Today Google brings us pictures from LIFE. Google gives us the possibility to see some historical pictures of ‘football’ or a specific event ‘Winter Olympic’ from LIFE via Google Image.

LIFE and Google Image

Google hosts the LIFE photo archive and via this initiative tries to have it own database of pictures. It means that you don’t leave Google website when you click on the picture, Google via LIFE becomes a publisher of content.

The principal is very simple, if you search for picture from LIFE you add ‘source:life’ to the topic that you were looking for on Google image search.

Google Image Result Page (LIFE)

Note that all the new functions (size, source, and colour) of Google image search don’t work with the ‘source:life’. It is not very smart of Google to neglect this.

Anyway, this search is more a gadget than a real new function from Google, but at the same time it shows Google’s aim: to own more and more content.

In order to promote the show Yellowstone, BBC Two uses its Youtube channel.

They have posted the extraordinary video of the incredible fox who dives in the snow!

Great success, the video is one of the top favourites on Youtube this week (Most Discussed This Month). Very good, when you know that Susan Boyle and other Britain have talent videos are taking possession of Youtube UK.

Fox Snow Dive - Youtube

It is not new for the BBC to post a video but it is one of the first times the have had such a successful video on Youtube.

But like most of the time with people who don’t know the fine details of SEO, the video is far from optimised. For example, the link on the video links to the BBC home page and not on the specific page about Yellowstone. A good video not so well exploited.

Yellowstone BBC 2

We also can note that the page for the Yellowstone is not optimised…at least the video is doing well on the Google results page.

Google result page - Yellowstone

Bo is the newest furriest member of the Obama family. The new pup is a black and white Portuguese Water Dog. He may be only 6 months old but already has a huge online presence!

The number of online searches over the last few days for ‘Bo Obama’ has exploded. Google Trends show that in a few days the number of searches and the number of pages relevant to the subject will continue to increase considerably.

Bo Google Trends

There is a Wikipedia entry where we can find all the information about him.

Wikipedia Bo

 The White House has also set up a doggy-blog for the best friend of Sasha,
 

Bo Blog White House

as well as a video page on Vimeo where we can watch the first family playing with dog in the White House.

It is the first time that the American government has started an online campaign for an animal. The weird part of it is that based on Google information and the ranking of the news (from Yahoo US) people really care about this little dog.

Strange times people…one day, dogs will have Facebook and Twitter

In November 2008 Google announced the introduction of SearchWiki. Google allows its users to mark up Google search results. It is possible to add comments and change your Google ranking! You can also see the result comments from other people. In a way, people vote for the best result and help the Google algorithm to pick the best result with human votes. Nice principal, but do you use it?

Effectively few people use it and there are few rankings or comments about any website. It is maybe a good thing because one of the worst things is the website comments: everybody is writing stupid comments and nothing is controlled. See below some comments about the Yahoo.com website:

Yahoo Searchwiki notes

These comments are mostly spam or stupid comments without any interest. Not well planned.

After few months of existence, Google SearchWiki has not really improved the search but has polluted the search engine result page!

Rumour is that Google will drop this project (or at least part of it).

Wait and see…

The Red Cross recently launched its new campaign ‘Our world. Your move’. The campaign commemorates the 90^th birthday of the Red Cross. The aim of the campaign is to motivate people to make a move and do something to help others.

The Red Cross provides a very interesting flash website http://www.ourworld-yourmove.org with videos, animations, games and music.

Our World Your Move

The interesting part of this campaign is the diffusion of the message via social media websites.

Youtube Red Cross

The Red Cross has obviously thought about the Youtube channel, Facebook Group, Twitter profile, Myspace group and the different banners that you can use on your social media profile. ‘Your move’ can simply be a diffusion of the message via one of your social media profiles!

Social Media Links

But one of the most interesting concepts for me is the collectivist blog where everybody can share their own personal story.

Blog Red Cross

This project was very well planned and executed, better than most of the commercial projects done by other companies.

Anyway, I have made my move with this post…now it is up to you!

Oparla is the name of the new British search engine which gives you money for your search.

The principle is pretty simple, you need to register, execute a search and every day Oparla picks a winner. One thousand pounds is the prize! Good idea, but who is going to use this search engine over and over only for the chance of winning a prize?

So let see what this ‘new’ search engine can do. First, Oparla looks pretty much like Google before the search, simple with a clear call to action (only one button ‘search’)

Oparla

The Oparla result page on the default view is very different from the classic Google/Yahoo appearance. It is a list of the results with three columns, title, summary and URL. To be honest this list of websites doesn’t look very pretty, but at least the search result page is pretty quick to load.  At anytime you can switch to the classic view.

Oparla

The results of the search are pretty good for a ‘small’ search engine although occasionally the search engine doesn’t  find the most relevant result (e.g.: selected the LinkedIn directory page instead of my actual profile page when I entered my name).

In conclusion, this search engine who (can) give you money is a pretty good marketing idea but after few days I am not sure that it will be enough to keep people using Oparla. Also, I didn’t see any major benefit compared to Yahoo or Google. To be honest with you, I really don’t believe that this search engine will do well… Anyway the official launch is the 14th of April.

Good luck Oparla

New battle between the two online giants: the online coverage of the Indian election 2009.

Everything is ready to attract new users. And we can see that Google and Yahoo have definitely chosen the right country to fight over, with over 45 million  internet users in India. And the Indian internet market is growing pretty quickly. So what have the done for the Indian election 2009? Both of them have now made a micro site about this election:

Yahoo Site - Indian Election

http://in.elections.yahoo.com/ from Yahoo! and

Google Site - Indian Election

http://www.google.co.in/intl/en/landing/loksabha2009/ from Google.

My first impression is that Yahoo! has made a far better job of it than Google on this one. The design and structure of the information is very well done particularly in comparison with  Google’s attempt. Google has just created an iGoogle page for this election; not that user friendly!

We can also see that Yahoo!, unlike Google, is trying to make some money via advertising to finance this initiative. I imagine that this is because Yahoo has spent a lot more money on this project than Google and need to recoup their financial investment.

But the investment (time and money) is very little compared to the amount put in to the American election few months ago (obviously from an American company this is no big surprise).

It is hard to know who will be the big winner of this battle but one thing is sure Yahoo has come up with the best website, but the funny thing is on the first page of Yahoo result page,  for the keyword ‘Lok Sabha Elections 2009’ we cannot find the Yahoo site – a mistake not made by Google.com