digg_url = \’http://digg.com/apple/9_Tips_for_Google_s_New_Voice_Recognition_App_for_iPhone\’;
Here are some tips to help you get the most out of Google’s new Mobile Application for the iPhone.
To get Google Mobile App on your iPhone, go to the App Store and search for “Google Mobile App,” or click on this link to install from a computer. If you have an older version of Google Mobile App installed, you might want to uninstall the older version before installing the newer version.
Voice recognition is turned off by default for non-U.S. users. To enable voice recognition, click on the “Settings” tab at the bottom of the screen and slide “Voice Search” to ON.
If you hold the iPhone up to your ear and don’t hear the “baBUM” sound to start talking, swing the iPhone down and back up to your ear. Sometimes a little wrist flick helps to tell the iPhone you want to search.
You can search things besides Google’s […]
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Written by on November 17th, 2008 with no comments.
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I have a very good feeling about Google’s new iPhone app that does voice recognition. I’ve been playing with this voice recognition application for several weeks and I have to say that I’m really impressed. First and foremost, the voice recognition works really well. Crazy long-tail specialized vocabulary is tricky (more on that later), but for queries with normal words in them, the voice recognition is really accurate and I think it will get even better. You can say “population of Troy, New York” and you’re pretty likely to get good search results:
I like the slick interface, because all you have to do is start the app. When you want to do a search, just hold the iPhone to your ear. The iPhone’s accelerometer senses the movement and makes a “baBUM” noise to let you know when to talk. Then just say a query like [daffodil pictures] or whatever. It’s […]
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Written by on November 17th, 2008 with no comments.
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I’m not sure what Google Docs market share is, but I thought it would be interesting to mention a couple data points and add a new data point.
Data point #1: Compete. Compete just estimated that 4.4M visitors stopped by Google Docs in September, which is just a hair below 2.4% of the U.S. online population, according to them. Compete buys data from ISPs, among other sources, but doesn’t reveal which ISPs sell their surfing data, so it’s hard to tell if those ISPs’ users tend toward tech-savvy vs. newbie or affluent vs. lower income. One other metrics service (Nielsen//NetRatings) has claimed that Google Docs users tend to skew toward higher-incomes and are more likely to be technology early adopters.
Data point #2: ClickStream. A recent press release from ClickStream Technologies that claims that 1% of internet surfers use Google Docs. Honestly, this felt a little low to me. So I read […]
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Written by on November 16th, 2008 with no comments.
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I arrive Wednesday afternoon for the 2008 Pubcon conference, and I’ll be staying until after the networking event on the last day, which is the heart of the event. It’s the heart because the networking event is held at a pub, and the original idea of Pubcon was that some of the best parts of a conference take place at the pub after the official conference is done.
If you see me, please come up and say hello! Tell me how you’re doing, or what you like or dislike about Google. I’ll be participating in the Search Engine Super Session that traditionally wraps up the formal part of the conference.
What are you likely to see if you head to Las Vegas? Well, here are some pictures that I’ve been meaning to post for a year. No joke, I’m that behind on things I want to blog. First off, you’ll meet […]
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Written by on November 11th, 2008 with no comments.
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Every so often I get an email like this:
Dear Webmaster,
I have browsed your site and I’m interested in purchasing advertising space in it.
I am mainly interested in placing a new page on your site with content and links that I will supply.
Please let me know if you would like to discuss this further or if you have other ideas.
Kind Regards,
Rob
Normally I just delete junk like this, but I decided to reply. I wrote back “Can you show some other examples of stuff you’ve done before?” And usually at this point, the person realizes that I’m a webspam person at Google and shuts up. But I got a reply:
My offer is this:
I want you to create a new page on your site.
I will send you a gambling related article with my links on it that will be
on the new page.
I wish that this page will have only my links on it […]
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Written by on November 7th, 2008 with no comments.
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You probably saw Google’s Halloween logo today:
But you may not have noticed that Google made another change for Halloween. Check out Google’s robots.txt file today:
That’s right. Zombies are disallowed from accessing /brains on Google today. You can never be too safe!
Hat-tip to Google Blogoscoped spotting it first and to Search Engine Land for a round-up of Halloween logos.
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Written by on October 31st, 2008 with no comments.
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Pay no attention this to page with a noindex tag. I just want to check on how Yahoo/Live/Ask treat pages with noindex meta tags.
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Written by on October 26th, 2008 with no comments.
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At 9 a.m. Pacific time (noon Eastern) today, we’re going to do our third Google webmaster chat. People will be able to ask questions via Google moderator and we’ll answer a bunch either in Google moderator or over the audio portion of the chat. There will also be several Googlers doing short presentations. I hope to chat with lots of people, so please thinking about signing up. Here’s how to do it.
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Written by on October 22nd, 2008 with no comments.
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I’m really happy about a new experiment that we’re trying that has the potential to help a ton of site owners. A new blog post on the Google webmaster blog (you are subscribed to the webmaster blog, right? You’ll find at least as much good SEO and search-related info on that blog as on my blog) mentions that we’re alerting webmasters to vulnerable webserver software.
There’s been a recent trend of spammers hacking websites, and most of the time that happens because the webmaster or site owner didn’t update a piece of software that runs their website. If you think you can install a piece of software on the web in 2008 and run it forever without upgrading, I’m sorry to say that your website will be at much higher risk of getting hacked.
If you log in to the webmaster console and we think your website is running WordPress 2.1.1, you’ll […]
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Written by on October 16th, 2008 with no comments.
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I can’t believe a new feature from Google isn’t getting more notice, because it converts already-existing links to your site into much higher quality links, for free. The Google webmaster blog just announced that you can find the pages that link to 404 pages on your site.
Let me back up and give you a little history. When someone comes to your site’s webserver and asks for a page that doesn’t exist, like http://www.mattcutts.com/asdfasdfasdf , most web servers are configured to return an HTTP status code of 404, which means that the page was “Not Found.” If someone links to a page on your site that doesn’t exist, most webservers give a pretty sucky experience: visitors usually land on a pretty useless page, and search engines might not give you full credit for those 404 errors.
Now Google’s webmaster portal lets you see who is linking to your 404 pages. Once you […]
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Written by on October 13th, 2008 with no comments.
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