A recent post over at Search Engine Land suggests that Google will be rolling out a new search interface – or more precisely search result page design – to selected users later today. The effort seems to have originated in the analysis of the current search results layout which is everything but coherent and has been a major point of criticism lately.

The new search results layout will use a cleaner design with an additional left sidebar. The left sidebar will always be visible and seems to have originated from the advanced search options which currently have to be expanded to make them visible. The sidebar will make use of colorful icons for permanent listings at the top and a dynamic lower part that display contents depending on the choices the user made. A selection of video for instance will display filters for playtime, date of publication or quality while the selection of images will display image related filters.

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Tags: Google, google search, google search results, search engine
Categories: Google, Search Engines

Seems that the Youtube developers are finally starting to implement new features at the popular video hosting portal. After the announcement of 1080p video support which began rolling out in the last 24 hours. There does not seem to be an option just yet to search for those 1080p videos on Youtube. Youtube videos that are already available in 1080p quality will offer a menu that becomes visible when pressing the HD button. This button will give the user the option to watch the video either in 720p or 1080p. See the example below for a video that can be viewed in 1080p on Youtube.

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Tags: 1080p, automatic captions, Google, videos, youtube 1080p, youtube captions, youtube videos
Categories: Google, Music and Video

VideoToMKV is a comfortable software program to convert various video formats into the Matroska container format (mkv). The program utilizes the ffmpeg library for the conversions. New videos can be easily added to the application by drag and drop or a file browser. The videos that have been added are then displayed in the main interface. The only other controls available in the interface are located in the header menu at the top.

Here it is possible to change the output directory and video bitrate before the queued videos are processed. Advanced users can edit batch files with advanced settings that are located in the program’s installation directory. These batch files contain the default configuration for the video to mkv conversion. The standard settings produce great results but advanced users might want to tweak the settings further to improve the quality of the output further.

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Tags: convert to mkv, mkv, video, video to mkv, windows software
Categories: Windows, software

Users looking for torrents usually go to a website like Mininova or The Piratebay that index torrents. An alternative to this is a desktop torrents search engine like Torrent Fetcher is available for the Microsoft Windows operating system. Torrent Fetcher comes with a comfortable interface to perform the search for Bittorrent files from the local computer system without firing up a web browser first. This method has several advantages including the ability to search multiple torrent indexers at once, the display of all discovered torrents on the same page in the same interface and a comfortable option to download torrents without having to switch pages.

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Tags: bittorrent, torrent, torrent fetcher, torrents, torrents search, windows software
Categories: Windows, software

Now that the source code of Chrome OS is in the open the project has entered the second stage of the development phase. I suggest to visit the announcement about Chrome OS that was posted yesterday and take a look at the video posted if you have not followed the news about Google’s operating system closely. In short; Chrome OS will be a cloud based operating system meaning that the majority of data – Google even says all data – will be stored in the cloud. The cloud means remote servers on the Internet. It’s the same thing that many web services like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Youtube or Flickr already do but on a larger scale.

Chrome OS will be minimalistic which has the advantages that it will boot fast. Several security concepts like sandboxing processes or verifying core systems during startup make it harder to attack and less likely to spread.

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Tags: chrome os, chromium os, google chrome, google chrome os, google os, operating system
Categories: Google, Operating Systems

Google today has released their Google Chrome OS – or operating system – as Open Source under the name Chromium Open Source Project. You might have already read in the past month that Google is working on a operating system that makes use of the core of the Google Chrome web browser, Linux and then some. Most interesting for users who have followed the project from the beginning is the announcement that the development from this point on will happen in the open so that releases of the operating system (including its source code) will be made available for download in a similar fashion as it is done already for the Google Chrome web browser.

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Tags: chrome os, chromium os, Google, google chrome os, google operating system
Categories: Operating Systems

A new version of the image viewer FastStone Image Viewer has been released today by the developers. Version 4.0 introduces several new and enhanced features including better Windows 7 compatibility, improved performance in network folders, display of GPS information with a link to Google Earth, favorite folders and several minor improvements and bug fixes.

The image viewer is available in several editions including a portable version and an installer. It supports multiple languages and is completely free for personal use. The main interface of the software looks a bit cluttered and very colorful at first glance. Especially the two icon bars at the top of the window can cause some confusion at the beginning. It is possible to make changes to the skin but not the the interface itself. The designs itself looks professionally done and the three program windows for browsing folders, previewing images and thumbnails are intuitive to use after all.

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Tags: faststone image viewer, image viewer, images, photos, portable software, windwos software
Categories: Windows, software