Colorless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously

From Wikipedia:

"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).

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

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

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).

The Network Will Truly Be the Computer

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 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?

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

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

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.

The Inefficiency of Feed Readers

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

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

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.

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.

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. }