Yahoo Mail Beta vs. Gmail

Google Operating System got Yahoo Mail out of beta for thousands of Yahoo users. Their opinions aren't too favorable to the new webmail application.

"I tried the new Yahoo Mail Beta and is horrible slow, with bloated interface, obtrusive ads, I much prefer Gmail which is elegant, simple, fast, and more importantly it does not get in your way."

"I prefer Yahoo Beta to the folderless Gmail structure. "

"I agree with everyone about slowness. Even more to the point is its freakish desire to emulate a basic software email client. I don't want that for my webmail. That's why Gmail is brilliant, it's webmail and it's not like an average client (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.)."

"Wow. Yahoo has had Oddpost for 2 years now and after the long wait, we get this? This is very disapointing. The user interface looks like a bad version of Outlook Express. Gmail and Google Calendar eats Yahoo's lunch..AND dinner."

You are free to try Yahoo Mail Beta and tell what you think.

Also read:
5 ways to check Gmail faster
Yahoo Mail Beta review

Google Statistical Machine Translation Is Live

Automatic translation between human languages was one of the earliest applications suggested for digital computers, but it wasn't easy to do it. Machine translation generally uses natural language processing and tries to define rules for fixed constructions. The original text is encoded in a symbolic representation from which the translated text is derived.

Google developed a different kind of machine translation using a statistical approach. "We feed the computer with billions of words of text, both monolingual text in the target language, and aligned text consisting of examples of human translations between the languages. We then apply statistical learning techniques to build a translation model." explains Franz Och.

Google's statistical translation is now live for Arabic-English and English-Arabic translations.

Related:
Multilingual search from Yahoo

Opera 9 - Discover A New World

Opera 9, the new version of the most underrated browser, brings a fresh look and more goodies than anyone would expect.

Opera Widgets

Widgets are small web applications that run directly on a user’s desktop. They can show stock information, weather reports, news headlines, calendars, latest posts from your favorite blog, games. They live outside Opera's window, but are active only when Opera is running. They are similar to Google Desktop's panels, but Opera widgets don't clutter your desktop: they are visible only when you want to. Just press F6 in Opera and discover a new world.

What you see in the screenshot are:
* KnowledgeMate, a widget that searches Google, Wikipedia and Yahoo News
* Pandora - the radio that plays your favourite music in a mini version
* a clock and a slick calendar
* a slideshow with pictures from Opera Community
* latest posts from Google Operating System

Customize any page

Remove images from pages, block ads, choose if you want cookes from a site, enable or disable JavaScript for a site, enable Java, SVG or other plugins only for the sites you trust. If you find Flash ads from a site obtrusive, you can disable them and you'll never see them again in Opera.

BitTorrent download

You don't need a BitTorrent application if you have Opera 9. You can download torrents like any other file, you can even search for BitTorrent files from the toolbar.

Thumbnail preview for tabs

If you don't remember what site is in each tab, you can hover on the title and see the URL, a thumbnail and the complete title.

Better rich-text editor

You can edit your Blogger posts like you do in Firefox or Explorer, you can use your favourite webmail site to write mails with custom colors, fonts, lists and links.

Your favorite Firefox features

Search engines are editable, you can add a search engine from any searchbox. Opera has about:config, to change your preferences faster. View the source of any page using the new source viewer that has a compact look.

For geeks only

Opera 9 adds support for: CSS 3 (not complete), XSLT 1.0, XPath 1.0, Web Forms 2.0, SVG 1.1. Opera 9 passes Acid 2 test.

Download Opera 9 Beta

Related:
Make Gmail Chat work with Opera 9

Google News Autocomplete

If you enjoy Google Suggest, the feature that autocompletes your query with the most frequent expressions that have been searched, it's a good thing to know that Google News has its own suggest feature. And if Google Suggest is interesting but not very useful most of the times, Google News Suggest will create a list of expressions from the most important recent news that match what you've typed.

You type [michael] (or only the first three letters) and you see the most important Michaels in the news. Select [Michael Jackson] and you'll see keywords from recent news that involved the pop star.

Google Reader Has Video Player

Google Reader included the support for videos published as Flash files. You can now track videos from Google Video and YouTube using Google Reader: view
popular videos from Google Video,
most discussed video this month on YouTube,
videos tagged Google on YouTube,
or search results for iPod from Google Video.

While viewing this playlists, you'll notice the new look for YouTube player, that now includes volume control.

Test Internet Explorer 7 Without Installing It

To run Internet Explorer 7, you need Windows XP SP2.

Step 1

Download Internet Explorer 7 (14.8 MB). You could also download IE7 from File Hippo.

Step 2

Download the IE7 Standalone archive created by Jon Galloway.

Step 3

Create a new folder IE7 in Program Files, copy the IE7 setup file and extract the files from the archive downloaded at Step 2.

Step 4

Run the file IE7 Standalone Setup.bat and click OK to install xmllitesetup.exe, an update necessary so that IE7 has tabs.

Step 5

Create a shortcut on the desktop to the file IE7.bat. Change the icon of the shortcut to one from IE7's iexplore.exe.


Now you have a standalone Internet Explorer 7 that runs along with Internet Explorer 6. You can launch IE7 from the shortcut you've created on the desktop. Note that not all the features will work well and this standalone installation is recommended only for developers that want to test IE7, but also need Internet Explorer 6.

More about this setup from Jon Galloway.

Related:
Internet Explorer 7 Review

Google vs Yahoo Spam Battle

If you want to see how good a search engine deals with spam, one idea would be to search for the most spammed keywords. I selected three pharmaceutical keywords.

hydrocodone [orally active narcotic analgesic and antitussive]
Google: results #7, #8, #10 are spam pages
Yahoo: results #1, #7, #8, #10 use sneaky redirects; result #3, #4, #5, #6 are duplicate and uninformative


valium [a tranquilizer used to relieve anxiety and relax muscles]
Google: results #4, #8, #9, #10 use sneaky redirects and keyword stuffing
Yahoo: results #1, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10; result #2 is a site generated automatically, that uses expressions like "Is valium is for valium i was recently announced valium"; result #3 is uninformative

One page even disguised as an online poll:

Do you want?
1. cheap valium
2. buy valium online
3. discount valium

cialis [drug used to treat male erectile dysfunction]
Google: results #5 use sneaky redirects; result #3, #7, #10 are blank or nonexistent pages
Yahoo: results #7, #9 use sneaky redirects

Google wins for hydrocodone and valium, while Yahoo wins for cialis. It's clear, though, that Google puts more effort in detecting and removing spam pages from the index.

How To Recover Data From A Hard Drive

TechRepublic has updated a collection of 200 tips for repairing a faulty hard drive.

"One trick I have learned as a technician, when the problem is data-read errors off the platters themselves, is to freeze the hard drive overnight."

"I've run into this scenario numerous times. One time it involved the main Novell SYS volume on our HP File Server. I was really sweating as the server would not boot. I took the drive out and put it in a freezer for 30 minutes. I then reinstalled it into the file server and Presto! I was up and running. Needless to say, I quickly mirrored the drive onto another and got rid of the bad drive."

"If you are willing to destroy the disk and try to get some data off the drive, there is a quick hack available. Place the drive in a static-free bag, then place the drive and static-free bag into a ziplock bag to seal out moisture. Place this into a freezer turned to as low as possible for 24 hours. After 24 hours, pull the drive out and immediately put it into a computer (the faster the better) that boots to a floppy and has another hard drive to transfer data to. If the drive wasn't damaged too much previously, you should be able to pull some data off before the metal of the drive heats up and starts destroying the data storage platters. You can repeat the process only if you shut down almost immediately and go through the 24 hour freeze process again. Chances are that the first time attempt will be the only chance to recover data."

Related:
EBCD: System recovery boot CD
TestDisk: Recover lost partitions
Burn a Windows Live CD with system recovery software preinstalled

Sitemaps Shows Google Penalties For Your Site

Now that everyone can use Google Sitemaps, Google decided to transform Sitemaps into webmaster's corner. Matt Cutts informs that webmasters who use Sitemaps will get detailed information about penalties for their site. If your site doesn't follow Google's guidelines and uses hidden text, cloaking, doorway pages or sneaky redirects, it may be removed from the index. If you use Google Sitemaps, Google will confirm the penalty and offer you a reinclusion request specifically for that site.

Not everyone will get information about Google's penalties.

If the webspam team detects a spammer that is creating dozens or hundreds of sites with doorway pages followed by a sneaky redirect, there’s no reason that we’d want the spammer to realize that we’d caught those pages. So Google clearly shouldn’t contact every site that is penalized–it would tip off spammers that they’d been caught, and then the spammers would start over and try to be sneakier next time.

Everyone Can Use Google Sitemaps

Google introduced a new type of verification for Google Sitemaps: insert a meta tag in to the homepage of your site. The previous method (uploading a file to the server root) didn't work for Blogger users that host their blogs on BlogSpot.com.

You don't have to submit a sitemap for your site to use Google Sitemaps. If you prove you're the owner of the site (using the methods above), you can find interesting information: the top search queries - the queries that most often return pages from your site, top search query clicks - the top queries that direct traffic to your site, crawl statistics, PageRank distribution, crawl errors (this is a good way to detect bad links, HTTP errors).

If you have a blog on Blogger and can't host a sitemap for your blog, you can just submit your blog's feed to Google Sitemaps: http://yourblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml.

A simple way to create a sitemap for your site online is using ROR Sitemap Generator. If you want to have a sitemap that updates dynamically, you have to install a web application on your server (PHP, ASP, ColdFusion).

Yahoo Homepage In Two Flavors

The newest design experiment for Yahoo homepage allows users to choose between two different layouts: a wide layout and a narrow layout.

Wide Yahoo homepage



Narrow Yahoo homepage



The new interface puts the accent on Yahoo search box, My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail and Yahoo News.

Previous design changes:
New Yahoo homepage (February)
Another possibly new Yahoo homepage (March)

First Google Logo

Google's first name was BackRub, back when the search engine lived on Stanford's servers and could be found at backrub.stanford.edu. BackRub's logo was a scan of Larry Page's hand.

From BackRub's FAQ:

Your logo is upside down: Why is the light source obviously below the image? It looks quite unnatural...

The logo is simply a scan of my hand, from a flatbed scanner converted to black and white. The back in the picture is the scanner cover, and the shadows are from the scanner light.

SketchUp Is Free

Google did it with Picasa, Urchin, Keyhole. Now SketchUp, a 3D modeling program bought by Google last month, is free for personal use and you can download it if you have a decent PC with Windows 2000 or XP. Google promises to come up with a Mac version for SketchUp soon.

The nice thing about SketchUp is that it allows you to create 3D models with simple drag and drop operations. You don't have to read the manuals, it's that easy to use. You can view geo-referenced 3D models in Google Earth and upload them in Google 3D Warehouse. You can already see interesting buildings in Google 3D Warehouse: Rose Bowl Stadium, Taj Mahal, Empire State Building or Apple Campus (you can see it in the screenshot).

Google Maps Mobile

Launched last year in November as Google Local Mobile, the map service was enhanced and got a new name. If you go to www.google.com/gmm on your mobile phone, you can try Google Maps Mobile: get directions, find local businesses, view maps and satellite imagery.

The list of supported mobile phones is very big and includes: color BlackBerry devices, Nokia 6230i, Nokia 6600, Samsung SGH series, Sony Ericsson K750i, Sony Ericsson P900. Google Maps Mobile is a Java midlet that connects to Internet and displays maps as JPEG images.

If you want to test drive Google Maps Mobile, go to this page (requires Java) and try the interactive demo.

Related:
Google Maps for the rest of the world

Guge

It's spring, everything is growing, having thriving vitality

In this sowing season, Google takes the name Valley (Grain) Song. Using the grain as a song, it is a song of sowing and expectation. It's also a song of harvesting and joy.

We hope that Guge will integrate global information for everybody, so that everyone can have access to it and will benefit.

Welcome to Guge. Let's search for you. Let's harvest for you.

Guge is the new name Google wants to be known in China. Google created a Flash video to illustrate the metaphoric concept of search using harvesting.

We see each website as a voter, voting for one another. All these search results are ranking completely according to the voting, because we believe that everybody is equal in front of the information. Only the information voted by everybody on the internettrustfulable and valuable.

It's surprising to see Google saying "everybody is equal in front of the information" when they are censoring the web search in China. What you can see here is the approximate translation of the Chinese text.

Via Google Blogoscoped.

Google Homepage Promotes Firefox

If you are in the US and you use Internet Explorer, Google homepage will tell you to switch to Firefox. And while you switch to Firefox, you'll also get Google Toolbar.

If you aren't in the US, and you want to see the first cluttered Google homepage, use this free proxy while browsing with Internet Explorer.

If you have Internet Explorer 7, Google homepage is even uglier.

I thought Google.com should be simple, as Marissa Mayer once said: "It's simple, it's elegant, you can slip it in your pocket, but it's got the great doodad when you need it."

Related:
Reduce memory usage in Firefox
How much money made Mozilla from Google in 2005?

Google And Yahoo Show More Ads

A ComScore qSearch study shows that in March 2006, Yahoo increased the proportion of searches that contain ads with 30 percent: 59.7 percent of searches display sponsored listings. Google showed ads on 52.9 percent of searches, up 50 percent from a year ago.

Both Yahoo and Google increased the clickthrough rate for ads: Yahoo from 9.5% to 11.4%, while Google increased the clickthrough rate from 9.7% to 11.8%.

If so many people click on the ads from SERPs, does this mean they don't find relevant pages in the organic results or they click on the first link on the page, even if it's a sponsored result? I think Google shouldn't place any ad in front of the organic results, not even for commercial queries.

Google Mobile Search Used Mostly To Find Porn

Google released some interesting data about Google mobile search:

1. the top five Google mobile search topics are: porn, entertainment, telecom, local services and games.
2. one in five people searches for porn.
3. one in five people enters web addresses in Google search box, using Google as a mobile proxy.
4. the number of characters used in a typical Google cell phone search query is almost the same as in searches from PCs.
5. it takes one minute, on average, to enter a search term and get results.

The study has been conducted on a million Google mobile phone queries and it will be presented tomorrow at the CHI 2006 conference in Montreal.

Google Control Panel

You are invited to Googleplex to visit Google playground and you are given read-only access to all the data gathered by Googlebot (and other Google bots). You can write programs that manipulate the data, you can view the most visited sites and the most frequent queries, the most influential sites and the queries for which these sites rank well. What would you do with all that power?

I would:
* list the most visited websites that used to be updated once a day, but haven't been updated for many months. I would like to see archive sites.
* list the top expressions used in the anchors to link to a certain site.
* create an interface that allows you to start with a site and then go to the most visited external link (in Google). The journey continues until a threshold is reached.
* define the distance between two sites: how many links do you have to click from a page of site A to go to a page from site B?
* start with a query and see how people modify that query to obtain better results.
* list the sites that deliver the most clicked news stories in Google News.
* list the most used words in a language.
* describe a site using vocabulary richness: how many different words use BBC News or MySpace?
* list the results for a query not with respect to a page relevancy, but with respect to a site relevancy. Who is more entitled to talk about Sony Ericsson K800i: BBC News or a MobileReviews.com?
* what do people that use OS2, BeOS or Amiga are searching for?
* discover unknown parts of the web: what sites have no backlinks?
* create a verbose interface for Google that explains why a page was included in the results.

Google Interface Experiments

Google explains the latest UI experiments:

From time to time, we run live experiments on Google — tests visible to a relatively few people -- to discover better ways to search. We do this because there’s no good substitute for understanding how real people, in real-world situations, actually operate. Theories are fine, but "improving the user experience" really happens best when we understand what people do online.

So to learn more, we sometimes randomly select a group of people to see a possible improvement to search options. Or we may select a group of people and try out a new element while they're searching. If you ever wonder why your Google site looks slightly different from that of the person sitting next to you, this is why.

This is the first time Google stops to explain users their interface tests.

More details:
Extended snippets
Try new Google design
Other version of the design changes

Google Maps For The Rest Of The World

Google Maps, that now includes the old Google Local, will increase the coverage to Europe. You can already see satellite images from Holland, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal and get directions in local languages. Google updated the satellite data used for Google Maps so it now has the updates recently made to Google Earth.

Although the maps are incomplete, so you may sometimes get lost, it's interesting to see Google expanding Google Maps ahead of the competition. It will be the first time since Google translated the search interface when Google will make a huge impact on people's lives. People will be able to explore the world and their neighborhood using natural language.

More at: Google Blogoscoped Forum.

Microsoft Hires Ask.com CEO

Steve Berkowitz, CEO of Ask.com, has been hired by Microsoft to head MSN's OnLine Business Group, which includes include MSN.com, MSNTV and MSN Internet Access programming, advertising sales, business development, and marketing for Live Platforms, MSN and Windows Live.

Steve Berkowitz has been responsible for many changes at Ask.com, including a cleaner interface and better search results, that were the reason for the recent gains in traffic and revenue. "Steve is an accomplished senior executive with a rich skill set, including consumer brand building, media, marketing, operations, people management, finance, and technology. He also brings a great blend of start-up and high growth business experiences. Prior to joining Ask, Steve was the President and COO of IDG Books, where he successfully built a consumer brand by expanding the "Dummies" series of books to cover topics ranging from C++ to pet care." said Kevin Johnson, Microsoft's copresident of the platforms & services division.

In January 2006, MSN Search market share in the US was 13.5%, while Ask market share was 6.0%.

Multilanguage Search From Yahoo

Yahoo wants to make every language feel like English. Enter your query in your language and the search results will include not just the web pages written in your language, but also web pages written in other languages. For example, you'll be able to find this blog post if you search for [Recherche multilingue Yahoo], even if I didn't include these French words. And when you click on the results, you'll see this blog post translated in French.

The multilingual search is available at Yahoo! France and Yahoo! Germany. You just have to activate "Recherche multilingue" or "Suche Translator" option. The search results will include pages written in French, English, German, Spanish and Italian.

Get Yahoo Mail Beta

A reader posted in the comments a clever trick to try the new Yahoo Mail Beta:

To get Yahoo Mail Beta, just switch your content preference to Germany, France or UK. Then you will be asked if you want to join the beta when you log into your Yahoo Mail. Say yes, and join the beta. Then from the options menu, change your content preference what it was before. Then go to Yahoo Mail again. You should see Yahoo Beta. If you don't see it, go to options and click "Try Beta" button. That's all.

How to change your content preference:

* log in to Yahoo Mail
* click Options
* select Account information from the left panel
* go to Member Information, General Preferences, Preferred Content
* select, for example, Yahoo UK
* click Finished
* go to Yahoo Mail
* you'll see a page that says "It's the New Yahoo! Mail Beta... and you're invited."
* click on "Try Beta Now".

Related:

Yahoo Mail has unlimited storage
Yahoo Mail Beta vs Gmail

Update [September 16]: Now you can get Yahoo Mail Beta from this page.