Google Korea to Verify the Age for Adult Queries

Google intends to comply to the local law from Korea and ask users to confirm they're at least 19 if they use one of the 700 adult queries defined by the Korean government. Google's reason is that every other search engine and portal that operates in Korea does that. You can see what happens if you search for "sex" in Yahoo Korea. To verify your age, you need to enter your name and your national resident registration number, an unique identifier.


Google wants to increase its local presence in Korea to compete with search engines like Naver that dominate Korea's market. But they can't do that without respecting the law, even if it's absurd.

That's a tough challenge for a company that cares about ethics, but they already made their decision when Google started to censor the search results in China.

It's also interesting to note that Korean search engines mix the content from a lot of specialized search engines in one page and often images, videos and news are at the top of the page, while web pages are somewhere at the bottom of the page. Also Q&A sites similar to Yahoo Answers are very popular in Korea.

An article published last year by Associated Press explained why Koreans don't prefer Google:

Google has seeped into many aspects of online life across the globe, but the Internet search engine has failed so far to make any notable inroads in one of the world's most-wired countries: South Korea. Users here are some of the most Internet-savvy in the world, with millions of people running their own blogs and taking advantage of omnipresent broadband hookups and Wi-Fi hotspots. South Koreans would seem like natural Google users, but the leading search engine is merely a bit player.

Experts say Google's struggles here stem from unique factors in the Korean market, as well as Google's reliance on its software rather than human expertise to get search results. The Korean slice of the Web is relatively small compared to the English-language chunks of cyberspace. Koreans often come up short when trying to find information in their native tongue. To remedy the situation, Naver — which is more like a Yahoo-esque portal than a mere search engine — came up with what it calls Knowledge iN, where users post questions that are answered by other users — creating a database that now totals more than 41.1 million entries. (...)

"Google's site is just not enough for everything. Their search results especially are too limited," said [a Korean student]. "I think Google is paying less attention to Korean Internet users' demands."

Enso - A Command Line for Desktop Services

Enso is a new kind of software that wants to bring the power of command line to the normal computer user. Every program installed on your computer has a set of features, but most of them work only locally: you need to import the data, process it and then export it to the initial program. You need to translate a text, so you have to select the text, open a translator (or go to Google Translate), paste the text, translate it, copy the result and paste it in your text editor. Wouldn't be nice to select the text, press a key or enter a command and have the translated text in your editor? Enso wants to make this and any other similar feature possible.

"Having to change programs to perform simple tasks -- such as make a quick calculation or look up a definition -- it breaks your concentration, takes you away from the task at hand, and wastes valuable time," said Aza Raskin, president of Humanized and son of the late Jef Raskin, creator of the Apple Macintosh. " Humanized's Enso applications are designed make common computing tasks easier and faster to perform, without breaking focus or forcing the user to switch applications. Enso takes Jef's legacy from vision to reality, revolutionizing the way we use computers the way the Macintosh did back in 1984."

Enso can be seen as a feature launcher. You press Caps Lock and then enter the command that modifies the select data. The program autocompletes the command name, so you only have to type the first letters. Then release Caps Lock and you have the result.


Select a text in any program, enter the google command, and you get the Google results instantly.

Other useful feature is launching programs, which works similar to Launchy. Enso stores all the programs from your Start Menu and lets you access them by typing open followed by the first letters from the program's name. You can also attach short names to files by selecting them and typing "learn as open", followed by the alias.

Another cool command is go. Just type it and a list of the names of all the open windows will appear. It's much easier to switch from Firefox to Open Office, especially if you have a lot of programs that clutter your taskbar.

For now, Enso is a shareware that costs $24.95, works only in Windows and offers limited functionality. But it's also a wise idea that could improve your productivity dramatically if you could write your own commands or download other people's commands.

The video below, which has almost 90 minutes and is titled "Away with Applications: The Death of the Desktop", explains more about this and the author's philosophy on software. Instead of building bloated software, Aza Raskin suggest to build services available at the OS-level, for any other application. "Web applications are often more usable than their desktop-based counterparts because each one does one thing and does it well. Desktop applications used to be the same way, but over time -- as applications grew to support the users in the long tail -- each became a complex portmanteau of all possible features."

<a href="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-6856727143023456694&hl=en">Link to the video</a>.

Phone Calls in Google Talk

We didn't see any update for Google Talk in the last 5 months (the latest major feature was Vista support), so next release must add something important. A plausible hypothesis is phone calls. Google inserted this screenshot "from the future" in a presentation for Google Apps. We can see revealing messages like: "Show dialpad", "Call details", "Enter a name or phone number".


{ via Blogoscoped Forum }

Google Maps Aliases

Sometimes you need to find the same address on Google Maps again and again. Google saves your addresses, so you can just type the first characters and use the autocomplete feature. But wouldn't be nice to assign friendlier name to these long and boring addresses?

It's easy to do that: enter the addresses, followed by the friendly name inside the brackets, like in the screenshot below.


Then when you need to find the same address on the map, type your alias and select the address from the list of suggestions. You can manage the aliases in the "saved locations" section.

Should Google Buy FeedBurner?

When I first heard about FeedBurner I wondered what's so great about "burning your feed". Well, you get stats for your feed, you can customize your feed, add dynamic content at the bottom of each feed entry and transform that weird XML file into a nice HTML page that lets people subscribe to the feed.

FeedBurner transformed from a site that offered a way to make your feeds more humane, to the one-stop-shop for bloggers. They now offer stats for your blog, email subscriptions for feeds, ads for feeds and blogs. FeedBurner has dedicated services for companies, so there's no wonder that AOL, Wall Street Journal, Reuters are among their clients. But even if FeedBurner grew so much over the years, they keep adding new features, the customer support is excellent even for non-paying users.

There's a rumor that says Google intends to buy FeedBurner and this seems a very good idea. Not just because FeedBurner is the Google of feeds and has a great team. What could FeedBurner do for Google?

* make Blogger's feeds smarter out of the box

* FeedBurner's services could become totally free (currently you have to pay for more advanced stats)

* offer a lot of interesting information to mine

* integrate the stats for feeds with Measure Map and create the perfect analytics solution for blogs

* FeedBurner has a very big number of feeds: more than 700,000. Google has a lot of advertisers, but the AdSense for feeds program is still in closed beta.

No JavaScript, No Google Navigation

If you disable JavaScript in your browser, you'll notice that the recently updated Google.com doesn't have too many navigational links anymore. That's because the menu from the top left corner is written entirely in JavaScript.

Google, that usually writes pages with graceful degradation in mind and builds custom interfaces that don't require JavaScript (Google Maps, Gmail), forgot about the browsers that don't support JavaScript (text browsers, some mobile browsers) and the users that have JavaScript turned off for its biggest assets: the homepage and the search results pages.

Here's a quote from Google's guidelines for webmasters: "Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site." That means there's another problem: Google.com will be more difficult to crawl.

Google Video Starts to Index Third-Party Video Sites

As promised in January, Google Video started to index videos outside the Google Land (YouTube + Google Video), one of the first steps necessary to qualify as a video search engine. The first video site seems to be Metacafe and the screenshot below illustrates a query that returns only one result: a video from Metacafe. In most of the cases, YouTube videos dominate the search results and that isn't likely to change unless Google limits the number of results for each site, like they do in web search.

While Google sends you to Metacafe if you click on the title link, the preview option shows the video in a Google Video player and, what's more, Google actually hosts the FLV file.


Unlike the videos from YouTube and Google Video, the results from Metacafe don't have previews and information from metatags in Google's main results. The only new addition is a thumbnail:


{ via Blogoscoped Forum }

The World Wide Web, as Seen by Google

At the Searchology event, where Google talked about its history and launched some major new features, a slide caught my attention: this is the World Wide Web* today, or probably the most important sites and the links that connect them. Too bad we can't see the address for each node.


* "The World Wide Web (or the Web) is a system of interlinked, hypertext documents that runs over the Internet. With a Web browser, a user views Web pages that may contain text, images, and other multimedia and navigates between them using hyperlinks." (Wikipedia)

Slideshows for Your Photos

It's the week of the slideshows at Google. After the Gmail slideshow for presentations, Picasa Web lets you create a sleek slideshow for each one of your albums and embed it in your blog. It's not as hot as Monoslideshow, but it doesn't cost $20 either.

The options is available only for your albums (both public and unlisted), but if you change the albums ID and the username in the code you could use it for any album from Picasa Web.


If you want a customizable slideshow and you know some JavaScript, there's an AJAX slideshow control launched by Google as part of their API for feeds. You can use it for any MediaRSS photo feed (like the feeds from Flickr), change the number of images, the scaling, the transition time and other options.

A similar AJAX slideshow available only for Picasa Web Albums, but easy to create even without knowing JavaScript, can be found at this site.

Related:
Google's photo screensaver

The Old Google Search Moves to AOL

While Google pushes a new platform for a more comprehensive search and changes its layout, some of the users want the old Google back. Well, I'm happy to announce you that I found the old Google. It was so mad that Marissa and Sergey threw it out the door. So it decided to move to the creative people from AOL (and I bet that Google approved this move).

Google Launches New Design, Universal Search and a Site for Search Experiments

At the Searchology event that happened today at the Googleplex (and is still available here), Google talked about the past, the present and the future of search. They explained that search is a difficult subject with a lot of problems yet to be solved, but search is still Google's core competency.

Universal Search

Google launched the universal search that adds news, images, videos, books and local results in the standard results. "Google's vision for universal search is to ultimately search across all its content sources, compare and rank all the information in real time, and deliver a single, integrated set of search results that offers users precisely what they are looking for."

This screenshot shows a video integrated in the main search results and a Plus Box that lets you view the video inline. And in the case of Nosferatu, you can see the whole movie.


New Design

The interface we talked about last month will also be live for everyone. Google adds a horizontal navigation menu to all of its services, but the menu will feature different links based on the page you're currently viewing. Everything will go live in a few hours.




Search experiments

But the most exciting launch for those who try to find all the new Google features is Google Experimental, a new place from Google Labs where you can see new features and layouts tested for the search results. You can play with them and send feedback so that Google makes them better and they eventually become a part of the Google search experience.

As anticipated here, Google tests new ways to view results. "With the timeline and map views, Google's technology extracts key dates and locations from select search results so you can view the information in a different dimension." So you can view the location a page refers to on a map. There's also a timeline view that shows results sorted by the most important dates included in the pages.


Another cool new feature is keyboard shortcuts for the search results. For example, you can navigate in the list of results by pressing j and k and visiting the selected result by just pressing enter. Like in vi and Gmail.

Google also tests two designs: one that places the navigation links and the refinements to the left:



... and one that moves them to the right:



Now you don't have to change your cookies to test new designs anymore, you can just use them from Google Experimental. That doesn't mean Google's random experiments end here: they'll still test features on small samples of users, but those who want to see the new features have a Google site to quench their curiosity.

Searching for meaning

But Google's experiments with search continue. In the next weeks, Google's quality will improve by including results from modified queries that are likely to produce better results.


They'll also translate your query into 11 other languages and show results from these searches if they're relevant. Just in case you search for [French recipes] and the best French recipes are... in French. Using Google Translate, you'll be able to read the pages in your native language. As if everyone spoke a single language.

To sum up

Google's search results will be better because they'll include content from specialized search engines. Google will translate your query to different languages and even slightly alter it to show better results. It will also be easier to navigate to other Google sites and to go to the most appropriate service for your query.

New Text View in Google Maps

The integration with maps in Google Local lets you visualize the results and choose one easier, but there are situations when you want to see the full description for all the relevant local businesses, like in a normal Google search.

Google Maps has a new text view that focuses more on results and less on the map. You get thumbnails, snippets from reviews and direct links to reviews for each search result. The map is static and lies almost unnoticed in the top right corner of the window.

This new view is similar to what you see if you disable JavaScript in Google Maps, but the addition of the snippets makes it more valuable and brings it in line with Yahoo Local.


{ via Greg Sterling }

Gmail's PowerPoint Viewer

The Spanish blog Dirson found a new feature in Gmail that lets you view the attached PowerPoint presentations as a slideshow. Until now you could only download the attachment or view it as stripped-down HTML file.

It's interesting to see this new feature, not long before Google launches the promised presentation tool for Google Docs. The slideshow included in Gmail uses Flash, while most Google tools use AJAX, and seems inspired by Picasa Web Albums.

Among the features, there's an interesting "embed this presentation" that should let you include a presentation into a site. But it's not functional yet.



By default, you have to manually advance to the next slide, but there's an option to start the slideshow.


If you have PPT/PPS attachments in your Gmail account (do a search for filename:.ppt OR filename:.pps), you could try to see if you have this feature by looking for a link that says "View as slideshow" next to a PowerPoint attachment.

Update (June 12): The feature is now available for everyone. The presentation embedding option has been removed, although it could be reincluded when Google launches its full-featured presentation app, in the coming weeks.

Google Video Shows Inline Previews

If you do a search on Google Video, which now is a video search engine and returns content from YouTube and Google Video, you'll notice an option to watch each video result on the same page, in a small player. This is a good way to preview the content before watching it in full view.

If you have a slow or unreliable Internet connection, you can open more videos at the same time and pause all of them, so that you can watch the videos without interruptions.

Google tested the video PlusBox in the web results, but probably realized that it's more appropriate to use it in Google Video.

Google Local OneBox Becomes a Search Result

Google's OneBox results (you know, those little boxes from the top of the page that show links to results from Google News, Google Maps etc.) slowly move inside the search results. We first saw these with news and now local results descend in Google's SERP.

Google aims to consolidate the main search results and to build an universal search engine that ranks all flavors of content. As Larry Page mentioned in January, "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."

For the moment, Google only assesses the importance of the results from the OneBox, but the next step should be removing the OneBox and integrating the results. While it may seem that Google compares oranges and apples, when you search for Travis, you may want to see web pages, videos and their next concerts on a nice map. Like in an encyclopedia page built on the spot and custom-tailored to each user.

Informational Voyeurism

It's very cool to see things as they happen. Google has at Googleplex a big display that shows live queries from all the world, but they didn't make it available online for privacy reasons. But there's an alternative: Dogpile, a small metasearch engine, shows unedited real-time Web searches.

To see all the recent Flickr photos that also have geographical information, there's Flickrvision. All the photos are placed on a Google map and they change very quickly. It's an addictive way to learn about diversity, people and to destroy the artificial borders between countries.


If you have a site and want a real-time view of your visitors, Clicky has a "spy" feature "that shows you actions on your web site as they are happening, delayed no more than five seconds" (here's a demo). You'll spend hours finding who visits your site and why.

Digg Spy is another prime example of live view of a site: see all the submissions, diggs, buries and comments from Digg. Gianni Milanesi even tried to reverse engineer the system and provides the code for a simple Digg Spy clone.

To visualize the blogosphere activity, Twingly Screensaver uses a lot of graphical resources, but is cool enough to let you focus on a region.

All these tools show live data and the feeling of immediacy makes them almost hypnotic. You don't see the big the picture, but you're flooded with surprising details that capture your attention.

Stereotypes Revealed by Google's Spell Checker

Google's automated spell checker is useful and most of the times accurate, but lately some people noticed that the spell checker corrects queries like "she invented" / "she created" / "she discovered" with "he invented" / "he created" / "he discovered". Google analyzes people's queries to come up with the suggestions, so one of the explanation could be that the masculine versions are more frequently used.

Chicago Tribune got an official response from Google: "Google develops its own spell-checking algorithms based on sophisticated machine learning methods, using cues from aggregated user input, Web documents, and many other sources. The algorithm provides a 'best-guess' alternative suggestion that we think might improve the search results, and is completely generated without human input. It can be thought of as a suggestion offer, rather than a definitive answer."

Google's Browser Address Error Redirector

Google has partnerships with computer hardware makers like Dell or Gateway to set the default search and the homepage to Google on new computers. By default, if you type a non-existent address in Internet Explorer's address bar, you're sent to a special Microsoft homepage that suggests some related links. Google decided this is a lucrative feature, so they install a Browser Address Error Redirector that replaces Microsoft's redirects. Here's the explanation:

This page was generated because of one of these two reasons:
* The web address you typed did not resolve correctly.
* You typed a keyword query in the browser address bar.

This page is meant to provide you with helpful related content, including web search results and paid advertisements, based on the meaning of the web address/keyword query that you typed. This program can be uninstalled from the Control Panel Add/Remove Programs. Look for the application named "Browser Address Error Redirector". Older versions may be called "GoogleAFE".

If you type linux.om in the address bar, you're sent to this page that has 5 big ads at the top and links to high-paying keywords.


Google is the same company that makes money by placing ads on parked domains. "AdSense for domains allows domain name registrars and large domain name holders to unlock the value in their parked page inventory. AdSense for domains delivers targeted, conceptually related advertisements to parked domain pages by using Google's semantic technology to analyze and understand the meaning of the domain names."

{ Thanks, Tim. }

Shortcuts for Special Gmail Labels

In Gmail every built-in view (e.g.: inbox, trash, read mail) is actually a label. So if you want to view all the unread messages from the inbox, you could search for: label:inbox label:unread.

You can combine these built-in labels with your labels and create interesting queries. But these queries can become long and hard to write. Fortunately, you can replace label with l and everything with still work fine. The previous query will become: l:inbox l:unread.

If you still think the query is too long, Gmail has shortcuts for the special labels.

^b chats
^f sent mail
^i inbox
^k trash
^r draft
^s spam
^t starred messages
^u unread mail

That means our query could become: l:^i l:^u. What about all the unread messages that aren't in the inbox? Search for: -l:^i l:^u.

Google Categories

Photo licensed as Creative Commons by Google Blogoscoped.

Last month, Google started to test a new way to present search results that groups the pages by category and displays the top two results from each category. For example, if you search for a movie, you could see reviews, news, blogs, encyclopedia pages, stores. Each category can be expanded.

Google already shows refinements for a small list of topics like: health, computer games, travel, cars and photo equipments. "Topics are specific search areas that Google is developing with the help of expert contributors. Contributors to topics annotate websites that they think are especially useful, relevant, or authoritative to a topic with pre-defined category labels." But not only experts can contribute. You can select the topics that interest you and use Google Marker to annotate sites as you browse the web.

Google also has a list of general labels and those labels were used to categorize search results in the experimental view from last month. To annotate pages with the general labels, you can create a custom search engine and add labels from the list. I made a custom search engine to test the quality of the labels and I noticed that in many cases the labels didn't describe well the content of the page.

Many people enter very broad queries (like "Vista") and search engines try to guide them to the right results using refinements. One way to refine a query is by adding another word that eliminates the ambiguity (for example, "Vista reviews"), but this is not always the best idea because someone could review Windows Vista without including the word "review(s)" in the page. Having a list of pages that offer reviews could save the day.

Hakia, a semantic search engine that will officially launch this year, uses categories for general queries, like iPod or Italy, but they appear to be dynamically generated and look more like an encyclopedia entry.

It seems that Google Co-op's secret mission was to rebuild at a larger scale Google Directory (ODP), which also organized the web by topic into categories. One thing is for sure: this year, Google's interface will undergo radical transformations.

Related:
New ways to visualize search results
SearchMash

Google Gadgets in Your Search Results

Google Subscribed Links are a way to build your own OneBox results, by defining direct answers for a list of queries. For example, you could check the status of a flight or find a book if you know the ISBN by entering a simple query.


Now the subscribed links can have a richer interface by including Google gadgets. You can't add inline gadgets or built-in gadgets like the preview of Gmail's inbox, but the good news is that your gadget can access the query and display something relevant.

A good example of gadget that's now included in a subscribed link is Google Translate. After subscribing to the gadget, you can translate some text directly from Google's search box. A query like [translate "I love you" to German] will trigger a direct answer.


This could be used to show search results from other search engines, the latest posts from a blog, solve complicated equations, show relevant photos from your Flickr albums and more.

In Search of Google

Last week we tried to define Google using the collaboration features of Google Docs. I compiled a list of my favorite definitions, that are much better than the results for define:google:

• Google is the most used search engine in my school, according to interviews.
  
  
• Google is a web interface to the world.
  
  
• Google represents a Faustian bargain between society and technology.
  
  
• Google is a big platform for distributed computing.
  
  
• Who needs the Internet? We've got Google cache!
  
  
• Google was a search engine. Google is more than the sum of its usable parts. It is an entity that many use to access personalized information and find both new and old ideas alike. It is now an essential part of the Internet.
  
  
• Google is the other half of my brain.
  
  
• Google is the command line, the start of an OS.
  
  
• Google is a gateway to millions of ideas.
  
  
• Google is the crossroad where life is transfered from desktops to the Internet.