As a long-time Android user I can tell you two specific areas where Android beats the iPhone’s otherwise superior user experience hands down: speech and navigation. All text fields on Android devices are speech-enabled, including email, SMS and the search box on any site. The iPhone offers..

Google News has become one of the most widely used and recognized ways to search through web stories that are fresh off the presses. That may be partially due to the overall popularity of Google and the fact that Google provides some news stories on its SERP for about one in six queries. But Google News was not a part of the original game plan for the company.

With over 10 million users, Blogger is significantly more popular than WordPress, the second on the scale of in-demand blog-hosting services. That may be because Blogger was established well before Google purchased the company, earning the early trust of the blogosphere.

Blekko hasn’t been getting the same degree of media attention that it did in the anti-Google-spam blitz early this year. However,Blekko has continued its unique style of promotion which includes killing spam with as much ruthless violence as your average Bond villain, giving away  free stuff (including t-shirts), and developing a strong base of web partners. Blekko has been growing consistently, if perhaps not dramatically: the site has reached roughly 575 thousand unique visitors each month and over a million searches each day. An additional partnership will give both those figures a substantial boost

For over a year now there were rumors of Google Store Views, a feature where Google will let people walk through your store as they come from Google Street Views. Instead, Google launched Google Business Photos.

Today, Google News did a post about the death of Osama bin Laden.

The idea of exploring the world, including the distant geographies, breathtaking vistas, and historic buildings of other nations – or even your own – is certainly exciting. It’s little wonder that Google Earth has reached hundreds of millions of users

Google has had very little to say to hurting webmasters who saw their rankings tank overnight due to Google’s rollout of the Panda Update. Many of these webmasters have depended on traffic from Google to pay mortgages and feed their families — and many sites were forced to lay off staff and no doubt others have just shut down. Previously, beyond telling webmasters to identify and remove (or improve) low-quality or “shallow” content, Google hasn’t had much to say.

Here’s a roundup of today’s other search news and headlines from around the web. Click to read the rest of this post..