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Google Maps: Now Officially GorgeousOctober 9th, 2008 at 5:31 amSource:Mashable! Iterend is a new blog search engine (still in private beta) that hopes to steal Technorati’s lunch money, but first they have to beat Google’s Blog Search to the punch. In this showdown, we’ll perform a search test on all three services and compare the results. Checkout the screencast as well. Technorati has been king of the hill for a long time when it comes to blog search but as happens with all monarchies, they’ve grown complacent and stopped innovating which has opened the door for other potential heirs to the throne.Enter iterend and Google Blog Search which recently hit the streets. The initial reviews of Google’s foray into the blog search arena has been mostly positive. Before checking the results of the showdown, here’s a little bit about iterend which presents a busy home page with a flood of recent phrases as tags along with the top stories in the past twenty four hours. At the top of the page is their search bar which you can adjust to search for a different time frame such as the last hour, last week, anytime, etc. Here are some other features of note. - All articles are linked to structured wikipedia information, which makes it possible to search by categories. - Search results are clustered and you can search on sentence level, post level or blog level. - Next to the search results, relevant phrases and categories are displayed, so you are able to restrict your search or get an overview over the information you are looking for. - You can search for related posts to a given topic, url or cluster The Test Results As you’ll see in the screencast, the old dog Technorati still seemed to provide the best and fastest results when searching for the same exact keywords. We used a post from Mashable for this video just to show how different the search results were for all three search engines. In most cases, Technorati provided the most recent blog posts. While Google’s Blog Search impressed with its sheer extensiveness, Technorati seemed to include far less unseemly characters in its search results. Both Google Blog Search and Iterend appeared to include far more spammers, sploggers and other things you usually find hiding under a rock. Over all, Technorati is still the top dog for blog search while Google’s Blog Search and Iterend are worthy challengers that will surely improve with time.
Remember when we told you about Google’s new satellite, GeoEye-1, which should bring highest resolution commercial imagery available to Google Maps? Below, you can see the first image that the satellite captured. GeoEye-1 captures images at .41 meters in black and white and 1.65 meters in color; for real life reference, that means crisp enough to read license plates. Google, however, will receive imagery in 50-centimeter resolution because of a government restriction and the fact that it’s not the only customer who benefits from GeoEye-1. They’re sharing it with National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency; which collects and analyses geospatial data in support of national security. Translated, that means they get the really good stuff. Real spies probably have their own, even more advanced satellites, though. Speaking to Wired, Mark Brender, GeoEye’s vice president of communications and marketing, said that GeoEye-1 is “the opposite of a spy satellite. Spies don’t put info on the internet and sell imagery. We’re an Earth-imaging satellite, and we can sell our imagery to customers around the world who have a need to map and measure and monitor things on the ground.” The important fact is that GeoEye-1 is up and running, collecting imagery for Google Maps which will soon start looking like the image below. Time for a new round of mapspotting! —Related Articles at Mashable | All That’s New on the Web:Bumpy Map Mashups with Google TerrainGoogle Offers Easy Embed Code for MapsGoogle Maps in (Almost) 3DGoogle to Get New Satellite Imagery From GeoEyeGoogle Earth and NASA Complete ProjectGoogle Maps Hangs Up on Click-to-CallYahoo Maps: More Color, More Zoom
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