Google Code Search

Google Code Search is a new search engine created by Google that "helps you find function definitions and sample code by giving you one place to search publicly accessible source code hosted on the Internet". You can restrict your search to a certain language, license, file or package. You can also use regular expressions, so don't forget to escape characters like space (for example, for\ \(;;\)).

Google does a good job at finding duplicates, and locating a file in a package.

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Krugle, search open source code

The New Google Groups

What I love about Google products is that when they're finally out of beta, there's a new beta version around.

The new Google Groups Beta looks different. It has childish icons for each group, but you can change that. In fact, you can change a big list of settings if you are the owner of a group (select a template, change the navigation, access rights and more).

You can create web pages and upload files (storage: 100 MB) to a group, and that seems to be most important new feature. The web pages can be edited by more people at once and Google Groups shows all saved versions. People can also comment on the page.

Google lets you create a real profile: now you can add a picture and more information about yourself. Each user has a rating, the average rating for your posts.

There's no left sidebar. The recently visited groups moved to a quirky menu that can be accessed from the "My Groups" link. Google merged the two search boxes, so the interface looks cleaner.

Messages from a topic look exactly like a Gmail conversation, each message is collapsible, can be forwarded or printed. If you don't look carefully, you'll think this is not Google Groups, it's Gmail.

All in all, the new design seems a combination of Gmail and Yahoo Groups. The tight Gmail integration is a nice addition, while the file storage might make migration from Yahoo Groups easier. To quote Mr. Justin Timberlake, Google Groups brings sexy back, and it's mature enough to have all the feature you need.

We can conclude that this is the first transplant from the new Google to the old Google (Google Groups was launched in 2001) and the patient feels much better.

Google Syndicated Search

After the famous discovery that Google Public Search is vulnerable to phishing, Google decided to redirect all the pages hosted there to googlesyndicatedsearch.com. This way, the sites can't read the cookie for google.com and don't appear reliable enough to enter your credentials.

"Google University Search customers have complete control over the header and footer html. Create the Header HTML to fit the look & feel of your site." Unfortunately, the service is still unavailable.

The problem with user-generated content is that it can contain malicious code and that visitors can be easily mislead into thinking that Google owns the site and is responsible for the content.

Behind Google Q&A

Peter Norvig gave a talk at UC Berkeley on September 25. Among other things, he talked about some Google projects that use artificial intelligence. He also said that a large corpus of data can be much more valuable than an efficient algorithm. One example of project where Google uses a lot of data is Google Q&A, that is extracting facts from web pages and delivering as answers to common questions like "what is the population of Japan?". Google doesn't use predefined patterns, they find the patterns from examples, as this approach is more scalable. They extract data by matching the patterns against the top results for a query.

The presentation is available online (MMS stream).

Include Google Gadgets Into Any Page

Google announces that some of the gadgets available for Google Personalized Homepage can be embedded into any web page. The list of the gadgets includes: Google Calendar Viewer, Google Calculator, US Traffic Information, Moon Phase, Picasa Album Viewer and more. This way, you can enrich your web page with live information.

Google gives an example of usage:

"For example, let's say you are in charge of your club soccer team's website, and you want to add a current weather forecast so your fans can plan for your games or you want to include a daily brainteaser on your site without having to come up with something new every day. Google Gadgets lets you do this easily. Just visit the directory of "Google Gadgets for your webpage" to find gadgets that you'd like to add to your own page and select your preferences for how the gadget will appear on your page. Then, copy and paste the HTML from the window into the HTML code for your own website. It's an easy way to get the content you need and want without spending hours writing code!"

Previously, some gadgets could be included in Google Page Creator if you selected the experimental features.

Clean the Labels from Google Video

A couple of months ago, Google Video started to let people add labels that describe videos. Instead of displaying only frequent labels, Google showed all the labels and people started to abuse the system by adding unrelated labels, idiotic texts, web addresses. Now you can report spam labels, to clean the mess from most popular videos.

Google should have taken the time to explain the role of the labels and should have displayed only popular labels, the same way they do in Google Image Labeler.

Do Questions Lead to Innovation?

Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, talks about Google's plans and their partners in an interesting interview from Time. He also explains that people at Google put a lot of questions, some of them leading to ideas and new products.

We run the company by questions, not by answers. So in the strategy process we've so far formulated 30 questions that we have to answer. I'll give you an example: we have a lot of cash. What should we do with the cash? Another example of a question that we are debating right now is: we have this amazing product called AdSense for content, where we're monetizing the Web. If you're a publisher we run our ads against your content. It's phenomenal. How do we make that product produce better content, not just lots of content? An interesting question. How we do make sure that in the area of video, that high-quality video is also monetized? What are the next big breakthroughs in search? And the competitive questions: What do we do about the various products Microsoft is allegedly offering? You ask it as a question, rather than a pithy answer, and that stimulates conversation. Out of the conversation comes innovation. Innovation is not something that I just wake up one day and say 'I want to innovate.' I think you get a better innovative culture if you ask it as a question.

SearchMash, a New Google Search Site

SearchMash is a low-profile site created by Google, that mixes Google Search with Google Image Search and adds some interesting features. The concept is similar to the old A9.

Search results are numbered and you can reorder them. Clicking on the green URL, you'll see a list of options like "cached copy", "similar sites". You don't have click on the search box to type your query. There is no search button, you just have to type enter. Google shows the number of visible search results in the top right corner. Clicking on the "more" link, Google loads a new set of results using Ajax and scrolls to the first result of the new set using a nice animation (this seems broken in Firefox). Actually the entire site uses a lot of JavaScript and Ajax, and it can't be used if you disable JavaScript.

For the moment, SearchMash is a playground for small ideas that could be the foundation of an entirely new Google site. Although this site is mainly for Google testers, it's interesting to see it growing.

{ Found by Pete Warden, who has an interesting site called... SearchMash. Via Blogoscoped Forum. }

Related:
Restrict your search to your favorite sites, soon at Google

Google Base Store Connector

Google Base Store Connector is a migration tool that allows you to export product information from online stores hosted by eBay, Amazon or Yahoo to Google Base. Google explains: "Google Base Store Connector is a free download that puts info about your store into our index, so that when people search Google for the products you have to sell, you'll show up in their search results, along with a link directly to your site on eBay, Amazon or Yahoo."

Google spends a lot of time lately getting ready for their big December launch. The launch of Google Base API, this migration tool and some additions to Google's robots.txt suggest that Google tries really hard to be successful in the shopping area.

What Does Britain Mean to Children?

Google had a competition in Britain called "Doodle 4 Google". Kids were asked to "design a Google doodle explaining what it means to be British today". The jury selected the top 30 doodles and now Google wants to know what do you think about their creations. The winning entry will be featured on Google UK homepage.

You may not be British, but you can still try to vote for your favorite doodles. Maybe Google won't take your vote into account, but you'll enjoy some nice logos like this one...

Update: here are the winners.

Google Buys Its First Office

Google has bought "the Silicon Valley home where co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin rented a garage eight years ago" and started the company, reports AP. They'll pay an undisclosed amount to Susan Wojcicki, who is now Google's Vice President of Product Management.

Google talks about its history in a hilarious way: "In September 1998, Google Inc. opened its door in Menlo Park, California. The door came with a remote control, as it was attached to the garage of a friend who sublet space to the new corporation's staff of three. The office offered several big advantages, including a washer and dryer and a hot tub. It also provided a parking space for the first employee hired by the new company: Craig Silverstein, now Google's director of technology."

The house is barely visible in Google Maps and it's already a touristic attraction. "We plan to preserve the property as a part of our living legacy," said Google spokesman Jon Murchinson.

{ Image from thirdsquare.com: Sergey Brin and Larry Page in their office-garage (1998).}

Restrict Your Search to Favorite Sites, Soon at Google

Time has an interesting article about Google called Google's Growing Grasp. One interesting scoop is that: "Marissa Mayer, who manages search products, says the company has assigned more engineers to search than ever before and plans to release a new search tool that will enable users to design and build their own flavor of Google search, scanning just the sites they're interested in."

This seems related to the new domains recently bought by Google: search-mashups.com, mashsearch.com and other similar domains.

MSN Search (Windows Live Search) already has search macros, that allow you to define a list of sites where you'd like to search (for example, sites about recipes). Rollyo lets you define a list of trusted sources and create your own search engine using results from Yahoo.

So we should expect a similar offering from Google, that will most likely include a way to share your search mashups that combine content from more than one source. Until then you can already do that, albeit not in an elegant way.

Gmail Improves False-Positive Spam Detection

New York Times quotes a report from Lyris, an email marketing firm that tracked 57,000 mails sent from 57 businesses and nonprofit organizations. Only 3% of these messages were mistakenly labeled as spam by Gmail. In the first quarter of 2006, a similar study concluded that 44.1% of the business messages were sent to the Spam folder, although customers chose to receive them.

Gmail's spam filters are adaptable, so they get better over time. In 2004, Slashdot asked "How good is Gmail's spam filter?" and someone responded:

"So far, no spam whatsoever has found its way into my inbox. However, the amount of false positives filtered into the spam folder is overwhelming.

For a while I wondered why I only got reports by email about 30-40% of my finished online auctions (link omitted, no free advertising here). Last week I accidentaly clicked on the spam folder, and there it was, dozens of FALSE POSITIVES."

Hidden Labels in Gmail

If you enable saving your chat history in Gmail, your conversations from Google Talk are saved as standard emails. To make them stand out from the rest of messages, Gmail adds two labels: chat and chats.

If you want to search your chats, you just have to add label:chat to your query. If you want to search only your mail, exclude the chats by adding -label:chat.

Gmail has many other hidden labels that can make your life easier, so you don't have to use the advanced search:

* label:inbox - search only your Inbox. It's a good idea to keep your Inbox clean.

* label:star (label:starred) - search only your starred messages. You can use the star button like a bookmarking system. Star only important messages.

* label:draft (or label:drafts) - search only unfinished messages. Drafts could be used for storing notes or emails that must be sent later.

* label:sent (or label:sentmail, label:sent-mail, label:sent mail ) - search only sent mail. It may be useful to restrict your search only to messages you've sent, or only to messages you've received if you add a minus.

* label:all (or label:allmail, label:all-mail, label:all mail ) - search all your mail, including messages from Trash (label:trash) and Spam (label:spam).

* label:read and label:unread. Restrict your search only to read mail or unread mail. For example, to find all your sent messages that have unread replies, you can search for label:unread label:sent.

* label:voicemail (or label:voicemails ) - search only the voicemail received from a Google Talk user.

It's nice that you can combine all these labels with user-defined labels in a query. To show results that have both label A and label B, just search for label:A label:B. To show results that have one of the labels A and B or both, just search for label:A OR label:B.

Update: Instead of label:A, you can just type l:A. [Thank you, Busse].

Top Sites

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Google Earth API

The unofficial Google Earth Blog reports that Google is about to release an API for Google Earth. "The Google Earth COM API is designed to let third party applications query information from and send commands to the Google Earth software. External applications can query the current viewport, control the 3D camera, enable, disable, load KML features, traverse features, and more."

A draft for the API documentation is available here. This small API has been available for awhile, but Google didn't officially support it.

The Most Bookmarked Google Services

As del.icio.us is the most used bookmarking service, I decided to use it as a measure for the most bookmarked Google services. The numbers are not very accurate, as some services have different URLs that point to the homepage, like Gmail, but I tried to add the number of bookmarks for each URL.

1. Gmail 16000+


2. Writely 15143


3. Search 7675


4. Maps 6197


5. News 5130


6. Reader 4745


7. Video 4307


8. Scholar 3215


9. Labs 2720


10. Earth 2583

Some can argue that Google.com is very well known, so it's not necessary to bookmark it. Usually the philosophy behind bookmarking is "this site seems useful for me, I'll probably use it later".

Gmail and Writely are the most popular Google services (they're still way behind search, even though not in this ranking). Google Reader's ranking is surprising and that means its redesign was pretty successful.

Not yet in the top 10, but pretty close: Blog Search, Sketchup, Book Search, Page Creator, Google Moon, and Spreadsheets.

Yahoo Mail API, at the End of the Year

Yahoo announced at Yahoo Hack Day that they'll open Yahoo Mail, so programmers can develop extensions and new interfaces for Yahoo Mail. The new API, that will be available later this year, will use Yahoo's browser-based authentication. Google has a similar API for Google Accounts.

"Chad Dickerson, head of the Sunnyvale company's software developer relations program, said he believed that the open approach to programming represented the biggest single Web software ever to be opened up for public development." Yahoo Mail has more than 257 million users, some of them being spam bots.

Yahoo doesn't include POP3 access for their free mail service, so this API might allow developers to deliver this feature (there are applications that create POP3 servers for Yahoo Mail, but the API will make things easier).

It will be interesting to see if Google follows the trend and provides an official API for Gmail.