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

Google Puts Ads on the Map

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.

Google Video Recommendations

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 - 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. }

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.

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.

Google Checkout for Holiday Shopping

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.

Historical Trends in Google Finance

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.

Opera Mini 3.0 Launched

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.

The Failure of Google Answers

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.

Pieces of 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.

Weather Forecasts in Google Video

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

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

Google Reader Notifier

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.

The Lost Google Tapes

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.

Google vs. Delisted Sites

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.

Gmail Available to Everyone in Egypt

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.

The Stories of Google Books and Google Scholar

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.

Google is Responsible for All the Bad Things

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.