According to an announcement on the Official Google Blog , the search engine giant is rolling out a new format for their universal image results. Set to go live over the next 24 hours, the updated format will now feature one larger image alongside multiple smaller images. Because of this new layout, you'll be able to see "more pictures than before," writes Google Software Engineer Alex Petcherski in the blog post. Sponsor The New Image Results To be clear, this update is for universal image results only - not Google Image search itself. "Universal" results refer to the search results you receive when doing a traditional search on www.google.com. Introduced back in 2007, the term refers to the combined search results from multiple verticals, including image search, news, video search, and the other specialized engines linked from the top of Google's homepage. With universal search, you only have to refer to one set search results page to see all the relevant information on a particular topic. The page serves as the jumping off point for whatever knowledge you're after - whether that's a photo, a video, the latest news, or just good ol' fashioned information. The updated image search results represent a minor change to Google's interface and one that many mainstream users may not have even noticed. But every little tweak that Google makes is only done after extensive testing. In this case, the update allows for one more image to appear in the universal image results box. One image may not seem like a major improvement, but it could mean the difference between a user clicking through to see more or abandoning their Google Search altogether. (You would be surprised how quickly some users give up on a non-productive search. Forget refining queries, they just go elsewhere or stop their search entirely!). Google Announcement's Timing Aimed to Deflate Interest in Bing It's also notable that Google is announcing this change around the same time as Microsoft plans to make another announcement regarding updated features for Bing , the company's new search engine. Since its launch earlier this year, the Bing Search Team at Microsoft has been busy rolling out updates that have included things like a revamped mobile search , improvements to maps , integration with math engine Wolfram Alpha , Twitter integration , and a new visual search interface . As most of these announcements were made, Google would make an announcement of their own - for example, how they were planning on adding Twitter to their results, too . And when Bing announced Visual Search, Google posted to their blog about a Google Experiment called "Fast Flip" which lets you visually peruse print articles online. There's no doubt that the timing of this latest, albeit minor, news about Image Search improvements has to do at least partially with the upcoming Bing announcement. Clearly, we have entered a new era of "search wars." As angel investor Ron Conway noted earlier this fall at the TC50 conference, this time war is a good thing: "I think the huge winner here will be consumers because competition breeds innovation, and this nice little battle between Google and Microsoft is fantastic for consumers." Disclosure: Sarah Perez also freelances for Microsoft's Channel 10. She is not a Microsoft employee. Discuss

Original post:
Google Rolls Out New Format for Image Results

It's official: Google is ditching its homegrown Gears offline web app API in favor of backing HTML5 for the win. Now that the Chrome browser is becoming available for Mac, and the Snow Leopard OS doesn't play nicely with Gears, Google has decided to trash the whole works and wait for HTML5, even though the spec isn't yet ready and isn't supported by commercially available browsers. Oh, the humanity... or rather, the machinery. Sponsor In the mists of time, back when Gears first launched , we wrote, "We've written many times before about the need for offline web app access... And guess who is most at risk with this announcement? Yes, Microsoft. Google after all has many of the top 'best of breed' web apps now." This was before Google's Chrome browser had hit the scene, and the Gears project was a collaborative effort between Goog, Opera, and Mozilla. But in our coverage of last year's Google I/O conference, we wrote of Gears, "We question whether offline access is even necessary. After all... in today's world, you're never too far from an internet connection. We concluded that offline access is important now, but less important with each passing day." Not only could Gears be used to take online data offline; Google had more in store for Gears users. A few short months later, Google announced a geolocation API for mobile devices running Gears. We wrote, "We think that location-aware software is going to be one of the most interesting markets to watch in the near future and as as location-aware devices become more ubiquitous, we will hopefully see a lot of new and innovative services make use of them." But the party ended with Snow Leopard's release. A change in the newest Mac OS prevents Gears from running on newer Mac computers. Whether or not the relationship is one of causation or mere correlation, Google is now abandoning Gears. As one Google rep told the L.A. Times , "We are excited that much of the technology in Gears, including offline support and geolocation APIs, are being incorporated into the HTML5 spec as an open standard supported across browsers, and see that as the logical next step for developers looking to include these features in their websites." Believe us Google, no one is looking forward to the cross-browser, cross-OS implementation of HTML5 as much as we are. Discuss

View post:
Google Dumps Gears for HTML5

Opera just announced the release of Opera 10.10 . This latest version of Opera's desktop browser now includes Opera Unite , the company's browser-based web server. With Unite, users can share photos, music, notes, websites, forums and calendars - but unlike standard web apps, these apps are hosted on the user's computer. When Opera first talked about Unite, it claimed that this service would "reinvent the web." This resulted in a lot of hype before the announcement and the inevitable backlash right afterward. When we tested the first alpha version of Opera with the built-in Unite feature, however, we came away quite impressed . Sponsor As usual, this latest version of Opera is available for a wide variety of operating systems, including Windows, OSX, FreeBSD, Solaris and Linux. Your Browser is Now Also a Server Opera Unite allows you to easily turn your desktop into a web server and run a number of web services like photo-sharing, file-sharing, a web server, and an online media player right from your machine and access all of these services from anywhere. While this gives you control over your media, it also means that your data is only available online as long as your computer is running. Starting a Unite server takes seconds (though you need an Opera account to make this work). Opera will assign an address to your computer based on your username. Users can choose if they want to protect their applications with passwords or if they want to make them available to anybody on the net. Nothing New Besides Unite Besides Opera Unite, this latest version doesn't sport any major new features. With features like Opera Turbo, bookmark syncing, and the sleek new visual tabs design that Opera introduced in the last update, Opera 10 does have a lot of things going for it. In our tests this morning, the browser was stable and fast. Even though we didn't run any benchmarks, Opera 10 felt just as fast as any other modern browser. For more information about Opera Unite, also have a look at our more in-depth review of the service and the apps that Opera includes by default. Discuss

Read more:
Your Browser is Now a Web Server: Opera Includes Opera Unite in Opera 10.10

After 18 months of negotiation, the Open Web Foundation , a group made up of 106 employees of Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, some small startups and their lawyers, today released a legal document template for licensing open web technology specifications . The result could be greatly accelerated time-to-market for new technologies developed on top of these specifications and more awesomeness, sooner, for web consumers. Standardized legal documents for technical specifications may not seem like the sexiest thing in the the world - but this is actually pretty exciting news. Developments like this could be a key part of the foundation that online service providers need to move forward on a long list of great ideas for ways to serve their users. Sponsor What does this mean? It means that other companies will be able to use technologies like Media RSS, OAuth, Salmon, Web Slices and more without fear that unclear licensing agreements will lead to legal problems later. It also means that developers creating innovative new tech specifications to push and pull user data from one site to another can launch them using a turn-key license developed by some of the top legal teams in the business. People come up with crazy ideas for making the web work better all the time. This agreement aims to provide an easy way to make it safe to implement those ideas. The companies participating have spent large amounts of time and money negotiating the agreement, now anyone can take advantage of the fruits of that labor at no cost. Existing specifications that will be placed under the Open Web Foundation Agreement, per the announcement today, include: Syndicated media delivery spec Media RSS (currently controlled by Yahoo!) Secure 3rd party authentication spec OAuth Core and Wrap (from Facebook, Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft) Real-time feed protocol PubSubHubbub (Google) Comment aggregation protocol Salmon (Google) Web Slice Format (Microsoft) And several others. Discuss

Read the rest here:
New Licensing Agreement Could Open Floodgates of Web Innovation