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Windows Phone 7 lets you make Google searches, but only through a back door.

Google’s free Search app for WP7 is available today, according to the Google Mobile team. “Just search the Marketplace for ‘Google Search,’ download, pin to Start, and the power of Google Search is only a click away.”

“Search, download, pin to Start” — doesn’t that seem a little complicated just to load a search engine on your phone?

A distinguishing feature of Windows Phone 7 handsets is their three dedicated hardware buttons. The Windows logo goes home; the left-arrow button goes back; and the magnifying-glass “search” button opens up Microsoft’s search engine, Bing.

That button is permanently tied to Bing. There appears to be no way to change it.

On the iPhone or Blackberry, or nearly every web browser on the desktop (with Google’s Chrome a notable exception), you can pick your default search engine. You can’t do that with Windows Phone 7. On the Microsoft smartphone, you get Microsoft search.

Now, Bing has a lot going for it; it works very well on WP7, and I think Microsoft is onto something by putting search front-and-center on smartphones. The hardware button is usefully contextual, too: if you’re in the Marketplace, it searches the Marketplace; if you’re in Outlook, it searches your inbox, etc. That’s handy, and exactly the kind of behavior you’d hope for.

But that doesn’t change the fact that hardwiring Bing makes Windows Phone 7 much more closed than most other smartphone platforms.

Considering the close ties between internet search, ad revenue and content-sharing with partners like Facebook, the fact that Microsoft is driving nearly all of its mobile search through Bing is no accident.

It’s a feature, but it’s also a problem.

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Source:wired.com

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Google Instant on a PC browser has always been a clever idea in search of a use case. With the new mobile beta for Android and iOS, the search giant has found its first.

“Wouldnt it be great to have Google Instant on mobile devices, where each keystroke and page load is much slower and you frequently have just a moment to find the information you need?” writes Google engineer Steve Kanefsky.

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When Microsoft and Facebook announced that they were partnering to integrate Facebook and Bing for social-network-powered search, it confirmed something I thought Monday: Windows Phone 7 is the real Facebook phone.

I don’t know whether Facebook has a secret team working on a phone where they control the OS. But they don’t need one. They’re already deeply integrated into Android and iOS. Now with the Microsoft partnership, they’re tied to the most socially-optimized smartphone ever brought to the market.

“This is, I think, one of the most exciting partnerships we’ve done on the platform so far,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the Bing announcement Wednesday. “Our view is that over the next five years we expect that almost every industry is going to be disrupted by someone building a great product that’s deep in whatever area that industry is, plus is extremely socially integrated.”

The first Windows Phone 7 handsets are due in stores November. The OS is Microsoft’s complete do-over on mobile after its predecessor Windows Mobile tanked in popularity and market share in the wake of more consumer-savvy handsets such as Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android-powered smartphones.

Every aspect of Windows Phone 7 is geared around social networks: phone, contacts, gaming, photos, even Office. Focusing the phone around Hubs doesn’t just mean that local client apps and cloud apps are grouped next to each other; it means that the local client and cloud work together.

Microsoft tried to explicitly build a social-networking phone featuring Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and MySpace with the Kin. The Kin failed and was killed by Microsoft mostly because it wasn’t a full-featured smartphone (it was a fork of Windows Phone 7), but required a smartphone’s data plan.

The Kin’s cloud-backed social and sharing components lived on in Windows Phone 7. They were always there. Only now, Flickr and MySpace are nowhere to be found.

Even before the Bing announcement, Facebook was a conspicuous part of the WP7 presentation. Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore outlined a scenario where users could take a photo on their phone that’s then uploaded to Facebook automatically, without even opening the Facebook app.

In the press release for WP7, Microsoft notes that “the customizable Start screen with Live Tiles provides real-time updates so you can keep tabs on the latest weather forecast, your favorite band, a friends Facebook page and more, all with just one glimpse” (emphasis added).

That wasn’t an accident. The Facebook-Bing partnership was already happening.

It’s the exact strategy that Zuckerberg outlined in his interview with Michael Arrington, where he explained why Facebook wasn’t building its own phone.

Zuckerberg only makes an offhand reference to WP7 in that interview: “If Windows Phone 7 takes off, then Im sure well put resources on that.” But he added, with reference to their efforts with the iPhone and Android, “the question is what could we do if we also started hacking at a deeper level, and that is a lot of the stuff that were thinking about.”

In order to do that, Zuckerberg explained, you need to find a company that was willing to incorporate social networking from the operating system up — not adding a layer on top of what they were doing, but making that the focus of the device and its services.

At least one of those companies is Microsoft.

We started thinking what would social search look like, and we started looking around for partners, Zuckerberg said. Microsoft really is the underdog here and they really are incentivized to try new things.

He was talking about search, but he may as well have been talking about phones.

Microsoft may be the underdog in search and phones, but they’ve actually been ahead of the curve in terms of incorporating social layers into their products. The Zune had song and photo sharing between devices over Wi-Fi before the iPhone was even announced.

But that was a closed network, limited to just Zune-to-Zune, and later Zune-to-Xbox. In order to get outside of itself, Microsoft partnered with Facebook early on — it still owns part of the company — and Facebook helped shape Microsoft’s social strategy.

Microsoft has been quietly building a social network without anyone actually noticing. Windows Live, Office Live, Xbox Live are all social networks where users work, share files and talk about media together. You use the same identity across all of those services on every Microsoft device.

Facebook is already embedded in all of them: it’s built into Messenger, Hotmail and Outlook; it’s what powers part of the social dimension of Xbox Live. And Bing is already embedded in Facebook, in the form of maps and search results.

Now Facebook’s information is embedded in Bing search. And search is one of just three buttons on every WP7 phone.

Consequently, Facebook’s partnership with Bing isn’t just about Google; it isn’t just about “like” results showing up when you search in a web browser on your PC.

It’s about incorporating a social layer into media on every device in your household, from your phone to your set-top box. It’s about making those devices smarter in how they communicate with each other and from one platform to another.

That’s what stood out to me most at the Windows Phone 7 launch event. The Office people demonstrated how to use Windows Live to stream a PowerPoint presentation from a Windows PC to a Mac. The Xbox people were showing how to chat about a Netflix movie with your Facebook friends on Xbox live. The hardware people were showing off a wide-angle HD webcam to let families chat with families from their living rooms. Deep integration of devices, media and services, using the cloud to power person-to-person interaction, through voice, images and text.

If we think about Apple’s attempt with Ping to bring a social layer to iTunes (which has been criticized, in part, because Apple didn’t partner up with Facebook), Sony’s idea of a multitasking television set or Twitter’s plays to get on the television screen with Google TV, it’s clear that that’s where we’re heading.

The only places where Microsoft and Facebook are “underdogs” are search and smartphones. When it comes to social networking and smart partnering with other companies — including each other — the two giants are way ahead of the field.

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Source:wired.com

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Google’s iPhone app just went from sometimes-handy curiosity to super search-tool. Finally, almost a year after it appeared on the Android version, Google Mobile App has Goggles.

Google Goggles uses the world before you as a search-term. Hold up the iPhone, point the camera at something and Google will tell you what it is. It works for landmarks, books, logos, pretty much anything easily recognizable. What it doesn’t work with, according to the Google Mobile blog, is “animals, plants or food.” This video, featuring a 3D-glasses-wearing Brit, explains it all quite nicely.

The app needs an autofocus camera to work, so it’ll only offer Goggles on the iPhones 3G and 4. I do wonder why it has taken so long for such a useful feature to make it to the iPhone – Goggles launched on Android last December. Perhaps this, like the recent approval of Google Voice apps, has something to do with the relaxing of Apple’s App store rules? The app is available now, and is free.

Google Goggles now available on iPhone in Google Mobile App [Google]

Google Mobile App [iTunes]

Source:wired.com

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Google unveiled a new website preview of its Google TV service and announced content partnerships with HBO, CNBC, Turner Broadcasting, and the NBA. Each of these network partners will build custom applications with premium content optimized for Google TV.

Most of these TV applications are either news-oriented or offer specialized interfaces for content. NBA Game Time follows basketball news and highlights; HBO Go will be a special on-demand portal for HBO subscribers that appears to be separate from whatever on-demand offerings are available through one’s cable provider; CNBC Real-Time augments the news channel with personalized stock tracking and news; and Turner will provide a big-screen, new-interface version of its website content from TBS, TNT, CNN, Cartoon Network and Adult Swim.

Other announced Google TV applications include Netflix, Amazon Video On Demand, The New York Times (which appears to be mostly video- rather than news-driven), VEVO’s music video service, Pandora, Twitter, and of course, Google’s Chrome web browser (w/Flash 10.1 support) and an HDTV-optimized version of YouTube called Leanback. Additional and forthcoming applications will be available through Google’s Android Market beginning early next year.

Google TV’s overhauled website offers a tour and feature list, including TV search, use of an Android smartphone or iPhone as a remote control, and the ability to “Fling” websites, video and audio from your handset to the television. It also spotlights its hardware partners, Sony’s Internet TV and the Logitech Revue set-top box, with an option for notification when more products become available.

Here Comes Google TV [The Official Google Blog]

Source:wired.com

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Google unveiled its new Instant search feature, which autoloads search results as you type. I’m skeptical about claims that it will save fifty kajillion man-hours once you add up all the milliseconds saved. Its real use cases are still on the way: local, mobile, and video search.

Part of the inherent silliness of doing a Google Instant search on the wide-open web is the sheer size and heterogeneity of the data sets you’re working with. Google has no idea whether you’re looking for a quote, a movie title, a blog, a government site, or a string of text you remember sticking into a doc file months ago. So it spits out a similarly wild range of results.

Now let’s suppose we narrow that data set. Suppose I’m not looking at every string of text on the web, but for movie or television titles on the new Google TV.

Now, when I begin to enter text, Google will have a much better idea of what I’m looking for. In fact, it might actually be able to give me what I’m looking for even when I don’t know what that is.

The key to the next generation of TV is likely to be search, and the biggest drag on search is going to be text entry. This isn’t your laptop; people are going to be banging out text on remotes and mini-keyboards in bad light. Anything a company can do to minimize the number of keystrokes and make that process as painless as possible is going to be a tremendous usability boon to its customers.

If Google TV is really going to be the “one screen to rule them all,” it has to solve that problem.

Suppose I’m looking for a movie I saw years ago. I can’t remember anything about it except it was an action movie and that I think the word “China” was in the title. IMDB.com might be able to tell me the title and the year, but I’d have to click on each one, then click again to find the plot synopsis, just to discover that it wasn’t the movie I was looking for.

Instead I might type “C-h-i” into a future Google product — let’s call it Instant Movie Search — quickly discard all the variations on “Chicago,” and get to “China.” I know I don’t want “Chinatown” or “The China Syndrome.” In the sidebar, I see that I can narrow it by “Action/Adventure.” Perfect. And there it is: “Big Trouble In Little China.” It shows me a movie poster thumbnail, a short synopsis and a cast list — even before I click on the title! Then I can go ahead and queue it up.

Instead of drilling down and back out through dozens of pages, I’ve typed five characters and clicked one menu link. Not only did I find what I was looking for, I knew that it was what I was looking for with a high degree of confidence before ever clicking on the link — indeed, before I ever glanced at the title. As soon as I saw that poster of Kurt Russell and Kim Cattrall out of the corner of my eye, I knew that was the movie I wanted.

Gmail already does this with contacts, and it’s a big time saver. Now extend that concept to a half-dozen other forms of local search: Google Books, Google Scholar, Froogle, Desktop, News, Reader, Apps. Imagine it in all of Google’s local search sites, popping up thumbnails and textual descriptions.

We already have an analogous mode of search in the analog tech world — flipping through channels on television or scanning the dial on the radio. Simple up-down TV channel flipping, though, can’t make finer distinctions the closer it gets to your target, and analog radio tuners can’t deliver the same precision. Both though, have the virtue that they can present what you’re looking for while you’re in the process of looking for it. Search engines couldn’t do that before. Now they can.

Right now, Google Instant is just a game, the alphanumeric equivalent of the Google buckyball logo from the other day. The real innovations in discovery are still on their way.

Source:wired.com

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Don’t type when you can talk, says Google. The search giant has strengthened its existing voice command feature on Android and introduced a new application called Chrome-to-Phone, for syncing with Chrome browsers.

Voice Search, despite its name, now lets you do more than just search: It will let users send texts, compose e-mails, call businesses, navigate, jot notes, and set the alarm on their phone by just speaking into the device.

The voice commands, called “voice actions,” are part of Google’s effort to improve the user interface on Android and let consumers go beyond the traditional keyboard and touchscreen interface on their phones.

The Voice Search application is currently available only for phones running version 2.2 of the Android OS — which means HTC Evo, Droid X and Droid 2 users can get it on their phones immediately.

Google also launched a mobile sync app to link its Chrome browser to Android 2.2 devices. The tool, called Chrome-to-Phone, lets users on Google’s Chrome browser click an icon to send a web page or a map to their phone. The page or map is then almost immediately available on the phone.

“This is a low-latency, super-fast app for pushing data to the phone,” says Dave Burke, engineering manager for Google.

Google debuted its voice search application in the U.S. about two years ago when it introduced Android. Now one out of every four queries, or 25 percent of queries, on devices running Android 2.0 OS and higher comes through the voice interface, says Google.

The earlier version of the voice command allowed users to do just three things: web search, call a specific contact and navigate to an address.

The new voice search app goes beyond that. For instance, you can speak the name of a song or a band into the phone and the app will go online, find the music and show a list of apps such as Pandora and last.fm that can play the music you want.

For more details, check out Google’s list of voice commands available through the app.

But when it comes to the Chrome-to-Phone app, the service is more limited. It is currently available to only Chrome users, though some Firefox users are also using it. The sync feature is also only available for Android devices, though Google says it will work to bring the feature to iPhone users as an app.

Image: Screenshots of Voice Search courtesy Google.

Source:wired.com

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