Smarter Search Results in Google Video


Google Video shows a new link next to search results: "Start playing at search term", that sends you to the first occurrence of your query in the video. This works only for videos that have closed captions and it's useful if a video is long. Soon you'll be able to search inside a video.

For the moment, there aren't too many captioned videos, but you can try the new feature for Google TechTalks videos.

Universal Extractor



Universal Extractor is an application that lets you extract files from all kinds of archives and installers. You can use it to extract resources from Windows Installer files, Inno Setup and NSIS executables, InstallShield packages, MHTML files, Microsoft Compiled Help files, any archive type that can be extracted with WinRAR (rar, zip, ace, cab, 7zip, etc), CD-ROM images, Linux packages and more.

I find this useful because it provides a consistent way to see files that contain other files. You may need to extract the files from an installer to create a portable version of an application (like this portable IE7), to read the help file before installing it or to get a file. Instead of using the command-line and different small utilities, you can try Universal Extractor, an open-source Windows application.

Talkonaut, Google Talk for Mobile Phones

Expanding GTalk2VoIP, a service that lets you transform Google Talk into a true VoIP client, Talkonaut is a Java client that can be installed on your mobile phone and gives you access to Google Talk.

As expected, you can use this service only for text messages. If you want to make voice calls, you can't do that for free. "Talkonaut utilizes callback technique to make voice calls. This means, when it is necessary, our system (GTalk2VoIP gateway) calls back to your mobile phone, then calls to your recipient, after that it merges two voice calls in one."

Talkonaut works with any Jabber account and looks better than MGTalk, another mobile client for Google Talk, which is open source.

Google China Shows Related Searches

In an interesting twist, Google China shows related searches at the bottom of each search results page. You can see the suggested searches for "censor" (someone who censures or condemns).

As you might know, Google agreed to censor the search results from Google.cn.

SearchMash Remixes Search Results

Remixing the search results might be the answer for a better search engine. SearchMash, Google's playground, has been updated and now includes results from blog search and video search, which are displayed on-demand in the right sidebar. Now when you choose to see the results from a certain type of search, you can still view the top results from the other search types.

While Google's experiments are interesting, I think a better idea would be to integrate other search flavors into the main index and enable them if the query is appropriate.


Previously in SearchMash:
SearchMash is found (10/02)
Sections make an appearance (11/05)

Yahoo Maps Is Out of Beta


The Flash version of Yahoo Maps replaced the old-school version at maps.yahoo.com and got out of beta. Unlike Google Maps, the new Yahoo Maps lets you have "multi-point routing", so you can define a path using more than just two points and get directions.

Yahoo Maps added street-level coverage for Europe for most capitals and other cities, but the coverage is inferior to Google Maps. Yahoo continues to have a distinct local search engine, so you can't search for businesses on Yahoo Maps. But you can find unrelated animated ads, though.

Mobile Versions for the Major Search Engines

I rarely do a search on my mobile phone, but when it happens, I want simple information. All the major search engines have a mobile version, so I decided to compare them.

Google ( google.com on your phone, google.com/xhtml on your computer)

Google offers links to Gmail, Personalized Homepage and Google News and has mobile versions for web search, image search, local search, mobile and news search. Unlike the standard Google search, the mobile optimized version shows smaller snippets, adds numbers in front of the search results so you can use it as shortcuts, and renders the pages using a transcoder.

Windows Live ( mobile.live.com/Portal )

Microsoft shows you information about weather, stock quotes and news. Instead of showing more types of searches, Windows Live has an universal search that groups web search, local search, news search and Space search (Microsoft decided to search only the blogs created on its platform). The result page shows you at most 2 results from each type of search, even if a search for "flowers" shouldn't trigger news results.

Yahoo ( wap.oa.yahoo.com )

Yahoo lists a lot of links on its homepage, including a link to Yahoo Search. Here you can find local search, image search and web search (in this order). Yahoo shows fewer search results and combines searching web pages with mobile web pages. When you click on a search result you get a warning that says "External web pages may not work with your phone" and this is quite true.

Ask.com ( m.ask.com )

Ask shows links to its services, including its various search types. While featuring fewer search results than Google, Ask shows options that can help you expand or narrow your query and more OneBox results at the top of the page. Ask also shows numbers next to the search results and has shortcuts. Ask is also the only search engine (from the four analyzed here) that includes a mobile version for blog search.

Google and Ask.com have the most easy to use mobile versions for their search engines. Google has the best search results, but Ask has many smart answers that can help you a lot.


Commercial Software Available for Free 24 Hours

Giveaway of the day is a site that offers one commercial software for free every day. The trick is that the application is available on the site for only one day.

Until today, the site offered interesting software like the excellent file manager Frigate, but also many puzzles and screensavers. Today you can download LoadScout, a program that lets you view the content of a remote archive or the metadata of a MP3 file without actually downloading it.

The authors of the site hope that "Giveaway of the day will allow both publishers and clients to meet each other and win together".

So what do you think? Will this site succeed?

HandyFind - Search as You Type

Free utility for Windows 2000, XP - 585 KB.

I've never liked Window's standard find dialog. You know that modal dialog that forces you to enter your query and press enter, while preventing you from using the application. Microsoft loved their tiny find dialog so much that you can see it even in the latest version of Internet Explorer.

HandyFind is a free tool that lets you find as you type in almost every Windows application. And that includes Internet Explorer, Notepad, Word, or help files. The default shortcut that triggers a search is Ctrl-Space, but you can change that.

What's really cool is that you can use it to search in applications that don't have a find feature, but contain text boxes.


Yahoo and Microsoft Support Google Sitemaps

Whenever you write a blog post, there's a big chance your blogging platform automatically pings a dedicated server. This way, a blog search engine (like Technorati or Google Blog Search) can discover new stuff to index.

If you create a standard web page, and upload it to a server, no search engine will find out unless there's a link to that page somewhere or you manually submit it. Sitemaps protocol, developed by Google, and supported by three major search engines: Google, Yahoo and MSN, wants to overcome this problem.

"A Sitemap is an XML file that can be made available on a website and acts as a marker for search engines to crawl certain pages. It is an easy way for webmasters to make their sites more search engine friendly. It does this by conveniently allowing webmasters to list all of their URLs along with optional metadata, such as the last time the page changed, to improve how search engines crawl and index their websites.

Sitemaps enhance the current model of Web crawling by allowing webmasters to list all their Web pages to improve comprehensiveness, notify search engines of changes or new pages to help freshness, and identify unchanged pages to prevent unnecessary crawling and save bandwidth."

There are many tools that can help you generate a sitemap for your site, including a Python script created by Google.

The fact that Yahoo and Microsoft support this protocol is a big step towards a wider acceptance.

Here are the announcements from: Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.

Google Universal Search

Latte, a political blog, found in its logs this referrer: http://corp.google.com/~username/universalsearch/modes_v1/usability/rumsfeld.htm. As you can guess, this is an internal Google site. The blog is in the top 10 results for the query "Rumsfeld resigns" (albeit with an April Fool's Day prank), so his author thinks the blog is part of a test for a more comprehensive search engine, that will include fresher results like real-time news.

Indexing pages in (almost) real-time is probably the dream of every search engine. Until that's possible, Google might try to merge some of its indexes and create one interface for all the specialized searches. And that could be Google Universal Search.

Gmail to Fax

TPC Fax is a free service that lets you send text faxes by email. It doesn't have a huge international coverage, but it works for most big cities.

To send a fax, you need to drop a mail to:
remote-printer.recipient_name@fax_number.iddd.tpc.int. For details about the syntax, go to this page

Adrian Hristov, who sent me this tip, has an interesting idea: what if you forward all your mails from Gmail to a fax number using this service? You could also use a filter to forward only some of the mails.

Click-to-Call in Google Maps

Justin Uberti reports from Google's Kirkland office that Google Maps will soon include a new feature: click-to-call. If a business has a phone number, you'll be able to call it for free through Google. You just have to enter your phone number, Google calls the company and you'll get a phone call from that company (without giving your precious phone number to that company). The feature is already available in Windows Live Local.



Update: the feature is live.

Search Public Events with Google Calendar

Google Calendar has a new feature that lets you search public events. You can restrict your search to a location or a period. If you click on an event, you'll see details, the address and a map that shows you how you can find that address. It's easy to copy an event to your calendar.

Even if you have a private calendar, you can mark certain events as public, from the privacy section of Options, so your events can be included in the search results.

Google's implementation is nice, but not better than the community-driven Upcoming, where you can easily find interesting events in your area.



Google Hires iRows' Founders

Google hired the two people behind iRows, a startup that focused on online spreadsheets before Google did. iRows has an interface that tries to mimic desktop products like Microsoft Excel and includes features not available in Google Spreadsheets, like charts.

Here's how the iRows team commented on the launch of Google Spreadsheets, in June:

How does the Google product compare to iRows? I have to say they did a good job. They have a few features that we still do not have (like workbooks, which are on our short term plan), and we have features they do not have (for example charts). (...)

When a giant like Google enters a market, it could mean trouble for the little guys, but it could also be an opportunity. It will depend on how good a job Google will do with their tool, and how good a job we will do. While they have more people and resources, I think we have more passion, focus, dedication and an attitude that is more responsive to our users. Let's wait for the waves to settle down, and see in a couple of month how the products are evolving.

In September, iRows team ceased the development of their product because of the lack of resources.
Our main challenge is money. We think we have a good product, many users, some of use the product extensively. But (and this is a big but) it is not generating enough money to keep us alive.

Now Yoah Bar-David and Itai Raz, iRows' founders, are a part of Google. But you can still check an example of a iRows spreadsheet: iRows vs Google Spreadsheet Comparison, which is a little outdated. iRows will be available until the end of the year.



{ Via TechCrunch and Philipp Lenssen. }

Update: iRows founders say: "Being at Google will allow us to continue doing what we love to do best but on a much larger scale. There is a lot of exciting work at Google waiting for us."

Google Desktop 4.5 Has Transparent Sidebar

Google Desktop has a new version that includes support for Microsoft Office 2007 formats, Windows Vista and Firefox 2.0.

But the most visible change is the new sidebar, that looks much better. You'll find transparent areas, new icons, easier to use options. All in all, the sidebar will look closer to the desktop and the gadgets will have a distinct touch.

"The new Sidebar is transparent, so it fits seamlessly with your desktop environment. Gadgets that fought for attention now look right at home, and content-heavy gadgets get new frames and icons that make it easier to tell them apart. All of this leads to a better place to find your email, news, feeds, stock prices, weather and other essential information," concludes Google Desktop blog.

Another change is that Google Desktop sends you to the cached version if you click on a search result that has been deleted or moved, so you no longer get an error message. The site: operator can now be used in Google Desktop, to search the web history.

It will be interesting to see how many Vista users decide to install Google Desktop. As you know, Microsoft Vista includes a sidebar and has a built-in desktop search. So maybe we can expect more from Google Desktop 5.0.

Google Desktop started as a desktop search tool available from your browser, and became a central point for user's information flow.

One Checkbox, More Settings - a New Google Practice?

It's so nice to be helpful and provide options for your customers, don't you think? What if next time you install an update for your favorite music player you see this:

Your favorite music player has new features that will help you organize your music collection. Using Enhanced Media Library, you can automatically get metadata for your audio files, get recommendations and auto-playlists tailored to your music tastes. MusicRank is a new feature that shows you the popularity for each song you play.

* Enhanced Media Library and Hi-Fi Sound send usage data to our servers.

[.] Enable Enhanced Media Library and MusicRank.
[.] Disable Enhanced Media Library and MusicRank.

It's nice that I am offered a choice, but why mixing something useful (Enhanced Media Library) with something less useful and potentially confusing (MusicRank)? Google does this in Google Toolbar for Firefox with PageRank and Enhanced Safe Browsing. They use two radio buttons instead of two checkboxes for each feature.


They also do that in Google Toolbar for IE, where there's a single checkbox for two options: "Set Google as default search and notify me of changes".

In the same IE toolbar there's a single option for "PageRank and page information", where page information include the cached version of the page and links to the current page. Why mixing a feature that sends data to Google (that is PageRank) with other harmless features?

Google Desktop also has an option for "advanced features". But what are these options? "Information about web pages you visit may be sent to Google to personalize features such as the news shown in Sidebar. Other non-personal usage data and crash reports may be sent to Google to improve Desktop." But Google mixes a lot of things in this broad definition. It would be nice to have separate options for news personalization, crash reports etc.

How Google Video Search Works

Hunter Walk, product manager at Google Video, talked to Beet.tv about advertising and search in Google Video. Google looks at the metadata provided by the video's author, the data provided by the community (labels, comments) and tries to analyze the video in order to understand it. When talking about content analysis, he gives as an example speech-to-text, and that might mean Google will incorporate that explicitly in the future.

Google Earth Promotes Geography Awareness Week

As part of this year's Geography Awareness Week, an event that promotes the importance of geography in the U.S. and Canada, Google Earth includes more interesting layers:

* Rumsey Historical Maps: 16 maps that show different regions of the world between 1680 and 1892. If you want to see more maps from David Rumsey Historical Map Collection, you can visit this site.


* Tracks 4 Africa: roads, points of interests and beautiful pictures from Africa. You can use it to learn more about this continent.

* Spotlight on Africa: flags and information from CIA World Factbook for each African country.


* National Geographic Quiz on Africa: test your Africa IQ, by answering 10 multiple-choice questions. If you can't find this layer in Google Earth, you can add it from here.

* European Space Agency: interesting images of the Earth seen from space.

All these layers and many others can be found in the Layers sidebar, Featured Content section.

Naked Google SERP

A naked Google search result page shows only the URL for each result. You won't see titles, snippets or links to the cache version. You may think there are entries in the robots.txt files that prevent Google to index these pages, but that's not the case.

Click on the screenshot to see the top 10 search results. Note that there's a good chance you can't reproduce it.

Google Apps Has a Start Page


As reported in September, Google Apps for Your Domain now includes a personalized homepage, "a central place for your users to preview their inboxes and calendars, access your essential content, and search the web". The page is similar to what you see in Google's IG, except that administrators have more control over the page. They can lock down the left column, provide a list of recommended gadgets and change the logos, colors, and fonts.

For more information about the personalized start page, visit the help center.


Related:
Google Apps for Your Domain
Homepage 2.0

Sun Open Sources Java

Sun decided to release the code for Java under the version 2 of the General Public License. Programmers can choose a different license for their applications.

"In the case of Java SE (Java Standard Edition), we're enhancing (the GPL) with the classpath exception. So when you're working on top or shipping applications with the (Java) libraries and virtual machine, you're not affected by the Java license," said Rich Green, Sun's executive vice president of software.

The reason why Java hasn't been open sourced until now was the code forking and compatibility problems that could result from that.

Search Inside a Google Video

Google Video started in January 2005 as a way to search the closed captioning text of TV programs. It showed all the TV shows that talked about what you were looking for and if you selected a result, you could see all the matches of your query in the show's closed captioning. But unfortunately, you couldn't see the show.



Google moved from the TV shows to the user submitted videos, but never forgot the captions. Google Video lets you add captions for your videos, but the big news is that soon you'll be able to search inside a video that has captions. That's especially useful for long videos. Instead of losing an hour watching the entire video, you'll be able to find the relevant scenes.

Another new feature will be video alerts.

Related:
10 Google Video tips
What's next for Google Video?

elgooG


elgooG is a site where you can find Google's homepage in the mirror. Everything is in reverse: "I'm feeling lucky" button has focus, you must enter your query in reverse, the search results are displayed backwards.

To balance the server load, the site uses multiple mirrors, so you'll notice a little delay before actually visiting elgooG.

Customize the Embedded Google Video Player

If you go to Google Video, you can get a code that allows you to embed a video into your site. Although Google doesn't mention that, the Flash player used by Google Video (googleplayer.swf) lets you customize many parameters. In the code obtained from Google, you'll see in the src attribute: http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=[number]&hl=en. You can add more parameters to the player, not just docId and hl. Here are some of the more interesting.

* playerMode lets you change the skin of the player.

playerMode=simple (a basic version of the player without progress bar and volume control, you can see it in the screenshot below)
playerMode=mini (even more basic)
playerMode=clickToPlay (the skin used for video ads)
playerMode=embedded (the standard skin)

* autoPlay lets you control if the video starts automatically.
autoPlay=true
autoPlay=false (by default)

* loop lets you repeat a video indefinitely.
loop=true
loop=false (by default)

* showShareButtons is useful if you want to add a button at the end of the video that says "Send link to a friend".
showShareButtons=true
showShareButtons=false (by default)

So here's one of example of customized player, that repeats a video and shows a simplified skin:
http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=[number] &loop=true&playerMode=simple

Getting Control of Your Google-Stored Data

You use Google to search every day, you improve their search results, you store your mails on Google's servers and a lot of other data. What if one day you discover other company that provides better services and you want to move all your data? Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, thinks that will be possible in the future: "We are working to ensure that as long as it is yours, we want to give you the equivalent of number portability. Data should never be held hostage. We might as well get ahead of it before a law gets passed forcing us to do that."

For the moment, there isn't an easy way to export your mails from Gmail to Yahoo Mail, for example or to export your posts and comments from Blogger to WordPress. Google usually promotes choices and making easy to switch to other competing services would be a logical step. If you think your services are the best and you respect your users, you shouldn't be afraid of the competition.

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