Five Bing Updates To Know And Love: Data Retention, Autosuggest, Maps, And Apps

Five updates they've released in the past two days are any indication; they are on track to do just that.

First up, they notified the Article 29 Working Party in Europe that they are reducing the amount of time they store IP addresses to just 6 months. Up until now, they have held on to the info for 18 months.

Secondly, they added current and trending news topics to their Autosuggest feature.
The last 3 updates are related to Bing Maps.

Bing Maps has removed the "beta" label! With the elimination comes the switch to the Silverlight maps for all US users. The switch will take up to about a week. And with the removal of the "beta" label comes the launch of 2 Maps Apps, which brings us to our last 2 Bing updates for this post.

The Local Events app helps you find stuff to do in your area. You can also find events by location and/or date and time.

Destination Maps is a sweet way to help out people originating from varying locations finds directions to a common location. For instance, if you have ever thrown a party, you know it's a pain to try and give specific directions to your home to all guests. So, you generally give the address and inform people to look it up online or GPS, right? With this application, you set the destination and then outline with a box the area including your guests' various locations and then the application gets down to the serious business of making certain your guests get there to your party (fashionably late, of course).

So there are five Bing updates that have been announced in the past 2 days. Go have fun with them.

Updates: Google Updates Local Business Place Pages

Google have released an update to their local business called ‘Place Pages’ which gives business owners the capability to post short updates to their pages. Google says these can be used to promote a new product, event or coupon.

Here is an example of what the new feature looks like on a business listing:

This feature is especially useful for restaurants that will get lots of traffic to their place page and could use this to promote daily specials to customers looking online.

Google have also introduced badges for place pages that have been claimed as well as verified by the owner of the business. This helps to show clientele that the business information is very accurate as it is been updated by the business owner directly.

Here is an example of the new badges:

Local search and business place pages seem to be a growing area of importance for Google, so make sure you have got a Google local business listing!

Google offers local searches on mobiles

Wish you had an easy way to find out whether there is a coffee shop or an Apple store close by?

Well, if you are using an iPhone or an Android cell phone, now you can open up a google.com window in the browser to find out.

Google Inc. late yesterday announced Near Me Now, a local mobile app that can exhibit search results on mobile phones that show the locations of close by businesses.

"Near Me Now was designed to address two user problems," wrote Mr. John Eric Hoffman and Mr. Jussi Myllymaki, members of the Google Mobile Engineering team, in a blog post. "First, we wanted to make it fast and easy to find out more about a place in your immediate vicinity,whether you are standing right in front of a business or if it is just a short walk away. Second, we wanted to make searching for popular categories of close by places really simple. Imagine that you emerge from the subway station and you want to grab a coffee, but you don't see a coffee shop around you. You can simply search for all nearby coffee shops by using “Near Me Now”."

The app also has a feature called Explore Right Here that's designed to allow users expand searches to get more information about a place. As a restaurant comes up in a local search, they might dig down for reviews and menus.

Over the past several months, Google has been doing quite a bit of work on serving users find local hot spots even friends in an area.

Last November, Google announced Google Latitude, an upgrade to Google Maps to find the location of friends' residences. The Google Latitude tool lets users contact friends by SMS, Google Talk or Gmail.

Google Chrome updates its developer build, currently with extensions for Mac

If you are into getting the latest, greatest, most-untested updates to Google's Chrome Browser, the developer channel is the right place for you. New updates to Chrome on all platforms just hit the dev channel, with a bug fix that must solve some problems with HTML5 audio and video. The big news is just for Mac users, though: Chrome Extension support is here!

That means OS X users at present can share in the epic winningness of Download Squad's 10 must-have Chrome extensions, compiled by our own Sebastian, also a collection of 15+ extensions put together by Lee. Or, if you prefer to find extensions on your own then head over it to Google's Chrome Extensions Gallery and start browsing.

This update to Chrome by the dev channel should not be confused with the latest nightly build of Chromium, which is the open source browser that forms the source for Chrome. As Nik pointed out, Chromium nightlies for Mac now have Bookmark Manager enabled by default. You can enable bookmark sync in the dev channel release of Chrome Mac; however a known bug crashes the browser on adding a new folder.

Google Updates: Google Launches 'Nexus One' Phone

Search engine giant Google has unveiled its much-awaited phone, 'Nexus One'.

The phone uses Google's Android 2.1 version, features a touch-screen display, and weighs around 130 grams and 11.5 mm in thickness, the company said in a statement.

The phone comes with a voice-recognition technology that permits users to compose e-mails by speaking, it added.

Google said, Nexus One combines the newest in hardware from HTC Corporation and the new Android software.

"Nexus One represents the unique combination of design and innovation. 2 companies like Google and HTC can have when they collaborate," HTC Corporation CEO Mr. Peter Chou said.

The company said the goal of its new consumer channel is to give efficient ways to connect its online users with select Android phones.

Google.org develops a tool to track deforestation

What can't Google do? The search engines philanthropic arm, Google.org, has developed free home energy monitors, an ocean-exploration tool and now software to observe the world's deforestation.

Google.org's software analyzes a decades-worth of satellite images to gauge how tree cover has changed over a period of time.

Google.org said on its blog that "We hope this technology will help stop the destruction of the world's rapidly-disappearing forests,” adding: Emissions from tropical deforestation are similar to the emissions of all of the European Union, and are greater than those of all cars, trucks, planes, ships and trains worldwide.

The software, unveiled previous month at the climate conference in Copenhagen, aims to assist the United Nation's REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries) program.

Google.org worked with Greg Asner of the Carnegie Institution for Science along with Carlos Souza of Imazon to develop the software, presently used only by a few partners for testing.

"It is not yet available to the general public but we expect to make it more broadly available over the next year," Google.org added. It will be provided as a not-for-profit service.

Google Doodle Greets Happy Centenary to Sir Isaac Newton

Have you noticed something new on Google Search Engines today? Did an apple just falling as you tried searching for anything? Yes? Well, it is one more of Google’s ‘Google Doodles’. Google Doodles are what is more common to us in one more form as logos. Google includes a range of modifications and/or humorous features, such as cartoon modifications, of their logo for use on holidays, birthdays of famous people, also major events, such as the Olympics. A man named Mr. Dennis Hwag was responsible for the Google Doodles.

On this day rather, we saw a Google with a missing ‘o’ replaced by an apple falling from a tree. Google just paid honor to Sir Isaac Newton and Sir Isaac Newton’s birthday is January 4, 1643. Sir Isaac Newton was a Mathematician, English physicist, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist also a theologian. He was well-known for his formulation of the theory of gravitation by watching an apple falling from a tree, and that’s the reason why the Google Doodle shows an apple falling from a tree.

If you have not seen it, just log into www.google.com and search away!