ReadWriteWeb

It seemed inevitable that geeks were going to do some geeky magic with Google voice search for the desktop and in less than two weeks after the technology was launched at Google's big search event mid-June - the geekery has begun. A New York City developer lab called Breakfast has released an open source project called Verbalizer that anyone can use to as a microphone for performing Google voice searches while standing in a room away from your computer.

Breakfast says that, out of the box, touching any spot on the Verbalizer device will trigger a Google voice search from up to 10 meters away. So, imagine a computer monitor hanging on a wall in your living room. A Verbalizer could be placed by the door so that when you walk into a room, you can ask it to search for anything on the Internet, without sitting down at a keyboard.

On the heels of some major search improvements earlier this week, Google has announced another round of search-related updates today - this time to its "related search" feature. On the surface, these changes are simply meant to make the display of related queries much easier for users to navigate.

Starting today, if you perform a search on a particular category, Google will display some of the most popular and referenced items within that category. It will also include the three top sources of this information.

With this week's launch of a new tool called "Me on the Web," Google wants to help users better understand and manage their online identities, as well as learn how to remove unwanted content from Google search results.

Through Google's online dashboard, available to anyone with a Google account, this added section helps you track your online mentions, view your public profiles on various social networking sites and blogs, manage your digital identity and even learn the process involved in having items removed from the Web entirely.

Today, Yahoo introduced two new search tools, one a new online search engine for finding new mobile applications, and the other a mobile app called AppSpot (iPhone, Android), which does the same. According to a Yahoo blog post, the goal of these new services is to help you better sort through the some 425,000 mobile applications on the iTunes App Store and the 200,000 apps on Google's Android Market so you can find the app you need.

But will Yahoo's efforts prove better than any of the existing services that already do the same?

Just because Microsoft has its own mobile operating system called Windows Phone 7, that doesn't mean it's above using the popularity of Apple's iPhone to attract new users to its up-and-coming Bing search engine. For example, this week, the company highlighted a recently added Bing feature called "auto app discovery" by way of a company blog post that describes how the Microsoft search engine is a great tool for finding new iPhone applications.

Some of the earliest and most useful search verticals in Google have been discontinued. Google search for Linux, Microsoft and BSD (Chrome license) blogs and forums have been shut down along with those for Mac, "About" Google and Uncle Sam about the state and location information.

In a message to Search Engine Roundtable, Google said that it is shutting down these verticals because  "search quality has advanced tremendously, and based on our analysis we've found that in most cases you're better off looking for this kind of specialized information using the regular Google search box."

Last week I attended the e-G8 in Paris, France. I arrived with many questions as to the eventual value of the event, some of which I shared in a previous post. Beyond that post my cynicism had grown somewhat, as frankly I was concerned that the event was going to amount to little more than thinly veiled theater intended to push a predetermined agenda at the G8 Summit. I was right to be concerned because it appears this is exactly what it was.

While the event itself was of the highest quality - held in the Jardin des Tuileries near the Musée du Louvre with great food and wines at each break - it was not the "discussion" it was positioned as in the run-up to the event. Very little time was allocated for attendees to engage in a dialog with the speakers and it lacked any semblance of a workshop or forum.

Today a new company founded by software industry veteran Ed Iacobucci began its operations, along with $8 million in seed funding. Its goal is to fight what Iacobucci calls "data sprawl" by developing a pervasive data indexing programming interface and architecture that will act as a guide across both cloud and private data stores. The idea is to index everything so that users can find files from any particular device, in the cloud, or on their local desktops and servers.

Quixey, an application search startup and makers of an accompanying suite of tools for app developers, is today announcing three more tools to aid in application discovery. These tools provide new ways for publishers and partners to integrate app search into their own websites, and include everything from a simple widget up to fully customized solutions built to a specific publisher's requirements.

Let's be perfectly honest. For those of us who are tied to a Web browser all day, searching the Internet comes in handy for a wide range of work-related purposes. But who among us hasn't snuck in an on-the-job search or two to find a place to eat that night, look up trivial news stories or straight-up distract ourselves with queries like "play Tetris online" or "kitten falling asleep"?

Indeed, the Web sometimes blurs the line between our personal and professional activity, and the folks in charge have a vested interest in ensuring we're maintaining at least a bare minimum level of productivity. Some companies restrict Web access or snoop on employees' browsing, while others are more hands off.