Google Health vs Kosmix vs WebMD

As announced, Google Health is live. You can try it only here for the moment.

Kosmix has a similar structure with Google Health, but has more subcategories (targets specific patients: kids, women), it lets you personalize the search and has much less results than Google (for [bird flu], Kosmix has 17,506 results).

WebMD has less categories than Kosmix and Google Health, their ranking algorithm isn't that good (an overview for bird flu is ranked #8, while the first results are about the shortage of flu shots). WebMD has a very good video archive and many interesting articles, but it has too few results (for [bird flu], it has 956 results).

Google integrated Google Health in their web search, but the categories aren't very well delimited and are easy to ignore. Also if you select a category, the Cache version doesn't work for any result (this seems to be a bug).

All in all, I think Kosmix and Google Health do a better job than WebMD, but Google Health wins because it has much more content.

Warning: Internet Is Dangerous

David Canton, a business lawyer and trade-mark agent, has a funny but real disclaimer for the Internet.

Business is unpredictable and unsafe. The Internet is dangerous. Many blogs have been written about these dangers, and there's no way we can list them all here. Read the blogs.

The Internet is covered in slippery slopes with loose, slippery and unpredictable footing. The RIAA can make matters worse. Patent trolls are everywhere. You may fall, be spammed or suffer a DOS attack. There are hidden viruses and worms. You could break your computer. There is wild code, which may be vicious, poisonous or carriers of dread malware. These include viruses and worms. E-mail can be poisonous as well. We don't do anything to protect you from any of this. We do not inspect, supervise or maintain the Internet, blogosphere, ISP's or other features, natural or otherwise.

These words remind me of Dante Alighieri's famous quote from Inferno: "Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate" ("Abandon all hope, ye who enter here"), the inscription from the Gate of Hell.

From TechDirt via /.

Google Cooperation

In the last post, you've seen a new Google feature that allows you to refine your search. In case you're wondering how Google knows how to create clusters for related information, the answer is simple: some medical institutions label web pages related to medical research. The institution that label the results are: UCSF (University of California San Francisco Medical Center), Medline, NIH (National Institutes of Health).

If you click on the profile link, you'll go to a yet-unknown Google site: http://www.google.com/coop/profile%3Fuser%3D002279906532590700777 that gives an error. It seems it's Google Health, it works for queries like: flu, aids, blood pressure. But I still think this is a part of a much larger project. This is a clear sign that Google will launch a cooperation feature similar to My Yahoo 2.0 and every user will have a profile with bookmarks, similar to del.icio.us.

To get these results, go to this Google data center.

Via Google Blogoscoped Forum

Related:
Google Health to launch next week

Google Semantic Web (Google Reads Your Mind)

Google is about to make a new revolution. After seeing that Google has word categories, a new feature shows that Google works on a new approach to search: a semantic web without a special markup language. The new feature allows users to refine the search by choosing directions to follow. If you search for [tired], you may want to find medical treatments, or alternative medicine suggestions, research papers or news.

If you click on [Treatment], Google will follow this link:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en
&q=tired+more:condition_treatment
&cx=disease_for_patients
&sa=N&oi=cooptsr&ct=col1&cd=1

Google uses a new operator, more, that has special arguments (in this case, condition_treatment). cx is a new parameter that provides the context.

You can view the live Google search here and more comments at Nico's Blog, that thinks this is search results clustering. I think it's not just clustering, it's understanding user's intentions and providing a better experience.

Microsoft Found How To Win Google Battle

"Microsoft will increase investments in MSN and its other online businesses to $1.6 billion next year as it escalates a battle with Google, its chief executive said Thursday." writes New York Times.

"Only two to three companies can really deliver the infrastructure that's required to keep pace with consumer demand and advertisers' needs." said Steve Ballmer in a speech to advertisers at Microsoft's headquarters. Those companies are, of course, Google, Yahoo and (maybe) Microsoft.

Ballmer also introduced Microsoft adCenter, Microsoft's answer to Google AdWords and Yahoo's Publisher Network, that brings a greater ability to target ads at specific user demographics.

"Our R&D spend just in our online MSN area has gone from a $500 million in our fiscal year '05, to a projected $1.1 billion in our fiscal year '07," Ballmer said. "We will invest as much in this online opportunity in R&D as any of the other big players in the market."

Bill Gates admitted that Google has done a "great job" in search and advertising, but said that Microsoft will show it was underestimated in these areas.

I wonder if doubling the budget is the key to obtain a better performance. Last year, Yahoo invested $547m in product development and Google invested only $484m in R&D, but Google had better financial results.

Related:
Google vs Microsoft
Amazon drops Google for Microsoft
Microsoft hires Ask.com CEO

Google Sued For Promoting Child Pornography

"Meiselman, Denlea, Packman, Carton & Eberz, P.C., acting on behalf of Nassau County Legislator Jeffrey Toback, has filed a lawsuit against Google, Inc. (Nasdaq:GOOG) charging the internet search giant with putting Child Pornography profits ahead of the well-being of children and community members." reports chron.com.

"This case is about a multi-billion dollar company that promotes and profits from Child Pornography," the complaint states, adding that Child Pornography "has become an obscenely profitable and integral part" of Google's business model.

The accusation sounds serious, but how could Google make profit from child pornography? The plaintiff says that Google has AdSense ads that promote child pornography. When I searched for "child pornography", no ad was shown. You can see the top three ads for "pornography" in the screenshot. Ironic, don't you think?

Results from Google Search for "child pornography" show non-profit organizations, anti-child pornography sites or talk about child pornography laws. So Google doesn't encourage child pornography or makes money from it.

Here's what AdWords policy says about adult-content ads:
* Ads are reviewed and categorized as "FamilySafe," "Non-FamilySafe," or "Adult Sexual Content" on a case-by-case basis.
* After our AdWords Specialists categorize the ads, Google generally allows ads containing adult themes, such as explicit sexual content, provided that they meet the conditions for AdWords advertising.
* These ads may not be accepted on our ad network of sites and products. Therefore, there is a possibility that your ads will appear only on Google search results pages.
* Advertising is not permitted for the promotion of child pornography or other non-consensual material.

Here's what the suit asks Google to do:

-- Prohibit on its Google site links or advertising relating to websites that display, market or otherwise provide illegal access to Pornography.

-- Prohibit access through the Google site to pornographers and traders in illegal pornography.

-- Comply with state and federal statutes relating to Child Pornography, including, without limitation, the Protection of Children from Sexual Predators Act of 1998, which obliges Google to report violations of child pornography and obscenity laws.

-- Post warnings to purveyors and distributors of Child Pornography that their criminal activities are subject to monitoring and reporting to law enforcement agencies.

-- Provide filters and all other available technology to concerned Google site users to block the display and access to Child Pornography.

Most of these requests are not just absurd, but impossible to put into practice. How can GoogleBot know if a site provides illegal access to pornography? Google already has a safe-search option that filters adult-content sites, not just child pornography content.

I wonder why to sue Google just for child pornography? Google lets you find information about how to build bombs, how to get involved in criminal activities, how to commit suicide or how to scan and print money. Would this message be useful? I definitely doubt it.

Google Has Word Categories

Watch Google blog discovered a new Google feature: word categories.

If you search for [type fruit], you'll get an interesting entry at the top of the results, that says:
Fruit — Type: Term

If you search for [type:shakespeare], you'll get:
William Shakespeare — Type: Person.

Not every word has an associated type, so that is probably the reason why Google didn't launch this feature oficially.

It would be nice to find out that Google has created a hierarchy of words and expressions similar to Wordnet's synsets and indexes web pages not just for words, but for their meaning. So maybe in the future, we could search for [apple type:fruit] and get only results about fruits, not about Apple Computers.

BigDaddy's Collateral Damages

The Register informs that many webmasters don't like BigDaddy, Google's latest index update.

Webmasters now report sites not being crawled for weeks, with Google SERPS (search engine results pages) returning old pages, and failing to return results for phrases that used to bear fruitful results.
"Some sites have lost 99 per cent of their indexed pages," reports one member of the Webmaster World forum. "Many cache dates go back to 2004 January." Others report long-extinct pages showing up as "Supplemental Results."

Google intended to remove spam pages from the index, but apparently they removed innocent pages. The amount of spam that shows up as top result is still high at Google, but less significant if you compare it with Yahoo and MSN.

Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, said in March that Google has "a huge machine crisis". But that can't be a reason for not indexing pages. Probably the non-spam sites dropped from the index are just collateral damages.

Google Reader On Google Homepage

Google Reader has a module that can be added to Google Personalized Homepage (/ig). You can view the posts from your favorite blogs in one place, without adding a separate module for each one. Posts open in a bubble and that is handy if you want to see skim the posts. You can change the number of posts shown, how they are opened (in a new window, in the same window or in a bubble).

Google Reader and Personalized Homepage are somehow similar: both allows you to read feeds, but the reader lets you tag feeds, rate posts and catch up with the news faster. Google could also integrate Google Reader into Gmail, like Yahoo did with Yahoo Mail Beta.

Add Google Reader to Google Homepage

Google World (Beta)

A blog called b3ta challenges tries to imagine how our world would look like if Google ruled it. Google would know your favourite songs, your past habbits, your friends so you could use it to find your keys, songs you used to listen or information about your bank account.

You could translate any book in your language, report information about fugitives using Google Maps, find Osama bin Laden, play with genetic engineering using Google DNA, find arguments pro or against any opinion.

Your shopping cart would have information about the products from Froogle. Outdoor banners would have non-obtrusive AdSense ads and every street sign will include maps from Google Maps.

Google Health To Launch Next Week

Marissa Mayer told USA TODAY that Google will make some important announcements next Wednesday at the annual Google Press Day.

Although she didn't want to say what new things Google will launch next week, she hinted at some interesting to come this year:

* "Health is an interesting [subject] -- keep your eye out for that next week."

* Later this year, Google will integrate video into Google News.

* "The presentation of search results is going to change a lot in the next couple of years. Video will play a big role. If you search for how to cut up a chicken or how to change a flat tire, video is the right answer."

In March we found out that that Adam Bosworth, Vice President of Engineering at Google, is working on a new Google project, known as Google Health. Google Base already has some medical features: finding clinical trials or proteins.

No Strings Attached?

Let's say you meet a stranger that gives you a bottle of orange juice out of the blue. You don't know anything about him, about his intentions or about the orange juice. Do you take it? Do you trust him or you refuse his offer, thinking that there must be some string attached.

Google offers most of its services for free, you can use some of them (web search) even if you're not registered or if your browser doesn't accept cookies. They say: look, we have a free document editor online, would you like to use it? What do you do? You look at the privacy policy, try to decrypt the legal language or you trust Google and write private documents online?

"Google's servers automatically record information when you visit our website or use some of our products, including the URL, IP address, browser type and language, and the date and time of your request."

"We may use personal information to provide the services you've requested, including services that display customized content and advertising."

"We offer some of our services in connection with other web sites. Personal information that you provide to those sites may be sent to Google in order to deliver the service."

From Google Privacy Policy.

10 Features You'll Find Only In Opera

Everyone says that Opera is an innovative browser, but most fail to say why. So I created a list of ten features that are really helpful in your everyday browsing and are available in Opera. Some of them are available in Firefox, if you download extensions, or in other browsers, so you may say they're not unique to Opera, but Opera used them first and they are a part of Opera's innovation.

Here's the list:

1. Duplicate this tab
You visit a page and you want to read it later. For the moment, you want to go back to the previous one. What do you do? Copy the address of the page, create a new tab and paste the URL in the address bar. In Opera you just click Duplicate. The new tab will also duplicate the history.

2. Go to URL
You see a web address in a page, but it's not not hyperlinked. How do you visit the web page? You copy it and paste it in address bar, then press enter. In Opera, select the address, right-click and select "Go to URL".

3. Reload every 30 seconds
You go to a site that shows the live score of a baseball match and it doesn't reload periodically. So you'll have to press F5 every 30 seconds to see the score. In Opera, select "reload every 30 seconds".

4. Fit to window width
Nobody likes the horizontal scrollbar in a page, but some webmasters don't bother to view their sites at different resolutions. In Opera, select "fit to window width" to remove the horizontal scrollbar and shrink the content.

5. Rewind
You search for something at Google, discover a great site, you visit 20 pages from that site and then you want to go back to the search results. You can click Back 20 times or try to locate Google in the list next to the back button. Or you can just hit "Rewind" if you use Opera.

6. Nicknames for collections of sites
How do you visit you favorite sites? You bookmark them and then try to locate the sites in the Bookmars menu. Or you enter the first letters of the URL in the address bar. In Opera you can associate nicknames to sites or collection of sites. Picture this: type "news" and see your favourite news sites opening in their tabs.

7. Tab closing
You visit site A, open a link to site B in a new tab, but the tabs A and B aren't next to each other. If you close tab B, Firefox won't revert to the tab A. You'll see site C in a tab at the left of tab B. Opera shows the previous active tab.

8. Instant back
When you click Back, the browser tries to refetch the page. Opera shows the page from the cache, so the "Back" action happens instantly.

9. Page zoom
Some sites have almost unreadable font sizes, others have huge pictures. Opera zoom feature maintains the site integrity and allows you to view the site without losing the visual presentation.

10. Crash recovery
Your browser crashes and you want to go back to the sites you were visting before the crash. In Firefox, you have to go History and open them one by one. Opera automatically saves last session so you'll see the tabs in the same order when you open the browser.

And that's not all:

11. if you want pages to load faster, you can load only cached images
12. you can control the browser with voice commands
13. use mouse gestures (you can go back this way: hold right button and move mouse left or hold right button and click left button)
14. create beautiful presentations without using Microsoft PowerPoint (even online)
15. change keyboard shortcuts

All the features above are available in Opera 8. The new version of Opera (Opera 9 Beta) has even more: BitTorrent integration, widgets, thumbnail preview for tabs and page customization (that's right - you can save settings just for a page).

Related:
Full list of features
Download Opera
Great tips for Opera

20 Questions

How many questions do you need to guess a word? It depends, you'll say. But what questions do you have to ask to get relevant information about the notion? We'll start with something general like "Is it an object, an animal or a concept?" and then we get into details. How will we know when we have an answer? Too complicated, ask 20Q.

But what is 20Q? 20Q is an online game that uses artificial intelligence to guess asking just 20 questions the word you are thinking about. Because the game uses neural networks, it gets cleverer everytime someone plays it.

Is it mind reading or something? There's no magic and it doesn't work all the time: in 80% of the cases.

Is it new? The 20Q AI was invented by Robin Burgener in 1988, and went online in 1995. The game was played more than 25,000,000 million times, so now it's pretty smart.

The AI technology was also incorporated in a handheld electronic device and was used to promote Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith.

So where's the game again? 20Q.net.

Google Is More Than Search

John Dovan from ABC News interviewed Marissa Mayer, Google's Vice President. The interview doesn't include novel facts, but it's interesting to see Google saying that the search was just the initial step in their evolution. Now Google means more than search: Google Books, Google Earth.

"It's really amazing how fast change happens, because as recently as a year ago, Google Earth didn't exist," Marissa Mayer says. "Now it's become a standard thing that people just expect." But before Google Earth exist, there was Keyhole, a company founded in 2001 and bought by Google in October 2004.

Marissa also says that Google was thinking about book search and satellite imagery back in 1999, which is kind of hard to believe if you take a step back and look at Google's homepage from 1999.

Valleywag notices another contradiction: "We've never been outwardly focused on competitors," says the lady who accused Microsoft of unfair practices yesterday.

Overall, Google wants to be perceived as a company that delivers more than web search and will probably focus on that in the months to come.

A Button For You

If you use Google Toolbar 4 (my review), you can add buttons for your favorite feeds. The feature is similar to Firefox's live bookmarks but it's better implemented: the button alerts you if there is a new post (the icon changes) and if you rest the mouse over an item, you can read the first phrases as a tooltip. Plus you can search the blog directly from the search box.

Now you can add Google Operating System to your toolbar. I've tested the button for the last month and now that Google put it on its gallery I wanted to share this with you.

* Google Toolbar 4 is available for Internet Explorer 6/7 on Windows 2000/XP

Chinese Don't Like Google's New Name

Chinese fans of Google created an online petition to determine Google to change its new Chinese name: Guge. Here are some adjectives Chinese bloggers use to describe Guge name:
* weird
* unsophisticated
* fool
* funny
* traditional

Guge means "harvesting song" or "Valley song" and was intended to be a metaphor that describes how Google crawls the web harvesting for information. Another reason to change Google brand in China was that more than half of China's internet users couldn't spell Google, informs AsiaMedia.

Also view:
Google vs Baidu video (Baidu is the most used search engine in China, followed by Google)

Google vs. Microsoft

New York Times is certain that the competition between Google and Microsoft is much more fierce than we might think.

"A measure of how seriously Microsoft takes the challenge came last Thursday when it announced that its spending would rise sharply next year, about $2 billion higher than previous estimates. Much of the extra money, analysts say, is going to meet the threat from companies offering advertising-supported Internet services and software, led by Google."

"How far Google can eat into Microsoft's software franchise is uncertain. But Microsoft fears that Google could become a kind of operating system of the Internet in the same way that Windows is the dominant operating system of personal computing."

Google has a great advantage in front of Microsoft: all their products are free, up-to-date (because they are online) and easy to use. But the transition between desktop software and online applications won't be easy for most users. So it's hard to imagine Writely as a competition to Microsoft Word.

Microsoft has the advantage of the operating system monopoly and of a large conservative user base. After losing the search war, the next battle for Microsoft is internet advertising.

Related:
The battle for IE7 searchbox
Amazon drops Google from A9 and Alexa
Next challenges for Microsoft in 2006

Sphere - Blog Search With Style

Sphere is a new blog search engine that has many interesting features. You can find the most relevant blogs for a search, not just the most relevant post using "Featured Blogs". And because the featured blogs are determined algorithmically you won't find sponsored listings.

You can search blog posts written in a custom period of time or even in the last hour. For every blog, there is a profile that lists some statistics: average posts/week, average words/post, average links/post, number of posts in the last week, number of backlinks.

Sphere has a nice bookmarklet you can drag to your browser's toolbar: Sphere it and that helps you find blog posts that match the subject of the article you were reading.

Unfortunately, the relevance of standard search isn't that good. In a search for [internet explorer 7], the third result was the first relevant to the search, the first two being a collection of links to other posts. Sphere ranks high archives and pages that contain all the post with a tag, but this will probably be fixed. Another problem is that only the last four months of posts are searchable.

"Sphere, a San Francisco- search engine company that specializes in searching blogs, for relevant information has closed a $3.75 million in fresh capital from Hearst Publishing, Trident Capital and About.com founder Scott Kurnit." says GigaOM. So Sphere has the money and the potential to become a great blog search engine.

Google Analytics Hack: Edit Your Stats

Google Analytics has an easter egg: most labels from the reports can be edited. You can't modify the graphs or the numbers, but you can produce fake statistics that show your site was both digged and slashdotted in the same week. The links from the chart are real, but are somehow verbose.

For a video that shows this feature, check Google Blogoscoped.

Google Doesn't Want MSN As Default Search Engine In IE7

New York Times reports that Google talked with the Justice Department and the European Commission about Microsoft's decision to put MSN Search as default search engine in Internet Explorer 7. "The market favors open choice for search, and companies should compete for users based on the quality of their search services," said Marissa Mayer, the vice president for search products at Google. "We don't think it's right for Microsoft to just set the default to MSN. We believe users should choose."

And it's not difficult to choose. Internet Explorer 7 lets you add another search engines easily and if you visit google.com with IE 7, Google will ask you if you want to choose Google as default search engine.

"The typical default when users install IE7 on their Windows XP machines will most likely be their usual search engine." claims IE Blog.

Firefox, Opera and Safari use Google as default search engine and don't include MSN Search as an option. Most Google software (Google Toolbar, GTalk, Google Desktop, Google Earth, Google Video Player) has a default option in the setup to set Google as default search provider. While the battle for Windows XP was won by Google, the battle for Windows Vista seems fierce.

More:
Explorer 7 review
IE7 standalone (no install required)
How Google used to promote its search engine
Google promotes Firefox on the homepage

Steve Jobs: Build Your Dreams

A great man with an extraordinary life, the man who invented* the personal computer - ladies and gentlemen, Steve Jobs, CEO at Apple Computers:



The video is from Stanford Graduate Commencement address delivered by Steve Jobs on June 12, 2005. Some key quotes:

"If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right."

"Death is the destination we all share, no one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be because death is very likely the single best invention of life."

"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."

"The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it."

* Steve Jobs co-founded Apple with Steve Wozniak in 1976, and a year later launched the Apple II - the first desktop computer to have a built-in keyboard, built-in sound and that could produce color graphics when hooked to a color television.

Download Google Videos As AVI Files

Update (Sept. 2007): This doesn't work anymore, but you can still download the videos as MP4 by clicking on "Download for Video iPod/Sony PSP". After Google acquired YouTube, Google Video started to remove features and to morph into a video search engine.

If you want to save videos from Google Video in Windows and Mac OSX, you only have the option to download them as MP4 files, in a lower quality that's suitable for the iPod and PSP. Google removed the option to save the videos in a higher quality after closing the video store and discontinuing Google Video Player. But you can still save the videos as AVI files using a bookmarklet (a bookmark that only contains JavaScript code), as described below.

Make sure the link toolbar is visible in your browser. You can enable it if you go to the View menu in your browser, click on Toolbars and check:
* Bookmarks Toolbar in Firefox
* Personal Bar in Opera
* Links in Internet Explorer


For Firefox and Opera, drag and drop the link below to the toolbar. For Internet Explorer, right-click on the link, select "Add to Favorites", ignore the security warning and choose "Links" from the list of folders (Internet Explorer no longer supports dragging bookmarklets).

Download Google Video

The link toolbar should look like this:


Next time when you see a video you like on Google Video, click on the bookmarklet and save the video. Note that this only works for videos hosted at Google Video, not for YouTube or other third-party sites that are available from Google Video.


Because Google adds a non-standard header to the videos, not all players can render them. Some good applications that ignore the headers and play Google videos are Media Player Classic (Windows), VideoLan (Windows/Mac/Linux), MPlayer (Windows/Mac/Linux). If you want to remove the special header, so you can play the videos with Windows Media Player, try this small tool.

Amazon Drops Google From A9 And Alexa

A9 (Amazon's search engine) and Alexa (online traffic monitoring service) have replaced Google as default search engine with Windows Live Search. There's no official information about this change, but this is the first major success for the new Windows Live Search, the replacement for MSN Search. A9 search engine powers web search at Amazon.com and IMDB.com.

New Google Test: More From The Top Result

Google tests another interface for search results. You can already see for some top results a list of three or four important pages from that site.

In this experiment, Google shows the links on separated lines and displays the URL the same way it does for standard results. Google knows that 62 percent of search users click on a link within the first results' page and most only on the top result.

Disclaimer: the line "Try your search on Yahoo, Ask, ..." was generated by a Firefox extension - CustomizeGoogle.

Each Newspaper Will Have A Software To Read It

Why go to nytimes.com to read the latest news from New York Times when you can install a simple program that lets you view the news on your desktop? That's what Microsoft must have said to the New York Times board to convince them they need Times Reader, a PC-based software application for news distribution.

Overall, the Times Reader enhances the onscreen reading experience through Windows Presentation Foundation, Microsoft'’s advanced display technology in Windows Vista. The text in Times Reader is displayed in columns and formats to fit the size and layout of any computer screen and enables readers to customize the display according to personal preferences, such as font size and content relevance. The Times Reader also uses the same font styles as the printed newspaper, extending the strong brand identity of The New York Times.

It's really strange to see a high-tech company like Microsoft creating a software that essentially delivers the same content that can be found on a site. People can customize a site using custom stylesheets, Greasemonkey scripts and New York Times could have let the users change the font size or the layout.

And why creating a software that displays news from one source? It's like developing a RSS Reader that reads just one feed. The other papers will want their own paper-like viewer and Microsoft will replicate Times Reader instead of developing some widgets that could be integrated in Vista Sidebar.

It's ironic to see applications like Microsoft Word moving online (Writely, Office Live), while New York Times' site moves offline.

• Microsoft's press release

• New York Times' coverage