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Microsoft launches Bing iPhone app. Yes, you read that right.
Microsoft launched a fantastic iPhone app today. That sentence really says an awful lot, and what's more first blush impressions of this app are very impressive. Echoing the functionality of the web portal itself, the app offers a fantastic image search system, maps and navigation, news, and local business and movie search. The app even offers speech to text for entering searches. It definitely looks as if Microsoft has put their $99/year Apple developer license to good use. The app is available now in the app store. Additional screen grabs after the break.
Google real-time search accelerating crawls?
Google's recently launched real-time search functionality, which pulls data from a number of real time data sources, including the now publicly accessible Twitter firehose, is enhancing search functionality across the board. It seems that hyperlinks contained inside the microblog posts are being immediately indexed, and in turn is speeding up the time it takes for new content to appear not just in the live feed, but in the actual crawled index as well. Try doing some searches on Google for the title of any new blog posting from a major source, and note that the crawled index lists the post within minutes at most.
The real time feed could cause far reaching benefits for all of Google's services over the next few months as the big G continues their roll out. It's a safe bet that as this technology matures in the coming months we'll see further improvements that are thanks to the accessibility of real time data.
Google real-time search is live
Google real-time search results
Announced on Monday (see Mashable's post on the topic), Google's real-time search functionality appears to now be fully live. Try some timely topical searches (Tiger is a safe bet these days) and you should see comments, posts, and articles streaming in as they are created. As this technology matures this has the potential to blur or completely erase the line that exists between live feed based informational searches and traditional crawl based searches, and the reach of microblogs suddenly becomes that much more vast as well. Google's video demo after the break.
Jeff dePascale is a web and mobile applications professional based in Fairfield County, CT.
