Google Profiles

They're coming and it will be difficult to get away without having one. Google Profiles will be integrated in most Google services so you have a coherent identity and a simple way to manage your contacts.

"A Google Profile is simply how you represent yourself on Google products — it lets you tell others a bit more about who you are and what you're all about. You control what goes into your Google Profile, sharing as much (or as little) as you'd like."

Until now, you could create profiles in Blogger, orkut, Google Groups, Google Co-op and all of them could contain different information. You could also add photos in Gmail, Google Talk and orkut, so the situation started to become confusing.

The new Google profiles are already available in Shared Stuff, Google Maps, Google Reader and will be added to other web applications. For example, in Google Maps you'll find the link to your profile at the top of the page.

Profiles are public and contain basic information about yourself: a nickname (the real name is displayed only to your contacts), your occupation, your location, a list of links, a photo and a short description. They are embedded as iframes in pages that showcase user-generated content (personalized maps, shared bookmarks).


It's not a stretch to see that these profiles are the perfect host for your activity streams and your public activities could become a part of the profile (uploading photos to a public album, bookmarking web pages, posting a new blog post). It's basically FrindFeed's widget that can be contemplated at Paul Buchheit's blog.

A side-effect of the public availability of your profile is that people can find it. "Can people do a Google search for my name and find this profile? It depends. If you put your full name in the Nickname field, pages on which your profile appears may be returned as results by Google." You can already find more than 100 profiles attached to Google Maps pages. Maybe Google will even create a directory for profiles and start to suggest friends based on personal descriptions, location and activity streams.

Features that Just Work

The best features are those that just work. They don't require special settings, answers to all kinds of questions, advanced interfaces and reading the manual to understand how they work.

Even if Google's search algorithms have evolved a lot in the last 10 years, Google works without having to type anything else than a query. It doesn't ask if you want personalized results, recent web pages or if your query has anything to do with celebrities. You can get away with spelling errors because Google automatically detects them, you can also type ambiguous queries without seeing a dialog that asks you to be more explicit. Now you don't even have to specify if you want images, news or videos because Google adds them to the list of search results.

The "add subscription" box from Google Reader is smart enough to take care of all the possible situations. You can enter a feed, but you can also enter the address of a site. Unlike My Yahoo, Google Reader detects if the site has feeds and picks the first one. But what if the user types New York Times? Google Reader shows the feeds that match this query and lets you choose the one you like. The feature could be improved by automatically subscribing to the top result for navigational queries like TechCrunch, where there's a single best result (at least in English).


Another feature that just works without human intervention is auto-save. You'll find it in Gmail, Blogger, Google Docs and it basically saves your text frequently so you don't lose what you type if your browser crashes or your Internet connection is down. You don't have to setup this option or mention how often you want to save your text.

But things aren't that great in Google Calendar, where you have to choose between 5 options if you want to add a calendar:


... or when you constantly need to choose between iGoogle and Google Reader when you subscribe to feeds, even if you only use one of the two products:


... or when iGoogle asks you location after you select a theme even if you've already added your location in Google Maps.

The features that just work are most of the times barely visible and that's a good thing. They're a part of a system that delivers what you want without constant interruptions and annoying workarounds.

Google Reader Shows Shared Items from Your Friends

Google Reader finally becomes social and automatically subscribes to the list of shared items from your Google Talk friends (which is a subset of your Gmail contacts). Your friends will also see your shared items, but you can remove those you don't want to read you favorite posts.


Google uses the profiles from Shared Stuff and Google Maps.


"If any of your friends on Google Talk are using Reader and sharing items, they'll automatically show up in the Google Reader sidebar under Friends' shared items. You can read these items in a combined list, or click the "+" icon to expand the list and see the shared items from each of your friends," according to the help center.


This feature was long overdue and Google made the right decision to not allow every Gmail contact see your shared items, but you should also remember that people can automatically become your Google Talk friends if this option is enabled in Gmail: "Automatically allow people I communicate with often to chat with me and see when I'm online".

A lot of people complain on Google Groups that this is a privacy issue and you may not want to share those items with your Google Talk contacts. "I think the basic mistake here (...) is that the people on my contact list are not necessarily my "friends". I have business contacts, school contacts, family contacts, etc., and not only do I not really have any interest in seeing all of their feed information, I don't want them seeing mine either. This is a major privacy problem." Another user has an interesting way to use the shared items: "I share items with a very specific audience. I know the people who have subscribed to my shared items and that allows me to share items I think would be of interest to them. I'm not trying to be Boing Boing. I'm just trying to be me. Now, when I know that any of my "friends", from any possible social circle, from any level of familiarity, can see what I share, I really can't be me at all." The problem is that Google Reader didn't manage to explain what "share" really means and didn't consider that Google Talk contacts aren't necessarily friends.

Robert Scoble, who has a very popular shared items feed, noticed that Google Reader doesn't filter duplicates (a certain post can be from one of your subscriptions, but also in your contacts' shared items). "Google Reader now is bringing me TONS of duplicates from people. This clutters my all items feed and keeps me from finding new, original items."

Filtered feeds are a great way to deal with information overload: if your friends have a special interest in a domain, they could offer you a summary of the most interesting things that happened in that particular field. Of course, your friends could also share funny things from the web or share everything they read. "If you don't want to see shared items from any particular friend, you can hide their items from your list; just click on the friend's name and click the Hide button."

In the next updates, Google Reader should let you comment on shared items or chat with your online friends about certain posts, separate your shared items with tags and recommend shared items from people that have similar interests with you.

Notes:
* this only works in the US English interface (you can change the language in Google Reader's settings).
* if you don't see all your Google Talk friends that use Google Reader, don't worry. You'll see them after they open Google Reader and find out about the new feature.
* my shared items (and the the feed)

Update:
Google Reader updates feeds almost instantly. What I noticed in November is now widespread.

Google Video's Redesigned Homepage

Google Video's homepage has been redesigned and now focuses on trends and rankings. There's a section for hot videos that includes the most blogged, most shared and most viewed videos. Movers & shakers continue to include videos with a growing popularity, while the recommended videos continue to be uninteresting or already watched.

If you expand some of the sections, you can see a daily/weekly/monthly archive of the most popular videos. Unfortunately, I couldn't find the feeds for this useful data.

Google Video doesn't intend to remove the video hosting feature. The homepage shows videos recently uploaded to Google Video and each search result page includes a link to the upload form. There's also an option to restrict your search to videos hosted by Google.

The homepage still doesn't communicate that Google Video is actually a search engine. It's surprising to see a search engine promoting videos from AOL on the homepage, showing enhanced features like the inline player only for YouTube and Google Video and being so biased towards YouTube and Google Video when ranking search results.

Annotating the Web with Google Toolbar

The latest version of Google Toolbar integrated Google Notebook, the service that allows you to save interesting parts from a web page for later. Google also started to highlight the fragments from a web page that were previously saved and show your comments in a tooltip.

As you probably know, notebooks are by default private, but you can invite some of your contacts to collaborate. This way you can create a shared list of bookmarks with annotations that allow you find the most important parts of a web page and read your collaborators' opinions. Your annotations are highlighted with a different nuance of yellow so you can distinguish them from those added by your contacts.

For now, you can't export the annotations or subscribe to someone's public annotations, but it's not hard to see these features added in the next iterations of Google Toolbar. Trailfire already lets you find trails, "collections of web pages, assembled and annotated by any Trailfire member". The collections of notes could be used to guide people to the most important parts of a Google search result or they could become a part of a dynamically-built encyclopedia page.

The current implementation from Google Toolbar provides you with a simple way to share clips from web pages with your friends and also add comments.

Subscribe to Custom Search Results

I reported in October that Google added Subscribed Links to the preferences page and renamed them as search add-ons. Google removed that feature a couple of days after I wrote that post, but now it's back for good, at least in the US English version of Google.

You'll notice at the bottom of the preferences page a list of subscriptions and a link to a directory of subscriptions. Each Subscribed Link matches some of your queries (for example, queries about weather, nutrition, traffic) and shows information extracted from a database. It's like a Google OneBox created by third-parties, but you can decide if you want to see it and there's always an option to unsubscribe.


According to the FAQ, "using Subscribed Links, you can add information created by providers you trust to your Google search results pages. Whenever you search on Google in an area of their expertise, you'll see a custom result from those providers in your search results. (...) Your Subscribed Links will appear in the fourth search result position", even if they aren't counted as a real search result.

Here's what happens if I subscribe to the Nutrition Facts knowledge source and search for [calories in cream of celery] or even [cream of celery]:


Even if other results offer similar information, I get the benefit to find what I want without having to click on a search result. In some cases, it's not necessary to enter the context of my search because my subscriptions already provide that context ([cream of celery] shows information about calories because I'm interested in nutrition).

The Subscribed Links are some special search results with custom snippets and a limited range of queries that are displayed based on your preferences. They allow you to perform specialized searches on a general-purpose search site.

And if you're not satisfied with the limited number of Subscribed Links that are available, you can create one and promote it on your site.

Google Knol, an Encyclopedia Written by Experts

Udi Manber from Google writes about a new service for sharing knowledge called knol.

"Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling knol, which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing."

Unlike Wikipedia, Knol wants article written by people who are an authority on a subject. The articles written in Knol are more like scientific papers because they have clearly defined authors, references, even if they don't necessarily include original research. "We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content," explains Google.

Knol will be open to anyone and it will be interesting to see how Google verifies your identity. If you claim to be Nelson Mandela, how can Google know that this claim is real?

Google provides tools for editing the text, hosts the article and allows you to monetize it (but that's not required). Obviously, Google can't guarantee that an article is accurate or complete and that's the small role of a community: rate the articles, write reviews and suggest edits.

"Once testing is completed, participation in knols will be completely open, and we cannot expect that all of them will be of high quality. Our job in Search Quality will be to rank the knols appropriately when they appear in Google search results. We are quite experienced with ranking web pages, and we feel confident that we will be up to the challenge."

Google did a similar thing when it allowed people in the news to comment on news articles. The number of comments is very small (around 150 for the last 30 days), but they're interesting and add a lot to a story.

Wikipedia managed to become one of the most important sites on the web even if it allowed anyone to edit an article. According to the online encyclopedia, "The English Wikipedia edition passed the 2,000,000 article mark on September 9, 2007, and as of December 13 it had over 2,125,453 articles consisting of over 921,000,000 words. Wikipedia's articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world and the vast majority of them can be edited by anyone with access to the Internet. Having steadily risen in popularity since its inception, it currently ranks among the top ten most-visited websites worldwide." But one of the most important problem of Wikipedia is that articles lack credibility and it's difficult to tell if they contain accurate information. Assuming Google manages to verify people's identity, Knol could solve this problem.

Udi Manber, who heads the project, told Danny Sullivan that the main goal is "to help people put knowledge on the web that doesn't currently exist, which in turn should make search better, since there will be better information out there." Google certainly hopes to attract important authors and that's probably the reason why Udi Manber talked about the project on Google's blog. But how will the project scale when it becomes available to the public?

YouTube Visualization for Discovering Related Videos

YouTube has a very cool visualization that lets you discover related videos. Just go to a YouTube video, click on the full-screen button and then click on the small button that shows a network. A lot of video ballons will pop up and the configuration will change once you hover over a button. It's an interesting way to discover videos and it reminds me of visualization sites like Liveplasma and Musicovery.




Update: You can find the visualizations at www.youtube.com/warp_speed.

Google Answers to Relaunch as Google Q&A

Google intends to relaunch the question-answering service Google Answers, which was closed last year. In Google Answers, "users could post a question (...) and specify how much they were willing to pay for an answer. A researcher then searched for the information they wanted and posted it to Google Answers." Some of the former Google Answers researchers built a similar service at Uclue.com.

Google Q&A, code-named Confucius, no longer has paid experts and works in a similar way with Yahoo Answers. Google Q&A was launched in Russia in June and in China, two months later.

Here's a message from Google's translation console:

"Q&A - This message is a name of successor for Google Answers. We will use it in OneGoogle toolbar, which you see on top of google.com page in the more.. section. Also, please use full name to translate it. That is, Questions and Answers. Abbreviation should be used only for English. URL showing this message: toolbar on top of http://www.google.com."


It's interesting to note that Google Q&A is also the name of a feature that displays answers to simple questions at the top of Google's search results page. Maybe Google will combine the facts automatically extracted from web pages with the explicit answers from the new service.

Will Google Give Up on Universal Search?

"With universal search, we're attempting to break down the walls that traditionally separated our various search properties and integrate the vast amounts of information available into one simple set of search results." (Marissa Mayer, May 2007)

Google already integrates in Universal Search video results, books, news, images, local search results and now subscribed links. The next ingredients could be blogs, products, scholar papers and some Google Base verticals.

Even if Google says it ranks results from specialized search engines along with standard web results, this is more like a figure of speech since Google displays groups of search results from Google News, Image Search and Google Maps, not individual results. More likely, Google determines how relevant some image results are for a query and finds the proper placement. Instead of actually mixing results from many specialized search engines, Google includes some of the previous Oneboxes in a controlled fashion. Google adopted a conservative approach in order to not clutter the search results and because it's difficult to compare completely different entities. How to compare some search results for "Christmas" from Digg with a news about Christmas ornaments?


Ask.com decided to separate the specialized results and display them in a column generally used for advertising (like in this search for Christmas). Now Valleywag has a screenshot of a Google experiment that displays the universal results in a separate column.


Does this mean Universal Search didn't work as expected and Google tries alternative interfaces?

{ Thank you, Trey and Jordan. }

Google Calendar Sync for BlackBerry

Synchronization is probably the most requested feature for Google Calendar and Google has finally done something about it. It's not quite what you would've expected, but it's still a promising start. Google Sync is an application that lets you synchronize your Blackberry's calendar with Google Calendar.

"Using your BlackBerry smartphone's native calendar, you can now access your Google calendar even when you don't have network coverage and be alerted for upcoming appointments with sound or vibration. Your Google Calendar stays synchronized whether you access it from your computer or your phone. You can add or edit entries right on your BlackBerry smartphone or on your Google Calendar on the web."

The application should be available at http://m.google.com/sync if you visit the page from your Blackberry's browser. According to Google Mobile Blog, it supports Google Apps accounts.

This week, Google launched a mobile package of applications for Blackberry and a unified interface for iPhone. Google really tries to build solid mobile offerings, but only Google Maps is available for the most important mobile platforms. Hopefully, Google Sync will be released for other platforms and it will synchronize your contacts as well.

Related:
Sync your mobile phone with Google Calendar (third-party apps)

Google Toolbar 5 for IE

There's a new version of Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer that brings a lot of updates and new features.

Google Toolbar's buttons can display gadgets when you click on the little arrow. Here's the YouTube gadget in a custom button:


You'll find a lot of built-in buttons in the Settings: almost every Google service has a custom button. In addition to gadget support, buttons can now display alerts, show status text next to the icon and create actions based on text selection.

Bookmarks and notebooks are now completely integrated: each note is a bookmark with some clipped content and notebooks are a way to organize and share your bookmarks. You no longer need to install a separate plug-in for Google Notebook.



When you add a note, the text will be highlighted every time you open the page. If you also add some comments, they're displayed in a tooltip when you hover over the text (you're annotating the web):


You can now create profiles for AutoFill, there's an inline find bar similar to the one from Firefox and Google can replace the "Page not found" errors with useful suggestions.


Probably the most interesting new feature is that you can choose to save your settings on Google's servers so you can access your buttons, settings and AutoFill data even if you don't use the same computer.

This beta version of Google Toolbar 5 doesn't integrate with Google Docs and doesn't synchronize your local documents with the documents stored on Google's servers.


{ via Google Blogoscoped }

Ratings and Comments in Google's Community Maps

Google LatLong Blog reports that Google Maps added a new community layer for the My Maps feature: comments and ratings. That means you can create personalized maps, transform them into wikis, import content from KML files and search results, add photos and videos, embed the map into your site. Even though these community maps are included in search results, I think they're hardly noticeable unless a popular site links to them or embeds them. Ratings and statistics will help Google create charts and show things like "popular community maps in your area" or maybe connect your search profile with some maps.

Maybe Google should also create a default community map anyone can edit. This way, you'll be able to add placemarks directly on the main map without having to create a personalized map.

Gmail Mobile Application, Now Available for Google Apps

The mobile Gmail application for Google Apps that used to only work if you had a Blackberry is now available for all mobile phones. Just go to m.google.com/a on your mobile phone and download "Mail by Google". The application looks exactly like the recently released Gmail Mobile 1.5, except that it has a blue icon and supports Google Apps accounts. You'll also notice that you can login with standard Gmail accounts.

It's unclear why Google didn't add support for Google Apps in the standard Gmail application (available at gmail.com/app), but it may have something to do with Google's branding and the Gmail name.

{ Screenshot licensed as Creative Commons by alphagiu. }

Street View Images for Dallas, Detroit and Other 6 Cities

Every two or three months Google adds new cities to Street View. This time Google included eight new cities from the US: Dallas, Detroit, Indianapolis, Fort Worth, Boston, Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Providence (all of them are in the top 150 US cities by population). The total number of cities that have the street view imagery is now 23.




According to Boston.com, "Google is also introducing a mashup service today that will enable Internet users to import Street View panoramas from particular streets or neighborhoods to their own websites or blogs. The service is intended to make it easier for people to use Street View to recommend sights, locate coffee shops, or design cyber-walking tours." More likely, Google will just extend the embedding feature to Street View imagery.

Google's Navigational Bar Goes International

Google's navigational bar is now available for all international versions of Google, even though the services included in the bar are different from one country to another.


There are also changes for the US version of Google (or the global version, if you like). Google removed from the list of services: Blogger, Labs, orkut, Patent Search, but added YouTube, the most popular property after Google Search, and a link to the More Google Products page.


Even though this makes Google's interface more consistent, you'll still find services that have an old navigation. Some international Google versions have different services: for example, Google Brazil and Google India include orkut in the main list of links because orkut is very popular there. In many countries, the antiquated Google Directory is still on the homepage.

YouTube's Revenue Sharing Program Expands

YouTube announced that the revenue sharing program will extend to a bigger number of users. In May, YouTune added "several of the most popular and prolific original content creators from the YouTube community" to a partnership program. Now anyone from US and Canada can apply, assuming he meets these requirements:

* create original videos
* have the copyrights and distribution rights for all the uploaded content
* regularly upload videos
* have popular videos

The program is called YouTube partners because it offers the chance to become more than a user who uploads videos. "YouTube partners are independent video creators and media companies who are looking for online distribution and who meet our qualifications. Becoming a partner gives you the ability to share in ad revenue from your YouTube videos."

Other online video sites, like Metacafe or Revver, have less strict conditions and allow virtually anyone to earn money from a video that becomes popular.

"Metacafe will pay you $5 for every thousand views your video gets on our site. Payment starts after your video reaches 20,000 views and has a rating of 3.00 or higher - which tells us that the viewers like the video."

"When you upload your video to Revver, we attach an advertisement and our unique tracking technology to it. We call this "Revverizing." There are two ways that your video and the associated ad can generate revenue: from impressions/views of the ad (CPM ads), and from clicks on the ad (CPC ads). When a viewer sees a CPM ad associated with your video, you get paid, no click required. When a viewer clicks on a CPC ad associated with your video, you get paid. In both cases, Revver splits the revenue with you 50/50."

YouTube plays safe as it will approve all the members of the revenue sharing program. This way people won't make money from content that breaches copyright laws and YouTube won't be flooded with misleading videos that only want to attract views, but the program will be too limited to make a real difference.

Google Finds Less Search Results

Everybody should know that when you use a search the engine, the number of search results is just an estimate. You only look at the first 10 or 20 results anyway and, in some cases, the search engine doesn't let you access more than a certain number of results. For example, Google only lets you see the top 1000 results, mostly for efficiency reasons.

"When you perform a search, the results are often displayed with the information: Results 1 - 10 of about XXXX. Google's calculation of the total number of search results is an estimate. We understand that a ballpark figure is valuable, and by providing an estimate rather than an exact account, we can return quality search results faster." (Google help center)

But recently something has changed in Google's algorithm that estimates the number of results. Here's a comparison between the number of results for [Moby] in May (notice the recently-launched bar that used gradients) and today:

Searching for Moby (May 17, 2007)

Searching for Moby (December 10, 2007)

From 15 million results to only 2 million results, there's a long way. For the same query, Yahoo estimates 18,900,000 results, Microsoft finds 7,730,000 results, while Ask only finds 4,089,000 results. Notice that all the other three major search engines show bigger numbers than Google. You might think that this query is just an exception, but that's not the case. Almost every query shows much less results in Google than in other search engines.

A search for [Google] shows (the numbers may vary across different data centers):
* 132,000,000 results - Google (screenshot)
* 1,610,000,000 results - Yahoo
* 244,000,000 results - Windows Live
* 281,620,000 results - Ask.com

And even if this estimate has never been reliable, it's strange to see a such an obvious inaccuracy. If you use complicated queries (more than 3-4 keywords), the estimates become more accurate and Google starts to show more results than other search engines.

In other related news, Google started to treat subdomains the same as directories for some queries. "For several years Google has used something called host crowding, which means that Google will show up to two results from each hostname/subdomain of a domain name. That approach works very well to show 1-2 results from a subdomain, but we did hear complaints that for some types of searches (e.g. esoteric or long-tail searches), Google could return a search page with lots of results all from one domain. In the last few weeks we changed our algorithms to make that less likely to happen in the future," explains Matt Cutts.

Related:
Google - Yahoo Comparison
Persistent queries (Greasemonkey script)
Index size and estimation (given two search engines, what are the relative sizes of their indexes?)