James Ward

I’m a big fan of Google Streetview – the privacy concerns that some people have don’t trouble me. So I’m really pleased that they’ve just released images of just about every street, road and lane in the whole of the UK.
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BBC Radio Leeds Breakfast Show presenters Andrew and Georgey (@andrew_georgey on Twitter) will be discussing how technology has changed our lives during the first decade of the twenty-first century (although some people say the decade doesn’t end until 31 Dec 2010…). I’ll be with them for a few minutes sometime after 07:30; here are some of the things I’ll be talking about. (more…)

Another new release from Google AdWords this week allows advertisers “whose ads meet a certain high quality threshold” to add sitelinks to their text ads when they appear on Google properties. These let searchers get straight to the content on your site that is most relevant to their query. (more…)

Google are enhancing their paid results listings in all sorts of ways, presumably to increase the click-through rate (and their revenue, of course…). (more…)

Google have started testing images in sponsored links.

I guess it was only a matter of time before they started enriching the content of ads within the ’search network’ (they’ve offered various ad formats, including image and video, within the content network for a while). (more…)

Your favourite search engine is Google, right? Or is it…

A Microsoft employee (working in his own time) has developed a ‘blind taste’ challenge where you compare the results from three search engines: Google, Yahoo! and the recently launched Bing. You choose your favourite set of results to reveal which search engine they came from. The results can be surprising. In my tests I found that I preferred Bing’s results almost as often as Google’s, with Yahoo! coming in a poor third. (more…)

The UK got its first look at ‘Street View‘ in Google Maps today. After various sightings of the Google car over the past few months, they have now launched the feature for a few major cities and the results are pretty breathtaking (take a look at Old Broadcasting House, where I work).

Like many people, I wasted a couple of hours looking around places I know spent some time researching the product. The detail and quality of the images is quite incredible (even if the face recognition software sometimes blurs out the wrong thing). Whilst oo-ing and ah-ing over it with some of my coworkers, we discussed what motivates Google to invest in products like this and how they plan to make any money out of the service (or any of its other free offerings). (more…)