Mashable reported on their site today that Adobe was spotted at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Fransisco showcasing Flash on Android devices as well as an Android tablet device much like the iPad. While it is no secret that Google’s next version of Android, 2.2, will support Flash it was a big surprise to everybody that there was an Android-based tablet. The fact that it can support Flash already gives us reason to believe it will be able to give the iPad a run for its’ money. According to the Zedomax blog Adobe says that there will be several Android Tablets available by the end of this year, although names of companies working on building the tablets weren’t released. Adobe Air, also not supported by the iPad, runs flawlessly on the new Android devices, as well.

The option to have Flash will surely be a big advantage for tablets running Android since there are many web sites and applications, such as YouTube (which is owned by Google), which require Flash to work. You can check out videos of the Android tablet prototype on the Zedomax blog.

All I have left to say is this: With the promise of Flash-enabled tablets on the way, I’m glad I didn’t go out and spend hundreds of dollars on the iPad.

Simply search for the name of the show you are looking for, then click the “Show options” button above the results. From there you can narrow your search to videos and again narrow the results even further by Season and Episode!

This feature will probably seem new to most people, however Google wasn’t the first to come up with the idea. Clicker.com has been offering the same abilities for months. Clicker, a “TV Guide for television content online”, has indexed over 400,000 episodes from 7000 television shows for you to search from and they even index premium content from Netflix and Amazon.

Source

“With the advent of blogs and micro-blogs, there’s a constant online conversation about breaking news, people and places — some famous and some local. Tweets and other short-form updates create a history of commentary that can provide valuable insights into what’s happened and how people have reacted. We want to give you a way to search across this information and make it useful.

[...]

Starting today, you can zoom to any point in time and “replay” what people were saying publicly about a topic on Twitter. To try it out, click “Show options” on the search results page, then select “Updates.” The first page will show you the familiar latest and greatest short-form updates from a comprehensive set of sources, but now there’s a new chart at the top. In that chart, you can select the year, month or day, or click any point to view the tweets from that specific time period.”

As of right now you can search for tweets going back to February 11th, 2010, but Google tells us that pretty soon you’ll be able to search for anything all the way back to March 21st, 2006 when the first tweet went out.  My first search? Let’s replay the excitement from when Steven Stamkos scored his 50th goal for the Lightning .

Google Changes its Name

In an effort to win over Google and get their coveted new broadband internet technology the city of Topeka, Kansas changed its name to Google for a month. On April 1st internet users were probably a little confused when they visited their favorite search engine and saw “Topeka” in the middle of their screen. The April Fools prank was a response to Topeka’s name change, but according to Google is not an indication of what city will get their new high speed internet.

Ferret Powered Broadband

The guys at Telegraph Media Group reported that a new and unlikely delivery method was now being used to bring high speed internet to people living in rural areas. According to the article on their website “The animals have been used by Virgin Media for over a year to help lay cables for its broadband service”. Finally, a better way to close the digital divide!

Prescription Windshield

Finally the seeing impaired people of the world can drive without the hassle of wearing eyeglasses! A video popped up on April Fools Day touting the new and innovative prescription windshield that brings everything right into focus.

You Scream, I Scream, Lick Your Screen for Ice Cream

Ben & Jerry’s had one of the most original April Fools pranks this year with the world’s first virtual ice cream. Simply activate the ice cream on their web site and lick!

5. Google Trends

One of the brainchilds of Google engineer Artem Boytsov is Google Trends. Google Trends lets you look up what trends are happening on the web. In the screen-shot above you can see I compared the search terms “Google”, “Facebook”, “Myspace” and “Twitter” and Google Trends returned a nice graph displaying the search volume (on top) and news reference volume for each of the terms since 2004. You can filter the results to see a different time frame if you want. Google Trends also gives you charts showing where in the world the terms are being search for the most. This tool is great for finding the amount of interest in competing brands or figures in pop culture.

4. Google City Tours

Are you going on vacation? Maybe you’ve got a free day and want to do something new in your own city. Google City Tours suggests walking tours of a city based on a starting location of your choice. It finds nearby points of interest for your tour or you can create your own tours with “My Maps”. This is a great way to see hot spots around town without getting lost or wasting time walking aimlessly.

3. Google Audio Indexing

Yet another innovative and useful tool from the engineers at Google is Google Audio Indexing. With this tool you can search videos on Youtube for spoken words and Google will return videos with those words spoken in it. It uses speech recognition software to find out what is being said in each video. Google tells you how many mentions your search term gets in each video and, even more useful, Google  lets you jump right to the portion of the video where your search term is spoken.

2. Google Related Links

Since a big part of what we do is web design we thought it would be a good idea to include one of Google’s many web developing tools in this list. Google Related Links helps webmasters increase web page traffic within their sites by suggesting related pages and search terms in a widget right on your website. Just tell Google what page you want to put the widget on and it will automatically generate a list of similar pages within your site to help keep your visitors on your site.

1. Google Transit

Google Transit is one of those tools that is insanely helpful when you need to get around town. Just tell Google where you’re leaving from, where you’re headed, and what time you want to leave. Google will give you step-by-step directions, even on your phone, on how to use your city’s mass transit to get where you need to be. View station information and schedules and more. Google suggests multiple routes, tells you how much you’re going to spend on things like bus fares, and even tells you how much money you will save compared to driving.

There are a whole lot more tools Google has to offer and they come up with new and exciting projects all the time, so check out Google Labs regularly to see what is the latest and greatest out of the Google headquarters.

Chrome isn’t the only thing those geniuses over at Google can tout. Just yesterday Google had a small text ad on their home page for the Nexus One phone, the new Android phone from Google. The fact that Google can advertise their products for free on prime internet real estate exemplifies how powerful Google has become. Now with this phone out, as well as Motorola’s Droid, Google keeps furthering its reach into the cell phone market.

Finally, a poll by Mashable found that 70% of those who interacted with the poll prefer Google’s Gmail over Microsoft’s Outlook. Although that really doesn’t say much, especially considering the tech-savvy audience Mashable appeals to, it is just another statistic leaning the way of Google.

The question now is What will Google reach it’s hands into next? Share your thoughts.

If you don’t have an internet connection in your home or office, chances are you have it on your mobile phone. If all else fails you can probably walk a few steps to your nearest coffee shop or restaurant and access it for free there. So with all these avenues to  connect to the web and conduct a quick search to get the information you want at your fingertips – why bother paying the extra money to have just a fraction of that news printed on paper and delivered to you? Of course, some people enjoy  the smell of a freshly printed newspaper, the daily ritual of senjoying a cup o’ joe while enjoying the feeling of having the news physically there in their hands and not having to stare at a flickering computer screen.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt said, Google Inc (GOOG.O) is not to blame for the news industry’s problems but is committed to playing a role in helping struggling publishers survive the transition to the online age (source). “With dwindling revenue and diminished resources, frustrated newspaper executives are looking for someone to blame…Much of their anger is currently directed at Google, whom many executives view as getting all the benefit from the business relationship without giving much in return…The facts, I believe, suggest otherwise.” he said.

Just a few days ago we were talking about a new feature on Bing, Microsoft’s search engine and Google’s biggest competitor, which integrates Facebook status updates into its search results. You didn’t expect the giant powerhouse AKA Google to just sit back and take a punch to the chin, did you?

In one swift motion Google pounced into the social search market by adding Google Social Search. The company announced that Google Labs’ new feature would be available starting Monday and would integrate things like Twitter updates and photos from Flickr into the bottom of search result pages. The results are pulled from social networks connected to users’ Google Profiles. The more connected you are, the more you can have your stuff shared in search results.

While more exact details of the what and how havn’t quite been answered yet, there is no question that search engines, and SEO, are changing drastically.