Google Pursues Role in Mobile Payments – WSJ.com

The project, which is in its early stages, would allow holders of Citigroup-issued debit and credit cards to pay for purchases by activating a mobile-payment application developed for one current model and many coming models of Android phones. The idea is to turn the phones into a kind of electronic wallet.

via Google Pursues Role in Mobile Payments – WSJ.com.

When will a phone be able hold a copy of your valid drivers licence and be legal?

Useful Operator for Google Search

ScreenClip(39)

See how “Visited pages” is in black text in the graphic to the left? Just found it tonight. It performs searches with only pages you have previously visited. Ever read a story about Apple, Twitter or Facebook but forgot how you found it? This feature, or is it a function, should enable you to track down what you are looking for rather quickly.

It looks like you must perform a search on Google to see this. The Advanced Search page doesn’t have what I was looking for. Go to Google and perform a search. Then look for something like “All results” to see the “Visited pages” option if it’s hidden. You might need to be logged in to your Google Account too.

Google Feature Request: Priority Search

“Google should add a priority box to URL’s in search results. Let me curate the sites that matter.” I was about to tweet that when the idea moved me to write a longer post first.

Currently Google allows users to block domains from search results. Earlier today I was wondering if there was an easy way to get RSS posts out of Google Reader and into my Twitter feed. You can see the two results that looked relevant and interesting to me in the screenshot nearby. Here is a request to Google, create a ScreenClip(32)way to add the sites that are relevant to users, for example mashable.com and louisgray.com, to a priority list. This list would search these sites as well as all others, but would put their relevant posts higher up in results, possibly even to the top.

Facebook may be creating a similar system from their “Like” feature. As people Like more and more pages the content in their news feed will become harder to find. Facebook may add an element that enables users to search amongst all the pages that users have previously expressed and interest in. Google already makes much of the web available to us. If there was a way to add priority to the sites that truly interest us, that would be very useful.

Google Bookmarks was a good step, but Google Priority Search would be like putting a man on the moon as compared to what happened near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina on December 17, 1903. Please make Priority Search a reality. Thank you.

Groupon vs. Living Social

ScreenClip(21)

The screenshot above indicates that both Groupon and Living Social are targeting the Detroit market where I live. Looks like Groupon prefers the terms “Detroit Coupons” and that Living Social prefers “Detroit Deals.” It is unclear what keywords Groupon is using. Perhaps their AdWords budget for the day was expended and not reset for the new day. Seems odd that they did not come up in any of the searches. Living Social came up as the top ad or the only ad on four variations of those search terms.

Example Google searches for those terms

Detroit Coupons

ScreenClip(22)

“Detroit Coupons”

ScreenClip(23)

Detroit Deals

ScreenClip(24)

“Detroit Deals”

ScreenClip(25)

Google Knows What You Are Looking For

ScreenClip(7)

When people share their website and email address they usually use some sort of space methodology to cloak the actual address or link. People don’t want spammers to find and gather up their email addresses. The above is an example search  for a website URL that was cloaked. Well, Google apparently can figure out what I wanted when it asks, “Did you mean: garyvaynerchuk.com.”

This makes it easier to get to where one wants to go. That was indeed the site I wanted to visit. Click, visit, enjoy.

Coffee Shop Mentioned in Book Naked Conversations

002

In the book Naked Conversations, (p. 81) the coffee shop Victor’s Celtic Coffee Company was listed as being the top result for a Google search. It was a favorite coffee shop for coauthor, Robert Scoble. His blog and links to his post gave it a lot of Google Juice. So much so, that it is still the top result for ‘coffee redmond, wa’ even today. They also undoubtedly have a great product. One that is remarkable and worth talking about.