Charles on… anything that comes along

My article this week for The Independent looks at Google’s new “local” search, at last in the UK - along with maps, SMS and also now on the .com site, a “history” feature.

Interestingly Yahoo! has today added a “search history” feature, as part of its “My Yahoo!” customisation options. (Talk about your bad timing - had they done it a week ago they’d have been in the print article.) And of course Ask Jeeves has had such a feature for quite some time now.

For a comparison - though perhaps slightly out of date now, given the most recent changes - of what search engines offer what, see this searchenginewatch.com posting. (Where would we be without them?)

There’s also some discussion on the Guardian/Observer blog about the limitations of Google UK maps. However, I still think it’s something of a threat to Streetmap and Multimap - as much as anything because it’s a lot faster, though Streetmaps Ordnance Survey output has always been attractive for anything that’s outside a city or town. Especially if you were taught (at the point of a stick) how to read maps.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• The Spartacus approach to beating comment spam (9 November 2004; score: 30.12%)
• Apple's Address Book: its search was already broken. And now mine has *completely* broken (9 May 2006; score: 20.75%)
• I'll just buy this... used library book via Amazon.. uh? (25 May 2005; score: 20.39%)