Customize Google Adds Infinite Scrolling for Google Search

Customize Google is a Firefox extension that adds or removes some features in Google's services, including links to competing search engines, removing ads and click tracking, rewriting links to point directly to images in Google Image Search.

Inspired by the infinite scrolling Greasemonkey script presented in a previous post, Customize Google includes a similar feature, which is not enabled by default, so you'll have to check "Stream search results pages" in the options. The infinite scrolling means that you don't have to click on "Next page" because the next search results are loaded in the background as you scroll down. This feature removes the related searches from the bottom of the page and some OneBox results, while not being able to function correctly when you hit back after clicking on a result, but it's still cool to enable it when you're in exploration mode.

Eric Schmidt Interviewed by John Battelle

John Battelle interviewed Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, at Web 2.0 Expo four days ago. Eric Schmidt answered questions about Microsoft, the DoubleClick deal, users' privacy, YouTube and the future of Google. This was the place where Google announced they'll add a presentation tool to Google Docs.

Google Page Creator's Sitemap and Feed

If you have a site hosted by Google Page Creator, be prepared for a surprise. Google automatically builds a sitemap file that lists each and every file from your site created or only hosted by Page Creator.

The address of the sitemap file is http://sitename.googlepages.com/sitemap.xml, so anyone who knows the URL of your site (or just your Gmail address) can find all the files from your site. Some sitemaps are even included in Google search.

That means you shouldn't use Page Creator to upload personal files because even if you don't link to them, their addresses are easy to find in the sitemap. But there's also a bright side: you don't have to build a sitemap for your site to submit it to Google Webmasters Central.

Also, each site has a RSS feed that contains only the pages created with the online editor. The feed is available at: http://sitename.googlepages.com/rss.xml.


{ Via A consuming experience. }

Google Search to Incorporate News Results

Search Engine Land reports that Google will start to integrate results from Google News with the standard web results. Googlebot is not able to crawl news sites as fast as Google news bot, so if you search for recent events, it's likely you won't find fresh news in the top results. That's why Google used a news OneBox that displayed the top 3 results from Google News for queries that are associated with recent events.


Starting from next week, the news OneBox will be removed and the news pages will become standard web results, "This allows us to rank news according to relevance in search results rather than at top of the page", said Google's Marissa Mayer.

"Mayer said that the changes are a result of new technology Google has developed to dig deeper into news and find truly relevant stories, rather than simply displaying up to three headlines in the OneBox format, which were displayed based on keyword triggers rather than a deeper analysis of news content.

News results will appear anywhere in a search result page, and links to different sources will be clustered together, similar to how stories are grouped in Google News. Thumbnail images related to the news will also appear next to these results."

This change will make Google's results even fresher and it's a big step towards a universal search that integrates content from different specialized search engines and provides a single ranking.

What Has Google Done in Search Lately?

Google is continuously accused that it didn't improve its search engine (some even say Google doesn't care about search anymore). So how is Google search better than two years ago?

Google's index updates faster
While two years only very popular sites were updated every day, now a lot of sites are updated every 1-2 days. A search for [Google Marratech] returned 8/10 results about Google's latest days in less than one day after Google Blog mentioned about it. Yahoo and Live Search returned no result about the deal in the first page of results.

Closer to the natural language
Google no longer tries to find the exact keywords in the documents. It uses stemming so you can find documents that include "flower" even if you search for "flowers", it includes synonyms for the keywords and expands abbreviations. If you search for [Aretha Franklin birthdate], most results' snippets have "birthday" in bold.

Categorization
Google Co-op aims to label high-quality web pages, so users can refine their queries. While there are only 6 general topics, users can label any web page for their own custom search engines.

Personalization
If you have an account, Google can record your queries and the visited web pages to improve the quality of the search results. This way, Google can do a better job at disambiguating queries and putting your query into a larger perspective.

More specialized search engines
Book search, blog search, patent search, music search, news archive search and more. All these search engines allow you to focus on different kinds of information and get the best results from their limited scope.

Unified search engine
Google brings more information from its specialized search engines using OneBox results and PlusBoxes. Google also wants to include results from other search engines directly in Google search: the first stop will be news results. Other plans include results from book search. The goal is to have an universal search engine that includes every useful information crawled by Google.

Outside the SERP
Google experiments with interesting ways of integrating search results into content that adds value to a site. AJAX Search API lets you build web applications that take advantage of search results.

Mozilla Thunderbird, Integrated with Gmail

The latest version of Thunderbird, Mozilla's email client, lets you add a Gmail account without entering any other detail than your email address. The account wizard's poor wording might mislead people into thinking that Gmail is not a mail service, and it also forgets you to tell you how to enable POP3 in Gmail.

Among other new features, Thunderbird 2.0 adds message tagging, saved searches, more descriptive alerts that include email snippets.


Even if you like Gmail's web interface, a mail client is still useful to backup your email and for reading your messages offline. If you use multiple email clients, your Gmail messages are available only to the first client that requests them. To change that, replace name@gmail.com with recent:name@gmail.com in your client's settings.

Google Web History

Last month I wrote a post titled Web history, the next step in Google's personalization (I quote myself):

Google's plans for using personalization to improve search results could face some difficulties. Google already uses your queries, the results you click on, your bookmarks, but this isn't enough to build a comprehensive profile. People don't search too many times and, most often, they click on the top search results.

So I think the next step in Google's efforts to tailor the search results to your preferences is to expand the search history into something more complex: the web history. Browsing web pages is an important part of your online activity and there are already applications like Google Desktop that monitor and index the visited web pages.

Google Web History is a reality starting today. This replaces the previous search history service that was limited only to queries and search results. If you want to add the web pages you visit, you need to have Google Toolbar with the PageRank feature activated and to enable web history here. It's just the regular toolbar, but you'll have to explicitly allow Google to use the PageRank feature to record all the visited web pages and associate them with your Google Account.

The listing mixes visited web pages with Google searches, as you can see in the screenshot below:


"You know that great web site you saw online and now can't find? From now on, you can. With Web History, you can view and search across the full text of the pages you've visited, including Google searches, web pages, images, videos and news stories."

Besides keeping track of all the web pages you visit and making them searchable online, Google Web History is used to improve the personalized search results.

"Web History uses the information from your web history or other information you provide us to improve your Google search experience, such as improving the quality of your search results and providing recommendations."

Google says they encrypt all the data and you're the only one who can access it (they even ask your password multiple times during a session). Web history is a feature implemented in most modern browsers, but the storage is limited and the history is usually deleted after a small number of days. Google's new feature lets you store your entire web history online (and that sounds pretty scary).

Of course, you can pause the service at any time and even delete the entire web history, but the big question is: do you trust Google enough to send it all your online activity?

Related:
Personalized Google
MyLifeBits - Making your life searchable

Changes in the Names of Google's Products

Google's shopping site has been rebranded from the catchy-but-not-very-clear Froogle to the simple-yet-boring Google Product Search. "You may be familiar with our product Froogle (a pun on "frugal"). Froogle offers a lot of great functionality and has helped many users find things to buy over the years, but the name caused confusion for some because it doesn't clearly describe what the product does," laments Marissa Mayer on Google's weblog.

"The ill-named Froogle was a problem from the start. "I don't think we understood the complications with rolling out another brand," Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search product and user experience, said in an interview with CNET News.com. "While it was a cute and clever name, it had issues around copyright and trademark, as well as internationalization. The pun (to "frugal") isn't obvious.", realizes Google five years after product's launch.

Google has a reputation of launching products with long and unattractive names that have the advantage of being very descriptive (Google Blog Search tells you more about the product than Technorati, but it's also less memorable). Some of the exceptions to the rule were: Gmail, Froogle, orkut, AdWords, AdSense, but also acquired services/products like: Blogger, Picasa, YouTube, which kept their original name.

Another change that should happen pretty soon is replacing "Google Personalized Homepage" with "iGoogle", the name behind the URL google.com/ig. With the addition of presentations and wikis, "Google Docs & Spreadsheets" should better choose a different name than "Google Docs, Spreadsheets, Presentations and Wikis" (what about Google Docs?). Also "Picasa Web Albums" is a long and strange name for a photo sharing service and could easily transform into "Google Photos".

Google has a very strong brand and should include that brand in the names of their products, but that doesn't mean there's no room for creativity or consideration for people who actually have to remember or type those names.

(On a related note, maybe Google Operating System is too long as well. But, hey, I'm not a Google property.)

Your Search History Does the Magic

Google's foray into search personalization stumbled into the great concept of recommendation. By correlating your search history, bookmarks and other data obtained from Google services with other users' data, Google recommends you web pages that might interest you. The first fruit of their work was a Google gadget that initially showed recommended searches, pages and gadgets. Then Google started to show recommended videos and news.

Now the recommended web pages are available in a feed, but also from an URL that sends you to a random recommended URL: Google Recommendation.

If you have Google Toolbar, add this custom button instead. Google's Sep Kamvar describes the magical button: "Click on the dice, and we'll take you to a site that may be interesting to you based on your past searches. If you want another, just click the dice again and we'll show you a new one. We'll give you up to 50 new sites per day that might be of interest."


Google split the all-in-one recommendation gadget into six smaller gadgets for: searches, web pages, news, videos, groups and other gadgets. To get them in your personalized homepage, go to this page and add the six gadgets one by one (alternatively, create a new tab titled "Recommendations"). Here's what I see (click to enlarge):


While this is no StumbleUpon, you may discover a lot of interesting web pages related to your queries you wouldn't have found otherwise.

Yahoo PayPal Checkout

It's so sad to live in a divided world where companies try to be better than their rivals by imitating everything the rival does. Yahoo's lack of creativity is proven by the latest partnership with PayPal to counter Google Checkout, which gained some traction thanks to Google's aggressive promotions.

"With the Yahoo! PayPal Checkout Program, a blue shopping cart icon appears next to your ad in Yahoo! search results. This can help your ad stand out, and let customers know you offer PayPal Express Checkout, from the brand known for security."

PayPal offers free processing until the end of the year, like Google. But there's more:

"The ability to quickly locate PayPal merchants will save you some time because the PayPal checkout system remembers all of your personal information, providing you (and me) with the convenience of a single username and password, as well as a consolidated look at your transaction history so you can view all of your purchases and track each items' shipping progress."

This seems pretty familiar, isn't it? Here's a fragment from a Google post written after Google Checkout's launch, in June last year:

"One cool feature of Google Checkout is that you can buy from stores with a single Google login – no more entering the same info each time you buy, and no more having to remember different usernames and passwords for each store. To help you find places to shop, you'll see a little icon on the Google.com ads of stores offering Google Checkout. It's an easy way to identify fast, secure places to shop when you search. And after you've placed your order, Google Checkout provides a purchase history where you can track your orders and shipping information in one place."


This is only about ads, Google and Yahoo have many common advertisers and there are some merchants who use both PayPal and Google Checkout. Google forgot about users' choices to promote Google Checkout, while Yahoo is always on Google's footsteps and replicates every new feature or product.

Google Life Search (The Chinese Google Base)

In 2004, BBSpot wrote a funny post about Google Life Search, a service that "uses a stream of magnetically targeted electrons to index a user's memory. (...) We think of this as the photographic memory you never had. Simply type in what you are looking for and Google Life Search will quickly locate that item. For example if I enter 'car keys' Life Search responds with the result 'In your pocket', and there they are right where it said!"

Three years later, Google will launch a service called Google Life Search, even though only in China. At least that's the latest message included in Google's translation program.

"Label for the tab on the homepage or search results page that leads to Google Life Search (google.cn only)."

So this is a search engine targeted to China's population. It can't search for alien life or for the origin of life, but it could be a search engine for interesting things to do or for lifestyle information. What do you think "Google Life Search" could be?

Update (May 19): The service is now live at Google China and it's only a nice interface for Google Base. You can use it to search for structured information from housing, recipes, products and more.

Google Spreadsheets Adds Charts

Google Spreadsheets finally added charts. This feature has been developed for many months and was one of the biggest lacks from Google's spreadsheet application.

You can create more types of charts: columns, bars, lines, pie, scatter, add labels and a legend. Just select the columns you want to plot and click on the new chart icon. After inserting the chart in the spreadsheet, you can save it as a PNG image or edit it.

The charts are rendered as SVG in Firefox/Opera and VML in Internet Explorer, so they don't require plug-ins. As usually, Opera is not officially supported, so you'll find things that don't work as expected.



You can annotate cells and search using Google the text from a cell.

Google Buys PowerPoint Solutions

Google bought Tonic Systems, a company specialized in Java solutions for PowerPoint.

"Tonic Systems is a San Francisco-based company that provides Java presentation automation products and solutions for document management (...). Features of their products included text extraction for indexing documents, presentation creation capabilities and document conversion tools."

Their most important products are:

• TonicPoint Builder - Java library to programmatically read, create and manipulate presentations.


• TonicPoint Transformer - Java library to convert presentations into images (e.g. PNG, BMP and JPEG), PDF documents, Macromedia Flash (SWF) and Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG).


• TonicPoint Filter - Java library to extract text from presentations with full contextual data. The text extraction library orders and organizes the text into its proper position relative to the other information. The output retains the vital information such as which text is on which slide, which are the master slides, which notes belong to which slide, and more.


• TonicPoint Viewer - Free PowerPoint viewer application for Windows, Mac, and Unix.

This straightforward presentation should be enough to realize that Google bought this company to integrate a PowerPoint-like tool in Google Docs. The official Google blog announces that the presentation tool will be launched this summer.

The question is why Google decided to buy yet another company when they've already developed Google Presently, which seemed an extension of Writely, but probably not powerful enough. It's interesting to see Google buying a lot of companies to accelerate the development of already existing products. This trend shows an impatient Google who wants to build everything, but relies more and more on external resources.

"TonicPoint Viewer, a standalone Java application that allows you to open and view PowerPoint presentations on any platform. The Viewer supports the standard PowerPoint file format used by PowerPoint 97, 2000, XP, 2003, etc. The Viewer uses TonicPoint Transformer technology to display sharp, crisp images of your slides."

Update: Here's an online application created by TonicPoint that will be used for Google's PowerPoint (the link doesn't work anymore, but I've got some screenshots).

How to Disable Google Personalized Search

In February, Google Personalized Search got out of beta and was enabled by default in every Google account. To personalize your search results, Google uses more sources, the most important one being search history. You can pause or even delete the search history, but you may find it useful for future reference.

If you don't want personalized search results, Google recommends to log out, but this may not be the best option if you use other Google services at the same time (for example, you edit a document in Google Docs).

The "deus ex machina" in this story is the pws parameter that can be added to the address of a search results page to control the personalization.

This URL corresponds to a search for [Google blog] without personalization:
http://www.google.com/search?q=google+blog&pws=0.

Try it when you're logged in and compare it to:
http://www.google.com/search?q=google+blog.

How to temporarily disable Google Personalized Search? Add &pws=0 in the address bar at the end of a Google search URL. Or drag this bookmarklet to your bookmark toolbar:

Turn off Google personalization

Unfortunately, the parameter is not persistent, so this only works for the current query. If you want to add a link that disables the personalized search, this Greasemonkey script will help you (requires Firefox + Greasemonkey or Opera).

Google Apps Demo

Rajen Sheth, who manages Google's enterprise products, shows in a 17 minutes video how to use Google Apps in a company or organization. The video focuses on the integration between Gmail and other Google products: email is seen as a starting point for collaboration. Gmail improves productivity by allowing you to transform attachments into collaboratively-edited documents or to add events from an email to a shared calendar.

Mac Theme for Google Reader

Hicksdesign wrote a custom theme for Google Reader, influenced by the clean design of Mac applications. The theme is actually a user stylesheet that includes new icons and leaves more room for the content. It should work in Firefox, Opera, Safari, Camino, Omniweb (from the instructions, in Opera and Omniweb setting up the theme is a one-step process).

There's also a similar theme for Bloglines, the elder brother of Google Reader.

Dodgeball Founders Leave Google

You may remember that Google bought a small mobile social network called dodgeball. You don't remember, right? Well, don't be upset: Google also forgot about it. And the two founders decided to leave the "Mountain View-based Internet behemoth". For good.

It's no real secret that Google wasn't supporting dodgeball the way we expected. The whole experience was incredibly frustrating for us - especially as we couldn't convince them that dodgeball was worth engineering resources, leaving us to watch as other startups got to innovate in the mobile + social space. (...) It wasn't worth being that frustrated all the time - it was making us both crazy.

So now dodgeball looks almost the same as two years ago, while the mobile social space evolved and services like twitter or dada grew a lot lately. The obvious question is: why did Google buy Dodgeball?

{ Via Digital Markets. }

Google to Sell Ads on Clear Channel's Radio Stations

Google made a deal with Clear Channel, the largest radio station group owner in the US, to sell audio ads. "The deal will run for several years, and will give Google access to just under 5 percent of Clear Channel's commercial time. That will include 30-second spots on all of Clear Channel's 675 stations during all programs and all times of the day, executives at both companies said in interviews yesterday," reports New York Times.

Google acquired dMarc Broadcasting, a radio ads platform, last year and integrated it in Google AdWords. They already sell ads on more than 800 radios, including XM satellite radios, but this is the first major test for Google audio ads.

Google wants to create a platform that allows advertisers to create and sell ads online and offline from the same place. And that includes TV ads, newspaper ads, display ads - everything managed from the same Google AdWords, using similar metrics, concepts and targets. In a recent interview from Wired, Eric Schmidt said one way to look at Google is "as an advertising system".

Visualizing Human Feelings

We Feel Fine is the name of the project that gathers texts expressing human emotions from blogs. "Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.)."

We Feel Fine aggregated a database of millions of human feelings that can be explored by restricting the view to several parameters like the age, gender, or the geographical location of the post author. In of the views (called "madness"), each feeling is represented by a colorful particle that moves around the screen.

"The Madness movement, with its network of many tiny colorful particles, was designed to echo the human world. Seen from afar, Madness presents a massive number of individual particles, each colored and sized uniquely, each flying wildly around the screen, proclaiming its own individuality. At this level, Madness presents a bird's eye view of humanity – like standing atop a skyscraper and peering down at the street. People bustle to and fro, darting in and out of shops, hailing taxis, falling in love, laughing, handling personal crises. From the skyscraper, the people below are like ants – their words cannot be heard, their facial features cannot be seen, and the notion of individuality is hard to recognize. At this level, each particle seems insignificant."

There's also a view that displays the most common feelings. Right now, they are: "I feel..." better, bad, good, right, guilty, sick, (the) same.

But the most interesting views are "Mobs" and "Metrics" that show the most representative feelings for a population (for example, men aged 20-29 from UK) or the most representative population for a feeling. The system shows that two times more women than men feel happy at the moment.