improves

The global mobile phone market saw another quarter of year-over-year decline in the second quarter of 2009, shipping a total of 269.6 million units, down 10.8 percent from 302.2 million units in 2Q08, according to IDC. The second quarter results are an improvement from the 17.2 percent decrease in the first quarter, but challenges from the economic crisis remain a factor to watch.

Google is adding a good deal of the functionality from Google maps to Google Maps for Mobile. This includes the ability to access and interact with different layers like Traffic, My Maps, and Search layers at the same time.

Google is now showing images in universal search results for location queries. They have shown maps for some time, but the addition of images enriches the results that much more.

Last year, Google began crawling and indexing Flash content, but now Google has announced that it can also index external resource loading. In other words, Google can index external content that loads within an SWF file, and associate it with that file, so that it will appear in search results. For example, a site that loads something like this in Flash: ..might appear in a Google SERP like this:

Back in November Google introduced a new keyword tool called simply Search-based Keyword Tool that enables paid search advertisers to see what keywords they may be missing out on based on searches that are leading to your site. Today Google has announced wider availability and some improvements to the tool.

Hulu announced some improvements to its search functionality today. For one, they have added some shortcuts to the autocomplete feature. Previously, the autocomplete suggestions would just take a user to the regular search results, but now, the shortcuts offer other options like going straight to the latest episode (for current shows), or the show page (for all shows).

Google has announced a couple new features for Gmail. They're almost cranking out too many to keep up with aren't they?

Searching online is better than reading books for increasing the brainpower of middle-aged and older adults, new research indicates.A University of California Los Angles team of scientists found searching on the Internet stimulates parts of the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning.The findings come from a study of 24 volunteers aged 55 to 76 who were asked to either search online or read while their brains were scanned using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).