Google upgrades search engine: search by image, voice on PC

  

Google makes one of the world's leading mobile operating systems. It does e-mail and an office suite and photo sharing and Internet phone service, and does them all well. It's even getting into solar power and is trying to invent the self-driving car. But for all its far-flung ambition, the company isn't synonymous with many things. It's synonymous with one thing: its namesake search engine, the business that started it all.

Google Voice Search, a technology which was pioneered on Google’s mobile products will now be incorporated into the search engine giant’s desktop search page. Users will now be able to tell their browser what they’re looking for, simply by speaking into their computer’s microphone.
Google said that over the past year, Voice Search traffic has grown six-fold, and that every day, people speak more than two years worth of speech into the system.

Microsoft Issues Updates for Office 2011, 2008, and 2004

  

Microsoft yesterday released several updates for users of its Office for Mac productivity suites, bringing security and stability improvements to Office 2011, 2008, and 2004, as well as a pair of ancillary updates.

- Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 14.1.2 Update   (108.9 MB):
Improvements   include security fixes and several stability and reliability improvements for Outlook and Word.
 Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac 12.3.0 Update   (333.0 MB) 
Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac 11.6.4 Update   (13.0 MB): Improvements appear to be limited to security fixes.

Additional details on the security fixes, which address as many as eight vulnerabilities in Excel depending on Office version, are available in a Microsoft security bulletin  .

 Open XML File Format Converter for Mac 1.2.0   (45.0 MB)
Microsoft Entourage 2008 for Mac, Web Services Edition   (64.0 MB):
These updates appear to primarily provide compatibility with the updated Office for Mac versions.