Gerhard Potgieter

Been on Google lately and wondered what that icons next to you results are? Well its part of Google’s all new SearchWiki functionality.

Have you ever wanted to mark up Google search results? Maybe you’re an avid sports enthusiast and the site you always go to is in the 4th or 5th position and you want to move it to the top. Or perhaps it’s not there at all and you’d like to add it. Or maybe you’d like to add some notes about what you found on that site and why you thought it was useful. From now on you can do just that.

SearchWiki enables you to customize your search results by re-ranking, deleting, adding, and commenting on it. With one simple click you can easily move the results you like to the top and next time it will be there. You can even write a little not about the site to help you remember why you must visit it again.

The changes you make to the results will only affect your search result, but the SearchWiki is also a great way to share your insights with other searchers. You can see how the community has collectively edited the search results by clicking on the “See all notes for this SearchWiki” link.

A few ways to use the SearchWiki.

For those wanting to try out the beta version of Google’s all new browser Google Chrome, it can be downloaded here. Currently the download is only available to windows users for beta testing, so the linux guys will have to wait a bit longer for this one.

Google will today launch it beta version of Google Chrome, a open source browser to go head to head with Firefox and the likes.

So why are they launching Chrome? Because they believe they can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web.

Google’s aim is to provide a fresh new browser built from scratch, in fact the first multi threaded browser. Under the hood, they were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today’s complex web applications much better. By keeping each tab in an isolated “sandbox”, they were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites. They improved speed and responsiveness across the board. They also built a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of web applications that aren’t even possible in today’s browsers.

Apparently this is just the beginning, Google Chrome is far from done, this beta is only being released to Windows clients to start a broader discussion and to get input from the public as soon as possible.

For a comic explaining Google Chrome go here

As soon as the donwload is available I will post a link and info here.