Yahoo Search Pad Is About To Launch To The Public

Tomorrow night Yahoo is planning to unleash Search Pad, a note-taking tool integrated with the search engine, to the masses. The company first showed off the product last February, but until now it hasn’t been available for public consumption. The new feature will go live to the general public tomorrow night at 9 PM, PST.

Search Pad is pretty similar to a host of other annotation apps that are already out there, with competitors that include Google Notebook. The biggest difference is that Search Pad tries to pre-populate your notes. For example, if you start running a number of queries related to a certain car model, Yahoo will detect that you’re going to ‘research mode”, and will then present a small bulletin asking if you’re like to launch Search Pad. If you click yes, the last few queries (in this case, the ones pertaining to the car) will already be in the text field.

As far as text entry goes, Search Pad is pretty straightforward. You can add links and thumbmails to the page, as well as your own notes. One cool feature: if you copy and paste text from a page, Search Pad can figure out where you probably grabbed the text from, which makes it great as a bibliography tool (or just to remember where your notes were coming from).

So why is this important? Because of the way Yahoo is promoting the product — automatically prompting users if they’d like to use it whenever it thinks it might come in handy — this is probably going to be seen and used by millions of people. And because there isn’t a plugin required, the barrier to entry will be much lower.

That said, the lack of having a plugin available can be seen as a shortcoming. The way Search Pad works now, there’s no way to set up a hot key to pull up your notes — you’ll have to browse over to the Yahoo page that’s displaying Search Pad. This may work fine for casual note taking, but for those really intensive projects where you’ll be collecting copious amounts of data, it could grow frustrating. Yahoo won’t comment on its future plans for the product, but I’ll be very surprised if they don’t offer a browser plug-in or stand alone program in the next few months

What The Hell Happened To The Free Version Of Google Apps??????

The free version of Google Apps is history. The current sign up page makes no mention of the previously free Standard edition. Instead, new users get a 14 day free trial, and then must pay $50 per user per year after that trial. Google Apps is a suite of online applications like gmail, Google calendar, Google Docs, etc. that are packaged and tailored for business use.

Earlier this year we reported that the usage caps were being squeezed by Google over time for Google Apps, from 200 users down to just 50. When the service first launched in August 2006 it was free and described as “a service available at no cost to organizations of all shapes and sizes.” A paid version first appeared in 2007.

Dave Girouard, Google’s President of Enterprise, commented on our post that talked about the decreasing number of users allowed for the free version, saying that the cap reductions were needed to keep resellers happy, adding “There’s no reason to believe that the cap will continue to “move down” – we have no plans whatsoever to do that.”

I guess not. They didn’t move the cap down, they just killed the Standard product entirely. No mention of this change was made at a Google Apps press event held last month.

You can actually still see the free version at this page. But it doesn’t appear to be linked to from any Google page at this point. We’re emailing Google for comment.

The old version of Google Apps had a comparison chart of the Standard and Premier versions that looked like this:

Google Voice Now Lets You Change Your Number

When I first signed up for GrandCentral a few years ago, I lived in a different city. As such, I had a different area code. And that was fine until I moved and Google, which bought GrandCentral in 2007 and subsequently put it on lockdown, prohibited me from changing it. I didn’t think much of it until my GrandCentral account magically transformed into a Google Voice account a few months ago, taking a good service and making it excellent. Unfortunately, I was still stuck with my old number. But now, there’s an option to change it.

The “Change your number” functionality, as spotted today by Boy Genius Report, is great news for users like me. Unfortunately, it will cost you to change it. There’s a one-time $10 fee, which in my mind is well worth it. Best of all, Google Voice will activate your new number right away and still keep your old one active and forwarding to the new one for three months.

What’s also nice is that in picking your new number, you can search by area code and by a word that you want your number to contain. So for example if I search for area code 408 and the word “tuna,” I can get a 408 number that ends in 8862 (”T-U-N-A” on a keypad).

Here are the details:

There is a $10 one-time fee to change your Google Voice number. Here is how it works:

• Pick a new number in the area codes we have.
• Pay $10 with Google Checkout, using your credit card.
• Your new number becomes active right away.
• Calls to your old number will keep coming to your Google Voice account for three months, so you have time to tell everyone about your new number.

We’re still waiting on number portability (the ability to use your existing numbers as Google Voice numbers), but this is a nice start.

Google App Engine Stalled Out For About 6 Hours Today

A little over two hours ago, a Google employee posted a note in this Google Groups thread indicating that Google App Engine was “seeing elevated Datastore latency and error-rates, as well as elevated serving error-rates.” He noted that the problem began around 6:30 AM Pacific time and that the team was looking into it. A few minutes later he updated that Google App Engine was going into “unplanned maintenance mode” — over 4 hours later, it’s still not back up.

That’s a long time for any service to be broken, but especially one that is the backbone for many startups’ web apps. What’s worse is that while Google is updating the Google Groups thread, the actual App Engine Status page has been down the entire time as a result of the problems, so people are going there for updates and seeing nothing.

The last update from Google came about an hour ago:

Read-only mode continues. Elevated latency and error-rates persist for Datastore reads. Memcache writes have been reenabled to better soak read-only load. Our engineering teams are looking into the root cause of the problem. Will post more information as soon as it’s available.

Obviously, the natives are getting restless on Twitter. This outage follows the popular hosting service Rackspace experiencing some rare downtime earlier this week.

Update: And it looks like this downtime is even hampering the development of Chrome for the Mac. Here’s was lead developer Mike Pinkerton just tweeted out: “Popup blocking UI is done, but appspot apps are all horked so I can’t get it reviewed. #chrome”

Update 2: 6 hours later, it looks like things are finally back in working order. The latest update from Google in the Google Group thread:

Datastore writes are reenabled and functioning normally! Overall App Engine health is back to normal! We will update this thread if anything else develops, but at this time we anticipate no additional problems. Thank you for your patience

Google Blog Search Takes Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

Last fall Google launched a revamped version of its Blog Search, converting the site’s frontpage into a automated news portal similar to sites like Techmeme. It has its fair share of issues (for one, it’s subject to the same problems of automated grouping as Google News is), but it was a step in the right direction for the site.

That said, it has been missing some key features. For one, there hasn’t been a good way to track breaking news stories as they happen — generally stories only pop up as they gain momentum and are written about by multiple sites, which can take quite a while (relatively speaking). There also hasn’t been a way to subscribe to a feed of the latest stories via RSS, which nearly every other similar site offers.

Today, Blog Search is finally adding these features. Each feed now offers its own RSS/Atom feeds, as well as an iGoogle gadget that integrates new top stories into your Google homepage. Finally, the site has added sections for both ‘Hot Queries”, which shows the most popular search terms, and “Latest Posts”, an unfiltered view of the latest blog posts indexed by the search engine. These last two features could be quite useful for tracking breaking news, especially given how fast Blog Search is at finding new blog posts.

Unfortunately, they’re not quite there yet. My biggest gripe is that the ‘hot queries’ and ‘latest posts’ sections are not category-specific. In other words, when I’m browsing through the Technology section of Blog Search, I’m still being shown new posts about McDonalds, Exxon, and Asteroids. The Hot Queries section is equally irrelevant. This is especially strange given that Google is already categorizing the blog posts into different sections based on their topic, and I’m hoping that Google will at least offer a filtered view as an option.

Google Makes Book Search Even Better

Google received some unfortunate news today, with the U.S. Department of Justice formally announcing the investigation of the $125 million settlement Google made with the Author’s Guild to pay authors a nominal fee for copyrighted works it has scanned and made available on the Web. The settlement has drawn its fair share of critics, including Jeff Bezos. But Google keeps on plugging away, making its book search better and better.

For instance, Google Books recently launched a plethora of new and innovative features to make the product easier for consumers to use, such as embeddable previews and better in-book search. Today, it added one more useful feature relating to search: a visual cue on the right margin showing the pages throughout a book where a search term appears.

When you search within a book, a page appears in a window, with a scrollbar on the right. Little rectangles will appear in the margin beside the scrollbar to show you where your results are located. When your mouse hovers over one of the rectangles indicating where a search term can be found in the book, you’ll get a preview of the search results and the option of jumping directly to that respective page by clicking on the rectangle.

With the previous search function, it wasn’t as easy to find the exact location of the results in a book. With this simple tweak, Google has improved the visual display of search functions, helping users navigate results in a more organized and efficient way. The DOJ will probably hold that against it.