Happy Birthday to Google Librarian Central. It's a year to the day that they posted the following to their blog: ''Like many of you, those of us who were in DC last weekend are still recovering from the excitement of ALA (phew!)... This summer, our blog team is taking a break to think about the best ways to communicate with you and keep you ...

I used to be able to do a search at Google for cinema <location> and it would come back and give me a list of results, showing exactly which films were on, together with timings and links to reviews. This seems to have disappeared now, and what I'm getting instead is just a listing of cinemas in the location that I'm interested in. This is a ...

Google Gets Monopolistic, Eyes 90% Of UK Search Market. ItProPortal is reporting from Hitwise that Google has increased its share of the  UK market by 10 points to reach 87.3%. During the same period, use of Yahoo has fallen by 8% to 4%, and both Microsoft and Ask are grubbing around on about 3% each. I think that this trend is really, really ...

Experimental Gmail Features have been enabled over at Gmail. There are a number of new things that you can try - best thing is to take a look at the labs section for detailed information. However, if you can't wait, you can now get Quick LInks to any URLs in Gmail. There's the opportunity to add 'star icons' to highlight individuals. Pictures in ...

Live Search : Book search winding down. Actually, what's the opposite to a 'development'? Microsoft is pulling the book digitization project and Live Academic project. Coupled with their announcement on Wednesday that they're bribing people to use their search engine it's pretty clear that Microsoft sees search as one thing, and one thing only - a ...

Google Flubs, Flops, and Failures. Interesting article over at PCWorld on the things that Google hasn't done right - the accelerator, search by voice, Orkut, Google coupons, Answers and so on. It's a list that makes you go 'oh yeah, I remember that!' and goes to show that Big G doesn't always get it right. Which we knew anyway.

Google Health has finally launched. You can create your health profile with information on your drugs, conditions, allergies, test results, immunisations and so on. You can import your medical records as well. If you're in the US obviously. I don't think even Google would be able to do much with the NHS system. Google says that they are very ...

Is Microsoft going to start moving on search again? There's an internal memo from Kevin Johnson (President, Platforms and Services) doing the rounds at the moment, with the highlight being: On Wednesday, we will be announcing a major new initiative that our search teams have been driving. We are getting better and better with our core ...

Google Maps is a great resource and I think it's one of the very best things that they've done. They've now added a really nice new feature - when you look for a location it brings up an opportunity to explore the area through photographs, video and user contributed maps. They've provided some very useful help on how to contribute your own ...

Live Search has finally, after much playing around, launched it's new interface. It should look something like this:Live Search interface via kwoutNow, what does that remind you of? Just a teensy bit like the clean crisp Google interface that the world knows, perhaps? Actually enforcing the concept of this should be what a search engine interface ...