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Started by VelMurugan, May 07, 2009, 03:37 PM

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VelMurugan

SpringSource brings in web management expertise

SpringSource, developer of the open source Spring Framework for Java application development, has bought open source web management vendor Hyperic.

The company said that it now offered a product set for powering the entire Java application lifecycle. Hyperic technology manages performance and availability of an application stack spanning from hardware and operating systems to virtual machines, web and application servers, and databases, SpringSource said.

"The acquisition of Hyperic enables SpringSource to provide a complete, proven suite of lean application infrastructure software products that enable enterprises to accelerate the build, run and manage application lifecycle within the data center, virtual, or cloud computing environments," Rod Johnson, SpringSource CEO, said in a statement released by the company.

"This is the marriage of two companies that share a common vision for the future of enterprise solutions and the application lifecycle. SpringSource is the default choice for many developers and IT architects creating Java applications and Hyperic is the default choice for many IT operations professionals that need to manage those applications," said Javier Soltero, formerly CEO of Hyperic and now CTO of management products at SpringSource.

SpringSource would not disclose how much it paid for Hyperic.

The company has been on somewhat of an acquisition binge. SpringSource acquired G2One, which specialised in Groovy and Grails application deployments, last November and Covalent Technologies, which provided services for Apache Software Foundation projects, in January 2008.

Source : techworld

VelMurugan

IBM buys Exeros for database analytics

IBM has bought the data discovery software assets of Exeros, and will use them to enhance the services offered by its business analytics consulting division, it has said.

Exeros makes software that can automate the search for relationships between different databases, something the company says is a prerequisite for successful data quality or data integration projects.

IBM plans to integrate the Exeros tools with other elements of its Information Management Software range, it said. That range includes software from Cognos, which IBM acquired for $5 billion (£3.3 billion) in November 2007.

The Exeros software can cut the cost of data warehousing and master data management, IBM said. Among the software's users will be consultants at IBM's Business Analytics and Optimization Services division, created last month following a reorganization of its Global Business Services consulting activities.

IBM did not disclose the terms of the acquisition.

Exeros, founded in 2002, is a privately held company funded by two venture capital firms, Globespan Capital Partners and Bay Partners, and by investment management company AllianceBernstein. Its CEO and cofounder, Piyush Gupta, is a former employee of IBM, where he helped develop an enterprise information integration tool called DataJoiner.

VelMurugan

UK firm splashes out to buy Borland and Compuware

One of the grandees of the IT industry for the past 30 years, Borland Software, has been acquired by British software company Micro Focus International, in a cash deal worth £50 million ($75 million).

At the same time, Micro Focus said it is also acquiring the application testing and automated software quality business of Compuware Corporation for £53 million ($80 million).

Micro Focus said the two deals would give it a leading market position in the testing and automation market.

Borland was founded way back in 1981 by three Danish citizens, but soon moved to the United States where it was headed up by the flamboyant Philippe Kahn, who led the company for most of the 1980s and 1990s.

Borland developed a series of well-regarded software development tools during its existence, and is probably most associated with Turbo Pascal, Quattro Pro (spreadsheet), and Paradox (database). The company was also known for acquiring Ashton-Tate back in September 1991, a deal that netted it the dBase and InterBase databases, and for a time Borland was counted as a serious rival to both Microsoft and Oracle.

But it soon found itself squeezed by its rivals and in 1998, Borland changed its name to Inprise Corporation in an effort to appeal to the enterprise applications development market. The idea was to integrate Borland's tools, Delphi, C++ Builder, and JBuilder with enterprise environment software. But the move backfired, and in January 2001, the Inprise name was abandoned and the company reverted to the "Borland" name once more.

In February 2006 Borland announced the divestiture of its IDE division, including Delphi, JBuilder, and InterBase. At the same time it announced the planned acquisition of Segue Software, a maker of software test and quality tools. The spinoff was called CodeGear.

From 2007, Borland concentrated on Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and in May 2008 it sold its CodeGear division to Embarcadero Technologies.

The deal to acquire Borland means that Micro Focus will expand its presence in the application testing market, where it already operates with its Data Express product.

"Micro Focus's proposed acquisition of Borland represents the next logical stage in Micro Focus's growth journey," said Stephen Kelly, CEO of Micro Focus, in a statement. "Our organic performance remains strong as reflected in our trading statement also released today, and this transaction will add new scale and breadth to further develop our customer proposition, in an attractive adjacent market to our existing business."

Newbury, Berkshire-based Micro Focus was founded back in the 1970s and is best known as a software provider that helps companies move older legacy software to more modern business systems.

The UK company is also acquiring the application testing and automated software quality business of Compuware for $80 million, again also in cash. Compuware made its name in the testing, development and management software for programs running on mainframe computer and client-server systems.

Micro Focus feels its products are "highly complementary to Micro Focus' core solutions as they address a logically adjacent portion of the software development and deployment value chain."

"Acquiring the Compuware Testing and ASQ business is a logical extension to our existing application management proposition, and we see strong growth potential in this market," said Kelly.

Both deals have been approved by the relevant boards, but still need shareholder and regulator approval. Micro Focus also said its group revenues for 2009 were expected to grow year on year by approximately 20 percent.

VelMurugan

AppZero moves apps virtualisation tools to Windows

AppZero has released a Windows version of its server application virtualisation tool. The company has stolen a march on  Microsoft with a technology designed to help users more easily move server applications between internal and cloud platforms.

AppZero 4.0 is part of small list of vendors offering application isolation and encapsulation technology, which separates the application from the underlying operating system.

Users can package the application with all its relevant parts and lift it off its existing underlying operating system and link it to a similar operating system running in the same or another environment.

Microsoft last week demonstrated similar technology it is working on, but it has not announced a ship date, what the software will be called or how it will be packaged as a product. AppZero (formerly Trigence) already has versions of its software for Linux and Solaris, but despite the 4.0 version number AppZero for Windows is the company's first support for the Microsoft platform.

With AppZero users create a Virtual Application Appliance (VAA) that basically includes all the software and configuration fields that make up the application and the associated data. The application can then be moved to another environment without the user having to write any code. The VAA contains nothing from the operating system so users don't have to consider Windows licensing issues.

The AppZero XML Creation Editor is used to build the VAA and a Snapshot tool, which helps create a template for creating a VAA.

What users end up with is a library of application appliances that can be deployed nearly on-demand.

"You have to see this in terms of IT shops moving toward the cloud," says Rachel Chalmers, an analyst at The 451 Group. She says IT directors are faced with departments that are comparing the weeks it typically takes for IT to get a server up and running internally to Amazon's EC2 cloud environment and looking at "five seconds and a credit card."

"That is one driver pushing IT directors to build cloud infrastructure internally, but they are also looking at being able to provision applications either to an internal server or with a cloud provider," Chalmers says.

That is where AppZero fits in along with similar competitors, such as rPath, Cohesive Flexible Technologies, Enomaly and Fast Scale Technology

"There is no move verb in application virtualisation infrastructure," says Greg O'Connor, president and CEO of AppZero.
AppZero 4.0 offers 64-bit infrastructure support for Windows 2003 and 2008 servers.

VelMurugan

Oracle upgrades BI offering

Oracle has launched Business Intelligence Applications Release 7.9.6, which includes improvements and integrations with other Oracle software, as well as a pair of new tools, Project Analytics and Loyalty Analytics.

The release adds a number of new human-resources dashboards, such as for talent management, recruiting and absenteeism. The vendor's procurement and spend-analytics BI module gets a number of updates, including a new employee-expenses dashboard and a "spend analyser."

In addition, Oracle has integrated its JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Financial Management application with its financial analytics BI software.

Meanwhile, the new Project Analytics module is aimed at governments, construction companies and services companies that want to analyse the costs of their projects. It includes a number of pre-built dashboards tuned for both private and public-sector organizations. Loyalty Analytics enables users to determine the success of marketing campaigns at both the customer and partner level.

Oracle's announcements reflect the fact that it's getting tougher for vendors to further evolve their underlying BI platform's capabilities, since the technologies have matured, according to Forrester Research analyst Boris Evelson.

"All the core functions have really been addressed," he said. "The real difference is in the applications."

The pre-built tooling in applications like Loyalty Analytics will likely have more appeal for smaller enterprises, which are interested in getting software up and running quickly or may not have a core competency in a particular area, Evelson said. A customer might say, "'We're a small bank, we know everything about banking, but not CRM. We're going to trust Oracle."

But large enterprises tend to shy away from such an approach, preferring to build out specialized BI applications themselves to gain a competitive advantage, he said. "There's no way anybody there is going to say, 'I'm going to trust Oracle to lead the way of how I should analyze my customers.'"

Meanwhile, the new project-analytics module could prove attractive to companies as the world attempts to emerge from an economic recession and government stimulus spending ramps up infrastructure projects and related activities.

There have always been plenty of choices for project portfolio management software, including the technology Oracle acquired last year by buying Primavera. But there is probably room in the market for advanced analytics that ride on top of such applications, Evelson said.

VelMurugan

Threading to boost Firefox on multi-core chips

Mozilla's developers have announced plans to add application multi-threading to Firefox over the next two years, a feature already partially enabled in its main rivals, IE8 and Google Chrome.

As well as allowing the software to take advantage of multi-core microprocessors to boost responsiveness, the enhancement would also improve browser stability, the company said in a news blog on the subject.

The unnamed project will happen in several phases, with the phase one 'bootstrap' due to complete by the middle of this July. Further phases will add and debug more complex elements of the new browser, with phase two due to complete by November.

No timescale is given for the phases beyond that point in time, which suggests that multi-threading Firefox could turn out to be a project that takes well in 2010 to even near completion.

The goal is to end up with a browser capable of running each tab as an independent process, which would stop a hang in one from crashing the whole program, as would currently be the case. "Security sandboxing will be covered in a later phase," notes the blog.

Other uncertainties include whether Mozilla will start using the open source networking stack taken from Chromium - also used by Google's Chrome browser - in place of Mozilla's own Necko.

"There have been mutterings about taking the chromium network stack wholesale (replacing necko, basically). This may or may not be the fastest path to success: it really depends on how hard it is to map the APIs together and how much we're willing to change callers versus re-implementing the XPCOM API on top of the chromium stack....needs discussion and a decision within a month or so. If we take chromium networking, we should probably do it on Mozilla-central in parallel with phase I, says a wry note by the project developers.

Mozilla's problem is that its main rivals Internet Explorer 8, and Google's Chrome, are ahead of it in the multi-threading stakes, both of which implemented tab threading. As some developers have pointed out, this architecture can, in certain circumstances, be less efficient when working on less capable processors. Quad core processors, for instance, will be the exception rather than the rule for at least another year.

VelMurugan

Chrome jumps after Google push

New web usage figures show that Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) once again fell to a new market share low last month, and even more alarming for Redmond, the browser's rate of decline means that it will slip to less than 50 percent market share in 2011.

IE lost 0.7 of a percentage point to end April with a 66.1 percent share of the browser market, another new low as pegged by metrics vendor Net Applications, which started tracking browsers in 2005.

As in March, the April gains by IE8, which launched that month, were not enough to stem the slide of the browser's overall share. While IE8 boosted its share by 2.2 percentage points, IE7 lost 2 points and the creaking IE6 lost 0.8 percent point.

"Is there an end to IE's decline?" asked Vince Vizzaccaro, executive vice president of marketing for Net Applications. "I don't know. I never thought they would drop this far."

Although IE8's gains originally came almost entirely at the expense of IE7, Net Applications' April data shows that IE6 users are also starting to upgrade: The older browser's 0.8 percentage point loss last month was higher than the 0.6 point drop the month before.

Microsoft recently started offering IE8 to IE6 and IE7 users via Automatic Updates, a factor that may have played a part in the accelerated decline of the older browsers and the uptick in IE8.

As usual, rival browsers picked up IE's losses. Mozilla's Firefox, for example, increased its share by 0.4 of a percentage point to end the month with 22.5 percent, while Google's Chrome climbed 0.2 of a percentage point to 1.4 percent. Apple's Safari, however, missed out on the action, and slipped 0.02 of a percentage point to 8.2 percent.

"IE had such a huge market advantage, and Firefox, in a competitive environment, continues to gain share," said Vizzaccaro. "We've seen some seasonal flux [to Firefox's share], but now it's just continuing to go on an upward trend."

Over the last 12 months, Firefox has gained an average 0.4 percentage point per month; if it keeps to that trajectory, the open-source browser will crack its next major milestone of 25 percent by the end of November.

IE, on the other hand, has been losing an average of 0.7 percentage point per month over the last 12 months. Unless Microsoft is able to stanch the bleeding, IE will lose its majority status and fall under 50 percent sometime in May 2011.

Google's Chrome also caught Vizzaccaro's eye. The browser, which remains a Windows-only application, had its biggest increase since last December. "We've seen Google putting ads [for Chrome] on its search page, and this play on marketing has given it a nice little bump," said Vizzaccaro. "But I don't know if that kind of increase is sustainable."

What would make Chrome a stronger rival for the likes of Firefox and Safari, he said, is if Google struck deals with computer makers to install the browser on new PCs. "That would make a huge impact," Vizzaccaro predicted. "Until that happens, though, I don't see Chrome making any big gains."

Net Applications measures browser usage by tracking the computers that visit the 40,000-some sites it monitors for its clients. The April browser data is available on its website.

VelMurugan

Open Text snaps up content management rival

Open Text is to acquire fellow content management tools provider Vignette in a deal expected to be finalised in the second half of this year.

The combined company will make Open Text, already one of the content management sector's few large independent companies, even bigger. Canadian company Open Text has 46,000 customers and reported $725 million in revenue for 2008.

Its pending deal to buy Vignette follows the acquisition last year of data capture vendor Captaris for $131 million, and falls in line with a general trend toward consolidation in the content management arena. Autonomy recently bought Open Text's rival Interwoven.

Vignette has struggled in recent years, leading to widespread speculation it was ripe for a sale.

Now that one is about to occur, significant questions loom about Vignette's fate, since there is "a tremendous amount of overlap" between its products and Open Text's, said 451 Group analyst Kathleen Reidy.

However, Vignette's WCM software is "a little higher-end" than Open Text's, she added. "You could make the argument that Vignette will become the more enterprise WCM option."

Meanwhile, the WCM market's dynamics are changing, according to Reidy. "Just because the bigger players have been bought there's no shortage of new vendors out there," she said.

The sort of million-dollar deals for large enterprises that Vignette and Interwoven have typically done only represent a small percentage of the demand for WCM software, leaving plenty of room for alternatives, from commercial open-source vendors like Alfresco to various SaaS (software-as-a-service) options, she said.

And while core WCM technology, such as document repositories, is fairly commoditized, there remains room for innovation, such as making tools easier for non-technical workers to use, Reidy added.

"Web content management's point was to remove IT bottlenecks from Web publishing. ... But the amount of development involvement in changing [site] layout or putting up content has always remained higher than it was supposed to be," she said.

VelMurugan

JavaScript hampers servers says web guru

Developers should reduce the amount of JavaScript on their sites if they want to improve performance according to one web expert. And some leading websites, including Apple.com and Wikepedia, score poorly on performance and should be overhauled said Steve Souders, Google chief performance engineer.

Souders, who was speaking at Microsoft developer conference TechEd, said that while developers were aware of the need to improve performance, they were tackling the wrong things. They were cutting the number of requests to the web server; shrinking JPEG sizes or employing a content delivery network vendor like Akamai Technologies, all of which had minimal effect said Souders.

"We used to tear apart the Apache [web server] code to figure out what Yahoo was doing," said Souders, who was previously at Yahoo.

But after performing a detailed analysis, Souders discovered something startling: Only 10 percent to 20 percent of the time it took to load a website could be attributed to the web server.

In fact, said Souders, the offending code was usually JavaScript, not because JavaScript files on a web page are large but because of the way browsers treat JavaScript.

"The first generation of web browsers decided that because they had to execute all of the JavaScript files in order, we might as well execute one while stopping all other downloads," he said, as well as preventing any other code from being executed or rendered.

That may have made sense a decade ago, but in today's era of PCs powered by dual and quad-core CPUs, it doesn't. And the cost of the delays created can be high.

Google has found that a 500-millisecond delay results in a 20 percent decrease in web traffic, while Amazon has seen a 100 millisecond delay cutting its sales by 1 percent, Souders said.

New and upcoming web browsers will be able to download JavaScript files while executing them. Internet Explorer 8, released last month, has this feature, Souders said, as do the upcoming Firefox 3.5 and Chrome 2.0.

Barring an overhaul of the JavaScript, the boost will stay small, Souders said.

To fix, Souders first recommends a free tool he created called Yslow that analyses and then grades how well a web page is designed for maximum speed. Originally developed for Internet Explorer, Yslow 2.0 is an add-on for Firefox integrated with the Firebug web development tool.

Using YSlow, users can see how much JavaScript is being loaded in the beginning, creating a bottleneck. Users can then split the JavaScript files, loading only the necessary JavaScript at the start and leaving the rest at the end after the words and images are already up, he said.

Yslow analyses 22 criteria in all. It is unsparing in its ranking. Popular Web sites such as Apple.com, ESPN.com and Wikipedia, received a "C" from Yslow, while other popular sites earned an even worse "E."

"When I look at it, I feel like the teacher who hands out very severe grades," he said. Search engines with minimal content on the page, such as Google and Microsoft's Live.com, are among the rare sites that get an A from Yslow.

There are other tools besides Yslow for diagnosing performance bottlenecks. Microsoft offers the Visual Roundtrip Organizer, while AOL developed a now-open-source tool called PageTest.

All these tools judge website performance by a set of rules, though none of them matches YSlow's 22 criteria.

Souders' Powerpoint presentation is available online.

VelMurugan

Pirates eat into UK software sales

Pirate software on PCs in the UK is breaking new records. The use of unlicensed software last year surged to 27 percent of all software, translating to around £1.49 billion in lost sales, according to the sixth annual global IDC software piracy study.

Worldwide, software piracy climbed to a record high, making up 41 percent of all software installed on the planet, according to the IDC report released today by the Business Software Alliance (BSA).

The value of unlicensed and pirated software worldwide could be as high as the US$50 (£33) billion, and cost another $150 (£99.3) billion to $200 (£132.4) billion in value-add technology services, the study of 110 countries revealed.

"Much more needs to be done by the industry and the government to warn businesses and consumers of the risks associated with under-licensed software, from a legal, financial and operational point of view," said Alyna Cope, spokeswoman for the BSA UK country committee.

"Software piracy hurts our knowledge-based economy by weakening the very foundation on which it is built - respect for intellectual property and innovation."

Software piracy also hurts the wider economy, according to BSA and IDC. An IDC study released in January 2008 found that reducing software piracy by 10 percentage points over four years could generate more than £6 billion in economic growth and increase tax revenues by £1.47 billion to support local programmes and services.

British Chambers of Commerce senior policy adviser, Kevin Hoctor, said piracy threatens the digital community jobs and revenue.

"To realise the Government's Digital Britain ambition, our digital and communications industries must have the protection they need in terms of copyright and piracy," said Hoctor. "In the current economic climate the impact effective enforcement could have on employment and revenue should not be ignored".

The BSA took the opportunity to issue recommendations for the UK government, such as developing strong enforcement mechanisms and tougher anti-piracy laws.

Other recommendations included dedicating significant resources to the problem, including national IP enforcement units, cross-border cooperation, and training for local officers and judiciary officials.

Finally, the government could lead by example by implementing software management policies and requiring the public sector to use only legitimate software.

But CIOs are finding it hard to cope with the "sheer complexity" of licensing schemes, according to Matt Fisher, director at Frontrange Solutions.

"Licensing schemes have become increasingly unwieldy and difficult to manage, meaning that, despite their best efforts, organisations are struggling to get a grip on their licensing software," said Fisher.

"Coupled with the fact that there is no commonality across differing vendors' schemes has made life considerably more difficult and likely brought unintentional misuse of software," he added.

Fisher advised CIOs to implement a standard licensing practice to eliminate complexity. "The good news for organisations is that there is already a mature and professional software asset management community in place to help them address and manage licensing. Working with this community would be a step towards halting the growing software piracy problem," he said.

VelMurugan

Microsoft to demo PHP kit for the cloud

Microsoft is set to demonstrate a the PHP SDK for Windows Azure in a move to boost its Azure cloud platform

The SDK features development by RealDolmen, which intends to provide high-level abstractions for PHP developers to interoperate with Azure.

"The PHP SDK for Windows Azure focuses on REST and provides PHP classes for Windows Azure blobs, tables and queue, helper classes for HTTP transport, AuthN/AuthZ, REST, and error management as well as manageability, instrumentation, and logging support," said Peter Galli, senior open source community manager at Microsoft, in a blog post.

Microsoft's Vijay Rajagopalan, principal architect, also will reveal the launch of projects that offer samples and a toolkit for PHP developers to include Silverlight controls, Microsoft Virtual Earth maps, and Internet Explorer Webslices and Accelerators in PHP applications.

The projects are available on the CodePlex open source project site under a BSD licence. A technology preview of PHP SDK for Windows Azure will be offered under a BSD license as well. A functionally complete version of the SDK is due this autumn.

Microsoft at the Mix 2009 conference in Las Vegas in March announced inclusion of FastCGI in the Windows Azure hosting environment, enabling developers to run web applications on Azure that were written in third-party programming languages likes PHP.

VelMurugan

Intel launches SMB software store in UK

After years spent trying to find a higher-profile role for its Software and Services group, Intel has come up with an interesting new tack - use the division to launch an online software shop for SMBs.

The chip maker is calling its latest software project in Europe the Intel Business Exchange Software Download Store (Intel BX), and has signed up 130 software companies to sell their wares through the web portal from this week, with plans to expand this several fold during the course of this year.

The site has been up and running for a year in the US , but is now being expanded to cover the UK, Germany and France.

Software currently available for download covers a range of categories the company thinks will appeal specifically to the small and medium enterprise, including security, reporting and database management, utilities and network management tools, accounting - and so the list goes on.

Indeed, the store looks much like any other newly-built software store, so what is Intel offering that the usual software channels can't? And why would established ISVs (independent software vendors) sign up to sell through Intel when they already have many channels though which to distribute their products?

According to Intel's EMEA director of developer relations division, Wolfgang Petersen, software is still largely sold to appeal either to the single user or large corporates. Intel's BX would give smaller UK and European companies a one-stop shop to buy products specifically suitable for SMB use.

The store would also seek to undercut prices compared to rival channels. "We will compete from a pricing point of view," he promised.

Customers would be able to buy safe in the knowledge that the products had been carefully assessed, something that was not always true of conventional software channels. "Intel is a big brand and people do trust Intel. If Intel trusts these products they must be OK," he said, describing the thought process of the customer.

One interesting idea behind the store is that Intel hopes to use it to offer a retail channel to very small software outfits that might lack the marketing nous to sell their own products to a sophisticated audience. These products might be innovative but lack brand presence and trust without the backing of a large company such as Intel.

"It is also great for the ISV community - providing a channel to market for some of the small and highly innovative software companies who might otherwise struggle to get their products in front of such a broad audience," he said.

Key, though will be Intel's ability to attract the better-known ISVs. A store without established brands could be no store at all.

Petersen said that a notable brand in the security space form the European launch would be Kaspersky Lab. Likewise, Symantec's products were available from the US store and he hoped that they would become available in the UK, German and French stores later this year.

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"We are trying to have 300 to 400 products by the end of the year," Petersen said. Companies of the ilk of Symantec already have numerous ways to distribute their software, he admitted, but the power of the Intel name coupled to the SMB focus would sway them in the end.

Big brand absentees still include security company McAfee and, inevitably, Microsoft, which sees itself as 'The Beatles of software', able to trade without the help of third parties.

And what does Intel get out of this arrangement? It gets a cut of every download, but perhaps its motivations go deeper still. One of the problems the chip giant has right now is convincing customers that there is a point to buying its newer generation of multi-core chips. Getting the best out of these depends to a large extent on running software threaded to execute across several cores, which few programs do today. In Petersen's ambition, the Intel BX would also help people find these programs as they appeared, bolstering the company's hardware business.

A full list of the ISVs offering products through the UK store can be found here. The company is offering UK downloaders a launch incentive of 10 percent off prices until 30 June.

VelMurugan

Google shows off pepped-up search

Google has announced a list of new search technologies geared to help users 'slice and dice' their Google search results, along with a tool to help cull information instead of web pages.

The news came today during an event dubbed 'Searchology', which was held at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California and streamed across the Internet. A spokesman for Google called the event a "state of the union for search."

"As people get more sophisticated at search they are coming to us to solve more complex problems," said Marissa Mayer, vice president of Google's Search Products, in a blog post.

"To stay on top of this, we have spent a lot of time looking at how we can better understand the wide range of information that's on the web and quickly connect people to just the nuggets they need at that moment. We want to help our users find more useful information, and do more useful things with it."

One of the features announced today is called Search Options, which is a collection of tools designed to let users better "slice and dice" their search results so they can manipulate the information they're getting. Mayer said the tools should help people who struggle with what exactly what query they should pose.

"Let's say you are looking for forum discussions about a specific product, but are most interested in ones that have taken place more recently," she wrote. "That's not an easy query to formulate, but with Search Options you can search for the product's name, apply the option to filter out anything but forum sites, and then apply an option to only see results from the past week."

One Search Options tool is geared to give users more information when they do a search. For instance, instead of just getting results in text form, they could have the search engine return images as well as text.

In that same vein, Google also is adding more information to its results snippets - those little pieces of text that tell you about the site that's been pulled up. If you're searching for a hotel, for example, the snippet won't just tell you the name of the hotel and where it is - now it could tell you its price range, number of stars in customer reviews and the number of reviews listed.

Google can't make that information available on its own, though. The company is asking website authors to add microformats or RDFa standards, both of which are geared to allow information, like contact data, to be automatically processed by software.

The company also showed off a preview of a tool they're calling Google Squared.

This tool, unlike most search engines, doesn't pull up web pages that hold information about the search query. Instead, it pulls up information from different sites and presents it in an organised manner.

Google Squared is set to be released to users as part of its Google Labs program later this month.

"These features really explore search from a broad and entirely new perspective," said Mayer. "Because we realise that when you can't quickly find just the exact information or content you need or want, it's our problem, not yours."