+1’s: the right recommendations right when you want them—in your search results

I can seldom judge the usefulness of a site just based on a list of returned results -- however -- I can often filter out junk (anything from experts-exchange for example). So it seems to me a -1 button would have been better. Not to mention less creepy than tracking sites I like based on my interaction with a search engine.

Better implementation - An in chrome button you can hit that -1 the current url. I'll never remember to +1 a site once I've clicked the link, but I do say WTF!?! once I'm there and I do want to sink the bad links w/o going back. Would be a cross-browser Addon.

More importantly, while having frequent minor upgrades on a wide variety of 'beta' software services gives some a feeling that 'nothing is ever finished,' it means that Google is not fighting for brand recognition with its products in most markets. Although there are several products, such as Sketchup, which are offered 'by Google' but have a separate brand, they're generally aimed at a small niche. Orkut is the only product I can think of that has a really large market (in Brazil) but is not obviously Google-branded in the way that Google Earth or Gmail are.

'Microsoft search' obviously wasn't working so they needed something different and settled on 'Bing!' - though they missed a trick by not using a variety of happy-sounding audio icons in the TV commercials and (optionally!) on the product itself. Intel's signature 'tune' has been a very successful element of their brand, and Microsoft had an opportunity to positively extend the host brand but instead opted to develop a new one in purely verbal terms. Their marketing team did a fairly good job - it could have become an embarrassing joke if they had not - but this year they're doing the same thing with the new slogan of 'to the cloud!' And of course, every 3-4 years they have to remind the general public that their computers are mostly running Windows.

You get the impression that Microsoft is vaguely embarrassed by its own name and its 1980s literalism, and so it hides behind a variety of hipper-sounding product offerings like an awkward parent at a youth club. Google is colorful and seemingly omnipresent, Apple is a healthy fruit with an iBrand, and IBM sounds so important that a quarter of the country probably thinks its part of the government. Yahoo...well, this says everything I feel about Yahoo's brand management: http://techcrunch.com/2008/08/25/yahoos-404-at-giants-stadiu... It's been there for years now, and I still snicker every single time I watch a Giants game. OK, only 1% of the public may be amused by such things, but the other 99% notice the reactions of the people who build/run/fix their computers, much as people listen to auto mechanics more closely than auto salesmen. that company is in dire, dire need of a brand makeover.

If people use this, I see how it could be useful.