Google Books Gets a Major Update

Google Books has made the headlines mostly with the controversy surrounding the project rather than with the product itself. But this hasn’t stopped the search giant from improving it and it has just announced a major update adding some very useful features.

“Today I’m excited to announce that we’re rolling out changes to Google Books that give readers and book lovers everywhere new ways to interact with the words and images contained within the books we’ve brought online. We’ve also made it easier for users to share previews of their favorite books on their blogs or websites,” wrote Brandon Badger, product manager for Google Books.

The most important new feature is a much simpler way of embedding the books on other websites. The Mountain View-based company now provides a small code snippet that should make sharing a book just as easy as sharing a YouTube video. Read more

Google Launches Google Squared

The amount of online data is increasing exponentially and everyone trying to keep track of it is having a harder time doing so. Even Google isn’t having it any easier and it has acknowledged that the current keyword-based search won’t be able to keep up for long. Adding structure to the data online, using it more like a database, would make it much easier to manage the volume of information. This is what the search giant hopes to do with its Google Squared project.

Having the web all organized, labeled and structured is what many companies are trying to do for the search engines of tomorrow. A recent popular example in this regard is the recently launched Wolfram Alpha, which works differently from most search engines, including Google’s, because instead of just indexing the data on the web it gathers it and stores it in its internal databases. Read more

Watching the Weather

Billed as the world’s first ‘Weather Watch’ this widget from Oregon Scientifictells you what the weather is going to be over the next 24 hours, oh yes, and it also tells the time. Quite how it performs this semi miraculous task wasn’t’ fully explained in the advance publicity blurb but it’s a fair guess that it measures barometric pressure, and by plotting a trend, can give an indication of what direction the weather is heading. In other words it is probably just a wrist barometer, though it’s just possible it picks up some form of weather data transmissions, though with a retail price of under £40 that seems a bit unlikely. Either way, in addition to the time and date it also has alarm and stopwatch functions, and just in case it fails to warn you that it’s about to rain, it’s waterproof too. Read more