Arts IT Savvy

Google have added “Promote”, “Remove” and “Comment” buttons to their search results.

New Google Buttons

I haven’t found the definitive answer as yet, but it appears at least that these only affect your searches, and are not a way to promote or demote sites that you do, or don’t like.  I certainly hope that is the case, otherwise we will start seeing sites popping up to the top of Google searches not based on their popularity, but on how many people they have in the background doing constant Google Searches that bring up their site, and clicking on the “Promote” button (and clicking “Remove” on any competitor’s site).

However, it seems a bit pointless at this stage- after all, I Google to find a site / information that I don’t know about, so each search is new and unique, and therefore the results will be fresh and unaffected by previous buttons I’ve clicked.  Secondly, I’d probably rather not have my biases affecting my search results – and would rather the most popular sites (and therefore hopefully the ones most likely to match my search criteria) coming to the fore.

Google Chrome is coming – today if the reports are right (US timezone though!)

What is Chrome?  Google’s answer to Internet Explorer and Firefox to put it in a nutshell.  It is pretty big news actually – too large to know the implications of this move at this stage, but the entry of a new, major internet browser is going to give a lot of IT people kittens I’m sure.

You can read more about it here, and a comic by Google about the decision, and the process they went through is available here, or as a downloadable pdf.

We’ll watch this new release with interest!