Wikipedia’s First App

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Wikipedia is finally stepping into the App world with their own application for the iPhone.  After looking into it and seeing all it offers, it doesn’t seem that great.  The app isn’t much different than the mobile website that they offer.  It does offer a history search however, which is convenient when trying to reference an old search.   The only other benefit to having the app is direct access from your home screen instead of going to your bookmarks (if you had it bookmarked to begin with).  Over all not a very impressive app but not bad for just getting into the app scene for the iPhone.  You can check out the differences in the mobile web page and the app below.

Add your church site search to your Chrome home page

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One of the most talked about features of Google Chrome is the rather innovative home page.  It shows your nine most often viewed sites, along with some goodies along the sidebar.  The sidebar can include quick-search boxes for sites you often search.  As often as I’m searching our church site, I thought it’d be great to have it listed there but I couldn’t make it show up.  After a bit of tweaking, I got it to work.  Here’s what I did.

First, it’ll help if you have a true on-site search of some kind. From what I can tell, there’s no way to add search boxes if you use the Google custom search on your site.  If you find a way around that, let us know.

As for our site, it only took a couple of very small changes:

  • The search needs to produce a GET request, not a POST request.  The difference is that a GET request will put your search term in the URL, which is critical to make this work.
  • You may need to change your search string variable. I noticed that most sites use “s=whatever” when you search, so I changed ours to that to help Chrome easily figure out what we were doing.
  • That’s it!
As for getting it onto the sidebar, here is the two-step process that tends to work.  Try it with our church site if you want.
  1. Perform a search on the site, just like you normally would.
  2. After that Google should recognize that it’s a search and give you a new shortcut.  Start typing the URL of the site in the address bar at the top (“M-T-B-E-T…”).
  3. After a few letters, a small bit of text should appear on the side that says “Press [tab] to search mtbethel.org”.  Go ahead and press [tab] and search for something.
  4. Done!
You should now have a quick-search box for our site on your Chrome start page.  There’s no way to manually remove it, but it will go away by itself after a while.  There seems to be a limit of three search boxes on your page, so if you have three already you may need to repeat step #3 (the [tab] search) a few times to encourage Chrome to replace one of the other ones.
That’s it!  Chome even uses your favicon to dress it up, and they look very nice.  If you have any questions or problems, please let us know in the comments below.

Google Suggest finally coming to the main Google homepage

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It’s been in Google Labs for a couple years, but Google Suggest is finally coming to the main search box on Google.com.

Google Suggest shows an on-the-fly drop-down of possible search results as you’re typing.  The advantages of this, as presented by Google, are:

  • Help formulate queries. Start typing what you want to find, and it’ll offer suggestions on how to finish your query.
  • Reduce typos. The results that pop up are already spell corrected, with the same logic as they use in the “Did you mean?” feature.
  • Save keystrokes. You don’t need to type the whole query.  Start typing until your desired query appears, then just choose the proper option to finish it.

You probably won’t see this on your Google homepage yet, but it’ll be rolling out to all users sometime this week.

Formidable Google competitor launches — Cuil

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Cuil (pronounced “cool”) has just launched today, and looks like it might be the first search engine in a while to give Google some competition.  The main thing Cuil promotes is the size of it’s index — 120 billion pages, compared to the estimated 40 billion pages in Google’s index.

However, we’re not sure what to make of the “larger” index.  For almost any search query, Google returns more results.  If Cuil had a bigger index, wouldn’t it have more results for common words?  For example, a search for “horse” on Cuil produces 128,400,000 results, while the same query on Google produces 322,000,000 results.

Cuil also seems to be having some issues with multi-word queries, but I’m sure those bugs will work themselves out.  As TechCrunch said

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, “Cuil is only an hour old at this point, Google has had a decade to perfect their search engine.”

Small Facelift to Google Maps

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As reported by the Google OS blog, Google Maps is getting a minor facelift.  They are replacing the tabbed search boxes at the top with a single search box that knows what you’re looking for.

I’m still seeing the old version (as are many other people), but the new one is apparently being rolled out.  Here is a comparison of the old and new search boxes.