Yahoo has started rolling out some new Search Assist features for its web search boxes. They are present in the search boxes of most Yahoo properties. For example, you can find them on Yahoo Sports, Yahoo News, or Yahoo Finance.
"These new features can take you directly to the information you need, whether it is real-time stock quotes or movie trailers," explains Yahoo Search Senior Product Manager Linda Wang. "You can also get enhanced search suggestions and easily navigate to the Yahoo! property that fits your needs the most."
Update 3: Mozilla has now released Weave Sync Version 1.0 Beta 2.
Update 2: Mozilla has now announced the release of Weave Sync Version 1.0 Beta 1.
Update: Mozilla has now released Weave Version 0.6.
Google has introduced a feature that lets you send attachments in Gmail while you're offline. It works the same way as it would online, except that you can't include inline images.
Compete has shared some findings from a new study on consumer holiday shopping behavior. According to the firm, active online buyers (consumers who intend to spend over 30% of their holiday budgets online) have bigger budgets than other shoppers. Furthermore, they are more likely to spend that money on Black Friday.
There's no need to start refreshing the Twitter Blog every five seconds; it doesn't sound like any pens are poised over paper at the moment. However, Biz Stone has made some statements concerning acquisitions that point to more of them taking place in the future.
It has been discovered that Google is now showing AdSense ads inside Google Earth. While it is not that surprising to see Google putting ads on another one of its properties, it has raised a few eyebrows, given that Google Earth is a desktop application.
Google TV Ads is about to become a significantly more powerful marketing system. A new pact with TiVo will allow Google to gather (and then pass on) very precise data about which commercials are being viewed, and even (to a lesser degree) who is doing the watching.
Google has opened up the Chrome Extension Gallery (beta) to developers. This means that anyone can now upload their extensions. Google says it is making the upload flow available early so developers have time to publish their extensions ahead of Google's full launch.
In this day and age, you pretty much can't ignore mobile users. The rate at which consumers are accessing the web via mobile devices is growing rapidly, largely thanks to the increasing popularity and production of smartphones.
Just having a mobile site isn't even enough. Sure, it's a great start, but you have to start thinking about a mobile site just as you would a regular site. Can people find it? Just because you have a good ranking in Google does not mean that your mobile site has a good ranking in Google's mobile search engine, or is even indexed at all.
Update: Google has now announced that it is expanding availability of Google Maps Navigation to devices running Android 1.6 (Donut) and higher, such as the T-Mobile myTouch 3G and the G1.