The Past Week In Google Search
One of Google's doodles
With another week going by, let’s talk a bit about what Google managed to do recently. As you might already know by now, the company behind the world’s leading search engine always comes up with new and innovative services and features. Recently, it has posted a list of everything it has managed to improve or release in the past week. For starters, flu season is coming up. This means that it’s time for you to get the flu vaccine. To make things easier, Google set up a deal with the US Department for Health and Human Services, flu.gov collaborators and the American Lung Association to help people surfing the web figure out where they can get a flu vaccine nearby.
If you’re searching for any flu-related terms, you’ll get some info right on the top of the search results. This information includes tips from flu.gov and a flu vaccine finder box featuring an expanding map that will display all of the nearby locations where you can receive the vaccine. If you want to go directly to the vaccine finder you can find it at google.com/flushot. Everyone’s hoping for a relatively mild flu season, but it’s good to be prepared and the Google enhancement might make it easier for some people to keep safe and healthy.
Also in the previous week, Google has added more languages to Alerts. Google Alerts has been around for years and it has been helping English speakers discover new videos which are related to their interests. As of now, 39 more languages are available, including Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian and Spanish. People from around the world will now get to monitor the web for new, interesting videos, news, blogs, web results or real-time updates. Alerts can be found, as always, at google.com/alerts.
Google Translate has also received an added language. While Latin is considered a “dead language” by most people, it’s surprising how many students worldwide are still studying it in school. A lot of sites which include educational material also feature text in the old language. Because of this, Latin was added as an alpha language to Google Translate. To help you test things out and keep the announcement interesting, Google wrote it in latin on its Google translate blog. Of course, this may not be of major use for a lot of people, but those who run across ancient documents, written in Latin, will finally be able to figure things out. Google does point out that translating something accurately from Latin is quite difficult. So expect to understand only the basic stuff from the translation (but then again, the same can be said about text that’s translated from Chinese to English, for example).
Finally, Google’s Beta of this week presents the most popular terms that people searched for in the previous 7 days. They include : rick sanchez, jon stewart, tony curtis, greg giraldo, tyler clementi, the social network, winkelvoss, eduardo saverin, ryder cup, sf giants.
Finally, something that Google didn’t announce on its blog, but, rather, confirmed to TechCrunch via e-mail, is the company’s acquisition of Plannr. Google actually revealed that it has acquired all assets of “Everything is the Best LLC”, a company run by Ben Eidelson and Jason Prado which builds mobile clients and includes several other mobile apps, aside from Plannr, such as ridepenguin, LoveTap and SheetIT. A Google spokesperson revealed that: ““We’re excited to welcome Ben and Jason to Google. They have built several innovative mobile applications, and we believe they can help us make a better and more useful mobile experience for our users.” Even though the two sides didn’t disclose the acquisition price, people believe it was somewhere around the $6 million mark.
