Google System: January 2012

Friday 27 January 2012

Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously

"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is a sentence composed by Noam Chomsky in 1957 as an example of a sentence whose grammar is correct but whose meaning is nonsensical, however some might argue that Chomsky simply wasn't imaginative enough to put the sentence into a context which would give it meaning. It was used to show inadequacy of the then-popular probabilistic models of grammar, and the need for more structured models.

Chomsky wanted a model with rules and representations, a formal way to describe a language, and imposed his views. But it looks like green ideas do sleep furiously and when they wake up, grow furiously. Speech recognition system started to use probabilistic approaches to make the distinction between similar-sounding words or phrases. And Google uses this for its machine translation:

Most state-of-the-art commercial machine translation systems in use today have been developed using a rules-based approach and require a lot of work by linguists to define vocabularies and grammars.

Several research systems, including ours, take a different approach: we feed the computer with billions of words of text, both monolingual text in the target language, and aligned text consisting of examples of human translations between the languages. We then apply statistical learning techniques to build a translation model.

An easy-to-understand explanation of the system is given by David Yarowsky:

Say you want to teach a computer how to translate Chinese: You give the computer 100,000 sentences in English and the same 100,000 sentences in Chinese and run a program that can figure out which words go to which words. If in 2,000 sentences you have the word Washington, and in about the same number of sentences you have the word Huashengdun, and they occur in the same place in the sentence, these words are likely translations.

So far, Google has released statistical machine translation systems for English <-> Chinese and English <-> Arabic, but more languages should be available soon.

Hide a Site in Google Page Creator

If you want to create pages or edit them, without anyone even suspecting you have a site at Google Page Creator, you have to go to "Site settings" and check "Hide this site". This way, none of your pages will be visible until you uncheck that option.

It's also a good replacement for "Delete this site", because your uploaded files will be unavailable too.

You can create four more sites, using one account. This feature was initially experimental, then it wasn't available, and now it's back.

Secret Google JSON API

Google already offers feeds for Google News, Blog Search, Google Video, so you can use the search results in your applications or sites. There's also a Google API for web search that uses SOAP, but it's limited to 1000 queries per day.

For the first time, Google offers a new kind of API, unified for web search, image search, blog search and video search. The API uses JSON, so creating applications in JavaScript is easy. You must know that this API is unofficial, so the details can change.

Google JSON API is the foundation of SearchMash, an experimental site created by Google.

So how do you get the search results using this API? You just load this page:
http://www.searchmash.com/results/[query]. You just have to replace [query] with the actual query. If you use this format: http://www.searchmash.com/results/[query]?i=11&n=10, you request 10 search results, starting with the result number 11. The formats for image search, blog search and video search are:

http://www.searchmash.com/results/images:[query]
http://www.searchmash.com/results/blogs:[query]
http://www.searchmash.com/results/video:[query]

The JSON object you get from Google has a list of members that are very easy to understand, like: estimatedCount (the number of search results) or results, which is an array that describes the search results. To make cross-domain requests, you may need to create a web proxy, like shown here.

XSS Vulnerability in Google Search Appliance

Maluc found a cross-site scripting vulnerability in Google Search Appliance, a box that indexes documents from intranet and web sites. If you set the output encoding to UTF-7, the appliance doesn't validate the query and you can pass JavaScript.

Here's one example for Stanford's site that uses Google Search Appliance: stanford.edu.

Extra Storage for Picasa Web Albums

Chris L. found an option to get more storage in Picasa Web Albums.

* Up to 250GB of storage space in your Picasa Web Albums account.

* 12 months of hassle-free uploading and sharing
No complicated monthly bandwidth limits to keep track of.

Each year, we'll automatically renew your account. But don't worry, we'll always contact you with the option of cancelling before charging your credit card.

You can always use your free Picasa Web Albums account without upgrading.

Choose the amount of storage you want:

6.25GB ($25 per year)
25GB ($100 per year)
100GB ($300 per year)
250GB ($500 per year)

These options seem to be available only for the US users. On the other hand, Yahoo Photos, that has been recently updated, has free unlimited storage and more features than Picasa Web Albums (like tags, ratings, search, photo editing, private albums).

New in Page Creator: Photo Editing and Mobile Sites

When you add a photo to Google Page Creator, you'll see new options. You can now crop a photo, rotate it, change the brightness, mix it with another photo, change the contrast, reduce the colors or sharpen the photo. Basically you can apply simple effects from your browser. In the screenshot below, I've used the mash-up effect.

Now every page created in Google Page Creator can be easily accessed from a mobile phone, as Google redirects it to the transcoded version, the same way it does with the search results. Of course if you manage to enter the long URL correctly.

Also interesting:
Hide a site in Google Page Creator
Page Creator supports JavaScript

Faster, More Convenient Holidays With Google Checkout

I don't know why, but every news about Google Checkout has something ridiculous and earthly. But the latest news is just too much: "According to a new survey conducted by Harris Interactive and commissioned by Google Checkout, 40% of employed U.S. adults say they'll be doing at least some of their online holiday shopping from work this year, with 1 in 4 of those shoppers logging on to track down that perfect gift on Monday, November 27 (57% plan to shop during coffee and lunch breaks, while 34% will wait until the end of the workday)." So 10% of employed U.S. adults will try to find the perfect gift on Monday, November 27. And Google decided to launch a version of Checkout for holidays on Monday to capitalize on this. Buyers will get $10 off purchases of $30, or $20 off purchases of $50, while sellers get free processing. And everyone will be happy. Google executives thought this holidays are the last chance for Google Checkout and they'll do everything to make their product successful. "Trying to squeeze online holiday shopping into already busy schedules, shoppers will be looking for even more speed and convenience this year. And while there are many online shopping options to make finding the right gift relatively easy, online shoppers still have to deal with hassles, such as entering billing, shipping, and contact information multiple times as they move from site to site. Google Checkout eliminates an average of 15 steps from the online checkout process, in many cases making checking out as simple as entering a single login. This can save a lot of time for online shoppers, who will visit an average of 5.5 websites for holiday gifts this season, according to the survey." Squeeze, shoppers, hassle. More speed, convenience. Happy holidays!

Private Picasa Web Albums? Almost

I don't see why the concept of private album should be debatable. An album is private if it can be accessed by the author and a list of persons invited by the author.

Google decided to replace the concept of private album with unlisted album. Basically anyone can access that album if he knows its title and the Gmail address of the author or the URL of a public album. Google even suggested to choose strange names for the unlisted albums, so they're difficult to guess.

Now Google adds a parameter to the URL of an unlisted albums, like:
http://picasaweb.google.com/[gmail address]/AlbumName?authkey=blabla, and denies you access if you don't specify that authentication key. But there's still a problem: anyone who enters the complete address can see the album, the address can be indexed by search engines if someone links to it. So much for a private album.

More context:
Picasa Web Albums launch
No private albums
Authkey parameter makes its appearance

GOOG, More Than $500

CNN Money reports that for the first time, Google stock jumped above $500. "Google is up more than 20 percent this year, far outperforming fellow Internet giants Yahoo!, eBay and Amazon.com, whose shares have all slumped in 2006. Google went public in one of the most widely awaited IPOs in recent memory in August 2004 at $85 a share."

Google shares closed at $509.65.

The New Google Book Search

Google Book Search has a completely new interface that uses AJAX. Unlike before, you can read a book without clicking on the "next page" button. You can just use the scrollbar or the arrow keys, like in Adobe Reader. There are new options: zoom in, zoom out that increase / decrease the size of the text in a book, and there's even a full screen mode.

The table of contents is displayed in the right sidebar, so it's easy to go to another section. Searching inside a book is much faster, as the results are displayed without reloading the page.

Google offers for each book a dedicated page (like this one) where you can find the description, related books, references from books and scholarity works and some key terms that may help you discover other interesting books.

Now you can actually read books in Google Book Search (of course, if copyright laws allow you).

Google Puts Ads on the Map

There are new ads on Google Maps. Until now you could see sponsored links similar to the ones from web search, that sent you to a web page. But this new breed of ads is visible on the map and also has a distinctive icon. When clicked on the ad from the left sidebar, Google shows you information about the business and locates it on the map.

While they have different icons and there's a clear label for "sponsored links", organic search results and paid results are treated the same.

The Network Will Truly Be the Computer

Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, wrote some interesting things in The Economist, and most of his beliefs are reflected in Google's plans.

The internet is much more than a technology—it's a completely different way of organizing our lives. But its success is built on technological superiority: protocols and open standards that are ingenious in their simplicity. Time after time they have trounced rival telecommunications standards that made perfect commercial sense to companies but no practical sense to consumers. (...)

In 2007 we'll witness the increasing dominance of open internet standards. As web access via mobile phones grows, these standards will sweep aside the proprietary protocols promoted by individual companies striving for technical monopoly. Today's desktop software will be overtaken by internet-based services that enable users to choose the document formats, search tools and editing capability that best suit their needs. (...)

Today we live in the clouds. We're moving into the era of "cloud" computing, with information and applications hosted in the diffuse atmosphere of cyberspace rather than on specific processors and silicon racks. The network will truly be the computer. (...)

The lesson is compelling: put simple, intuitive technology in the hands of users and they will create content and share it. The fastest-growing parts of the internet all involve direct human interaction.

Although Google doesn't want to admit they want to beat Microsoft, they bet on Internet's power to beat the desktop monopoly.

Google Data API Supports JSON

Google Data API has support for JSON. For the moment, the JSON output can be used in Blogger Beta, Calendar, and Google Base. As you probably know, JSON is an easy way to obtain data, parse it and use it in your web application. And because JSON uses JavaScript, the output can be used directly in the code.

Examples and details for the implementation can be found in Google Data APIs Developer's Guide.

Related:
Unofficial JSON API for Google Search

Why Use Google Book Search?

Google Book Search is a service that lets you search more than 500 million pages of scanned books and the number grows every day. But why would you need that when you could go to a library? Well, sometimes it's hard to discover books only from the title and description and once you discovered them it's hard to actually find them in libraries and book stores.

1. You have a quote from a book, but you don't know where it's from.

2. You have a quote from a book, and you want to find the context. Maybe you want to read the poem that contains the famous "eternal sunshine of the spotless mind".

3. Maybe you have a book and you want to read again a certain fragment. But it's hard to find it, even though you remember some keywords.

4. Search your bookshelves. You can't restrict the search to your books, but if you enter something unique (name of a character), you'll discover the book.

5. Search within books published in a certain year, to see different perspectives on a subject.

6. Find references from other books to a certain book.

7. Search for an affirmation or the prefix of an affirmation ("Paris is the only city...").

8. Find contexts for rare or difficult words (ineluctable).

9. Read out-of-copyright books online or download them as PDF files.

10. Detect plagiarism, as this article shows.

Related:
Google's Digital Library of Alexandria
Download public domain books

Google Blog Search OneBox

Andy Boyd spotted a new Google OneBox, for blog search, at the bottom of the search result page. The integration seems to be just an experiment and it's visible only to a small number of users.

Google has recently added links to Blog Search in Google News.

Related:
OneBox results

PortableApps Suite

PortableApps Suite is a sort of Google Pack with portable versions for important software. You can get Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, Gaim, ClamWin Anti-virus and more in a single download and then copy these applications to your USB Flash drive. There's even a replacement for Start menu that lets you launch the applications.

Google Video Recommendations

Remember the gadget called "Interesting Items for You", that shows recommended web searches, pages and gadgets? Now you can also get video recommendations. And if you click on the thumbnail, a small video player will appear.

It would be nice to see recommendations in Google Video. People are always happy to see there's something just for them on a site.

The gadget for Google Personalized Homepage is available here.

Gaia - Open Source Google Earth

Gaia is "an attempt to reverse engineer Google Earth and implement its functionality in open, portable, customizable and [extensible] way".

Although the project is far from being completed, Gaia supports Keyhole authentication, 3D earth view, navigation, layers, NMEA GPS.

It will be interesting to watch this project and the added functionality. Google Earth is a proprietary application that runs on Windows, Mac and Linux, but lacks a real API. An open source alternative to Google Earth is NASA World Wind, which, ironically, is a Windows-only application.

{ Thank you, Artur Klauser. }

The Inefficiency of Feed Readers

Feed readers are a very inefficient way to keep up with the news. As most news sites and blogs have feeds, you might think you save time by adding your favorite sites to a feed reader. After all, you don't have to visit them ever again if they publish full feeds or only if you find some interesting if they publish partial feeds.

Redundancy
A feed reader shows you the latest information from each site you've subscribed to. Often, many blogs discuss a single news, but you don't have all these posts at a glance. A feed reader should cluster related posts.

Closed universe
You have a list of feeds, but you can't discover new feeds organically. Your list of feeds should automatically based on your preferences.

Lack of order
There's no hierarchy in your feed reader. You may have only 5 minutes to find out what's new, but you don't know where to start. A good feed reader should rank posts and prioritize breaking news.

Sense of guilt
If you don't open/visit a feed reader for a week, you may end up with hundreds of thousands of unread posts. You may want to mark all as read and move on, but what if you lose something important? A feed reader forces you to read (or scan) each and every post.

No related universes
Maybe there are other people with similar tastes that may help you improve your universe. A feed reader should automatically detect that and suggest posts that were considered interesting by your virtual group of anonymous friends.

In most of these affirmations, I've described a typical feed reader. If you know one that does all of these things (or only some of them), let us know.

Preview Gmail Conversations

Mihai Parparita from Google created a brilliant Greasemonkey script last year. The script lets you right-click on a Gmail conversation and get a preview in a bubble. This way, you can read your mails faster, especially if you only want to read some of them.

The new Yahoo Mail and Windows Live Mail have a reading pane where you can preview your messages, but that takes a lot of space. This solution has the advantage that it's available on demand.

I know this is far from being new, but I've always wanted this feature in Gmail.

Greasemonkey details:
You need to have Greasemonkey in Firefox or Trixie in IE
Then install the script

Thursday 26 January 2012

The Venice Project - the Future of TV?

Here's something interesting from TV's future: the Venice Project, "a secure P2P streaming technology that allows content owners to bring TV-quality video and ease of use to a TV-sized audience mixed with all the wonders of the Internet". The project tries to improve the TV experience by removing "artificial limits such as the number of channels that your cable or the airwaves can carry and then bringing it into the internet age; adding community features, interactivity".

The new service comes from the same people that created Kazaa and Skype, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis. For the moment, the Venice Project is in closed beta.

Janus explains: "We are trying to bring together the best of TV with the best of the Internet. We think TV is one of the most powerful, engaging mass medias of all time. People love TV, but they also hate TV. They love the (sometimes…) amazing storytelling, the richness, the quality itself. But they hate the linearness, the lack of choice, the lack of basic things like being able to search. And wholly missing is everything that we are now accustomed to from the Internet: tagging, recommendations, choice, and so on… TV is 507 channels and nothing on and we want to help change that!"

Google Video - Legal Problems in Europe

A video uploaded to Google Video, that showed four teenagers beating an autistic classmate, stirred a lot of comments in Italy, reports Reuters. Two Google employees are under investigation, as a result of a complaint filled by Vividown, an Italian association. "There was this very disturbing video which was posted on Google Video a couple of weeks ago and we promptly took it down when we were notified," said Rachel Whetstone, from Google.

"In the footage the boy is taunted, insulted and kicked by one student in particular as others look on. The location seems to be a classroom and the people visible appear to be about 16 years of age."

The phenomenon of bullying is not new, but these aggressive children who like to abuse weaker or powerless children find another cruel pleasure in showing the humiliation to the world. What nobody noticed is that Google is just an intermediary between those who upload videos and the viewers. It's difficult to check (manually or algorithmically) if a video violates copyright laws or other laws and regulations. And even if the video hadn't been hosted on Google Video, it would have been on other sites.

In France, the producer of a film titled "The World According to Bush" wants 500,000 euros from Google, as his film has been uploaded to Google Video without permission. Flach Film, the production house, has an interesting point of view: "Google had not acted as a simple host but as a fully responsible publisher". They probably think Google has uploaded their film on purpose.

These cases aren't unique. Last week, a Digg user found the animation film Cars available for free at Google Video.

Google Video and other online video sites have a simple policy: users are responsible for the uploaded videos and if content owners complain, they'll take down the videos.

Annotate Gmail Messages

Sometimes people forget to write descriptive subjects when they send mail. Sometimes they just drop some files there and send a message with a blank body. And if the attached files have names like 1.doc, your chances to find that mail later are almost null. Unfortunately, Gmail doesn't have an annotation feature that would let you insert some comments in a mail you've just received. To make sure you'll find that messages, you could send a reply to yourself that contains a small description of the attachments.

It's a small compensation until Gmail has an option to search the contents of attachments.

Lyrics Plugin

Good things are simple and come in small packages. If you wanted a plugin for your music player that finds and displays lyrics for your songs, Lyrics Plugin is a good answer. It's free, small (around 60 KB) and available for Winamp and Windows Media Player. You don't have to configure anything, the plugin works well out of the box.

The drawback of this plugin is that the lyrics database is not very big, so you may still find famous songs that don't have lyrics. But it's easy to add them.

What's the Best Embedded Video Player?

Life Goggles compares seven online video sites: YouTube, Google Video, MSN Soapbox, Revver, Blip.tv, MyHeavy and Vimeo. One video has been uploaded to all these sites and you can see the differences between embedded Flash players, the video quality and the information displayed next to the video.

The only players that offer some information about the video are: Soapbox, MyHeavy and Vimeo, while MyHeavy lets you rate the video from the player. If we look at the video quality, Soapbox and YouTube seem to be the best and also the fastest. Revver is the only service that shows ads at the end of the video and does a revenue split with the publisher. The easiest to share are the videos from Soapbox, MyHeavy and Vimeo, that lets you copy the code directly from the player. Google Video only wins at simplicity and design.

That means Microsoft's Soapbox has the best video player. For the moment, Soapbox is an invitation-only service.

Powerful Search Features in Netvibes

Here's an interesting new feature from Netvibes, probably the best personalized homepage. Now you can perform a search in all your feeds simultaneously. You can filter only recent content from your feeds, and also from other modules like Gmail or ToDo list. While searching your feeds is not something innovative, this feature is powerful because you can see each feed separately.

But the fun starts when you add search modules for web search, image search etc. If you click on Search, you'll get results from all the search engines and for all the search flavors simultaneously. To see the snippets, you have to hover over each search result, but that's the price you have to pay in order to see all this information in one place.

I know what Google would say: "but we have Google Ajax Search API", and it's very nice, but Netvibes' solution is simpler and works for almost any module.

The Full Google Master Plan 1.0

Google's Master Plan, from the lobby whiteboard, has been erased two months ago. Chris diBona says: "It was getting kind of crufty." The mix of serious plans with geek humor shows a lot about Google's culture. From hiring hardware engineer to redesigning TCP/IP and HTTP, from the space elevator to buying AOL, from Google OS to Noosphere, and finally to saving the world.

You can see the now-erased Master Plan in a series of photos taken by Chris diBona and licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license if you go to this album (you should click on magnify button to see each photo clearly). Or you could check the plan in one single high-resolution image from Undergoogle.com.

{ Rediscovered by Googlified. }

Google's Ranking Algorithm

Many people have tried to find how Google ranks web pages. While the algorithm is still secret and in continuous change, we know it uses more than 200 signals, one of the most important being PageRank.

As Google explains... "the heart of our software is PageRank, a system for ranking web pages developed by our founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University. And while we have dozens of engineers working to improve every aspect of Google on a daily basis, PageRank continues to provide the basis for all of our web search tools."

Compiling the opinions of webmasters, search engine optimizers and Google's explanation, Google Ranking Factors - SEO Checklist is a long list of positive and negative factors that may influence a page's ranking. While the list contains a lot of interesting observations and suggestions, you should take everything with a grain of salt.

Google Checkout for Holiday Shopping

The new Google Checkout site created for holidays is now live and includes a small selection of colorful, popular gifts. Google says thousands of merchants accept Google Checkout and, using this payment system, you'll eliminate 15 steps, on average. Another incentive is that you'll get $10 off purchases of $30, or $20 off purchases of $50 and more. You can also go to that site to make donations to charities: for the first donation of $30 or more, Google adds $10.

These days, Google Checkout is almost everywhere. Let's recap a list of places where you might see Checkout's shopping cart:

* searching for products, you'll see a Froogle OneBox and a link to products that can be bought using Checkout.

* you may see Google ads that have a small shopping cart.

* stores that accept Checkout and search results that can be bought from these stores are clearly marked at Froogle.

* many stores show a "Google Checkout" option.

Update: John Battelle had a bad experience with Google Checkout and took a closer look at the privacy policy.

Daylight Map

Daylight Map is a segmentation of the Earth using the day/night criteria. You can add places on the map and even change the date. The site also shows you the local time for each place you add on the Google map. If you bookmark a permalink to the current state, you can check it later. I think this presentation is more attractive than some random world clocks.

You probably know that if you search for [time in city-name], the major search engines show direct answers at the top of the page.

The $100 Laptop (Video)

One Laptop per Child is a non-profit organization that develops a $100 laptop, so that every child can have access to education and technology.

The actual specifications aren't very different from what Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of One Laptop per Child, envisioned. "The proposed $100 machine will be a Linux-based, with a dual-mode display—both a full-color, transmissive DVD mode, and a second display option that is black and white reflective and sunlight-readable at 3x the resolution. The laptop will have a 500MHz processor and 128MB of DRAM, with 500MB of Flash memory; it will not have a hard disk, but it will have four USB ports. The laptops will have wireless broadband that, among other things, allows them to work as a mesh network; each laptop will be able to talk to its nearest neighbors, creating an ad hoc, local area network. The laptops will use innovative power (including wind-up) and will be able to do most everything except store huge amounts of data."

The first machines have already been built, as you can see from these pictures. And here's a small demo that shows the user interface. Note that the operating system is emulated using VMware.

Yahoo Mail Maps Addresses

Yahoo Mail has become a little smarter. If you receive an email that includes addresses, Yahoo Mail recognizes them and underlines them, so you can easily view on a map, get directions or add to the address book. Yahoo Mail also underlines email addresses and phone numbers.

Yahoo has a very broad definition for addresses because even country names are underlined. But instead of the "add to Address Book" option, you'll see search results. If you don't like the new features, you can go to Mail Options and turn them off.

Gmail had this feature for a long time, but the integration is more subtle.

Related:
Refine search results in Yahoo Mail
The new Yahoo Mail, slowly released

Historical Trends in Google Finance

Google Finance shows historical data in the charts, so now it's easier to see the evolution of a stock. The earliest year available in Google Finance is 1970 (until this update it was 2001), while Yahoo Finance shows data from 1962.

Mobile YouTube

New York Times reports that a select number of YouTube videos will be available next month to Verizon Wireless subscribers. Despite the fact that the service won't be free, YouTube expects to be successful. Modern people don't have patience anymore and don't know how to enjoy the rare quiet moments, so they'll go to YouTube on their mobile phone to view some funny videos.

"Verizon Wireless and YouTube said the service would be available early next month. The companies would not discuss the financial terms of their deal but said Verizon would have the exclusive rights to distribute YouTube videos on mobile phones for a limited period of time."

If the experiment is successful, expect more carriers to make deals for mobile YouTube videos.

Related:
Almost a mobile Google Video
Google Video remote control

Opera Mini 3.0 Launched

The new version of the best free mobile browser is out. Opera Mini 3.0 includes a feed reader, makes it easier to share photos, has support for secure connections (SSL) and it's optimized for AJAX web pages. In addition to being slick, fast and easy to use.

You can test it using this Java emulator on your computer or just point your mobile phone to operamini.com to download it.

Opera Mini does a much better job than Google's transcoding and tries to keep the browsing experience intact, so you'll see a single page instead of multiple smaller pages, most of the time.

Offline Google

Felice M., from Italy, sent me this:

Last Wednesday we had, here in Italy, some big troubles connecting to Google services; we have been disconnected for two days. It was a problem with some routers of our Telecom Operator.

Reading local blogs, people underline that we are too dependent on web 2.0 services (..) In the end, we lend our data to Google in exchange for advertisements and world indexing (and marketing research etc.)

And this is telling me that we need a new feature in our Google Operating System: BACKUP.

Let's call it SNAP (snap.google.com); a service that will present me with all the Google Services I'm subscribed to (personal web site, notes, Gmail, Picasa Web, Docs & Spreadsheets, etc.), allowing me to choose the set of data I want to download to my PC for web backup purposes.

I would like to be able to choose data to download based at least on size and age, but a combination of a lot of other switches is, for sure, welcome.

The Failure of Google Answers

Google Answers, the service where you could ask questions in exchange of a sum of money, is now officially dead. "We considered many factors in reaching this difficult decision, and ultimately decided that the Answers community's limited size and other product considerations made it more effective for us to focus our efforts on other ways to help our users find information."

The problem? While Google Answers is almost invisible, Yahoo Answers is a big success, produces results for many search results page and has a big community. The big difference between the two services is that Yahoo Answers doesn't involve money: no one pays or gets paid. But, as I showed in Asking the Internet, "while Google's researchers give more detailed answers, Yahoo uses the advantage of having a strong community" and sorts the good answers.

So what happened to Google Answers? Let's see what Google Answers experts have to say:

"The quality of GA has become diluted with spam questions that are conceivably attempts from credit card thieves to verify the validity of stolen credit card numbers, webmasters realizing that a mention of their website in a GA question may boost their ranking in the search results (although this may have been resolved), and the disappearance of researchers."

"It would be nice to think that G-A has itself reduced the demand for search assistance by demonstrating how to search and how to use search features that are not immediately obvious to the layman/woman). But it could be that people have just become more savvy to the system by themselves."

"I think a big problem is that there is no obvious link to GA anymore from Google's homepage."

"Maybe it has something to do with the fact that they're not accepting new researchers? I answered two questions (correctly, I might add -- one $5 and one $20) before I realized that I had to be a "researcher" in order to submit an actual answer (as opposed to a comment) and get paid for it."

The problem seem to be that people don't want to pay some experts to get detailed answers, they just want simple answers from the man on the street. People don't have time to read books, newspapers with a lot of pages and long articles, but they're eager to watch reality shows. Listening people as clueless as you gives you a comforting feeling.

Major Update in Google Spreadsheets

Google Spreadsheets continues to be surprising and miles ahead of the other half of the package, Google Docs. This is probably the biggest update since the product has been launched.

Now you can publish a spreadsheets in every imaginable format (HTML, PDF, XLS, ODS, CSV) or as a feed. What's great is that the file is automatically updated, so you'll be almost certain that someone gets the latest version. You can also publish all the sheets or only some of them. But the coolest thing you can do is to embed a spreadsheet into your blog or site. The spreadsheet you can see here shows the top 20 queries for this blog's search from April 1st until yesterday.

Google Spreadsheets shows you all the revisions of a spreadsheets, so it's easy to go back to an earlier version. And there are two new functions that use information from the web:

* GoogleFinance("symbol", "attribute") that returns information about a stock. GoogleFinance("GOOG", "price") returns the current price for GOOG.

* GoogleLookup("entity", "attribute") that returns answers to simple questions like: population of Italy, Jay Leno's date of birth, that usually appear at the top of search results in Google.com. GoogleLookup("Italy", "population") will return the population of Italy.

Don't forget to place an equal in front of the function name.

Google Display Advertising Network

John Chow has been invited to join Google Display Advertising Network, a new CPM network that uses image and video ads.

"The Google Display Advertising Network was created so Google can go after Fortune 1000 companies, which buy advertising to build a brand more than to sell a product. (...) Every display network member negotiates a flat CPM rate with Google. The contracts are one year long and publishers have to guarantee Google that they will provide a minimum amount of ad inventory each month."

There's no mention of this network on Google's sites and the only way to become a part of it is to be invited by Google.

Pieces of Google

If you have a screenshot of a Google product taken in a special moment, if you found something interesting at Google.com and want to share it with the world, if you have a meaningful photo related to Google, post a link in the comments.

The best photos will be a part of an album that will be available at the end of the year.

* Don't submit copyrighted photos. Your photos will be licensed under Creative Commons ShareAlike license, unless you request otherwise. Please remove personal or sensitive information.

Update: 12 pieces of Google.

Google Spreadsheets Has an API

I told you Google Spreadsheets is way ahead of Google Docs. Now you can update your spreadsheets programmatically using Google Spreadsheets API. You can use it to get a list of spreadsheets for an account, to add or delete rows from a spreadsheets or to send simple SQL-like queries.

While the API isn't powerful enough to create desktop applications, as you can't manage spreadsheets, you could use the API to synchronize multiple spreadsheets or to import data from the web.

The API uses Google Data, "a simple standard protocol for reading and writing data on the web".

{ Found on Blogoscoped. }

November Recap: New Answers for Old Problems

Problem: Google Checkout is not successful.
Solution: Free processing and other incentives for holidays.

Problem: orkut doesn't do well in the US.
Solution: make it available to everyone and integrate Google Talk.

Problem: Gmail needs some Web 2.0 changes.
Solution: a new design for displaying messages.

Problem: Vista comes for Google Desktop too.
Solution: a transparent sidebar.

Problem: Windows Live Local has click-to-call.
Solution: add click-to-call to Google Maps.

Problem: it's hard to read books in Google Book Search.
Solution: new Adobe Reader-like design. Still few full-view books.

Problem: very few people use Google Answers.
Solution: delete Google Answers and come up with a better service. This time a free service.

Problem: people want charts in Google Spreadsheets.
Solution: new functions, easy-to-publish spreadsheets and an API. Also kill iRows.

Comment of the month (from Jon):
"This is sad. Yahoo Answers is pitiful. It should be renamed Yahoo Preteen Opinions, because that's the quality of "answers" one will find there. Unresearched, juvenile, illiterate, asinine, absurd, naïve, giggly, drivel is about the extent of what you will find there. Oh, but wait, at least they have disgusting, cutesy little avatars.

OK, maybe it's not all that bad, but Yahoo Answers does not even come close to the quality of the Google Answers website. The only reason it has succeeded is that there are far more people wishing to hear free, feel-good, life-affirming drivel (and see cutesy avatars), than those who will pay for well-researched answers (life-affirming or not). Just sickening."

No idea why, but people found my 10 tips for Google Image Search useful.

Google's Plans for 2007

Business 2.0 asked 50 people "how to succeed in 2007". Two of the key people at Google talked about company's intentions and plans for the year to come. The key words seem to be: simplicity, integration and personalization.

Sergey Brin:

"Simplicity is an important trend we are focused on. Technology has this way of becoming overly complex, but simplicity was one of the reasons that people gravitated to Google initially. This complexity is an issue that has to be solved for online technologies, for devices, for computers, and it's very difficult. Success will come from simplicity. Look at Apple, the success they have had, and what they are doing.

We are focused on features, not products. We eliminated future products that would have made the complexity problem worse. We don't want to have 20 different products that work in 20 different ways. I was getting lost at our site keeping track of everything. I would rather have a smaller set of products that have a shared set of features."

Eric Schmidt:

"Silicon Valley companies have a tendency to develop these systems that rely on complexity. But it produces things like the personal computer running Windows. Google from the beginning focused on the simple search box, the simple search page.

We have the tiger by the tail in that we have this huge phenomenon of personalization. Now we need to make it simpler for people. We are trying to shape the innovation going forward from here and get things more integrated, make Google more integrated. This is a big change in the way we run the company. In the past the philosophy has been "get this done, get it built, and get it out." But continuing that, we would end up with hundreds of products named X-Google, and people can only remember five products."

Google Good News

Hello and welcome to Google News. Here are the headlines:

* World Peace sparks outpourings of joy. Almost all of the human race were united today in a vast expression of joy in response to the newfound world peace.

* Golden Age back. People leave their doors unlocked. Kids play on the streets. Community spirit back. Crime rate down. Drugs non-existent. Hovis Van drives slowly down cobblestone streets.

* Scientists pack up: "Everything explained". Scientists all round the world today went home for a nice cup of tea after a revolutionary breakthrough explained everything. The new unified theory (NUT) unites science and religion, explains genetics, the origin of the universe, quantum phenomena, and provides the first instant cure for a hangover in human history.

* All music to be free. Record companies are to give away their music. Artists will give free concerts. iPODs to be given to every child at birth.

More details at David McCandless' Goodle Good News, a vision of Google News homepage that will cheer you up.

Weather Forecasts in Google Video

Google Video has partnered with AccuWeather.com and now includes weather forecasts for important cities in the US. Each video has 94 seconds and is updated daily, so you can bookmark its address.

Google also shows information about weather if you enter queries like [Tampa forecast] in the web search.

Google Answers Comeback

While everyone notices that Google Answers is dead, the reactions vary. Google Answers researchers want it back and sign petitions, Greg Linden thinks "it is great that Google is shutting down some of its failed experiments to try to keep their focus", and Yahoo celebrates.

"The project started with a rough idea from Larry Page, and a small 4-person team turned it into reality in less than 4 months." And that happened 4 years ago, in April 2002. Here's an explanation for launching the product, from that time:

There are a lot of people looking for information on the web but don't have the time to find the information," said Cindy McCaffrey, Google's Vice President, Corporate Marketing. "This program takes the burden of time away." McCaffrey also said the program should appeal to people who don't understand how to search, and would prefer to delegate the process to a professional.

So why shutting down Google Answers?

Over the past year, many of you have written to ask about the future of Google Answers. Today we can finally offer a definitive response: after four and a half years, we're closing up shop. We considered many factors in reaching this difficult decision, and ultimately decided that the Answers community's limited size and other product considerations made it more effective for us to focus our efforts on other ways to help our users find information.

The other efforts are:

* Google Co-op, that wants to annotate the web with the help of experts. Labels let you refine the search results and deal with a smaller set of authoritative sites.

* Google Q&A tries to crawl the web looking for facts like the population of Italy or the birthplace of George W. Bush. You can improve the service by adding your own facts using Subscribed Links.

* Google Base enables people to submit structured content and make it searchable online. Google also try to extract structured data from the web automatically.

Extraction of information from authoritative sites and building a huge database of connected information - this might the base of a new Google Answers.

Related:
The next step in search

Mercora IMRadio

"Mercora's mission is to catalog and organize the world's music and make it universally searchable and legally listenable." Sounds familiar?

Mercora is a radio network that lets everyone create a radio station and stream music in a P2P fashion (people can't download music). You can invite your friends and listen to their music, search for an artist and find all his albums or just choose a genre. Mercora lets you discover similar artists, read biographies and add comments.

The software, Mercora IMRadio, has a social side, as you can log in with the username/password for an instant messaging client (Google Talk included) and invite your contacts. You can create a profile, interact with other users, share photos and much more.

Regarding copyright, Mercora says: "you can webcast any music that you own legally. These recordings must originate from an authorized source (either created originally by the artist or record label that owns the copyright), and are not unlawful copies that have been downloaded illegally or obtained from an unauthorized third party."

Mercora IMRadio is a freeware for Windows 2000 and Windows XP. It uses an open source format for streaming (OGG Vorbis) and it depends a lot on network connection speed, so you may notice buffering problems.

Related stuff:
Vibe Streamer - personal MP3 server
Hype Machine - music search engine
Winamp moves to the web

Google Reader Notifier

So you use Google Reader and Firefox, but you don't want to visit reader.google.com from time to time to see what's new. Google Reader Notifier is a Firefox extension, developed by Mark D.B.D, that shows you how many new posts are in Google Reader. You can also see the number of unread items for each label and get alerts if there's something new. Of course, those numbers aren't very helpful because +100 can be anything from 101 to a googol or more.

For Mac users, there's an even better solution: a software called the same, that has sound alerts, shows the titles for the latest posts and sits nicely in the the menubar next to Google Notifier.

Google Updater Service

The latest version of Picasa* includes something very interesting: a Windows service called Google Updater, set to start automatically. The new service is connected to Picasa, which has new options. Before this version, Picasa had an option to check for new updates and let you manually install the new version.

There are also new keys in the Registry:

Although there's no information about the new service, it seems that Google wants to create a centralized update system, similar to Windows Updates, that will be installed with each Google software.

Google Updater is also a program that installs and updates the software for Google Pack, but this one has a GUI.

* Picasa 2.6, Build 35.83 (beta)
- changelog: mostly an update for Vista
- download here

Online File Convertors

Sometimes you receive a file in an exotic format and you don't have an appropriate viewer. Installing a software just to view a file is also not a bright idea. Or maybe you want to send your OGG podcast to your aunt, but she only has Windows Media Player, so you have to convert it to another format (MP3).

Media Convert lets you convert a huge number of formats: from images, audio files (you can also split the files), videos, archives and documents. You just upload a file, select the output format, select the options and get a link to the converted file. And if a file is on a website and you want to download it in a different format, Media Convert can also help you. While the usability of the site is not very good, it's a powerful alternative to software like Super.

Zamzar offers less formats, but it lets you convert up to 5 files at once. When converting more than one file, you can download all the files in a zip archive, like in Gmail. Unfortunately, you need to enter a mail address to get the converted files, but you can also use a disposable email address.

The Lost Google Tapes

This is a fascinating story. John F. Ince made an interview in January 2000 with Larry Page and Sergey Brin for the Upside magazine. Unfortunately, the editor didn't like the optimistic tone about a company with "no business model" and the interview has been diluted into a talk about search engines. Now the interview will be available for the first time, after seven years, on podventurezone.com, starting on December 11.

Here's a little bit more about the story and some highlights from the interview:

Chronicle podcast.

Embeddable Slideshow for Picasa Web Albums

If you use Picasa Web Albums and want to make your albums more visible, a good idea would be to include a small slideshow into your site. Unfortunately, Google didn't have time for that, so someone created a small JavaScript code that uses the yet unofficial JSON feeds. You just have to enter the RSS feed of a public album.

Although it's called Picasa Web Albums Widget Creator for Blogger in Beta (that's a really long name), it can be included anywhere. If you want to add it in your Blogger Beta blog as a widget, you just have to click on a button.

{ Via A Consuming Experience. }

Read News Inside Google Personalized Homepage

Personalized homepages are a good place to start your Internet browsing, but many people would like to do more inside this space: read their mails and send replies, read news, search and preview the search results.

Google OnScreen is a GreaseMonkey script that opens each external link from your Google Personalized Homepage in a small iframe inside the page, where you can read the news and then go back to your homepage easily.

Note that script only works for the feeds added to the homepage.

Privacy Stigma

AP has an article about Google and their efforts improve children's education using technology. Google tries to promote its software, especially collaborative tools like Google Docs&Spreadsheets, that could help students work faster and more efficiently. "Google views its educational initiative as a public service for teachers who often lack the money and expertise to introduce more technological tools into their classrooms."

But there are concerns, and the article mentions them. Repeatedly.

Even if Google stands by its promise to protect its users' information, there are no guarantees that mischief-making computer hackers or crusading government agencies won't eventually try to pry into the database, said Lauren Weinstein, co-founder of People for Internet Responsibility.

"When data is sitting on computers other than your own, it becomes a very tempting target," he said. "I have no problems at all with Google's motivation because I really do believe they want to protect their users' privacy. But I think they are creating something that will have the vultures circling."

Despite those concerns, having Google automatically store important documents appeals to absent-minded students like Palo Alto High junior Ryan Drebin. "I am always losing my flash drive anyway," he said, referring to a small portable memory chip.

It's very interesting to see how this magical word "privacy" must be mentioned in each and every article about Google. As if no other company would store user's data on its servers, and as if Google had exposed user's data in many occasions and must be reminded every time. Even though Google's software is free and can be used to access your data anywhere, everybody knows that Google's servers are much easier to hack than your personal computer, that has 1234 as a password. I mean, that's common sense.

Another story, this time a parody, unveils a new Google product: "Google today launched a handy new facility which allows browsers to observe the private lives of any other computer user. Google 'YouSnoop' seamlessly combines YouTube, its recently acquired video posting website, with Google Earth, Google Mail and Picasa to reveal images, personal correspondence and much more about unsuspecting strangers."

Google vs. Delisted Sites

Wesley Elsberry runs a site that has been hacked recently. The spammy links inserted in his site triggered Google's filters and his site has been delisted. As Wesley didn't know about the hacking, the absence of his site from Google's index came as a surprise.

Matt Cutts explains in his long post how Google tried to alert him and even indicated the problems detected by GoogleBot.

Ultimately, each site owner is responsible for making sure that their site isn't spammy. If you pick a bad search engine optimizer (SEO) and they make a ton of spammy doorway pages on your domain, Google still needs to take action. Hacked sites are no different: lots of spammy/hacked sites will try to install malware on users’ computers. If your site is hacked and turns spammy, Google may need to remove your site, but we will also try to alert you via our webmaster console and even by emailing you to let you know what happened. To the best of my knowledge, no other search engine confirms any penalties to sites, nor do they email site owners.

The discussion is interesting and can teach you a thing or two about Google's guidelines and what happens when something goes wrong, even if it wasn't your fault. I think this is an excellent exercise of communication from a company that has been accused of having too many secrets.

The Perfect Search Result Is an Encyclopedia Page

The perfect search result should be a small review of a novel, that briefly describes the author, the context of his work, the characters, then comments some important events from the book and gives a verdict.

The perfect result should be an answer to your question, but it should also give you pointers where you could find other information. The answer should be as detailed as you want.

The perfect search result is a page from a book, the annotations and its context.

The perfect search result could be a delicate sunshine, a chart, the smell of a fruit or an algorithm, a part of a movie or an advice.

The perfect search result is an automatically-generated encyclopedia page that gives enough information about a topic to satisfy your curiosity, but also references to the original sources of information.

Gmail Available to Everyone in Egypt

People from Digg report that Gmail doesn't require invitations and you can get an account by simply going to this page if you are in Egypt. Although the Digg post stated that Gmail is available without invitation worldwide, it seems that it's not the case. At the moment, the other countries where Gmail is a public beta are: Australia, New Zealand and Japan. The day when Gmail will be available to everyone is close.

Microsoft's Book Search Brings Something New

Microsoft released its own book search service, that includes only out-of-copyright books and books for each Microsoft received permission. The approach is different from Google's initiative, where publishers can only opt-out from Google Book Search.

But the most interesting thing about this release is a statement from Danielle Tiedt, general manager at Microsoft: "As we move out of beta, what you will see is that book content integrated with the Web content (search results on Windows Live Search). What we are focusing more of our efforts on for live searching is integrating all of those content types together to give you the most relevant results. Sometimes the most relevant will be from books. If, for example, it's a search on historical content, chances are the most authoritative content may be found in books."

It will be very interesting to see books as search results, and mixing various content sources is something that Google intends to do with Google Universal Search or SearchMash.

Related:
The new Google Book Search
Digitizing books without permission

Email Spam Skyrocketing

The beautiful New York Times confirms something everybody notices: spam is doing very well. "In the last six months, the problem has gotten measurably worse. Worldwide spam volumes have doubled from last year, according to Ironport, a spam filtering firm, and unsolicited junk mail now accounts for more than 9 of every 10 e-mail messages sent over the Internet."

The techniques responsible for this growth are image spam and the use of "vast networks of computers belonging to users who unknowingly downloaded viruses and other rogue programs".

Spammers try to fool message filters by using excerpts from books or articles. OCR software is not very effective because image spams use special effects, background images and weird fonts.

Traditional spam is still effective, as many mail services don't have powerful spam filters.

Using Google Desktop as a Google Reader Notifier

Google Desktop is a very powerful software. One of the most interesting gadgets that comes preinstalled is Web Clips, a list of the latest posts from your favorite feeds. The gadgets also shows alerts, so you'll never miss an important news. Here's how can you configure Google Desktop to show the feeds from Google Reader.

1. Copy this address:

http://www.google.com/reader/atom/user/-/state/com.google/reading-list

2. Open Google Desktop, make sure the sidebar is visible. Click on the small arrow next to "Web Clips" and select options.

3. Uncheck "Automatically add clips from frequently viewed sites" and remove all the clips.

4. Paste the address from step #1, and click on the Add button.

5. Login to Google.com in Internet Explorer.

You can also subscribe to the Atom feed from step #1 using Live Bookmarks in Firefox, Opera's feed reader or other desktop client.

The Stories of Google Books and Google Scholar

Ben Bunnell tells the stories of Google Book Search and Google Scholar, two tools that let you find books and scholar papers. Although both were launched in 2004, Google's founders were thinking about creating a book search tool when they were at Stanford and worked on the Digital Library Initiative.

Sky, Powered by Google

British Sky Broadcasting, a satellite broadcaster owned by News Corp., signed a deal with Google that makes the Mountain View-based company the provider of search, advertising and communication services for Sky Broadband customers.

Google will provide a customized version of Gmail, essentially a flavor of hosted Gmail for the sky.com domain, that will also include access to Google Calendar and Google Talk. There will be a video portal that uses YouTube back-end to "allow users to edit, upload and share their own video content, including the facility to upload and download from a mobile phone".

Google's Eric Schmidt seemed dangerously excited:

"I've been waiting for this for a while," he said at a meeting in London, adding that the significance was boosted as it marked the first time Google had sold the use of the back-end technology of YouTube and GMail.

He said that Google was planning similar deals with other large media firms and content providers. "If we can get this structure right over the next few months and it rolls out, then it becomes the index case for every other country and every other operator."

The partnership with Sky is also a sign that Google is making its way into the TV advertising market. The Guardian reports that "Google is looking to use information about viewing habits, which can be obtained through the broadcaster's set-top boxes, to produce more targeted TV advertising."

If everything works well, Sky will "provide further services such as Google's VoIP (voice over internet protocol) telephony services, enhanced storage and future product developments".

Dear Google

Many people think Google is a person somewhat smarter, with a bigger memory and that can also gives pieces of advice. Here's a list of popular queries obtained using Google Suggest.

Google is Responsible for All the Bad Things

Under the genuine mask of "Do no evil", the Mountain View-based company, hides some of the most horrible secrets. Robert David Steele, an ex-CIA agent, unveiled that Google was helped by CIA "when it was poor and it was starting up". Google is also known for "the deliberate stifling and manipulation of Alex Jones' Terror Storm film ranking on Google Video. Google was also caught red-handed attempting to bury the Charlie Sheen 9/11 story at the height of its notoriety."

In an interesting twist, Search Engine Journal, another reputable source of information, quotes Webmaster Radio's Jim Hedger who discovered that Google funds Hezbollah and Al Qaeda terrorist groups. The information was shocking: "Google is serving Adwords and Adsense advertisements on Google properties within Orkut which are managed by terrorist cells and sympathizers." But that's not all: "Google is serving advertising on the sites of Google AdSense members who are connected with Al Qaeda, Hezbollah and other terrorist groups which are benefiting from revenue which is originated by Google advertisers."

So a CIA-sponsored company helps terrorism. This is completely outrageous. I can't write about a such a company anymore. In fact, I'm logging off from Google for the last time.

Update: Read this funny-but-also-insightful post written by Matt Cutts.

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