Google announced today that they would finally be providing real-time NASDAQ quotes for free on Google Finance. This is great news, and, hopefully, the opening volley in the battle for democratized market data from exchanges around the world.
Official Google Blog: At long last, real-time stock quotes are here
Tags: google, googlefinance, nasdaq, market-data, investing, securitiespricing, stocks, equities
On June 27th, Google released Desktop for Linux. I had looked for a download link on the main Desktop page but it only offered a download of Google Desktop for Windows and Mac. The only download link available that I could find was on the Google Desktop Blog.
I installed Desktop for Linux on Ubuntu Feisty Fawn 7.04. The installation process was very straightforward. The first thing I did after installing GDL was to turn off “Advanced Features”. Enabling this will send some search data over to Google, though, they claim it is non-personal data that is sent.
Hitting the Control key twice brings up GDL (unless you’re using Beryl and on a Desktop with no windows open). GDL appears to take a lot less resources than beagle but that could also be because beagle indexes a lot more file types than GDL. GDL searches through Thunderbird email but it would be nice if the search results showed where a specific email was found (mailbox name, application name, or Google Mail). It would also be great if GDL was able to search through contact lists and emails in Thunderbird, Evolution, and Gmail and show me all relevant correspondence with a given contact name or number. GDL does need to improve the ability of searching within Thunderbird. I can’t explicitly say that Evolution results are better as I haven’t used Evolution in a long time.
I have also found that GDL hasn’t indexed all of my OpenOffice or PDF documents. GDL routinely finds no results when I search for a specific person that I have received a PDF from and the PDF is saved on my Desktop. I would expect when I search for that person’s name, GDL would show me the email that I had received from this person, as well as the PDF on my desktop which has his name within the PDF as well.
It’s also a bit annoying that if you have turned on mouse focus in Beryl, the GDL window closes immediately when you move the mouse to another window on the Desktop. This makes taking screenshots impossible in Beryl.
Overall, GDL is not a bad version 1 but there are definitely enhancements that would make this desktop search application much better.
Take a look at my short video of GDL on Ubuntu (and first video on YouTube).
With Google’s release of Google Maps for Australia, I am hoping Google Maps India isn’t going to be that far away. Being a complete outsider to Indian roads and traffic, it would be a very welcome addition to our list of expat related sites and tools that we’ll be relying on after we move to India.
I know the challenges of putting together Google Maps in a place like India. I’ve been to the tiny little alleys that are at least 400 or 500 years old. I’ve also been to what was farmland 6 months ago and today is a luxury residential development outside Bangalore. In a country where the streets are thousands of years old and where farmland and undeveloped land is changing so rapidly, it will be an immense task to keep the data updated. However, could this be the perfect place for an experiment in Social Mobile Mapping or Mapiki? This is the term that I’m going to use for what I think could be a tremendous addition to the social web.
Imagine an application that will redraw maps based on GPS transmitters and SMS text messages, submitted by none other than the users of the mapping application. In a place like India, a rikshaw driver can pull out his mobile and type in a message and sms it to a service that will instantly display on the map the changes reflected by the rikshaw driver. Of course, this can be gamed but so can Wikis. The question is, can the wisdom of crowds provide cleaner more accurate mapping information just like it has helped to create Wikipedia?
For now, however, at least I can get driving directions in New Delhi.
Google quietly released their blog pinging service on the same day they released their Code Search service. It’s a bit late but, hopefully, it will help improve their blog search results. They have said that they will continue to monitor other pinging services as well.
Here’s some information to get you started. Google Blog Search Help
Read more on the official Google Blog:
Official Google Blog: Got blog? Will ping.
Google announced two new services, Google Code Search and Google Blog Search Pinging.
In this post, I’ll discuss Google Code Search. Google code Search is meant to be able to search through publicly available source code based on regular expressions, strings, license type, and a few other criteria. I haven’t done any exhaustive tests on Google Code Search yet but it’s nice to see Google expanding beyond straight search to more refined searches like the type needed for trolling through source code or finding the most relevant blogs.
The user interface is the familiar Google search interface and the results currently don’t appear to be displaying ads.
If you’re in need of a search engine for source code, don’t forget to check out Krugle. I prefer the interface of Krugle a bit more as it’s easy to search for something within source code, and then hit one of the other tabs and show relevant results from blogs or other web pages and from projects as well. This is something for Google to catch up on.
Here are some screenshots of both code searching services.
Read more about Google Code Search: Official Google Blog: More developer love with Google Code Search
technorati tags:Google, Code Search, Search, Krugle
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