Google Helps Create a Window to Space

Associated Press reports that Google will help scientists "build a huge sky-scanning telescope" that will give people access to "digital footage of asteroids, supernovas and distant galaxies".

The 8.4-meter LSST is expected to begin surveying the sky in 2013, from a mountaintop in Chile. Its goal is to continuously scan space, taking a series of 15-second exposures that allow it to cover the sky every three nights. Officials say the telescope will open "a movie-like window" on nearby asteroids and far-off exploding stars, and help explore the mysterious "dark energy" believed to fuel the universe's expansion.

LSST Corporation shares more details about this collaboration:

LSST and Google share many of the same goals: organizing massive quantities of data and making it useful. Over 30 thousand gigabytes (30TB) of images will be generated every night during the decade-long LSST sky survey. The massive amount of data from LSST must be managed efficiently and analyzed in real time. Key areas in the Google-LSST collaboration will be: organizing the massive ingestion of information, processing and analyzing the continuous data streams in a 24/7 fault tolerant manner, enabling the new discoveries coming out of the LSST to be made available to the public and researchers in real time, and working with and managing large parallel data systems. In addition to aiding professional scientists and amateur astronomers, properly organized the LSST data will generate a new and dynamic view of the night sky for the public. LSST data will be valuable to curious minds of all ages, and will provide a powerful teaching tool.

Google also has an agreement with NASA that will allow it to show interesting data about our planet, moon and Mars in Google Earth. Hopefully, this telescope won't repeat Hubble's troubled history.

{ Image courtesy of LSST Corporation, where you can find out more about the project. }

Related:
Celestia - explore the universe

How Google Sees Itself

Press releases are boring, but the about section from the end (or the boilerplate) could tell you a lot about a company. Here are some excerpts from Google's press releases over the years.

1999:

-"Google is dedicated to providing the best search experience on the web. Google has its own search destination site at http://google.com. Google also offers co-branded solutions for information content providers. Google was founded in September 1998 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, building on three years of research as computer science Ph.D. candidates at Stanford University. Traffic has been growing at a rate of 50% per month since Google's inception, fueled only by word of mouth."

1999-2000:

-"Google was founded in 1998 by Stanford University Ph.D. candidates Larry Page and Sergey Brin to create a new generation of powerful, scalable search engine products to improve the user experience of searching the web. Based on three years of advanced research in computer science, Google is dedicated to providing the best user search experience by delivering a powerful, yet simple-to-use format for finding the most relevant answers to search queries."

2000:

-"Google exists to provide the world's best Internet search experience. Google accomplishes this for millions of users daily by delivering a powerful, fast, and easy way to find the most relevant information available. Google's technological innovations have powered the company to numerous awards, including a 2000 Webby and People's Voice Award For Best Technical Achievement; Best Search Engine on the Internet from Yahoo! Internet Life; Top Ten Best Cybertech of 1999 by TIME magazine; Technical Excellence Award from PC Magazine; and Best Search Engine by The Net."

2001-2002:

-"With the largest index of websites available on the World Wide Web and the industry's most advanced search technology, Google Inc. delivers the fastest and easiest way to find relevant information on the Internet. (...) A growing number of companies worldwide, including Yahoo! and its international properties, Sony Corporation and its global affiliates, Netscape, and Cisco Systems, rely on Google to power search on their websites."

(at some point in) 2004:

-"Google is a global technology leader focused on improving the way people connect with information. Google's innovations in web search and advertising have made its website a top Internet destination and its brand one of the most recognized in the world. Google maintains the world's largest online index of websites and other content, and Google makes this information freely available to anyone with an Internet connection. Google's automated search technology helps people obtain nearly instant access to relevant information from its vast online index."

2003-now:

-"Google's innovative search technologies connect millions of people around the world with information every day. Founded in 1998 by Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google today is a top web property in all major global markets. Google's targeted advertising program provides businesses of all sizes with measurable results, while enhancing the overall web experience for users. Google is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia."

2006 (April Fool's Day edition):

-"Google's innovative search technologies connect millions of people around the world with information every second of every minute of every hour of every day. Founded in 1998 by Stanford Ph.D. wannabes Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google today is a top web property in all major global markets and a very large number of minor ones. Google's targeted advertising program provides businesses of all sizes with measurable results, while enhancing the overall web experience for those users who haven't tuned out of online commerce altogether. Most Google lava lamps and bean bag chairs are located in Silicon Valley, though numerous such lamps and chairs can also be found in offices throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia."

Trying to provide the best search engine and to improve the way people connect with information, Google became a great brand and a top web property thanks to the word of the mouth, the important awards received and the collaboration with Yahoo, Netscape and other companies. Independent of platform, browser or language, Google conquered the world by being fast, easy to use and friendly.

Here are some definitions for Google from 1999:

Larry Page: "Google fills a real void in the Internet precisely because we have a manic passion for pure, unadulterated search."

Sergey Brin: "Google strives to get Internet users to the information they want as quickly and efficiently as possible, and that's all we do. We've engendered such strong loyalty because Google provides the purest and most powerful search experience on the web."

Google-Hosted Blogs, on Your Own Domain

If you wanted to enjoy all the features of the new Blogger, but also have your own domain, now you can. Follow these instructions: buy a domain, create a CNAME record for your domain and select "switch to custom domains" in your blog's settings.

Google will continue to host your posts and pictures, so you don't need to buy a hosting service. The old .blogspot.com address will redirect to your new domain. This way, you'll keep your visitors and the beloved search engine rankings.

There's also the option of using FTP publishing, but you need to pay for hosting, and you'll also miss features like: dynamic serving, managing layouts using drag-and-drop. The advantage is that you have more control.

Although Blogger is not yet a part of Google Apps for Your Domain, it will certainly be included.

Building Your Own Personalized Homepage

Omar Al Zabir, co-founder of Pageflakes, describes in detail how you can build a personalized homepage similar to Google IG using ASP.NET AJAX and .NET 3.0 Framework.

"Among [the popular AJAX start pages], Google IG is the simplest one. The one I have built here is something between real Google IG and Pageflakes in terms of Ajax and client side richness. Google IG is mostly web 1.0 style postback model and it's not really that much of Ajax. For example, you see it postback on switching page, adding new modules, changing widget properties etc. But the one I have built here is a lot more Ajax providing rich client side experience close to what you see in Pageflakes."

The result is DropThings, a site that mimics Google's Personalized Homepage, but has a much worse performance.

Google Removes Self-Promoting Tips

Google started to add last month tips that promote services like Blogger, Google Calendar and Picasa. This form of undisclosed advertising generated a lot of buzz and now the tips are gone. The tips were also too frequent and almost annoying, because they appeared at the top of the search results pages for every query that contained: "blog", "calendar", "photo sharing" - and that includes: "yahoo calendar", "bloglines".

It's nice to see that Google is receptive and understands that practices common for others are not consistent with Google's philosophy. And in case Google needs to be reminded about their principles, here's an excerpt from a page titled "Why we sell advertising, not search results":

In a world where everything seems to be for sale, why can't advertisers buy better position in our search results? The answer is simple. We believe you should be able to trust what you find using Google. It may seem odd for a search engine to speak about the integrity of its results. But like a news organization, we believe we have an obligation to present information as objectively as possible. That's why we don't bias our search results based on what people are willing to pay. (...)

And while we believe relevant ads can be as useful as actual search results, we don't want anyone to be confused about which is which. (...) Some online services don't believe the distinction between search results and advertising is all that important. We do.

Performancing Metrics Open Sourced

One of the last posts from 2006 was about Performancing acquisition: an important part of a start-up focused on helping bloggers has been bought by a company with a very bad reputation. Well, the deal is now off. "After much discussion, we've decided that the deal proposed by PayPerPost just isn't right for us or our community," says Nick Wilson from Performancing.


But the good news don't stop here: Performancing Metrics will become open-source, their Firefox editor for blogs will have a new identity: ScribeFire. Unfortunately, this also means that Performancing Metrics ends here, at least until it finds a developer community to adopt it.

On a brighter note, FeedBurner has just launched a stats package for blogs (based on BlogBeat) and Google should also relaunch Measure Map.

Google Calendar Sync for Windows Mobile Devices

GMobileSync is a free software for Pocket PCs and smartphones running Windows Mobile 5.0, that synchronizes Google Calendar with PocketOutlook. The software doesn't require Outlook on your desktop.

Some features:

* Choose a range of days to sync based on today's date

* Remove all Google Calendar events from PocketOutlook without deleting any manually entered events

* Automatically exit GMobileSync when synchronization is complete

* Supports recurring events.

In the current version (1.2), changes made in PocketOutlook aren't added to Google Calendar, but this should be fixed in GMobileSync 1.3, that will be released next Monday.

{ Thank you, Tijir. }

Search Inside YouTube Videos

PodZinger, the search engine that uses speech recognition to search inside audios and videos, added support for YouTube videos.

"Now besides simply searching on the metadata of the video files, you can search for terms that are actually mentioned inside the audio, allowing for a greater likelihood you will find relevant material. We're also automatically organizing the videos into channels based on the actual content of the video. Today you can narrow your search within entertainment, sports, and anime. And we'll continue to add more," promises PodZinger Blog.

A search for "youtube" on PodZinger shows 286,132, so we can assume that's the number of searchable videos. Unfortunately, you can't go directly to the section that contains your query, so you'll have to watch the video from the beginning.

I wonder if YouTube doesn't mind that PodZinger processes their videos. Google Video also does this, but only for videos that have captions.

New Version of Google Talk

There's a new version of Google Talk: 1.0.0.104. While there's no obvious new feature except for Vista support, it's interesting to look at some additions from the previous versions.

When you invite someone with a non-Gmail address, a new dialog informs you that Google Talk tries to see if that person uses another compatible service, like Gizmo or Earthlink.

Links to Gmail from Google Talk send you to the secured version of Gmail (you'll notice that the URL starts with https).

There are also some new status messages, but they aren't visible yet: "Show who I am chatting with", "Chatty", "talking w/".

Google Search Appliance Adds Clustering

Google Search Appliance, a box that indexes documents from a company's intranet and web sites, was updated and the list of the new features includes:

* search clustering (automated grouping of search results by topic)

* mark authoritative sources (similar to the way Custom Search Engines work)

* sitemap generator for company's sites, that can be submitted to Google Webmaster Tools.

* integration with Microsoft SharePoint 2003 and 2007 (the appliance can index SharePoint documents)

While the new version adds features already available for consumers (sitemaps, search bias), it will be interesting to see if Google decides to add clustering to the web search. Other search engines that have this features (like Clusty) don't have extraordinary results, but may help you view the big picture and guide you in refining your query.

Google Start Menu

If you'd like to have a Google Start Menu, (the unofficial) GUtil for Firefox could help you a little. The extensions adds on your navigation toolbar a big list of Google services. Instead of trying to find the name of the service in the list, you can just type the first letters from the name (typing "r" opens Google Reader).

The list is customizable, and might be a good way to open a certain Google site, instead of going to another page that contains the list.

Google Provides Search for China Mobile

Google made a deal with China Mobile, world's largest mobile operator, to provide search for its WAP portal. China Mobile has 300 million users (70% share in China's mobile market).

Users are able to search for ringtones, pictures, videos, and online games on China Mobile's Monternet portal. This partnership is important for Google, which is very far behind Baidu.com.

"Mobile phone is a multimedia platform, especially in China, it is embodied by the download of ringtones and pictures. Moreover, Google regards multimedia search as the development trend for mobile search," explains TMCnet. Google invests a lot in mobile technologies and mobile search could be a good way to improve its position in China.

Google Reader Trends

Google Reader added a way to see "personalized trends for your subscriptions and read items". You'll be able to see how many posts you read daily, what are your favorite feeds, the most prolific authors, the most inactive feeds. This is also a great way to decide if you actually read a certain feed or you just keep it in your subscription list because it's too difficult to unsubscribe.


{ Thank you, Jeff G. }

Update: Some people shared their stats: Matt Cutts, Mihai Parparita, and more.

YouTube's Content Identification Technology Delayed

YouTube promised to deliver by the end of 2006 a technology that allows content identification. "The new technology will be designed to scan a digital audio file, such as an MP3 or video, and compare the electronic fingerprints to databases of copyright material."

Financial Times speculates that the delay "could represent a serious obstacle to efforts by Google, its new owner, to forge closer relations with the media and entertainment industry". Content providers want to get a cut from the ads placed next to their videos or next to videos that use their content, so YouTube's content identification system should be up and running before it introduces video ads.

YouTube's success with CBS should make people think. "YouTube users are clearly being entertained by the CBS programming they're watching as evidenced by the sheer number of video views. Professional content seeds YouTube and allows an open dialogue between established media players and a new set of viewers," said Quincy Smith from CBS about their YouTube branded channel.

Take Notes with EverNote

EverNote is a free application for Windows that lets you create and organize notes. You can enter your own text, copy content from web pages or drag and drop it. For each note, you can assign categories. There are also automatic categories that let you find notes that contain images or notes from an application like Outlook. You can search your notes instantly and access previous versions of a note.

Notes can only be printed or sent by email, as there isn't a way to directly export them to PDF. You can drag and drop notes between EverNote and other applications such as an IM client.

My favorite feature is templates: you have built-in layouts for shopping lists, to-do lists, source code and more.

There's also a paid version with more advanced features like: synchronization with USB drives, search in handwritten notes.

All in all, an elegant application that looks like Windows Media Player (but it has more to offer) and beats the web-based Google Notebook, that is optimized only for web clips.

Create a Secret Personalized Homepage

Yesterday someone asked me how to remove the tabs from the personalized homepage. While there's an easy way to hide the tabs in Firefox, this personalized homepage won't have tabs.

Tabs help you organize your feeds and gadgets, but you may want to have a really personal homepage that you'll never read at work or in an Internet cafe.

Google-Dell start page keeps the old look of Google's personalized homepage, doesn't have tabs and saves all the settings in your Google Account. To add gadgets, find them in this directory, copy the source URL and manually add it to the Dell page.

You can also use Google-Gateway start page or create a page using Google Apps for Your Domain.

Browsing the Web Using Google Cache

Google Cache is a great solution if a web page is down. If you're visiting a site and it returns a 404 error message, you can either do a search on Google for that site (add the cache: operator, so your search query would be something like cache:www.google.com) or you can use this Firefox extension that provides a custom error page.

Google Cache shows a page like it was when Google last crawled it successfully, so it may be outdated. Google doesn't store images, scripts and other embedded objects, but it tries to retrieve them from their original location. If the page is down, most of the external resources won't be accessible and the page will load slowly.



In this case, it's a good idea to click on the "cached text" link to see only the text. You can also add &strip=1 at the end of the URL or install this Greasemonkey script that adds a link to the text version of the cached page in the search results page.

While reading the page, you may find other interesting links from the same site. Instead of repeating the same steps, you can install a Greasemonkey script that adds a new link to the Google Cache version for all the links from that page. This way, you can browse the web from Google Cache.

Oftentimes, pages load much faster from Google Cache and it's easier to spot your keywords as they are highlighted by Google. You'll also bypass access restrictions, so you can use it as a primitive proxy.

hakia, a Knowledge Search Engine

hakia is a new search engine that tries to understand more from the web pages and focuses on information rather than web pages. "The basic promise is to bring search results by meaning match - similar to the human brain's cognitive skills - rather than by the mere occurrence (or popularity) of search terms."

For simple queries like [panda] or [Napoleon Bonaparte], hakia shows galleries: a big list of results grouped by topics that try to answer to many possible queries. For Napoleon Bonaparte, you'll see these clusters: official websites, biographies, pictures, news and interviews, fan sites, awards, speeches, myths, controversies, resources, innovations, statistics, bibliography, filmography. So it's like an automatically-generated Wikipedia page, without a coherent story.

Like other search engines, hakia shows snippets for each result, but these snippets are bigger and try to highlight a possible answer to your query. Unfortunately, hakia is not always on the right track and when it fails, it fails completely.

hakia works only for English queries, doesn't recognize spelling errors too often, doesn't have advanced operators and it's a bad choice for navigational queries (the first search result for [google] is google.org).

The search engine will get out of beta this year and its founders predict it will be the first engine to use ontological semantics that enable it "to perceive concepts beyond words and retrieve results with meaningful equivalents".

Vanity Searches Can Help You Find Old Friends

Sometimes vanity can be a good thing. A Ruby on Rails programmer had the brilliant idea to connect those who need to find an old friend with their old friend, who does a vanity search* on Google. Long Time Lost is a site that creates a page, where you can enter the name of your friend and some details about him/her and your relation. The page will be indexed by Google and other search engines and will hopefully be in the top results for your friend's name.

The concept is very simple and if you don't want to use that site, you can create a page on your own site. Try to keep it simple, and don't forget to place the name in the title and the header.

* vanity search = searching one's own name on an Internet search engine

{ Via Digg. }

Gmail Contact List Exposure

[ I really didn't want to write about this, but because many news sites (Slashdot, Digg) already talk about this, it can't bring too much trouble. ]

Do you remember the post about the XML that contained your Gmail contact list? Well, Haochi from Googlified discovered that by adding "out=js" at the end of that URL, you can get the same data in JavaScript format. Even more, if you add "callback=name", you get a JavaScript code that can be used in any web site. This thing has a name: JSON and it's a very practical way of importing data into a JavaScript application. The problem here is that anyone can import your Gmail contact list (if you are logged in) and send it to a server.

The JavaScript file is used by Google to make it easy to send videos to your contacts in Google Video, to invite people in Google Spreadsheets and Google Notebook. So it's not a bug in Gmail, they just exposed some data in a wrong way.

Google can fix this in many ways and will certainly fix it. Until then, it's a good idea to sign out of Gmail when you're not using it.

Update (after a day): Google fixed the security vulnerability.

Gmail's Storage Capacity Stops Increasing

If you sign out of Gmail, you'll notice that the storage doesn't increase. It used to increase with about 0.33 MB a day, but the Gmail team forgot to add the code that manages the quota increase after 31st December 2006.

On April 1st 2005, Gmail space increased from 1 GB to 2 GB and started to grow every day. They called this: "Infinity+1 storage plan".

"Storage is an important part of email, but that doesn't mean you should have to worry about it. To celebrate our one-year birthday, we're giving everyone one more gigabyte. But why stop the party there? Our plan is to continue growing your storage beyond 2GBs by giving you more space as we are able."

Update (January 3rd): Everything is back to normal. On April 1st 2007 we'll have 2835 MB.

December Recap: Myths, Accusations, and Twists

December was a peaceful month for Google.

An AP article explained us that: "Even if Google stands by its promise to protect its users' information, there are no guarantees that mischief-making computer hackers or crusading government agencies won't eventually try to pry into the database."

After that, a site was removed from Google index because it contained spammy links and its owner complained. It turned out that the site had been hacked and Google tried to warn the owner before removing it.

Then we found out that Google is financing terrorism, even though it's a CIA-sponsored company. Both affirmations seemed hilarious to any common-sense man.

While trying to make IE6 users upgrade to IE7, Google created a customized version of Internet Explorer that included Google Toolbar. The problem was that the page that promoted this version looked the same as Yahoo's IE7 page. Blatant rip-off.

Google was also accused it treats its employees like kids. Googlers reacted: "Without seeming immodest, the work we do there has helped to change the world, and (I hope) will continue to do so in the future. It's a place where I can show up and end up working with some profoundly smart people."

Google also released the top searches in 2006, but it turned out they we're not the top searches. "We looked for those searches that were very popular in 2006 but were not as popular in 2005 -- the explosive queries, the topics that everyone obsessed over," explained Google Blog.

The brightly-colored search company did something good for programmers too by cutting the support for Google SOAP Search API.

Google added new tips at the top of search result pages that promote services like: Blogger, Calendar, Picasa Web. A post by Blake Ross, Firefox co-founder, called Tip: Trust is hard to gain, easy to lose stirred a lot of controversy. "Google's new age "bundling" is far worse than anything Microsoft did or even could do. Microsoft threw spaghetti at the wall and hoped it stuck, and likewise there's nothing wrong with Google's arbitrary front page ads. The difference here is that Google knows what users want and can discreetly recommend its products at the right time."

In December, around 60 Gmail users lost their messages, Orkut was down for almost a day (an earthquake in Asia was responsible for that), and Google promoted Firefox on the homepage.

Of course, Google did other things too: Blogger is out of beta (but the migration takes too long), Picasa Web has search (but it's too expensive), Google Toolbar 3 for Firefox is launched (but doesn't work for some users).

Some blogger decided to explain a small part of Google myths, show 12 photos that illustrate Google's activity in 2006, and start a wishlist for 2007.

But you were lucky: you just enjoyed the show and thanked God you weren't Google in December 2006. Happy New Year!

On Performancing Acquisition

I don't know if anyone noticed something strange in two of my previous posts: 2006 Metrics and Google Video Contact Manager. Both contained a reference to Performancing, a small startup that offered great products for bloggers: a nice editor for Firefox, a real-time statistics service and an ad network. I've only used their metrics service, which doesn't have all the features of Google Analytics, but it updates hourly, and shows much better information about referrals, outgoing links and ads.

Unfortunately, Performancing sold their metrics service to PayPerPost, a company that pays bloggers to write posts about products (a combination between advertorials and product placements). BusinessWeek said they're "polluting the blogosphere", while TechCrunch concluded they're offering to "sell your soul". While PayPerPost policy changed and bloggers must disclose that they are accepting payments, it's hard to trust a company that doesn't give a damn about ethics.

It's weird to see a great service in such ugly hands (this is the risk for any startup), but it's also difficult to find other service that offers the same features. So if you know a better alternative, or if you think I'm wrong, tell me in the comments.