100,000 Videos Removed from YouTube

You'll see this message more often on YouTube, especially if you're trying to watch MTV videos. Viacom demanded YouTube to remove more than 100,000 videos that use content from Viacom's companies.

"After months of ongoing discussions with YouTube and Google, it has become clear that YouTube is unwilling to come to a fair market agreement that would make Viacom content available to YouTube users."

It's interesting that Google has a deal with Viacom that allows web publishers to display streaming video ads and video content from MTV Networks on their own sites (in a limited test, for now). Viacom also offers a lot of content in Google Video, but not for free.

Viacom is disappointed that YouTube didn't implemented the content identification system that will allow YouTube to see if a video contains fragments from Viacom, for example. This way, Viacom would get some money from the ads displayed by the online video site. "YouTube and Google retain all of the revenue generated from this practice, without extending fair compensation to the people who have expended all of the effort and cost to create it," grumps Viacom.

It seems that YouTube respected their demands and took down a lot of videos. Do a search for [vh1 live] to see for yourself.

Always-Available Google Translate

gTrans is an interface for Google Translate. The free Windows application doesn't require installation, so you can use it from your USB drive.


gTrans sits in the system tray and lets you enter a text and a pair of languages. My favorite feature is "translate from clipboard": if you select this option, every time you copy text in the clipboard, gTrans translates the text for you.

Update. There's also a very nice Google Desktop plug-in that translates a text while you type it:

Google Maps for Windows Mobile Devices

{Photo by Er!ck}

If you have a Windows Mobile smartphone or a Pocket PC, you'll be happy to know that Google Maps application is available for your phone natively. The application should run in Windows Mobile 5.0, Windows Mobile 2003, and has support for GPS.

Mobile Google Maps also supports BlackBerry, Treo, Helio Drift and Java-enabled mobile phones.

If you have a Windows Mobile device, try it and tell us if you liked it.

Personalized Google

Google decided to extend personalized search to all users, even if they didn't sign up for Google search history. Google uses "information from Google Search History, Google Bookmarks and your personalized Google homepage, among other services that are tied to your Google Account. At this time, your Gmail and AdWords information will not be used to personalize your experience." The only way to see the "public" results is to sign out from your Google Account.

By using information from different Google services, search results could improve, because Google tries to infer your intentions by looking at your previous actions. "For instance for the query [bass], Google Personalized Search may show the user results about the instrument and not the fish if that person was a frequent Google searcher for music information."

User profiles are built from rough lines, as you can see by looking at Google's recommendations for pages, videos and gadgets. That means the targeting is still very imprecise and Google's assumptions could be way off. But this might help Google with word sense disambiguation: Google will pretend it understands something from your query.

Google Notebook Update

Google Notebook has been updated. First, there's a new version of the extension (1.0.0.14) that lets you make the mini notebook pop out into a new window. Now you don't have to go to the site to see the full notebook.


Google also updated the rich-text editor and included the same big buttons that are now available in Google Page Creator.


Public notebooks have feeds, so if you find an interesting notebook, subscribe to the feed read the updates.

{ Thank you, Chad. }

Google Makes Videos More Discoverable

Google Video's homepage added arrows for each category so you can browse more videos without leaving the homepage. This is a nice trick to fit more content in a limited space and could be used in Google Video's right sidebar, so you don't have to scroll too much to see related videos or the playlist.


If you use orkut, you have another way to discover videos: directly from your friends. orkut users can add favorite videos from Google Video and YouTube to their profiles. Unfortunately, the process is too complicated: you'll have to go to that video, copy the URL and paste it in orkut. Some integration with Google Video would've made this feature much more useful.

Google also recommends videos "based on your search history, ratings and viewing patterns". You'll get a daily-updated page of videos related to your preferences.


Of course, there's still no way to access your favorite videos, sorted by rating and number of views (search history is limited to videos found by performing a search), but the latest steps show that Google realized search is not always the best way to discover great content.

Doing What's Important

This is a very meaningful quote from Sergey Brin, Google's co-founder:

We've had this fortunate streak that when we've done things that have impacted our users and society as a whole — positively, in a significant way — we've been rewarded by that downstream in some way, even though we may not have envisioned exactly what it was right offhand. We didn't have ads when we first put up Web search. It wasn't clear it was great business when we started search. In fact, the companies that were doing search were moving away from it. But we just thought it was important, and we thought that where there was a will there would be a way. And in fact it turned out to be a great way to make money doing search with targeted advertising.

That was Sergey's answer to New Yorker's question if book search could be a profitable business. Even if it's not, it's too important not to do it.

No one really knows how many books there are. The most volumes listed in any catalogue is thirty-two million, the number in WorldCat, a database of titles from more than twenty-five thousand libraries around the world. Google aims to scan at least that many. "We think that we can do it all inside of ten years," Marissa Mayer, a vice-president at Google who is in charge of the books project, said recently, at the company’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California. "It's mind-boggling to me, how close it is. I think of Google Books as our moon shot."

Google hopes to improve the quality of the search results, because books contain much valuable information than web sites. "Google has become known for providing access to all of the world's knowledge, and if we provide access to books we are going to get much higher-quality and much more reliable information. We are moving up the food chain."

Blank Google News

Philipp Lenssen reports that Google News has technical problems and doesn't show any news on the homepage. Sometimes even the search is broken.

Oh well, who needs news about Windows Vista, Google's earnings or global warming? No news is good news.

Google Works on Unified Search Engine

Google promises to change the presentation of the search results. As most people use web search exclusively, they miss a lot of good results available in specialized searches. Google tried to compensate this using OneBox results, but the solution seems a bit artificial, because there's no correlation between the OneBox and the organic search results.

Marissa Mayer says Google really needs to do something about that:

I think we need to look at results pages that aren't just 10 standard URLs that are laid out in a very linear format. Sometimes the best answer is a video, sometimes the best answer will be a photo, and sometime the best answer will be a set of extracted facts.

Larry Page also thinks the current format, adopted by most search engines, is not the best:

Since users are interested in many types of information, we expanded our search index to include new types of content. We added the ability to search for code in more than 40 different programming languages and indexed more than 7 million U.S. patents. Google Video search now links to YouTube content and with that acquisition, over time, we will integrate the YouTube platform with our search engine.

To make this range of information more useful, we are working on integrating different types of results -- video, images, news, books and so on -- all in one place. We are now blending book results into the main index and we will add more going forward. We are excited about providing a truly seamless user experience in search.

Apparently, a Google Universal Search is already in testing. It will be interesting to see how Google can rank heterogeneous pieces of data and do it well.

We're Sorry, But We're Unable to Build a Reliable Blogger

The jury has reached a verdict: people from Blogger are simply unable to build a reliable blog software. The old version of Blogger had a lot problems and it's interesting to read this blog post from the Blogger team written in October, last year:

You need to look no further than our status blog or perhaps your own experiences to know that Blogger had a significant number of unplanned outages this last week (forgive me my euphemisms?) and a handful of planned ones to clean up from the unplanned ones. (...) We really regret these outages, which were a nuisance (or worse) to you. The past week's performance was not representative of the kind of service we want to provide for you. (...) More importantly, though, what are we doing to prevent this in the future? (...) In the long term, we're developing a new version of Blogger with some great new features that is built on technology and hardware that has proven, Google-quality reliability.

You can notice the "Google-quality reliability" by trying to view a blog post from almost any Blogger blog. An innocent message will tell you: "We're sorry, but we were unable to complete your request."


If you'll be able to actually view the post (refreshing the page might help), the slowness of the page will show you the power of a "technology and hardware that has proven Google-quality reliability".

It's also very hard to contact Blogger, because they don't like to link to direct contact forms like this one. Until they fix this new error, my apologies if you can't read my posts.

January 2007 Recap: More Integration

After an alarming number of security problems (Gmail contacts exposure, flaw in Blogger Custom Domains plus last month's problems), things got back to normal. Google removed the self-promoting tips, started to show stats for Google Reader and for custom search engines.

January 2007 brought a lot of updates for Google web search: new or updated OneBoxes (blog search, local, maps), related searches. January was also a month of redesigns for image search and Google Groups, and a month of mobile partnerships (Samsung, China Mobile).

We found out that Google Video will become a video search engine that will aggregate videos from other sites, while YouTube will remain independent and will allow revenue-sharing with video creators.

Gmail started to show more links to Google Docs, Google Book Search displays maps for books that talk about many locations, while Personalized Homepage shows (buggy) feed snippets.

Google respected their promise: features, not products, so you didn't see any new product. In fact, the latest addition in Google Labs is from October last year. That strategy might work since Google's popularity increases beyond web search and the profits are strong.

Read more:
All the posts from January

Icons for Google Talk Contacts

If you want to have desktop icons for your favorite Google Talk contacts, there's an easy to do it.

Right-click on your desktop and select New / shortcut. Then type:

gtalk:chat?jid=[Gmail-Username]@gmail.com

and the name of your friend (of course, replace [Gmail-Username] with the actual username). When you click on the shortcut, Google Talk will open a new window where you can chat with your friend. To make a shortcut that automatically calls your friend type this instead:

gtalk:call?jid=[Gmail-Username]@gmail.com

You could right-click on the icon, select properties and choose a new icon. To convert a JPG file into an icon, you need a software like IrfanView: just open the photo, crop the face area and save it as an ICO file.

If Google Talk is not open, clicking on the shortcut will launch it, but won't open a new chat window for your friend.

Bonus tip: you can easily launch Google Talk by going to Start/Run and typing gtalk: (gtalk followed by a colon).

Google's Popularity Increases

While last year people complained that Google lacks stickiness or Yahoo has more popular services, a lot of recent reports from companies that measure Internet audiences show that Google gains more users than ever, and not only for web search.

Comscore reports that Google is the number two site worldwide in 2006, but grew 9 percent, unlike Microsoft and Yahoo, that only grew 5 percent in 2006 and occupy the first and the third position.

"Google's popularity has been driven in part by its international appeal as well as the rapid uptake of some of Google's applications beyond traditional Web search," said Bob Ivins, managing director of comScore Europe. "Examples include the 40-percent year-over-year growth in visitors to Google Image Search, the 71-percent growth in visitors to Gmail, and the 62-percent growth in visitors to Google Maps."

A recent post from Hitwise showed that Google Calendar surpassed MSN Calendar and was about to surpass Yahoo Calendar. "In the six months from June 2006 to December 2006, the market share of visits to Google Calendar increased by 333%, at the expense of its main competitors."

After being featured on Google's homepage and in Google News, Google Blog Search gained a lot of traction. Another reason might be that Technorati continue to be really slow and almost unusable at times.

In June last year, when Google Earth celebrated one year, Google announced "more than 100 million unique Google Earth downloads".

Last year, Blogger grew 90 percent to 93 million visitors, Gmail was up 71 percent to 60 million visitors, while YouTube grew 1,972 percent (yes, you read that well) to 120 million visitors.

Google Fensi

Fensi seems to be the name of a new Google service, but there aren't too many details about it. The only contexts I could find are:

Who do you know?
What are you looking for now? Just come on, join Fensi right now.
Join Fensi, and you'll never be bored!

It may be a game, a social network or something completely different.

Update: here's a screenshot with these messages from Google's translation program.

Suggestions for Yahoo Products

Yahoo Suggestions Board is an interesting way to get feedback for Yahoo products. Users can submit ideas and vote for their favorite suggestions, while Yahoo employees constantly monitor this space and review the suggestions. For example, the most popular suggestion for Yahoo Answers is: Let me search within my own Q&A.

Google also has pages where you can vote suggestions for Gmail and Google Talk, but it would be nice to make the process more interactive and to expand it to all Google services.

Of course, the downside of a suggestion board is that companies could feel pressured to implement very popular suggestions, even though they have a different vision. And even though users might not know what they really want:

[Marissa Mayer talks about speed in web applications (in this case, Google search)]

The ideal number of results on the first page was an area where self-reported user interests were at odds with their ultimate desires. Though they did want more results, they weren't willing to pay the price for the trade, the extra time in receiving and reviewing the data. In experiments, each run for about 8 weeks, results pages with 30 (rather than 10) results lowered search traffic (and proportionally ad revenues) by 20 percent.

Google Reader Shows Embedded Videos

Google's feed reader lets you view videos from YouTube and Google Video, if they are embedded in a post. Until now, the feed should have contained enclosures, which is not possible in many blog softwares, including Blogger.

Feed readers ignore some code (embedded objects, JavaScript, iframes) for security reasons. Google Reader made an exception for YouTube and Google Video, but they should consider other online video sites and even other kinds of content.



{ Thank you, Huw Leslie and Rick Silva. }

Update: Google says you can view embedded videos from other sites like MySpace, Metacafe, Revver and more.

Google Video Recommendations

Google Video shows a full page of recommended videos. "Recommendations are based on your search history, ratings and viewing patterns."

Like in the Interesting Items for You Google gadget (what a long name!), Google mixes videos popular in your region with videos related to what you usually watch.

For each recommended video, there's a "Not interested" button that removes the video and might improve the quality of Google's recommendations in the future.

Google Local OneBox Gets Bigger

Google updated their local OneBox, by adding a static map and links where you can find more information about each business. This is the old OneBox:


... and this is the new one:


Google realized that not many people use Google Maps to find local businesses. Most people search on google.com, but standard web search results aren't suitable for these kinds of queries, because not every site is connected with a local business and because web pages don't contain structured data (address, company profile etc.)

Google also updated the Maps OneBox and started to include the addresses of local businesses in web search results.

Of course, most of these changes are available only for the US and a small list of other countries: Canada, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain.

Offline orkut: Scraps by SMS

I told you in November that orkut will add scraps by SMS and photo tagging. Google Blog announces that orkut SMS is live, at least for Brazilian members who use Claro's services.

"With orkut's new SMS feature, you can scrap your friends, look up their contact information and receive scrap notifications." Scrapping is a way of messaging another orkut user, by leaving a public comment.

Google also owns dodgeball, a mobile social network acquired in 2005, that informs users when their friends are nearby. The service is available only in the US, and it's not integrated with orkut, which is mostly popular in Brazil.

Google Search Tips

Here's a small list of tips that may help you use Google search better.

1. If you're on Google's homepage, click on "I'm feeling lucky" if you're searching for the site of a company or the official site of a product. "I'm feeling lucky" sends you to the first search result and saves you one click.

Example: use this for [bmw], [France Telecom], but not for general terms like [used cars], [mobile phones history] because for these queries you'll want to visit more than one page.

2. If you're not sure how to spell a word, or if you remember only the first letters of a word, use Google Suggest. You'll find it in Firefox 2 search box, in Google Toolbar or at its homepage.

3. Google shows direct answers for simple questions above the search results. When you try to find a simple fact, enter you query this way: "Italy population", and not as a complicated question like "How many people are in Italy?" because you might confuse Google.



If Google doesn't show an answer, try to imagine a page that answers your question. How would the answer sound like for a question like: "What is the fastest animal on land?". Of course, the page might contain this sentence: "[some animal] is the fastest animal on land".

Build your query this way:
* surround it by quotes, to obtain only results that contain that phrase
* instead of the answer, use a star for each word of the expected answer

For example, "* is the fastest animal on land".

4. The order of your keywords is important, so you'll get different results for "search history" and "history search". Type only the important keywords, in a logical order.

5. If you search for a file, you could:
* add filetype:[extension] for Office documents, text files, PDFs (for example: divine comedy filetype:pdf)
* use inurl: operator if you actually know the name of the file (for example: inurl:divina-comedia.pdf)
* exploit the standard format of Apache directory listings by adding intitle:"index of" parent directory to your query (for example: bigfix.exe intitle:"index of" parent directory).

6. You won't find information about a breaking news in Google search, so it's a good idea to try Google News and Blog Search. If the event is really important, Google will show results from Google News at the top of the page, in a OneBox.

7. Very few people use this option, even though it's really useful. If you found a good page, and you want to see related pages, click on the "Similar pages" next to the search result. Google will show 30 high-quality sites on the same topic. It's a good way to discover interesting sites.

8. If you found a site using Google search, but you don't remember too much about it, try Google Search History. You can browse all your search queries and the pages visited from Google, bookmark interesting sites and more.

9. When you want to explore a domain you aren't familiar with, a Wikipedia page is a good place to start. Add "wiki" or "wikipedia" to your Google search query to find the top results from Wikipedia. You can restrict your search to a site, by adding site:domainname to a query (for Wikipedia, you should add site:en.wikipedia.org).

10. Google doesn't give you a feed for search results, but Web Alerts sends you email updates with the latest relevant Google results for a query.

Related:
Google operators
Google search features
Gwigle game - you have the results, can you find the query?

Forced Switch to the New Blogger

A message posted by a Blogger employee on Google Groups announces that the time when Blogger users would be forced to switch to the new Blogger has come:

We've been giving you warnings. The signs have been there. Preparations have been made. Now, it's time!

That's right, it's time to embrace the new version of Blogger! Starting today, a small percentage of users who log in to an old Blogger account will be required to move to the new version. This involves moving your current Blogger account to a new or existing Google Account. After the move, you will need to log in to Blogger with your Google Account username, which is always the email address associated with your account. If you're one of the lucky folks who is prompted to move your account over to the new version of Blogger, you'll be able to postpone this process once (and only once) if you *really* need to get a post out of your head or want to say goodbye to the old Blogger. After that, it's time to befriend the new Blogger!

I really don't understand why Blogger team needs to make a big deal out of this switch. When Writely became a part of Google Docs & Spreadsheets, nobody asked Writely users if they want a completely new interface, a new name for the application or the integration with Google Spreadsheets. Google redirected writely.com to docs.google.com and that was all. Blogger could have switched the accounts automatically, as the new version is backwards-compatible and the visible differences aren't significant.

Closer to GDrive and Google Lighthouse

Almost one year ago, some interesting details were accidentally revealed in a Google presentation:

With infinite storage, we can house all user files, including: emails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc).

We already have efforts in this direction in terms of GDrive, GDS, Lighthouse, but all of them face bandwidth and storage constraints today. For example: Firefox team is working on server side stored state but they want to store only URLs rather than complete web pages for storage reasons. This theme will help us make the client less important (thin client, thick server model) which suits our strength vis-a-vis Microsoft and is also of great value to the user.

As we move toward the "Store 100%" reality, the online copy of your data will become your Golden Copy and your local-machine copy serves more like a cache. An important implication of this theme is that we can make your online copy more secure than it would be on your own machine.

Another important implication of this theme is that storing 100% of a user's data makes each piece of data more valuable because it can be access across applications. For example: a user's Orkut profile has more value when it's accessible from Gmail (as addressbook), Lighthouse (as access list).

At that time we didn't know too much about GDrive or Lighthouse. But in one year, a lot of interesting things have happened:

GDrive
In July we found about GDrive, an internal Google product that gives Google employees:

* Backup. If you lose your computer, grab a new one and reinstall Platypus. Your files will be on your new machine in minutes.
* Sync. Keep all your machines synchronized, even if they run different operating systems.
* VPN-less access. Not at a Google computer? View your files on the web at http://troutboard.com/p.
* Collaborate. Create shared spaces to which multiple Googlers can write.
* Disconnected access. On the plane? VPN broken? All your files are still accessible.
* Publish. All of the files you store on Platypus are automatically accessible from the (corporate) web.
* Share. Other Googlers can mount your Platypus folders and open your files in read-only mode.
* Local IO speeds. Open and save as quickly as you could if you were accessing them from your C: drive.

While the service is available only for Google employees, we can assume it will be publicly available when it will be ready. It's also interesting to note the storage is far from being unlimited (500 MB).

Lighthouse
If GDrive lets you store files, Lighthouse lets you edit them. A few days after showing the presentation, Google bought Writely. In June, it launched Google Spreadsheets and then merged the two products, which are now known as Google Docs & Spreadsheets. The product didn't intend to be a Microsoft Office replacement, just a usable tool that lets you edit documents collaboratively. The new Google Toolbar for Firefox lets you associate Office documents with Google Docs, and also open any Word or Excel document from the web directly in Google Docs. Gmail also added options to open attachments in Google Docs. Unfortunately, there's no way to synchronize local files with their online versions or use Google Docs offline (these seem perfect additions for a new version of Google Desktop).

Picasa Web Albums, launched in June last year, was another step towards Lighthouse. This time, you could store your photos and create simple albums easy to share with your friends. The client (Picasa) was already available, so Picasa Web Albums came naturally. Unfortunately, the free storage (250 MB) seemed too little and the storage was pretty expensive, while the service lacked a lot of features (tags and search were added at the end of the year).

Google Desktop
Google Desktop didn't evolve too much last year. The only interesting new feature ("search across your computers") could be expanded to actually sync your local data with the data stored on Google's servers. Google Desktop could be the bridge that connects your computer with different Google services and makes them more useful. Of course, there's a trade-off here: your privacy.

If you connect all these pieces, you'll notice we're not very far from a better integration of Google services, that will result in a diminishing role of the computer. "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," said Google's CEO in The Economist.

Google TV (Fake Video)

A lot of people were asking if the video below, that shows a new Google service called Google TV, is real or not. I'm sorry to disappoint those who still sign out and sign in to Gmail repeatedly, hoping to get an invitation to Google TV, a new way of watching TV programs and get recommendations from Google. But here is the video:



Homework:
1. There are many evidences that show the video is fake. Can you find at least one?
2. Google Video started as a way to search for TV programs, then moved to user-generated content. Why?

{ Thank you, Zach. }