Google makes mobile search suggestions

Google continues to smile on iPhone and Android users. On Thursday, the search giant rolled out some localization improvements for US searchers.

Though Bostonians are clearly a museum-minded folk, San Franciscans seem to be able to juggle both museums and Muse lyrics.(Credit: Google)

Type a query into Google.com from either an Android device or the iPhone and Google will now spit out results based on your current or previously logged location. Search "muse" as Google did in its side-by-side screenshots above and you'll see the most-often-sought terms in your area.

Hence, it isn't exactly that Google has made its search suggestions any better at anticipating your intended query. More accurately, Google is relying on the hive mind to contextualize location-based searches.

Based on Google's test, localized search suggestions will work best for businesses, and maybe the odd search for British rock bands.

To make sure you get the full impact, go into the Google.com home page settings from your mobile browser and turn on "save recent locations" and "allow use of device location."

Google rules search in December, Bing drops

Google continued to dominate the search market in December, trailed by Yahoo and Microsoft, according to media research firm Nielsen.

According to Nielsen's December US Search Rankings, released on Wednesday, Web users queried search engines more than 9.9 billion times in December. Google accommodated almost 6.7 billion queries, capturing a 67.3 percent share of the month's searches.

Yahoo placed second in Nielsen's December search rankings. It was queried more than 1.4 billion times, tallying 14.4 percent market share. Microsoft's Bing, which garnered 986 million queries, captured 9.9 percent market share, according to Nielsen. Ask.com, My Web search, and Comcast search followed, with 1.7 percent, 1.0 percent, and 0.5 percent market share, respectively.

Google's lead over the competition grew in December from November. The company's November market share was 65.4 percent, while Yahoo's search share in November was 15.3 percent. It's also worth noting that Bing dropped significantly in December from its 10.7 percent market share in November.

WebGL Demo

WebGL is a binding of OpenGL ES 2.0 for Javascript. It lets web pages do fast 3D graphics in the browser. The spec is still a work-in-progress, and support is only starting to appear in browsers. None of the regular releases support it yet, so you may need a nightly build.

Mozilla Minefield For WebGL:
Firefox nightly builds support WebGL. You can download those here

However, you need to turn on WebGL manually in the configuration. Type about:config in the address bar, then search for "webgl" and change the value of webgl.enabled_for_all_sites to true.