I’d like to share this fantastic presentation by French consulting firm faberNovel, a study on how Apple has maneuvered itself successfully in the market against Microsoft and Google.

The product managers at Google TV released a new video today explaining what Google TV is and what it may mean to you.

On May 20, 2010, Google announced the launch of Google TV, a service which brings the Web and TV closer together.

Here are some of the main features that Google TV will offer:

• Tune to channels or specific shows by conducting a text search
• Record and play back shows
• Browse the Web
• Multi-task on the same screen, i.e. browse a web page while watching a TV show
• Download and use apps from the Android market

Read Google’s official announcement for further details: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/announcing-google-tv-tv-meets-web-web.html.

If you’re interested in the future of Search and have got an hour and a half to spare, I highly recommend sitting down with your favorite beverage and watching this video.

In this video, Google presents their most significant product releases of the year, including real time search.

Marissa Mayer starts off by presenting four main areas of innovation at Google:

1. Modalities
How people search, e.g. mobile devices, voice search, search by taking a picture
2. Media
The types of media appearing in search results, e.g. maps, books, video, news
3. Language
Translation services which open up the world’s content to people of all languages
4. Personalization
Search results with higher relevance based on your location, social networks, etc.

Later in the talk, Google Fellow Amit Singhal talks about the huge relevancy challenges faced when delivering search results, especially now with real time search. He shared Google’s 4 pillars of search delivery:

Comprehensiveness,
Relevancy,
User Experience, and
Speed,

with relevancy becoming more and more difficult. The audience poses several important questions near the end of the presentation, including the question of whether Google uses the same algorithm to rank its general index as its real time results.

Real Time Search is being rolled out gradually for all users over the next few weeks. Whether these results appear or not will depend on the keyword used. There is a way to see real time search results right away, through Google Trends.

To see an example of Google’s Real Time Search in action, check out:
http://www.google.com/search?esrch=&tbs=rltm:1&tbo=u&hl=en&q=snow

Google made a couple of significant product announcements this week. Below you’ll find brief introductions to Google Goggles (image recognition on the Android phone) and real time search results on the Google search results page.

Here is a (very) quick look back at the Google story over the last 11 years. From Stanford to Mountain View and around the world, featuring many different products, starting with BackRub (Search) up to Google Wave, StreetView and Chrome.

This is a 45-minute video of Matt Cutts’ recent presentation at WordCamp – has to be one of the best recent summaries of SEO best practices you can find on video. My thanks go out to Jody Nimetz at the Marketing Jive blog for passing this my way.

It’s that time of year again when offices around the world brace for the worst, the most creative, and most daring ideas to surface in what is known as April Fools.

Search engine company Google hasn’t shied away from the fun over the past few years, and has even used the April 1 date to launch new products, for example, Gmail in 2004. As it turned out, the story of a free email provider providing a whole Gigabyte of storage was unheard of in the day, and spread like an April Fools joke.

Here I’d like to share my five favorite Google April Fools Jokes:

1. Project Virgle
The Adventure of Many Lifetimes, inviting participants to enter and qualify for an epic journey to Mars. This actually was a collaboration between Sir Richard Branson (Virgin) and Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, hence the name Virgle. I came across this by accident several months after April Fools, and seeing Richard Brandson talk about out-of-this-world plans for Virgin seemed quite plausible. They had me going for a while.

www.google.com/virgle

2. AdSense for Conversations
AdSense for Conversations promises to be a new type of monetization solution that “puts the ‘context’ in contextual advertising”. An interface attaches to the head of a speaker and lists ads related to what is being spoken about. As a recommendation for untargeted ads, it recommends rambling.

3. Gmail Custom Time
Be on Time, Every Time.
This innovative Gmail feature allows users to back-date the send time and date on an email, ultimately eliminating the concept of being late. It utilizes an e-flux capacitor to luckily work around the issues of causality. Unfortunately the use of this tool is limited to 10 per user per year.

4. Google Romance
Dating is a search problem. Solve it with Google Romance.
If you choose the Contextual Dating option, be prepared to deal with thematically appropriate multimedia advertising throughout the entirety of your free date.
www.google.com/romance

5. Rick Roll’d
Rick Astley’s video of his 80′s hit single Never Gonna Give You UP was the unintentional destination for many YouTube visitors on April Fools 2008. When clicking on any Featured Video on the YouTube homepage, users were taken to the music video in a practice which has since become widely known as being Rick Rolled or Rick Roll’d.

I’d like to give special mention to Google Gravity from the Chrome Experiments Group. Although this wasn’t an April Fools joke, it is a whole lot of fun. You can try the page for yourself, and it is best viewed in – you guessed it – Google Chrome. It actually is an impressive display of Chrome’s ability to process Javascript at speeds way above other browsers.

For your further amusement, here is a complete listing of Google hoaxes over the years on Wikipedia.

In this interview with Eric Schmidt, Charlie Rose asks the Google CEO a range of questions, from the origins of Google’s advertising model, to the monetization of YouTube, to whether the search giant would consider buying Twitter.

The interviewer turned to the concept of the digital divide, and the role technology companies have played to bridge the gap. Schmidt pointed out that, “In our lifetimes, we’re going from almost no one being able to communicate, to almost everyone being able to communicate. We’re also going from almost no one having information and any kind of access to libraries, to virtually everyone having access to every piece of information in the world. That is an enormous accomplishment for humanity. ”

Schmidt describes the future of mobile search, giving an example of how someone interested in history, walking down a street in New York could be delivered a “narrative stream that’s highly personal and highly entertaining.” He added, “Why can’t my phone generate the searches I should have been asking [based on my interests]?”

TechCrunch has posted a complete transcript of the 56-minute interview here.