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Google is stirring up buzz to rival Apple’s yearly expectations with an invitation for reporters to an event January 5—yep, just days before the CES show. Apple has made a tradition of big (or not so big) announcements scheduled conveniently upstaging the popular Consumer Electronics Show. So Google will definitely be cutting into the speculation market between now and then—especially since they told reporters the announcement, hosted at the Mountain View facility—will have something to do with their mobile OS, Android. First launched on the G1 over a year ago, “this is just the beginning of what’s possible,” Google said in the email invitation. The announcement comes less than a month after Google sent its employees home with an unlocked Android phone called the Nexus One , sparking a viral media frenzy when the employees hit social media. With free buzz already in the air and more to come, it seems entirely possible that Google will officially unveil the Nexus at the event. Apple, on the other hand, appears to be keeping any major announcements under its hat for now, with a major product announcement scheduled for January 26, according to Reuters . The anticipated Apple tablet computer would definitely rival a Google phone for buzz, but it looks like they won’t be in direct competition for consumers’ presales attention. So far, not a whole lot is certain about the Nexus One. Search Engine Journal takes a look at the definites and rumors from technical specs to carriers. On the other hand, there’s been a lot of buzz (which seems mostly misguided) around the Chrome OS being used on netbooks. Recently Google premiered a netbook with a Google OS—Android. What do you think? Will Google formally unveil the Nexus One? Or do they have something else up their sleeve?

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Google to Host Android Announcement Event

While Google’s CEO is experimenting with the wonders of Twitter (which by the way has been switched to @ericschmidt and has over 10k followers so adjust accordingly) the mothership, Google, is announcing some new search additions that are, well, timely. Today Google made the announcements from the Computer History Museum in Mountain view. The official Google blog tells us Be sure to check out the video there as well. First, we’re introducing new features that bring your search results to life with a dynamic stream of real-time content from across the web. Now, immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before. When they are relevant, we’ll rank these latest results to show the freshest information right on the search results page. Wow, this has been a rough day for SEO’s for sure. First, personalization is made the norm by Google for all users and now more front page real estate is threatened by the real time search offer. Of course, this type of offering will be more useful in some areas since searches like “injection die mold” won’t have much current activity around it (or will it?). There is a lot to digest with this new offering and it looks pretty comprehensive. I think it’s better for Google to tell you so here you are. Click on “Latest results” or select “Latest” from the search options menu to view a full page of live tweets, blogs, news and other web content scrolling right on Google. You can also filter your results to see only “Updates” from micro-blogs like Twitter, FriendFeed, Jaiku and others. Latest results and the new search options are also designed for iPhone and Android devices when you need them on the go, be it a quick glance at changing information like ski conditions or opening night chatter about a new movie — right when you’re in line to buy tickets. And, as part of our launch of real-time on Google search, we’ve added “hot topics” to Google Trends to show the most common topics people are publishing to the web in real-time. With this improvement and a series of other interface enhancements, Google Trends is graduating from Labs. Our real-time search features are based on more than a dozen new search technologies that enable us to monitor more than a billion documents and process hundreds of millions of real-time changes each day. Of course, none of this would be possible without the support of our new partners that we’re announcing today: Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca — along with Twitter, which we announced a few weeks ago. You can go to Google Trends and click on a hot topic to test out these new features which will be available in English over the next few days. This addition to Trends also marks its graduation from Google Labs. Sniff, sniff, our little application is growing up so fast sob, sob. So as to try to out do themselves, Google also announced mobile search changes as well. We have also made some new strides with mobile search. Today’s sensor-rich smartphones are redefining what “query” means. Beyond text, you can now search by a number of new modes including voice, location and sight — all from a mobile device. So we’ve been working to improve technology that takes advantage of these capabilities. Well, today could prove to be a watershed day in search as Google is now changing the game in a way that only Google can. What does this mean to the way you do business? How to you see these changes impacting your SEO practice? Is this a true game-changer or just another step along the way? Let’s hear your thoughts.

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Google Announces New Offerings in Real-Time, Mobile and Social Search

Google continues to play around in the lab trying to come up with something to create a better end user experiment. They sure seem busy over there in Mountain View because it doesn’t seem that there’s a day that goes by without some new service being announced. Today, it’s the Google labs offering called Image Swirl which is a different way to help group images in a search so they can be more readily sifted through. I think it’s pretty neat. Doesn’t set the world on fire but it’s neat. The Official Google blog proclaims Back in 2001, to give people a new, quicker way to find images, we launched Image Search. When you do a search for [eiffel tower] you’ll find an array of images of the tower in the daytime, in black and white, at sunset and more. With Similar Images, which recently graduated from Google Labs, you can click “Find similar images” to narrow your search to, say, pictures of the Eiffel Tower lit up at night. Today, we’ve launched an experimental feature in Labs called Google Image Swirl, which builds on new computer vision research to cluster similar images into representative groups in a fun, exploratory interface. A fun, exploratory interface? Sounds like some kind of alien probe in a not so pleasant area but hey it’s engineers talking here, right? Here’s the initial page you encounter when doing an image search in Swirl. Then you can further break down your images to see them like this Image Swirl expands on technologies developed for Similar Images and Picasa Face Recognition to discern how images should be grouped together and build hierarchies out of these groups. Each thumbnail on the initial results page represents an algorithmically-determined representative group of images with similar appearance and meaning. These aren’t just the most relevant images — they are the most relevant groups of images. So it’s neat but it’s not anything that will change the face of search. Hasn’t Google done enough of that already?

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Google Image Swirl in Labs Now

Google went a long way toward answering the naysayers of their Google Apps offering. How you ask? By winning a contract to provide e-mail and other Internet services to the City of Los Angeles. Nice get. While winning a contract is just the first step in proving that Google is a serious threat to the stronghold of Microsoft’s software business, it’s a pretty big step. This kind of deal will be felt up and down the left coast (that’s what we East Coast folks refer to the West Coast as). Starting in the great Northwest there will be some serious Steve Ballmer hand-wringing and maybe another Bobby Knight-like chair throwing moment or two. In NoCal (the Google Plex in Mountain View in particular) there may be some Tiger Woods-like fist pumps of victory. While in SoCal it’s likely that no one outside the people who made the decision will know or care because it’s not directly about them. Different strokes for different folks, right? Yahoo Finance tells us that while this is a victory for sure there are the typical concerns that still need to be overcome and there’s nothing like a financial penalty to overcome those issues. The Council voted unanimously for the $7.2 million deal with contractor Computer Sciences Corp. to replace many city computer systems with the so-called Google Apps services. An amendment added shortly before the vote makes the contract contingent on Computer Science agreeing to pay a preset penalty if a security breach occurs. The contractor’s project manager David Barber said he believed such an agreement would be reached. The city’s police officers’ union and privacy advocates had raised security concerns over the Google contract because it places data online rather than on individual computers under the city’s direct control. I bet dollars to donuts (there was a police officer reference after all) that Microsoft is assigning the task to someone to watch this thing like a hawk and to know just when and to what degree a security breach occurs if at all. This particular battle could be looked back on as a game changing moment as there is an ‘out with the old and in with the new’ theme. The big loser? Novell. The move will also end the city’s 7-year contract to use Novell Inc.’s GroupWise e-mail and record-keeping software, which city workers have complained is slow and crash-prone. Novell senior vice president said during the Council hearing that many city departments were not using the most recent version of GroupWise and reiterated an offer to provide additional services for free. That kind of ‘excuse based selling’ is not recommended and does not fly in today’s business world does it? My question is why weren’t they upgraded by Novell so they could at least have a shot at keeping the business? Silly me for asking such an obvious question, right? Meanwhile back at the Plex all is good with the world. “In our view, this can be a watershed agreement,” said Dave Girouard, president of the Google division that provides business services. “There’s a lot of cities and counties around the state and around the nation who were watching this.” Translation? If you are a Google rep and you are talking to any of the big government agencies you better set an appointment now to make it happen in a local government near you. So Google continues to expand far beyond the world of search. I’m not surprised are you?

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Google Wins Over the City of Angels