Google Sitelinks for Wikipedia

Google started to show some special sitelinks for Wikipedia articles. As you probably know, sitelinks are links to popular sections of a site that help you navigate directly from Google's search results pages. Initially, Google displayed sitelinks only for the top search results and only if the query was navigational, but now you can find sitelinks for other results: for example, you'll see sitelinks next to results from IMDb.

The sitelinks for Wikipedia results are special because Google doesn't send you to a different page, but to a section of the article. This is especially useful for long articles that include a lot of information.


It's the first time when Google indexes URLs that include anchors and sends you directly to a section from a page. The feature has already been available at Yahoo Search and Live Search.

{ Spotted by Milivella. }

Google Listen, a Podcast Manager for Android

As you probably noticed, Google releases many interesting services as Android applications and some of them are part of Google Labs: an application that records GPS tracks, a star map, a directory of points of interest. The latest release is an application titled Google Listen, a player for podcasts.

"Listen from Google Labs brings podcasts and web audio to your Android-powered device. It lets you search, subscribe, download and stream. By subscribing to programs and search terms it will create a personalized audio-magazine loaded with fresh shows and news stories whenever you listen."


The application lets you search thousands of podcasts, so it will be interesting to see if the podcast search engine will have a web interface. For now, Google Listen is an experiment and Google still has work to do to improve "networking, sdcard management, download storage, subscription updates, search quality, indexing more web audio, additional languages, and user experience".

And speaking of Google's Android apps, Anil Dash made an interesting point last month: "Google's recent development work on applications for mobile devices has often been delivered exclusively as applications for their own Android platform instead of as iPhone applications, despite the fact that iPhones are roughly forty times more popular in the marketplace."

Edit Albums Collaboratively in Picasa Web

As Picasa Web Albums gets closer to Google Docs (and the upcoming Google Drive), it's natural to add the most useful feature available in Google Docs: collaborative editing. Now you can create photo albums and add collaborators that upload photos, videos or edit captions.


To add collaborators, visit one of your albums, click "Share" and make sure that the option "Let people I share with contribute photos" is enabled.

"Contributors will need to sign in to their Google Account to add photos or videos. Their content will be attributed to them, and they can make edits such as adding captions to, rotating, or even deleting the pictures that they've uploaded. Of course as the owner of the album, you have complete control over who can contribute content. You also have the ability to edit this content as if it were your own. You can manage collaborative access for contributors on the 'Shared with' list by just toggling the 'plus' icon Add Contributors next to their name. A green icon means that user can contribute," explains Google.

"A limitation worth noting: contributors won't be able to upload to collaborative albums from the Picasa software," mentions the Google Photos blog.

Import Messages and Contacts from Old Accounts to Gmail

In May, Gmail launched a feature that lets you import messages and contacts from other mail services like Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL. Google promised that the feature will be rolled out to all accounts, but it was only enabled in new accounts. The good news is that the feature is now available in all accounts and you can find it if you go to the "Accounts and import" tab from the settings page.

You may wonder if it's a good idea to use this service powered by TrueSwitch instead of Gmail's mail fetcher. Here are some differences between the two service:

* Mail importing saves to your Gmail account the existing messages from other accounts and continues to check for new messages only for 30 days. Gmail's mail fetcher downloads the existing messages and checks for new messages indefinitely.

* Mail importing saves to your account messages and contacts, while Gmail's mail fetcher doesn't import contacts (you can manually import contacts).

* Mail importing works for mail services that don't support POP3 (for example: the US version of Yahoo Mail), but the mail fetcher requires POP3. Mail importing supports a small number of popular mail services.

"Copying mail over usually takes a couple days, occasionally up to a week — but eventually it all arrives. And once it's done, you can forget your old account and enjoy having everything in one place," says Google, but I disagree. You'll import the old messages to your account, but after 30 days the service will no longer fetch new messages.

Google Groups Integrates with Google's Web Apps

Google Groups is one of the services that would benefit a lot from an integration with Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites and other Google apps. It makes sense to create a document and to collaborate with other group members or to create a calendar and share it with your group.

Google blog announced that the integration is already available. "As an example, imagine you're organizing a local intramural softball team tournament. You use Google Docs to keep track of the rosters for each team as well as each team's performance. You want all the players, but only the players, to have editing access. You already have a Google Group set up with the tournament participants, so you simply share the spreadsheet with the group itself, granting the group members permission to edit."

To share a document, a calendar or a site, use the group's email address (groupname@googlegroups.com) in the sharing dialog.


And if you want to unsubscribe from a group, Gmail makes it easier by adding an "unsubscribe" option when you click on "show options".

Filter Images by Aspect Ratio in Google Images

As promised, Google Images added the option to restrict the results by aspect ratio. If you go to the advanced search page, you'll be able to choose one of the four types of images: tall, square, wide and panoramic.


This is one of the last missing features from Google Images Search that were available in Microsoft's Bing. Google Images has improved a lot lately by adding advanced options that help you refine the results (Creative Commons search, searching by size) and options that require image analysis (finding similar images, searching by color, detecting faces).

Sync Google Chrome Bookmarks

The most recent Google Chrome dev build added a feature that lets you synchronize your bookmarks with a Google account. Because of a technical issue with Google's new sync technology and because Google Chrome uses folders instead of labels, bookmarks will not be displayed in Google Bookmarks, but in Google Docs.



How to try the new feature? Make sure you use Google Chrome's dev channel, which includes a buggier and less polished version of Google Chrome. Then create a desktop shortcut for the browser, right-click on the shortcut, select "Properties" and edit the "Target" field by appending:

--enable-sync

(make sure to add a space before pasting the flag). You should see something like this if you're using Windows Vista:

C:\Users\Ionut\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe --enable-sync

Restart the browser and you should find a new option in the Tools menu: "Sync my bookmarks". Enter your credentials and the sync process should start immediately. You'll be able to access your bookmarks in a weird location: a read-only folder in Google Docs (things will look less weird when Google Docs is transformed into Google Drive, a general-purpose online storage service). Install Google Chrome's dev build on a different computer and you'll be able to access your bookmarks, edit them and all the changes will be saved online.

Google will release a sync API so that developers can add similar features for other services. "To make this sync infrastructure scale to millions of users, we decided to leverage existing XMPP-based Google Talk servers to give us "push" semantics, rather than only depending on periodically polling for updates. This means when a change occurs on one Google Chrome client, a part of the infrastructure effectively sends a tiny XMPP message, like a chat message, to other actively connected clients telling them to sync," explains a Chromium document.

Tip: import the bookmarks from Google Bookmarks by clicking on the Tools menu, selecting "Import bookmarks and settings" and choosing "Google Toolbar" from the list.

Update: The file that implements the syncing algorithms (syncapi.dll) includes many references to GDrive, so it's likely that Google will use the same technology to synchronize all the files stored in Google Drive.


{ Thanks, Pascal. }