Looks like I’ll have a new (extended) neighbor. Google has confirmed todaythat they are building a data center in Lenoir,NC a small town of 17,000 in the Western part of North Carolina.
This will create 210 jobs, and they plan to spend 600MM to build the center in exchange for some hefty state and local incentives.
Welcome, Google.
I’ve made many significant improvements and bug fixes to the Ink Search Tool, and 
publicly released Beta 2 today! This release is much faster, and has many new features – Including Desktop Search! WooHoo!
For those unfamiliar with the Ink Search tool, this is a Tablet PC application that lets you write (‘ink’) search terms on your screen rather than typing or using the Tablet Input Panel (TIP). A more general background can be found here.
Now for the good stuff…. New in this release:
All of the new searches are enabled with a button called, More Searches, selecting that will give you a drop down with the additional searches. Note: If you do not have Google Desktop Search (GDS) Installed, you will not see the Search Desktop option.
One really cool feature with searching Google Maps is that once you set your default location (via Google) you can enter a business name or type (ex: Computer Stores) and the search will show you the closest matches on the map. Very neat!
(Please uninstall Beta 1 first if you have it installed)
I’ll be adding some additional features soon!! Keep Watching!
As always, I’d love to hear your input, feedback, and feature requests. Please get in touch here.
Lot’s of buzz today about the newly announced Google Co-op engine which lets you create a custom engine tailored to your website(s).
Pretty cool concept. I was able to create one for EdHolloway.com in less than a minute. You can try it here – Search Ed Holloway.com
You can also create a custom search engine constrained to a set of sites and keywords you may regularly search, a programmer for example, could create a search engine to their favorite coding sites, and have the ability to search just this subset of the Internet, without having to manually filter out unwanted results. It will be very interesting to see what sorts of sites start popping up around this technology – http://www.realclimate.org and JumpUp.com are two that Google is already highlighting.
Give it a while – cool stuff!
More details and coverage:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/10/eureka-your…
http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=36…
http://www.informationweek.com/internet/showArticl…
Tech Crunch is reporting that Google is in talks to aquire You Tube for 1.6 Billion. Wow!
Talk about a nice way to end the week!
In all my free time, I decided to whip up a better search engine than Google, I named it EdOOgle.
Try it out and let me know if your results aren’t at least 40% better than Google.
This, of course, is just a cool little hack someones thrown together – it still uses Goolge for the search, it just replaces the logo with whatever you want. Just go to the site and change the name to whatever you like. This has probably been around a while, but I just saw it, and thought it was worth sharing.
All this being said, if anyone wants to fund EdOOgle, please get in touch 🙂 heh.