Google Maps Covers 54 New Countries

Google Maps increased the number of countries that have street maps and satellite imagery with 54. "We've more than doubled our coverage of Latin America and are now mapping three times as many countries in Asia as before. (...) We have better detail for some countries than others, but this is just the beginning," boasts Google LatLong Blog. While this a good news, some people complain that "the data is inaccurate and outdated" or only available "at the highway or major-road level".

Here's a list of the new countries, powered by Google Spreadsheets (the area is automatically generated using the GoogleLookup function and can be inaccurate). The largest country is Kazakhstan and the smallest territories are Bermuda and Aruba. Argentina, the eighth largest country in the world, is still a blank area on the map.

Profiles for iGoogle's Gadget Developers

If you like an iGoogle gadget, there's a big chance that the author wrote other great gadgets. Just click on the small arrow next to the title, choose "About this gadget" and the developer's name will point you to a profile page that contains all of his/her gadgets.

iGoogle also has a "hall of fame" of the authors that wrote the most popular gadgets. There's no overall ranking, as Google shows different rankings for each international edition. Here's the #1 gadget developer for the US edition of iGoogle: Phillip Olsen, who wrote 147 gadgets.

To find if one of your Gmail contacts writes gadgets, enter his/her name in iGoogle's search box or go to the My Community page.


"The evolution of this gadget ecosystem reminds me of the early evolution of the web itself. Many of our gadget developers, like many early web developers, built gadgets primarily for fun, and the hobbyist developer community remains vital to the success of the gadgets platform. As iGoogle grew, a second motivation for gadget development arose: impact. Building a gadget has become a way to reach millions of users on a daily basis. We now see companies building gadgets for the same reasons that companies started building websites in the early days of the web - to reach new and existing customers," writes Sep Kamvar, the lead software engineer of personalization at Google. He also mentions that iGoogle is a product that tried to answer a simple question: "What do I want to see?" and show this information without entering a query. Introducing an API for creating gadgets made it easier to offer a wide range of content. "Gadgets from our top developers get tens of millions of page views per week, and our users can choose from more than 10,000 gadgets in the directory."

The Number of iGoogle / Google Reader Subscribers

Google Webmaster Tools becomes more useful every month. Initially developed as a way to submit sitemaps, the service expanded its focus by displaying interesting information Google has about your sites, but shouldn't be available to the public: top search queries are the queries that most often returned pages from your site, PageRank distribution, backlinks, crawling errors. Google Webmaster Tools is also a way to alert webmasters about sites that violate Google's quality guidelines.

A new feature shows a list of feeds from your site and the number of subscribers that come from Google services. "If your site publishes feeds of its content, this page will display the number of users who have subscribed to these feeds using Google products such as iGoogle, Google Reader, or Orkut. Because readers can use other sites and aggregators to subscribe to your content, your total number of subscribers from all sources may be higher." At the beginning of the year, Google started to include the number of subscribers in Feedfetcher's user-agent, but only people that had access to the logs or used a service like FeedBurner could see it. Now everyone who authenticates a site in Google Webmaster Tools can see the number of subscribers.


Even though this blog's main feeds are redirected to FeedBurner, they still have Google subscribers. That's because Blogger does a temporary redirect to FeedBurner (HTTP/1.x 302 Moved Temporarily) and Google Reader treats them as separate feeds.

Google Reader's main competitor, Bloglines, shows extensive information about each feed: the number of subscribers and a list of those who made their subscriptions public. This information is even included next to the feed's URL in search results and can be obtained through an API. The complete list of backlinks, displayed in Google Webmaster Tools, is publicly available at Yahoo: just use the link operator. So some of the data could be easily made available to the public without causing too much trouble.

Visualizing Photos Recently Uploaded to Blogger

Blogger launched a new feature that shows the latest uploaded photos in a never-ending slideshow. Blogger Play is addictive, like many other real-time visualization tools, and could be a pretty good screensaver. The slideshow leaves out vulgar pictures, so the screensaver would be safe-for-work. "Blogger Play is (...) a great snapshot of what people are thinking and posting about, right now" and it expands the stream of recently-updated blogs from Blogger's homepage.

To create a screensaver from a web page, you can use RunSaver for Windows and IdleWeb for Mac (both are free, but there are more polished commercial alternatives).

Blogger Play was developed two years ago, but it remained a cool toy for Google employees. "Shortly after Blogger launched photo uploading two years ago, one of our engineers whipped up a web page that would show us the pictures that were being uploaded in real time. The result was fun, often beautiful, but above all, compelling. We couldn't stop watching. Over the years we've kept this photo scroller as part of the Blogger offices, on a monitor or projector, as an interesting (distracting?) slideshow, and a reminder of the diversity and vivaciousness of Blogger blogs."

Technorati has recently launched a real-time visualization of the most recent posts from the blogosphere, but it only shows posts from popular blogs. Now that Google indexes web pages really fast, it would be interesting to search for something and see the new web pages added at the top of the search results as soon as they're indexed.

Google Lunar X PRIZE

Google sponsors an exciting challenge to reconquer the Moon and bring interesting data from there. "Private companies from around the world will compete to land a privately funded robotic rover on the Moon that is capable of completing several mission objectives, including roaming the lunar surface for at least 500 meters and sending video, images and data back to the Earth." The prize is $30 million and the intention is to revive the interest for exploring the Moon.

"The Moon is a stepping stone to the rest of the solar system and a source of solutions to some of the most pressing environmental problems that we face on Earth – energy independence and climate change. Already, governments from around the world recognize the importance of lunar exploration, and national space agencies from the United States, Russia, China, India, Japan, and the nations of Europe plan to send probes to the Moon in the coming decade."

Google teamed up with the X PRIZE Foundation, well-known for the Ansari X PRIZE, a competition that offered $10 million to "the first non-government organization to launch a reusable manned spacecraft into space twice within two weeks". Google bought a replica of the SpaceShipOne, the winner of the Ansari X PRIZE, and installed it inside Building 43 at Googleplex.

In other news, Google Moon received an update and now includes "high-resolution immersive panoramas from every Apollo landing site (available in context for the first time), historic audio clips, re-projected high-resolution charts, surface imagery, and elevation data from the Clementine and Apollo missions". There's also a new Google site that showcases other space-related Google projects.


More at:
Google's Official Blog
Google LatLong Blog

Surprising Thumbnails in Google Search Results

Google crawls the web to find new or updated web pages, but these pages can be grouped in different categories. For example, some web pages include videos. If Google decides that a site contains a lot of videos, it might add it to Google Video and show thumbnails next to the snippet.

The query Amir Blumenfeld shows thumbnails next to a blog that occasionally posts videos and next to a "tumbleblog" that mostly consists of videos (the first and the seventh result from the screenshot below). The videos are hosted by other web sites (in this case, Vimeo) and the thumbnails are only included for homepages.

Google added thumbnails next to video search results as part of the Universal Search program that blends heterogeneous results from different specialized search engines. While the thumbnails sometimes help to describe a video, they also attract your attention as they're one of the few non-textual parts of the page.

It will be interesting to see if Google will eventually show different snippet formats depending on the type of a site (for example, Google could show the author of a blog, the date of a research paper, thumbnails from a photo album or the price and other information about a product).


{ via Googlified }

Google SMS Adds Location-Based Personalization

Google SMS is a very useful service that lets you text your query and receive instant answers. In addition to web search results, you can find local businesses, get directions, check the weather and use it for unit conversions. The problem is that Google doesn't know your location, so all your messages have to include information about your location, especially for local searches.

Now you can save your location by sending a SMS that contains:
set location [city, zip code, address]

To check the weather you only need to send "weather" instead of "weather 90210". This minimizes the text you need to type, so it saves time and effort.

Google SMS is available in the US, Canada, Germany, Japan, Spain at google.com/sms, but this new feature works only in the US.

Google Maps also has an option to set a default location, which is used to personalize your search results. "For those users who have provided a default location in Google Maps, Google will personalize results based on that location. For example, if a user has entered a default location into Google Maps and types in library, the results will bring up the user’s local library."

Google's Cricket OneBox

Google doesn't have too many sports-related features (there's a sports section at Google News and that's about it). The small OneBoxes are the perfect place for displaying live scores or information about teams and players, like you see in Live Search.

Google launched today a special feature for the Twenty20 World Championship of cricket. Search for cricket, cricket [Country] to see the latest scores and a list of current matches.

In true Google spirit, the OneBox links to three sources of information, some of the best sites about cricket, but it's interesting to see that the links contain oi=prbx, the same value used for the Bourne Ultimatum promotion. "Prbx" probably means "promotion box" and that doesn't look very good for Google.


{ via Google Blog }

Update: There's also a rugby OneBox, for the Rugby World Cup:

Mobile Search Ads For Everyone

Some Google advertisers received a mail that informed them about Google AdWords' extension to the mobile space:

In the next few days, your search ads will be eligible to run on Google Mobile Search pages (like they currently do on Google.com). We are offering this feature - and any resulting clicks - for free through November 18, so you can experiment with the rapidly growing mobile platform while still reaching qualified customers.

Each ad’s eligibility will be determined by its landing page and only ads with landing pages that can be adapted for viewing on mobile browsers will be shown. (...) Again, you will not be charged for clicks on these ads until November 19, at which time we will begin charging the usual CPC prices. And as always, you may opt-out of this feature at any time.

Google will automatically adapt the landing page the same way they do with search results. This is a better idea than the previous iteration of Google's mobile ads that required to have a mobile-optimized web page. The new mobile search ads will be available only in the US, so if you spot one and manage to take a photo, post a link in the comments.

Update: Here's a test page for Google's mobile ads.

Google Reader Numbers

Here are some interesting facts about Google Reader:

* Google Reader has two kinds of feeds:
- feeds that have one subscriber (two thirds from the number of feeds, they're updated every 3 hours)
- feeds that have more than one subscriber (these feeds are updated every hour)

* Google Reader uses 10 TB for storing all the raw data

* Google Reader crawls 8 million feeds

* Google Reader is the only major feed reader that keeps the entire history for all the feeds.

* many Google applications use Google Reader's infrastructure for feeds: iGoogle, orkut, Gmail's web clips, Blogger widgets, Google Spreadsheets, Ajax API. Google Reader is the place for any kind of user-driven activities that involve feeds and it's independent from Google Blog Search.

* the rate of user growth = the rate of growth for the number of feeds

* the index size grows 4% every week

* 70% of the Google Reader traffic comes from Firefox (a lot of geeky users)

* Gmail and orkut are the only Google applications that have a bigger number of pageviews/user than Google Reader

* search requires a lot of computational resources. Google Reader uses two indexes for search:
- a big tree updated twice a day (150machines, 600 million documents)
- 40 small trees for recent posts, updated every 5 minutes (40 machines, 40million documents)

* future features:
- very soon: internationalization, feed recommendations, accepting pings sent to Google Blog Search
- in the near future: simple clustering based on links (posts that link to the same page), adding comments to the shared items
- in the distant future: getting calls to Reader from Gmail and orkut's main interface
- idea for monetization: adding AdSense ads and sharing the revenue with publishers, assuming they use AdSense

Note: Most of the information from this post comes from a confidential video in which Google's Ben Darnell explained to some Nooglers how Google Reader works. The video was hosted by Google Video, but it's no longer available. More about the video here.

{ via Blogoscoped }

Google Intends to Integrate Its Social Applications

Apparently Google learned something from Facebook's success and intends to connect all of its social applications. The new central place for social activities will create feeds for all or your events ("activity streams") and share them with your contacts, if you choose to do so. I called this Social Gmail, but the name of the project seems to be Makamaka. All of these feeds will be managed using Google Reader's infrastructure, so the project will not be launched until Google Reader manages to handle a lot of new users. Here's an example of Facebook feed that served as an inspiration for this project:


Google's social applications that will be included should be: Gmail, Calendar, Docs, orkut and probably others. orkut has recently launched a feature that aggregates and displays all the updates from your friends, so the new feature will be similar.

The updates from your friends section on your homepage shows updates when your friends perform the following actions on orkut:

* make changes to their profile
* make changes to their photo album
* make changes to their video favorites
* accept new testimonials

When you make these changes to your own profile, your friends will see your updates on their homepages.

The new project could also mean a radically improved contact manager that shows a lot of live data from your contacts. Hopefully, the data will be searchable and only available to the persons you trust.

Note: Most of the information from this post comes from a confidential tech talk in which Google's Ben Darnell explained to some Nooglers (new Google employees) how Google Reader works. This tech talk is part of the "Nooglers and the PDB" series of weekly talks, which is open to all Googlers, but it was accidentally posted on Google Video.

{ via Blogoscoped. Screenshot licensed as Creative Commons by Danny Sullivan. }

Google Apps Gets Important Endorsement

AP reports that Google Apps gained more credibility as "technology consultancy Capgemini will begin recommending Google Inc.'s online suite of office software to its corporate customers. (...) Capgemini, based in Paris, France, influences the type of software used on more than 1 million personal computers in companies worldwide. Its major customers include drug maker Eli Lilly & Co. and accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers."

While this doesn't mean Google is going to get a lot of new customers, the awareness of Google Apps will increase. Capgemini will explain the advantages of a hosted solution and will provide ways to integrate it with the current systems.

"SaaS solutions, such as Google Apps Premier Edition, provide a cost-effective, easy-to-deploy alternative to installed, licensed desktop software; they are delivered over the Internet via a Web browser and do not require companies to install or maintain software locally, or to tap into internal IT resources. Having the ability to share, review, and edit data in a collaborative environment on the Web naturally serves the needs of Capgemini's enterprise clients with multiple facilities, global locations and distributed employees," detailed Capgemini in a press release.

Capgemini will continue to recommend software from companies like Microsoft and IBM. Google Apps could complement these solutions or replace them. "Capgemini application and infrastructure management experts can help clients develop a strategy for the most effective use of Google Apps Premier Edition, whether as an enterprise-wide office application or as a complementary solution for select departments or employees within a traditional managed desktop environment."

Capemini becomes the first global IT consultancy company that recommends software-as-a-service solutions and it could play an important role in the rise of the collaborative IT - "real-time collaboration unlimited by location, platform, versions, user roles or proximity to the IT hub."

{ Thanks, Thomas Marteau. }

Related:

* Google launches Apps Premier Edition: "simple, powerful communication and collaboration tools for your organization without the usual hassle and cost" (February 2007)

* Google Apps, not yet a mature enterprise solution: "the solution's rudimentary feature set means that enterprises need to pick carefully and implement slowly" concludes a report from Burton Group (August 2007)

Google Hot Trends Has a Feed

A good way to find the latest important events is to monitor the queries from a search engine and look at the queries that suddenly become popular. Google offers a list of "hot" queries updated hourly. For each query, you can see a chart that reflects its evolution and a list of search results that could explain why it became popular.

Now you can subscribe to Google Hot Trends' feed and keep an eye on what people are searching for. Note that the list is restricted to the US and the first feed item shows the most popular queries from the last hour.

The presentation isn't great, but this feed makes it easier to create web applications that use the data. There's also a third-party gadget that displays the top 10 queries.

You can use Google Reader to reconstruct the archive or just to search the feed and see how often the iPhone, Britney Spears or Ivan the Terrible were a hot topic.

Google Tells You What Time It Is

Google updated the OneBox (or the instant answer, if you will) that shows the local time in different parts of the world. Instead of just showing the local time...


... Google now adds a dynamically-generated clock, the time zone and other possible matches:


To trigger the OneBox, use one of these formats:
time city (time madrid)
time region/state (time queensland)
time country (time usa)

or other verbose formats:
time in...
the time in...
local time in...
current time in...
what time is it in...
what's the time in...

Other search engines also show the local time, but Ask.com does a really good job. It shows the seconds and more information about the place: a map and the current weather.

{ via Google Blogoscoped }

Tips for Google Reader Search

While Google Reader's new search feature has many limitations and is still far from Bloglines, there are some features that help you find a post faster.

1. You have three ways to view search results:

* snippet view, similar to the way Google displays web search results. This view helps you decide if a result is useful by showing snippets related to your query.

* expanded view, that shows the full posts. Choose this view if you want to read most search results.

* list view, which only shows the title of the post. This is useful if you want to explore a lot of search results.


2. Exact matches: put quotation marks around your search terms to get the results that include an exact phrase.


3. Wildcard: use an asterisk to replace some words in your query. This only works for exact matches. Include an asterisk for each word you want to replace.

For example: "has * * * new features" matches: "has just announced several new features", "has recently added two new features", "has released a few new features".


4. Negative searches: if you want all the posts that contain [book search] but don't include [Google], search for [book search -Google].


5. You can bookmark searches. Google Reader doesn't offer an option to save searches, but if you find yourself repeating the same searches, bookmark them. The latest Google Reader update added transparent URLs so you can use the Back button or bookmark pages.

Example: http://www.google.com/reader/view/#search/myquery


6. Search using the keyboard:

/ - add focus to the search box
Tab - choose a folder or a feed to restrict your search
Enter - instead of clicking the Search button, press Enter

Alternate between the three views: 1 (expanded view), 2 (list view), 3 (snippet view).

To select the first search result, press j. Then you can go to the next result (j) or the previous result (k).

Press Enter to read the full post and go back to the search results by pressing Enter again.


7. View a search result in its original context: make sure that the result is active and press v or middle-click on the title. This will open a new tab/window with the blog post or news article.


8. You can search other people's shared items and public folders. Assuming you know the numeric ID of a user, do a search in your shared items and replace your ID with another ID:

http://www.google.com/reader/view/#search/query
//user%2FIDNUMBER%2Fstate%2Fcom.google%2Fbroadcast

Example: here's a search for [Microsoft] in Robert Scoble's shared items.


9. Because Google Reader is not yet able to rank results by relevancy, a good way to make sure you'll find a post in six months is to star it. When you want to retrieve an important post, restrict the search results to the starred items first.

Microsoft Launches Translation Service

Microsoft launched a service for automatic translation called Windows Live Translator. The site lets you translate a text limited to 500 words or a web page from English to German, Dutch, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Russian.

Microsoft uses Systran to produce most of the translations, but also offers an option to translate computer-related texts using a machine translation system developed in-house. Microsoft's translation technology has been used to translate technical materials, including MSDN Library.

"Recent research in Machine Translation (MT) has focused on data-driven systems. Such systems are self-customizing in the sense that they can learn the translations of terminology and even stylistic phrasing from already translated materials. Microsoft Research MT (MSR-MT) system is such a data-driven system, and it has been customized to translate Microsoft technical materials through the automatic processing of hundreds of thousands of sentences from Microsoft product documentation and support articles, together with their corresponding translations."

Microsoft intends to integrate this service into Live Search and provide a feature already available in other search engines for a long time. Windows Live Translator's presentation is extremely interesting: the default view shows the original page and the translation side by side in two vertical frames. If you hover over a sentence in one of the pages, the sentence is highlighted in both pages. If you scroll in one of the pages, the other page performs the same action. This is an interesting approach especially for those who speak both languages fairly well or want to learn a new language. Unfortunately, it's difficult to read a page that requires to scroll horizontally.


Google also has a translation service powered by Systran. The translations are identical to the ones returned by Babel Fish, but they're different from Windows Live's translations, so Microsoft might use an updated version of Systran's software.

Google developed a machine translation system that's available to the public for only three languages: Arabic, Chinese and Russian. To expand these systems to other languages, it's important to have a lot of parallel texts. "Rather than argue about whether this algorithm is better than that algorithm, all you have to do is get ten times more training data. And now all of a sudden, the worst algorithm is performing better than the best algorithm on less training data," explained Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google.

While machine translation is not yet a replacement for human translation in most cases, it's a great way to get the approximate gist of a text in a foreign language. One of the most important problems is that machine translation doesn't always produce coherent phrases and doesn't understand the subtleties of language, so don't use it to translate poetry or to send important emails.