Google announced yesterday that they will add enhanced people tracking and location tools to their Google Latitude search service.

The two new location features are “Google Location History” and “Google Location Alerts (beta)”.

“Google Location History” will allow Latitude users to review and store their past Latitude locations. Think of this feature as virtual electronic breadcrumbs that you can use to backtrack your past activities and travels. Google Location History can also help you visualize your travel history on both Google Maps and Google Earth or replay a recent trip in location order. Per Google, Latitude users can delete their location histories whenever they wish.

“Google Location Alerts” will now be able to recognize a user’s regular, routine locations and will send alerts for a friend’s location nearby only when a user is at an “unusual” location or when they are at a “routine” place at an unusual time.

Google cautions, it can take their system up to a week to learn a person’s “unusual” locations and start sending alerts.

To learn more about the Google Latitude application, you can watch their video below:

Source: Google Mobile Blog

In August, Google announced that it was reworking its search engine to make it faster and more efficient. The new project is called Google Caffeine.

Google Caffeine is billed as an effort to improve Google’s indexing speed, power and accuracy.

Google’s own Matt Cutts discusses more about the Google Caffeine project in the video below:

Google has been the target of much criticism lately regarding how much information they record on people who use their search engine and other web services as well as how they use this information.

In an effort to make their personal data more public, Google has launched a privacy dashboard for users who want to find out exacly what information Google has collected about their online activity as well as control their privacy settings for Google services from one central location.

Google’s privacy dashboard covers personal information collected from over 20 of Google’s services services, including Gmail, Google Docs, Search History, Orkut, YouTube.com, Picasa, Google Talk, Google Reader, Google Alerts, Google Latitude and more.

The Google dashboard can reveal just how much personal information and online activity data you’re providing Google when you use their search engine and other web services.

You can watch the video below for more information on how the Google Privacy Dashboard works:

Wonder what all the fuss and buzz is about surrounding Google’s new communication tool called Google Wave? This clever video attempts to explain some of Google Wave’s “killer app” potential in 2 minutes and 15 seconds.

Although Google Wave isn’t ready for public release yet, you can learn more about Google Wave on their site at Google Wave.

Google has made some recent changes to help their search engine compete with the real-time search engines by adding search options that allow people to choose search results based on freshness and timeliness.

Today Google announced 9 new search options that allow users to refine their searches:

Past Hour and Date Range: Users can see the most recent results in the Google index, or get results from a specific date range. These search options will show you the freshest information or information that was released during a specific time period.

More Shopping Sites or Fewer Shopping Sites: Choose the “More shopping sites” option to show more commercial pages and product prices in Google’s search results. In addition, you can choose the “Fewer shopping sites” option to weed out many of the commercial search results.

Visited Pages or Not Yet Visited Pages: Find pages you’ve visited already by choosing the “Visited pages” option or remove the pages you’ve visited by choosing “not yet visited.” To use these options you must be signed in to a Google user account and have your web history enabled.

Books, Blogs and News: Choose these options when you want your Google Search results from one of these sources. Using these filters together, along with video, forum, and review options allows you to change between different source types directly from Google’s search results.

You can use the new search options yourself by doing a search on Google and clicking the “Show options” in the blue bar under the Google logo.

Source: Google

The New York State Supreme Court has ordered Google to reveal the identity of an anonymous blogger who posted defamatory comments about model Liskula Cohen on Google’s Blogger site.

Google fought to keep the blogger’s identity anonymous. However a judge ordered Google to hand over the blogger’s internet IP address, rejecting the legal claim that the online comments were “personal opinions”.

Protection of anonymous speech is a complex legal issue. Protection of anonymous opinions vary by state. In some states, the plaintiff only needs to prove that the request to reveal the blogger is being made in good faith. In other states, the plaintiff has to show evidence that damage has been done to their reputation.

Cohen stated that the anonymous blogger’s posts made it harder for her to find modeling work since the blog along with posted pics often came up in her job interviews. Cohen claimed the blogger’s comments labeling her as “skanky” and being a “ho” defamed her “serial monogamist” traits. Since this legal case was decided by the New York State Supreme Court it’s likely that the court’s opinion will carry significant legal weight and insuring that the controversial debate over anonymous internet opinions will continue to rage on.

Source: PCWorld

For more information on this issue you can watch the YouTube video below:

Google, in response to the increasing competition to its search engine dominance from Microsoft Bing and other search engines, is raising the stakes with their work on a new web search technology that will speed up the indexing of search results.

Some web developers have been invited by Google search to test a new search engine and give their input. The graphical layout of the new search engine hasn’t changed, but the underlying search technology is getting upgraded. Google engineers hope the new search technology will index new content faster and reduce delay between the time new web content is published and the time it appears in a Google search engine results.

According to a Google spokesperson: “”Google is always working on new technologies to improve the quality of our search services. We hope this new system will improve search in the areas of speed, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.”

Google’s new search engine technology has been dubbed “Caffeine”.

Google is also improving the freshness of its search results by including real-time results and more current news, along with updates from social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

Source: UK Telegraph

A recently launched Google search engine can search, find, graph and compare public data and public records statistics.

According to the official Google blog, the new public data search tool makes it simple to find and compare public record data.

For example, users can compare regional and national unemployment statistics, along with accompanying graphs.

If you go to Google.com and type in [unemployment rate] or [population] followed by a state or county, you will see the most current unemployment numbers for the regions that you specify.

Clicking on the results will take you to an interactive chart that allows you to add and remove public data for different geographical regions.

You can watch a short YouTube video of the new Google public data search below:

The data used in the first launch of this public information is somewhat limited to information published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau’s Population Division.

However, no doubt, as the public data search becomes more popular with people, Google will likely add to the amount of searchable public information that can be searched by users.

Source: Google Public Data Search

A recent article on Search Engine Watch asks whether or not keyword tracking of Google search terms could predict who the next US president will be.

The article looks at some regional and candidate name searches from Google Trends to get some insight into who the next president may be.

So who will the next US President be? Well, it will either be Barack Obama or John McCain.

The article doesn’t give a definitive answer, but nevertheless is still interesting for people who may want to use Google search trends to get some insight into how people are using the Google search engine and how the popularity of some search terms changes over time.

You can read the entire article @ Search Engine Watch.

Internet statistics show that people “Google” a person’s name around 50 million times per day.

Atlanta resident Brandyn Briley is a frequent “Googler”. She uses various web search engines like Google and Yahoo to lookup information on potential clients, her children and even herself.

Web 2.0 sites like Naymz.com and Ziggs.com now give people like Briley a tool to keep track of when another person is doing a web search on them.

Tim Demello, from Ziggs.com, says, “What it does for the individual is it really gives them a strong sense of who is out there tracking them.”

Demello compares the Ziggs technology to caller ID for the world wide web.

Whenever a person searches for and clicks on a Ziggs.com profile, the site sends the profile owner an email alert, detailing the searcher’s location, the web search engine that was used, and the search phrase that the person used to find the profile.

Demello noted, “If someone types their name into Google, we track that through and send them a real time e-mail saying you are being searched from Chicago at 8:52 on a Friday.”

Ziggs can trace web searches of its users’ profiles down to the street and block level.

However, Ziggs won’t give you information about the name or address of the person doing the searching.

Demello said, “We don’t provide the name of the person searching, and the primary reason is that we believe very strongly in privacy.”

Source: CBS46.com