Over on the Google Blog there’s a new post about how Map Maker helps users in rural India to map their local areas. People can add roads, buildings and create “…base maps where there were previously none”. Google’s vision is that by putting these places online “local commerce, tourism and investment” will all benefit.

By a wonderful coincidence, Squid has recently been using Open Streetmap to map Withernsea, a previously-unknown area of East Yorkshire.

Google are soon making their quirky Suggest feature live. Much like your Firefox toolbar, it offers search suggestions to help you find new content on the web. The cool thing is that you get a competition figure (i.e. number of results):

The question however is how to use this data. Should I start targeting ‘piggy bank’ and ‘piggymoo’? After all, Google are suggesting ‘piggymoo’ so a lot of people must search for it, right? Should I disard ‘piggy bank’ because there’s so much competition?

It’s been speculated that Google’s suggestions direct you to Ad-filled pages, essentially increasing your chances of clicking on an Advert and making Google money. If that’s the case, why don’t Google go a step further and try and keep users on the Google network? (They could!)

If Google are that cynical this information is pretty useless. It doesn’t reflect what people search for but what Google want people to search for. On the other hand, if it really comes straight from Google’s database it’s a goldmine of information. I think some serious testing is in order to find Suggest’s true potential – let’s hope I find the time!

I got back to work only to discover Google have changed their Analytics login page. You now have to click a button to enter your login details:

I don’t see the point to be honest! Isn’t it even good website practice not to require too many clicks?

I’m certainly not the only one interested in the rankings of Google Knols. Over at Search Engine Land there’s been a bit of research done into the Google rankings of entries that appear on the Knol home page – follow the link to see the whole article.

1/3 of the Knols rank well – this seems to indicate that they have an advantage over ordinary websites. Could Google deliberately not rank Knols? Now there’s a question!

Google Knol has just been opened to the public after being in Beta for some time. The idea is part Wikipedia, part Squidoo and part About.com, with ‘experts’ writing detailed articles on specific subjects, from their own point of view.

At the moment Knols have mainly been written by healthcare professionals – a glance at the front page selection shows the narrow range quite clearly:

Google states that Knols will appear in the search results, just like any other website. I’m reminded of Google Books, which appear for many search results regardless of whether you want a book. Presumably soon Knols will be appearing near (above?) similar Wikipedia entries.

MSN used to be the worst culprit for trying to keep you on their own network but it seems Google is going the same way. I’m all for healthy competition but when Google have such a monopoly on search they could quite easily rank their own domains before, well, real websites.