I feel lucky for getting to see this I guess … 2 minutes ago it wasn’t there and now it is.

Check it out:

I was logged in to my Google account when I saw it, so try logging in and trying it out.

So what is new in the search results page:

• New left column has been permanently added, compared to manual opening in previous design (by clicking on the “show options” link)
• Obvious design tweaks to the search bar and Google logo
• Number of search results and search time has been pushed to be right of the search bar and in light gray, I guess to put less emphasis on it.
• New icons for every different search type (images, videos, maps, news and so on…)
• Clicking on images search results in a nice looking search results page (border tweaks around the images)
• Link underlines in the site links section has been removed.
• New section called “something different” on the bottom left column (searched for ‘forex trading’)  –

Its interesting to note that no changes (from what I see) were made to the sponsored links section (both on the right and also above the search results start on the left).

New vs. Old Google Logo

Highlighted changes:

For more information visit – http://rationalcraft.com/Winscape.html

I thought it would be really interesting to check on the browsing habits of mobile users using the Android OS vs. the iPhone/iPad/iPod OS.

Some facts first:

• Tested between October 2009 – April 2010.
• Sample size is over 100,000 visitors.
• 83% of the iPhone mobile users came from Search engines vs. only 63% of Android users.
• 24% of Android visitors came from referring websites compared to only 12% of iPhone OS users.
• Source of data is from Google Analyitcs.
• US Traffic only was tested.

Time on Site

25% higher on the Android – this was surprising to me as personally I find the websites that are un-optimized for Mobile to look better on the iPhone OS – so I would expect it to be higher on the iPhone OS.

Average Page Views per Visitor

15% higher on the Android – again surprising for the same reasons as the Time on Site difference.

OS growth in visitors to our site

On Android we have seen a steady rise of 250% in visitors to the site (with a large jump happening at the end of January, after the Jan5th launch of the Google Nexus one).



Compared to only a 75% growth in users from the iPhone OS (this already includes a small percentage of iPad users that have started showing up since the iPad launch – in addition a large jump was observed in visitors during December – over Xmas).

In conclusion from what I am seeing based on the happenings on our site – Andriod adoption is growing and in general the very use of mobile and accessing regular web sites is in very high gear.

I plan to optimize the sites for mobile and hope to compare the above data in the next 6 months to see if it increases any of the tested metrics.

Hope you enjoyed.

Simon

Here is a bullet point list of the new features:

• Multitasking
• Folders
• Even Better Mail
• iBooks
• iAd !

Downside is that the Multitasking will not be working on my iPhone 3G – sad but true.

For the full data, check out Apple’s official OS 4.0 site – http://www.apple.com/iphone/preview-iphone-os/

I have taken upon myself a new challenge for this year – to port part of our applications to a NoSQL solution – mainly the statistical data we collect and supply to our users (basically a mini Google Analytics application) – its heavy in writes & read and stores hundreds of thousands of new rows daily.

Currently we host this solution on separated cloud servers from our main app – so adding new machines is simple enough.

First one I am reading about is HBase (below is an embedded introduction I found on DocStoc)

Enjoy.

Say hello to my new Trekker, cool ain’t it?

Its an Electric Scooter, goes up to 30km/h and has a range of 20km between charges.

Zoom zoom zoom….

So after a long long long time, I have finally brought my blog back to life. Hopefully this time I can actually keep myself busy and also have time to write on the blog.

I mainly want to start sharing my experiences with new technologies that I plan to start playing with in the near future, gadgets I also love to play with and interesting news I come across during my browsing hours online.

Hopefully I can keep it interesting for everyone.

Enjoy my future posts,

Simon

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