you want Google to prefer results from your local newspaper over stories from national papers, or if you want to see product reviews from specific sites.

Le Web 2008 conference, the web conference held this week in Paris, was not about bright, shiny, and new. It was about solid, reliable, and usable. The creative energy of the past few years now seems to be channelled towards building and growing apps that everyone, not just the tech community, wants. Here's a rundown of the major topics covered: portable identity, improved search, cloud storage, and video search.

This is the time of the year when search engines release their yearly round-ups, and today, both Google and Lycos released their respective lists of most popular search terms of the year. Former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin tops the list of fastest rising search terms in Google's year-end Zeitgeist, while 'poker' and 'Paris Hilton' were the top search terms on Lycos. This year's edition of Google's Zeigeist also breaks out individual results for over 30 countries.

A post on the Official Google Blog reminded us of a recently launched search experiment from Google called Accessible View. With this opt-in experimental version of Google.com, you can navigate through your search results using keyboard shortcuts. For those of you who are already heavy users of Google Reader, the inbox for the RSS-obsessed, these shortcuts will be very familiar to you. Although designed for people with disabilities, we gave the keyboard shortcuts a whirl to see if it made sense to use them on a regular basis.

Google today announced that it is now indexing the amazing amount of 1 trillion unique URLs. Google's first index in 1998 only had 26 million pages and by 2000 that number had jumped to 1 billion. Today, the Google index is growing by several billion pages per day alone. Not too long ago, Google used to have a counter on the front page of its search engine, displaying the number of sites in the index, but they dropped this information from the site around 2005.