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Google Playing Around With the Idea of Button-less Search

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We’ve yet to see this live ourselves, but people across Twitter and the blogosphere are commenting about a button-less Google search home page which has been popping up sporadically across the web, notably for Windows users using Firefox.

Apparently, instead of the usual “Google Search” and “I’m Feeling Lucky” buttons, there simply reads a message: “Press enter to search.” According to some of these users, the buttons fade-in when you mouse over the area. Anyone experiencing this live?

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Mystery Google: Search Someone Else’s Query

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Although it doesn’t do much good to type in your search query, click search and wind up with someone else’s search results, Mystery Google is actually pretty entertaining. Type in a search and press enter. You aren’t whizzed off to your own search results, but the results of the person who searched before you.

For example, I typed in a search of “gearfuse” and was brought to the search result page for “kittens.” Oddly enough, kittens would have been my second choice.

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Microsoft and Yahoo! Announce Major Search Pact

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This is a potential game-changer. In a real stunner, Microsoft and Yahoo! have announced an agreement which will attach Microsoft search engine Bing will now power Yahoo! In return, Microsoft will receive advertising and sales power from Yahoo! in their Bing and Yahoo! search results. The agreement will last at least 10 years.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says the agreement will provide “the scale necessary to more effectively compete, attracting more users and advertisers, which in turn will lead to more relevant ads and search results.” Can this agreement take down the Google machine? Probably not, but it can surely cause a dent in their revenue. Hit the jump for the BNO press release.

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Microsoft Launches Bing Search Engine

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Alright, alright. Look, I’d love to bash Microsoft’s latest attempt at search but the truth of the matter is that I can’t. Bing is wonderful. Know why? Live video preview. If you move your mouse over a video, it automatically starts playing so you can check out clips before you click them. Get what I’m saying? So all you have to do to get your daily fill of pornography is type in the word “tits” and click Search. Your day will be infinitely better. Give it a run. I think you’ll find that while Bing is no Google-killer just yet, it packs features that will keep you fapping for hours to come.

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Wolfram Alpha Launches Tonight

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While I don’t see Wolfram Alpha becoming a total Google-killer, I can see it gaining a lot of ground in the coming weeks. The “computational search engine” launches tonight at 7pm PDT and will finally be available to the public after a brief webcast. Wolfram Alpha looks badass though, as you could totally use it to solve complex mathematical problems in one click. Who says you need to study for that Calculus I test? Just plug it all into Wolfram and go!

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Dutch Hunt Marijuana Fields With Toys

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Guess who has a lot of free time and loves toys? If you said the Dutch government, you’d be correct my friend. These dudes love to build toy helicopters, attach sensors that sniff out cannabis and seek the stuff out in fields around the country. Seriously? You guys need a helicopter to find marijuana? It’s really not all that hard. Just throw a few matches into a field, let it burn and if you smell pot, success! If there isn’t pot, well, shit. Nice work on torching a field.

So growers beware. If you see a helicopter of any sort near your property, you’d best start running.

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Free Google Business Cards

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This is a neat deal that Google dreamed up. For a limited time, 10,000 people, myself included, can get 25 free business cards from Google and iPrint.com. The cards have your name inside a search bar and your profile information on the back. Even if you don’t want or need them, you know these will be worth money 50 years from now. Get on it!

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Google Images Gets Colorful

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I was searching on Google Images today and noticed a new feature that must have been rolled out recently. Before, you could filter by image size and content. Now there’s an option to filter images by color. That’s right. Let’s say you’re searching for an image of some jewelry but you only want to display blue items. A few clicks and voila. It works really well, too. I’m assuming Google created a way to analyze images on the fly and determine the basic colors that comprise the picture.

Give it a try and see what you can come up with. I searched for “awesome”, clicked green and this is what I wound up with.

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Voice Recognition Web Searching For The iPhone

Typing, “hot horny girls go wild in a jacuzzi,” can be difficult on an iPhone; even with that QWERTY keyboard. By Friday, Apple hopes to remedy this problem by releasing Google’s new voice recognition application in the iTunes store.

Once you have the app, you can forget about typing. Just say out loud, “Where can I find the Chicks With Dicks Vol. 2 DVD in New York City?” and the sound will be converted to a digital file to be sent through Google’s servers. This is when the magic happens. When the software tries to determine the words spoken and pass them along to the Google search engine. It won’t be long until you have every smutty video store’s location in New York.

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We’re Going To Google Like It’s 2001

Feeling nostalgic today? Take a trip back to 2001, when the economy was…well, pretty shitty. Dot-coms were folding left and right, TRL was huge and Google was gaining dominance. In honor of Google’s 10th birthday, our pals Larry and Sergey have launched a search page that uses the oldest available index the company has, which is from 2001. The old logo is even there! Search around for anything 2001 or earlier and you’ll find the results to amusing to say the least.

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