Microsoft's Live Search Adds Face Detection

Microsoft's image search engine added a new operator that lets you restrict the results to faces and portraits. You just need to append filter:face or filter:portrait to your query (for example, [larry page filter:portrait]). The search engine uses face detection algorithms that try to see if an image contains human faces, so you shouldn't expect to only find pictures of a certain Larry Page because that would imply face recognition.


Google added a similar option in May: you can find it in the advanced search interface. Unlike Windows Live Search, Google is a little bit smarter and finds pages that contain the exact name. The first result from Microsoft's search engine shows Larry Ellison from Oracle, the third one shows Larry Lloyd (an English football player) and only the sixth image shows Google's Larry Page.

Google makes mistakes too by including a photo of Marrisa Mayer as the second result for [Larry Page]. The reason? They both appeared in the same phrase: "Biz Week profiles Google hottie Marissa Mayer but doesn't mention that she's rumored to be Larry Page's girlfriend" (hottie links to Marissa Mayer's photo).


Overall, you may find Microsoft's image search engine more interesting because it includes infinite scrolling so you don't have to click on "next", a list of related people which is fairly accurate, a sidebar for image results so you don't have to go back to the results page and a scratchpad that lets you collect interesting images. Unfortunately, Microsoft's index is much smaller than Google's and the relevancy is often lower.

Another search engine that offers face filtering is Exalead. Even if the results aren't great, you'll love the advanced options: regular expressions, defining the width or the height of an image (you can find all the images related to words that start with summer, have 800 pixels width and less than 600 pixels height).

It's interesting to see image search engines becoming smarter and starting to actually analyze images and not just the filenames and the text that surrounds them. Google's acquisition of Neven Vision and the effort to label all the images from the web are also steps in this direction.

Is Google Checkout Confusing?

The Banking Unwired blog writes that Google Checkout's problem is that people have to overcome many barriers before using the service. And to do that they need to be really determined to use Google Checkout.
The benefits to users are many, including a central place to manage all your online purchases, added protection from someone fraudulently using your credit card, and limiting the chance for commercial spam. While this objective remains a noble one, its current incarnation of creating a parallel and optional path for users means a disjointed experience. The benefits of Google Checkout are only truly realized with an all or nothing approach. But getting there might be difficult given the customer experience kinks it has to overcome.
The author finds it strange that you should follow the Google Checkout badge, which may not always be very visible. Most people will choose the default checkout option because it may appear more convenient. They'll also ask questions like: "Who would I call for customer service issues? Where can I track my order or shipping? If I have a payment question or want a refund, where do I go?"
While the many benefits of Google Checkout outweigh its issues, the challenge of Google Checkout is one of adoption, data integration, branding, and how to provide a seamless customer experience. Having it as an optional add-on checkout option, however, raises the interesting prospect of increasing the confusion quotient, which was the original impetus for the need for Google Checkout.
So Google's main challenges would be to increase Google Checkout's awareness and to make the checkout experience better once you decided you want to use Google Checkout (a plug-in or a Google Toolbar option could help). Google is already heavily promoting Checkout in its shopping search engine.

View the Original Articles Inside Google Reader

If you subscribe to search results, partial feeds, link blogs or other peculiar feeds, you'll probably find it annoying to open the actual page in a new tab. For Google Reader users that also have Firefox and the Greasemonkey extension, there's a script that lets you open the original source in an iframe inside Google Reader. You can either press Shift+V, click on the title of the post or click on the Preview button from the bottom. To open the page in a new tab, press V or middle-click on the title.

This might also come in handy if you want to read the comments or send your feedback.

The original version of this script only works in the "list view" and automatically replaces each feed item with the original posts, but this solution is suboptimal. The updated script works in both views and lets you choose the posts you want to expand inline. Maybe a better idea would be to detect partial feeds or to enter a list of feeds that should be automatically opened.

Larry Page Wanted Foxit Reader in the Google Pack

Google Pack is a collection of free applications from Google and other third-parties that removes the hassle of installing and updating software. Google said it didn't receive money for including applications in the Pack and only chose apps that meet "Google's high software standards and are considered best in their class", but it's hard to explain some choices like Real Player, Norton Antivirus or even Adobe Reader when you could easily find better free software.

PDFzone reports that Larry Page, Google's co-founder, wanted to include Foxit Reader, a lightweight PDF reader. "[Marissa] Mayer said in an interview (...) that Page lobbied hard for several months to make Foxit Reader an element of Google Pack, the company's basic utilities download that enables PC users to quickly load new machines with the software they need to use Google services. Eventually, Google signed a deal with Adobe to make Reader the PDF viewer in Google Pack, despite Page's concerns about its load time before it went live in 2006."

Marissa Mayer explains that Google introduced the option to view PDF search results as HTML because Adobe's PDF reader was pretty big and slow. Foxit Reader's setup file has 1.67 MB, while the latest version of Adobe Reader has 22.3 MB (and more "bells and whistles").

{ via Mashable }

Google Maps Shows Popular Searches

If you do a search for a US location in Google Maps, you'll find a list of popular queries associated with that location. For Mountain View, Google Maps lists: Stanford University, Microsoft, HP, a hotel and an amphitheater, but there's no sign of Google.

This could help you explore a city using the wisdom of the crowds: the most popular hotels, restaurants, tourist attractions. It would be nice if Google clusters the searches and shows you an automatically-generated guide of a city.

The Absurd Phone Call

Zachary found the reason why Google decided to discontinue click-to-call in Google Maps and sent this illustrative dialog.

Prankster goes to Google Maps and searches for Bob's Pizza. Then he clicks Click-to-Call and enters 987-654-3210.

Owner of 987-654-3210 [John] (picks up ringing phone): Hello? This is John.
Bob's Pizza: Hello, thank you for choosing your local Bob's Pizza, now offering free delivery. Would you like to place an order?
John: Um... excuse me?
Bob's Pizza (louder and clearer): Would you like to place an order for a pizza?
John: Er... who is this? I think you um ... have the wrong number ...
Bob's Pizza: You called Bob's Pizza. This is Bob's Pizza.
John: What... when did I call... huh... [mutters on]
Bob's Pizza: Sir, you called us not long ago. Please don't try to trick me and say that I called you. I have better things to do.
John: No really, you called me. My phone rang, and I heard your voice! You called me!
Bob's Pizza: You called me!
John: You called me!
Bob's Pizza: You called me!
John: You called me!
[call goes on for several minutes in a similar fashion]
Bob's Pizza
[angrily]: That's it, this is a total waste of time. [curses several times] I've had enough of you! Goodbye! [hangs up violently]
John: No! Wait! Really! [hears dial tone]
John [to self]
: Oh no... what is wrong with me... I don't drink... I must have gone mad! I need HELP!!! [runs out of house and checks self into rehab]

Gmail Improves Document Preview

If you use Gmail's "view as HTML" option to read attachments, you've noticed that the document doesn't include images, the formatting is sometimes different and long documents are clipped.

But there are good news. Gmail improved the conversion to HTML for Microsoft Office documents and the images are no longer ignored. You can also read the entire documents, without having problems with unexpected truncations. I tested this with a 3 MB document that included seven graphs and it was converted almost flawlessly.

I wonder why it took so long to improve the conversion and why other file types continue to be handled rather poorly.


{ Thank you, Azwandi.}

Google's Magic Box

Google continues to promote the "Ultimate Search for Bourne" competition in the US and other countries by displaying a blue box labeled "Google Promotion". When the promotional box was first added, Google didn't label it at all. Google also mentioned it's not an ad: "The Bourne Ultimatum promotion is not an ad, but one of the many tests we run to provide users with opportunities to access Google products."

The competition is a partnership between Google and Universal Pictures to promote Bourne Ultimatum using Google's products.


According to Los Angeles Times, it was Google that had the idea to promote the movie. "[Douglas] Merrill said that Universal, the studio behind the Bourne movies, didn't hire Google to do this. Instead, the promotion was Google's initiative. Why? Because the basic Google business model is monetizing searches and other online activities, so the more things people have to find and do online, the more money Google can make."

Using this logic, you could argue that Google should start to promote all kinds of sites just to keep users online for a longer time. But I thought Google's aim was to send people away as fast as possible to the right destination.

"The win for Google is more content gets created, and we believe the tools we build offer easy ways to do that. Ultimately our goal is to have everyone who has content build cool interactive tools to engage their users. We don't want to be in the middle. We want to build the tools to allow content owners and creators to do it themselves," said Google's Douglas Merrill.

So this is not a promotion for "Bourne Ultimatum", it's just a sample of what you can do using Google tools. It's an ad for Google's tools disguised as a catchy competition. The blue box is just a link to an entry from the virtual gallery of sites that use Google tools to "build cool interactive tools to engage their users".

"With Google tools at your fingertips, you're well equipped for the mission," says the blue box. The message here is that Google's tools are powerful and you could use them to present your own content. And if a lot of sites use Google services, Google can continue sending people away: they'll continue to be connected to The Platform.

What You Need to Know to Get Better Search Results

In an interesting presentation titled "Searching for the mind of the searcher" [PDF], Daniel M. Russell from Google explains the problem of understanding the intent behind a user's search queries and how important is this task to measure user satisfaction.

Mr. Russell thinks there are four important "skills" that help you get better search results:

* know the search engine - how it works, its limitations, the advanced options

* use good search strategies - know when you need to use a more general or a more specific query, look at the search results critically and refine your query accordingly

* domain knowledge - you should know the terminology of a domain (it's hard to get information about a computer problem if you don't know the right terms)

* information mapping - categorize data, know if a site is authoritative, find the perfect query by combining the right keywords (a reverse dictionary might help)

While most of this knowledge is necessary only for information queries, it would be nice if Google had a query builder that guided you towards the perfect query. Of course, Google does it more subtly using related searches, spelling corrections or by automatically expanding some of your keywords.

Google Tests a New Homepage in Asia

PC World reports that Google tests new homepages in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Google sends the user to an iGoogle page preloaded with gadgets that highlight many Google tools, including Gmail, Google Calendar, Google News, Google Translate. To include a lot of content in a limited space, Google used the compound gadget.

Google justified the move by saying it "takes advantage of faster broadband speeds in those markets", but the real reason might be that the simple Google homepage doesn't work well there. "We think [the new design] will be more appropriate for the local cultures, and their context, and their broadband connections, which, for example in Korea, are extraordinarily fast," said Sergey Brin.

It's not the first change that reflects Google's intention to gain more market share in countries where it's not the leader in search: China, Russia, Korea. Google expanded its local presence in China by building custom services, launched a Q&A service in Russia and a new homepage in Korea.

Will these small compromises erode Google's philosophy? Will we still see the classic Google homepage in 5 years?

Google's experimental homepage for Hong Kong


Google AJAX Search for the iPhone

Google built a search interface optimized for iPhone that uses the AJAX Search API and it's available at www.google.com/uds/samples/iphone/isearch.html. The interface has all the limitations of the API (for example, you can only see the first 8 results), but it's more usable on a phone.

Mark Lucovsky's team has also added image search to the API, which now includes support for web search, custom search engines, image search, Google News, blog search, book search, Google Maps and video search. Until now, the AJAX Search API was mostly used to build widgets for blogs and personalized homepages and didn't successfully replace the discontinued SOAP API.

Update: A Google spokesperson asked me to clarify that "this is a developer demo, not a new Google service". Google only wanted to show how easily developers can use Google search in their iPhone apps.

SearchCrystal - Visual Meta Search

SearchCrystal is an interesting way to visualize results from different search engines. The results common to more search engines are placed closer to the center of circle and have special icons that indicate the search engines. You can use this visualization to compare search engines, to find the rankings of a site or just to discover less common web pages.

SearchCrystal also lets you view image results, videos, news and blog posts from the most popular specialized search engines, but the overlaps are less frequent here. Unlike most meta-search engines, SearchCrystal lets you view all the top results in a single page and you can also embed it as a widget in your blog. Unfortunately, the site is pretty slow, so I preferred to include a screenshot instead.

Search Engines and Favoritism

While most search engines say they return unbiased results, it's interesting to compare how well the services of a company perform in the search engine of the same company and other competing search engines. I chose the top three search engines: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft's Windows Live Search and 10 general queries directly related to products or services developed by all the three companies.

It's interesting to notice that Google ranked its own sites as #1 in 7 cases out of 10 and Yahoo in 6 cases out of 10. Microsoft's services have poor rankings in most search engines, including Windows Live Search. A single Google service was the top result in Yahoo Search (Google News) and only one Yahoo service was #1 in Google Search (Yahoo Mail). You'll also find surprising that for "desktop search", each company placed its own desktop search software as the top result. But then again, this is just an empirical test and everything might just be a coincidence.

The tables show the ranking for each product (for example, the second row from the next table shows how well performed Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Hotmail in Google Search for the query "mail"). You can use a site like yahoogooglemsn.com to compare the results in the same window.

Mail
Google
Yahoo
Microsoft
Google Search 2
1
11
Yahoo Search 8
1
2
Windows Live Search 2
1
11


Calendar
Google
Yahoo
Microsoft
Google Search 3
4
-*
Yahoo Search 15
2
-
Windows Live Search 3
6
-


Groups
Google
Yahoo
Microsoft
Google Search 1
2
7
Yahoo Search 3
1
2
Windows Live Search 1
3
4


Toolbar
Google
Yahoo
Microsoft
Google Search 1
3
5
Yahoo Search 2
1
6
Windows Live Search 26
1
3


Maps
Google
Yahoo
Microsoft
Google Search 1
4
10
Yahoo Search 3
1
13
Windows Live Search 3
4
17


Desktop search
Google
Yahoo
Microsoft
Google Search 1
5
3
Yahoo Search 3
1
4
Windows Live Search 4
3
1


Image search
Google
Yahoo
Microsoft
Google Search 1
3
10
Yahoo Search 2
6
9
Windows Live Search 1
3
28


Video search
Google
Yahoo
Microsoft
Google Search
1
2
19
Yahoo Search 5
2
-
Windows Live Search 3
1
-


News search
Google
Yahoo
Microsoft
Google Search 1
3
-
Yahoo Search 1
2
-
Windows Live Search 1
3
-


Search
Google
Yahoo
Microsoft
Google Search 8
5
1
Yahoo Search 2
1
16
Windows Live Search 3
2
8

* no web page in the top 30 results

Google Buys ImageAmerica to Improve Google Earth's Imagery

Google bought ImageAmerica, a company that produces high-resolution imagery using some interesting technologies. "In 1998, ImageAmerica set out to change dated industry methodology by developing a unique, digital panoramic imaging technology. Shortly thereafter, ImageAmerica fielded the world's first commercial high-resolution digital camera system based on this technology. Today, the patented DDP-2 camera remains the world resolution leader with more than twice the resolution of its nearest competitor. This high-resolution capability and proprietary ImageAmerica processing software are the keys to quick and efficient delivery of large imagery datasets."

ImageAmerica offered Google and other companies high-resolution imagery of the New Orleans affected by Hurricane Katrina so people could identify the affected areas. "700 square miles of high-quality six-inch digital aerial imagery of New Orleans and the surrounding area were captured and fully orthorectified and mosaicked in a 24 hour period," according to a press release.
ImageAmerica is in the business of providing updated and new digital orthoimagery* for use in Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Customers generally include city, county, state and federal government entities along with commercial enterprises.

Our digital ortho technologies provide a unique combination of benefits including wide area coverage, high resolution, National Map Accuracy Standard (NMAS) accuracy, quick delivery and low cost.

Our Beech Starship aircraft provides the perfect platform for the DDP-2 (Direct Digital Panoramic) system. Able to fly high, fast and with great stability, the aircraft allows us to optimize the camera system capability. (...)

Using ImageAmerica products, customers with existing GIS can now afford to obtain annual highly accurate updates to their ortho base maps.

Even if Google says we won't see the effects of this acquisition immediately, Google Maps/Google Earth's imagery should update faster and have a better quality.

*According to this site, "a digital ortho is an aerial photograph that has been processed to correct for scale variations and image displacement resulting from relief or terrain variations and camera tilt such that positions of objects appearing on the image are represented in their true position (coordinate)."

{ Most of the quotes are from Exalead's cache of ImageAmerica's website. }

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