Google Street View is raising massive amounts of controversy in the UK. Home owners and celebrities are worried about their personal privacy and today for the very first time a Google representative addressed these concerns while being interviewed live on GM.TV. So what is all the fuss about and is our privacy really being infringed?


Google Street Views is a new generation of 3d mapping service which has been integrated into the existing Google Maps and Google Earth systems. It allows users to virtually walk or drive down a 3d photographic representation of a road. Street view was launched in the US over 2 years ago and the service has just rolled out in the UK. It’s important to point out that less than 1% of the UK’s roads have currently been mapped by the service and Google Street View will only be able to map public roads, so the service will only show the view a member of the public would be able to see if they were to actually drive down the road itself. The images are not live, they are a combination of static photographs which have been stitched together to give the impression of a 3d environment. Google plan to update the service every 2 years.





Liam Gallagher, of Rock Band Oasis, was spotted outside a London pub in Regent’s Park Road. The 36-year-old singer looked to be wearing sunglasses, a dark t-shirt, shorts and black glasses. The original image of Liam, where he is seen pointing at the camera, has now been removed by Google but a second image is still available to view. Gallagher can be seen on Google Street View by typing 49 Regent’s Park Road, London into www.maps.google.co.uk


Liam Gallagher was spotted on the new web service by Craig Cooper, 45. He said: “If there’s one man you’d recognise having a pint it’s Liam Gallagher. He’s quite often in the Queens. He must be the most high-profile celebrity to be caught on Google Street View.”


A spokesman for the band has acknowledged that the sighting could “very possibly” be Liam Gallagher. He remarked that the star and his brother were both “stuck in London doing nothing” in June around the time the image was taken and after England failed to qualify for the Euro.


Privacy International has put forward a formal complaint to the Information Commissioner about the service invading people’s privacy. Google automatically blurs all the faces of people caught on the images and offers a removal service where users can report and request removal from the service.


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Technorati Tags: Gallagher Google, Google, Google 3d Street, Google Earth, google maps, google street view, Liam Gallagher Google, Liam Gallagher Street View, street view

Google has announced the launch of two new features which have been designed to improve the user experience of its main search engine.

The first is an updated related search facility which has been designed to offer broader variations of suggested search terms from within the original search criteria. The new functionality can be found at the bottom of each search engine results page.

“For example, if you search for [principles of physics], our algorithms understand that “angular momentum,” “special relativity,” “big bang” and ” quantum mechanic” are related terms that could help you find what you need,” said Ori Allon, technical lead of Google’s Search Quality Team.

The second update is an improvement to the search engine results listings. The snippet or description text, which appears under the page title of a search engine result, has been changed to improve the quality of served listings. This is a direct result in the increased use of more complex search terms and criteria from Google search engine users. The snippet length will get longer in order to serve higher quality information on long tail searches of three or more keywords.

“Suppose you were looking for information about Earth’s rotation around the sun, and specifically wanted to know about its tilt and distance from the sun. So you type all of that into Google: [earth's rotation axis tilt and distance from sun],” said Ken Wilder, snippets team engineer at Google..
“A normal-length snippet wouldn’t be able to show you the context for all of those words, but with longer snippets you can be sure that the first result covers all those topics.”

This is part of Google’s ongoing development program which is directly fuelled by its search engines immense popularity. Google is looking at ways of improving the quality of its search engine results. Personalised Search and Search Wiki are just a few of the potential updates which are currently being beta tested. Google is looking at new ways to serve more relevant, personalised and specific information to its search engine users.


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Technorati Tags: Google, Google description text, Google related search, Google Search Engine, Google snippet, google update

Google Insights is a powerful tool which has been designed by Google to allow advertisers and marketers to analyse keyword performance. Google is one of the most powerful marketing agencies in the world, holding data and statistics on the search habits of millions of internet users. Google insights offers a glimpse of the data, but really it only scratches the surface, how much do Google really know about the world through search statistics? I think the truth would scare us all.
The historic data generated by Google Insights can be filtered by date, location and category or even individual time ranges. Google has recently expanded the service even further by adding Image, News and Product Search. This will allow an even greater level of analysis offering more refined search and popularity based results. American users now have the ability to filter the results even further by region.

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Technorati Tags: Google, Google Insights, google insights for search, google keyword, google seo tool

Finally after a long period of Beta testing Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) has finally been released, this hot browser is publicly available and can now be downloaded from the Microsoft website. On the same day, in a cunning publicity move, Google Chrome has launched Chrome Experiments, a unique site which has been designed to showcase the power of Google Chrome and its unique JavaScript capabilities. Will you be rushing to download the new IE8? Click here to visit the IE8 website.

So how has IE8 improved and will the upgrades convince dedicated Firefox and Chrome Users to move away from their existing reliable browser platforms? IE8 is definitely a lot faster it boots up quickly and tab sessions are treated as individual processes, as in Chrome. This means that if a webpage now decides to crash, is slow loading or has errors, it will not affect the entire browsing session, just the specific tab. This will come as great relief to existing IE7 users. Microsoft have also looked at the tab processes and improved the usability. If you open a new tab, IE8 will group the tads by domain, placing the new tab to the right of an existing webpage tab. This great improvement will mean that pages from the same website will be grouped in the tab navigation rather than sending it to the end of the line, allowing browser sessions to be easily recognised. Another handy feature is the ability to drag tabs into tab clusters allowing them to become part of the browser session. IE8 uniquely colour codes the tab to mark it as part of the group and if any one of the tabs in a session is lost then IE8 will reload the tab and the page into its original position so nothing is lost.

Two other great features are Accelerator and Web Slices. Accelerator is a user experience enhancement designed by Microsoft to make the browser experience flow more fluidly. By right clicking on a webpage you will access the Accelerator context menu which will give you access to unique features like Live Search Maps, Email content to a friend and Post to a Blog or Facebook. This facility is still in its early stages of development but the more website developers that get on board with the technology the better the functionality will be in the future. Web Slices allows you to add and monitor web pages and web content from your tool bar. You could configure it to keep track of your emails or update you about an Ebay auction you’re following. The service uses a form of RSS technology but unfortunately the toolbar restricts the amount of content you can add. IE8 also includes Private Browsing (know by developers as “Porn Mode”) which allows the user to anonymously browse websites without leaving tracks or personal information.

The new IE8 is a massive improvement on IE7 but the jury is still out as to whether Google has done enough to temp Firefox users to betray their beloved browser.

Google Chrome has taken the opportunity to directly challenge the release of IE8 by launching Chrome Experiments, a website which has been designed to showcase the power of the Chrome browser and its outstanding JavaScript performance. There are 19 amazing animated games to play with and it’s well worth a visit. One of the experiments called Google Gravity, allows you to collapse the Google homepage into a pile on the base of the browser but still allows you to use the Google search facility and view results. Browser ball is a fun game that allows you to throw a beach ball from one browser window to another. The site is well worth checking out and offers a glimpse of the power of the Google Chrome platform. Click here to visit Google Chrome Experiments

Technorati Tags: chrome experiments, Google, google chrome, google chrome experiments, ie, ie8, ie8 chrome, internet explorer 8, Microsoft

Internet Giant Google is launching a new service which will allow internet users to virtually stroll around towns and cities. The service which has been available in the US for over two year is now set to launch in the UK tomorrow. Cities in France, Italy, Spain, Austria, New Zealand and Japan have already been added to the service and the UK is the latest country to benefit.

So how does it work? Cars painted with the Google logo, mounted with giant 360 degree video cameras on 4 foot masts, have been driving around UK streets taking millions of 3d images. The images are subsequently stitched together to create a 360 degree street view which takes the form of a virtual reality video. The service will allow anyone in the world to stroll down a 3D representation of a street from the comfort of their own home.

Initially major cities will be the first to benefit from the service – including London, Manchester, Birmingham and Edinburgh. More cities will be added over time and it is rumoured that Google plans to eventually map every road.

But the service has lead to great controversy, does Google street view infringe on our rights to privacy and does the service offer criminals the ability to “case out” potential burglary targets from the comfort of their own homes?

In America Google Street View has been seen its fair share of headlines. Controversial claims of infringement of privacy have been backed up by the removal of some 3D imagery. One such image, which was removed by Google, showed a woman exposing her underwear while getting out of a car and another showed a man entering a “sex shop”. It’s important to point out that the images are not live but are a snap shot of the moment in time the Google 3D Camera passed down the street. Google plans to update the images every one to two years.

A Google spokeswoman said: “Google works hard to make sure that our products respect both users’ expectations of privacy, and local privacy laws, in each country in which they are launched. Google Maps Street View is no exception.”

The service will be integrated into Google Earth and Google Maps. If the service is available in a specific area an icon of a small man will change from grey to yellow, the icon can be found on the “zoom slide” in the map interface. If the icon is then dragged onto the map the street view area will be highlighted and a street can then be selected and viewed in 3D.

Technorati Tags: 3d street view, 3d street view uk, Google, google maps, google maps uk, google privacy, google street view, google street view uk, street view uk