After tailoring the results to my interests (using my previous queries, ratings, videos watched), there's a big change. In-grid's music videos are no longer in the top results (the two videos were moved to #6 and #7). Meanwhile, the video "Grid-based Integrated Bioinformatics Systems for High Throughput" was moved from #7 to #1, "iClaustron: Open Source Grid Cluster Storage Controller" was moved from #11 to #2, "Pioneering the Laptop: Engineering the GRiD Compass" was moved from #29 to #3 and "Warren Miller's OFF THE GRID" (the only video from the top 5 that is not about computers) was downgraded from #1 to #4.
If you use Google Notebook, you'll find a new link at the top of search results pages: "My notebooks". There are two possible situations:
* you have the extension/plug-in. In this case, it's the same as if you clicked on "Open Notebook".
* you don't have the extension/plug-in and Google emulates the interface. You can copy search results in the notebook by clicking "Note this" next to the snippet, manage your notebooks or type some text in a new note.
Finally a new service at Google Labs: some people were really worried that Google's innovation went down the stairs.
Google Voice Local Search lets you search for local businesses from any phone and for free. If you're in the US, call 1-800-GOOG-411 and say what you want to find. Here are some of the features:
* You can find a business listing by category. Just say "pizza," for example. * You can send the listing details to your mobile phone via SMS. * The service is fully automated, so it doesn't rely on human operators. * It connects you directly to the business, free of charge.
In the US, 411 is the phone number for local directory assistance, but it's pretty expensive (more than $1). 1-800-FREE-411 is a free service that uses speech recognition to process your request and ads to monetize it.
Google tested several years ago Google Voice Search, a service that let you search Google by voice, but it's not available anymore. There's also Google SMS: send an SMS to 466453 with your query and get business listings.
If you're in the US, which 411 is better: 1-800-FREE-411 or 1-800-GOOG-411?
Update: This service has been around for a while (it was known as 520-Find). A post from October 2006 gives some interesting overview of Google 411:
Call 1 877 466 4411 (1 877 GOOG 411) and try your luck with two voices that I've come to think of as Mr. Google Smooth and Mr. Google Hawking. They won't tell you who they are, but they seem to be the voices of Google Local Search. (...)
If you call, nothing announces that you've reached Google, but a slightly arch and apparently human Mr. Smooth informs you your call might be recorded and then asks for a city and state. Mr. Hawking then cuts in, slow, methodical, and synthetic, to repeat your query. All good? Mr. Smooth then asks for a business type or name. He does all the traffic direction--the prompting for commands, the suggestions of ways you can interact, the questions. Mr. Hawking just gets to read back your queries and read out the searches.
Actual search results described below the fold, but just some general remarks: the voice recognition is pretty good, even with some "foreign" words, but not all English words.
"Now that Google has acquired JotSpot, all accounts are free. In addition, all accounts have been upgraded to unlimited users and unlimited pages."
Reading some questions from the help center gives you the impression that there's no integration between JotSpot's wikis and Google's products. There also funny texts like:
"Yes, JotSpot does support Apple Mac computers. For the most part, JotSpot will work with Safari. Because we do not test with Safari, JotSpot does not officially support it."
Stellarium is a free software that renders the sky from a configurable position. The application, available for Windows, Mac and Linux, creates an immersive environment thanks to the 3D full-screen rendering and the realistic photos. Stellarium lets you see stars, constellations, planets, nebulas and is a great way to learn their names. You can search the name of a planet or star and the application even auto-completes it for you.
You're the master of time, so you can make it run slower, faster or even stop it; you're the master of space, so you can change the position to anywhere you want; you can also control the events by running or recording scripts that simulate eclipses or other astronomical events.
It's very refreshing to use it as a virtual telescope that teaches you to look at the sky and to understand more from its mystery.
Maybe to combat ad blindness or maybe because the new formats are more attractive, Google decided to change some of the ads from Google search results and the content network.
Here are the changes:
* The ads displayed at the top of search results pages for highly competitive keywords have a background (#FFF9DD), instead of a blue background. The new background is so subtle that is almost white and many users might confuse them with the actual search results.
To prevent accidental clicks, "users now need to click on the link in the top line of an ad in order to be taken to an advertiser's site," according to AdWords blog. Until now, you could click anywhere in the ad box, including the blank spaces.
* AdSense ads change the famous "Ads by Gooooogle" branding from a text into an image that contains Google's logo. "After extensive testing and research, we've found that the new formats are not only visually appealing to users, but they also perform even better for publishers and advertisers," explains Leslie Chiang.
Google launched My Maps, a new feature in Google Maps that lets you mark some places on the map and annotate them. Essentially, it's an easy way to create a KML file from Google Maps (until now, the feature was available in Google Earth). To create a map:
* Select one or more places from the map. * Draw lines and polygons to highlight paths and areas. * Add descriptions by typing HTML code or using a rich text editor. * More in this user guide.
Each map will have its own permalink (like this map of Googleplex) and can be exported as KML to see it in Google Earth. Google wants to create a big directory of maps, so if you decide to make your map public, anyone can find it in the search results. The alternative is to make it unlisted, which means the address won't be included in search results, but it will be accessible to anyone who knows it (much like in Picasa Web).
You can find maps created by other people if you search for a local business and click on "see user-created content" at the bottom of the search results. This acts as a search engine for KML files available on the web, so you'll find a lot of KML files from bbs.keyhole.com (Google Earth Community), where you could host your KMLs and get some feedback.
This new feature (available for a long time in Windows Live Maps or in some Google Maps mashups) is also a good way to share more than one place with a single link. You can add placemarks manually or from the search results.
When it finds the most relevant sites to your query, Google also tries to filter adult sites, especially for general queries. There's a good reason for that: unless your query is explicit, you may not want to see adult sites in search results. Google also filters explicit words from Google Suggest or from related searches.
But not if you use Google China. Here are the related searches for girl at google.com:
If you search for girl at Google China and scroll down to the bottom you'll see different related searches:
Google offers more ways to use its instant messaging client. Here's a (supposedly complete) list:
Desktop applications
* Google Talk client - available only in Windows. Distinctive features: voice calls, voicemail, file transfers, Gmail notifications. You can also chat with people from other IM networks using Jabber transports.
* Jabber clients. Google Talk uses Jabber, so any Jabber client can be used to connect to Google's servers. Use this option if you have Linux, Mac or you want an all-in-one instant messenger that lets you talk to your friends from Yahoo Messenger, AIM etc. A nice all-in-one cross-platform instant messenger is Gaim.
Mobile applications
* MGTalk - third-party Java application that includes Gmail notifications.
* Talkonaut - another third-party Java application. Distinctive features: call your contacts (not free), easy way to add contacts from other IM networks.
* OctroTalk - Windows Mobile client for smartphones and Pocket PCs. It supports chatting and talking with other Google Talk users.
* Google Talk for BlackBerry. You can "add, delete and rename contacts, know when [your] friends are online and available, leave conversations and resume them later, copy conversation text into memory and even be notified when a message is being typed."
Web applications
* Google Talk is available in Gmail. This is particularly useful if you want to reply to a mail from someone who is online, but the email is not the most appropriate way (you need an immediate answer). Also Gmail is the place where you can search your chats (add label:chats in front of your query).
* Go to google.com/talk and click on "Launch Google Talk". A pop-up window will open and you'll be able to chat with your friends. Unlike the Gmail version, here you have tabs and a richer interface.
* Add a gadget to Google Personalized Homepage or to Netvibes. Use this option if you have your personalized homepage always open in the background.
* Add it to your browser's sidebar.
In Firefox, click on this link: Google Talk Sidebar to create a bookmark that opens in the sidebar. Now all you have to do is to click on the bookmark to load the gadget.
In Opera, create a new panel by clicking on this link: Google Talk Sidebar. To see the new panel, press F4 and select it from the list.
* There are also third-party sites like Meebo that let you chat with your friends from other IM networks as well.
Even though MacOS has Spotlight for desktop search, Apple users wanted Google Desktop. Well, now they have it.
The Mac version only includes the desktop search features and indexes these file types:
- PDF, TXT, and HTML files - email from Gmail, Apple Mail, and Microsoft Entourage - iChat transcripts - Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files - metadata for audio and video files (such as artist and album information) - Address Book contacts, system preference panes, and file names for most other files including applications - file types that have a Spotlight plug-in.
Here are some similarities and differences between Google Desktop and Spotlight:
Similar: - Google Desktop and Spotlight search your hard disk for information. You can continue to use Spotlight even after you've installed Google Desktop. - Google Desktop honors Spotlight's "Privacy" settings to prevent certain items from being indexed.
Different: - Google Desktop lets you search the text of webpages you've visited. - You can search text from old versions of your documents, or even from deleted files. - You can search your Gmail files even when you're not online. - In your browser, search results from your computer are integrated with search results from Google.com.
Installing Google Desktop is as easy as you would expect it to be: download the DMG, open it, and double click the icon to install. However, the application that launches when you double click that icon is also new. It is the Google Updater, your one stop shop for all Mac Google apps. The Google Updater gives you the opportunity to download and install Google's other Mac apps (Google Earth and Picasa Uploader) while you wait. (...)
Overall, Google Desktop is a worthy addition to any Mac. Does it trump Spotlight? Well, Spotlight has a lot going for it. It is built into the OS, developers can build applications with hooks into it, and there is no need to install anything to get it working. That being said, if you use Google's full suite of products, Google Desktop is the desktop search for you. The integration with Gmail and Google.com is killer.
Google will probably bring the rest of the features and the rest of their apps (Picasa, Google Talk) to Mac, now that they have a dedicated Mac team and a CEO on Apple's board of directors.
Google has an important partner for the new TV ads system. "EchoStar Communications Corporation and Google announced today that the companies have entered into a partnership agreement to introduce the first automated system for buying, selling, delivering and measuring television ads on EchoStar DISH Network's 125 national satellite programming networks. Google will have access to a portion of DISH Network's advertising inventory that spans across all channels and dayparts. The agreement is the first of its kind for a national pay-TV provider and Google."
The ads are bought through the same interface as AdWords and their performance will be measured by aggregating anonymized metrics from the set-top-boxes. Google will target the ads to the shows and not to their viewers: advertisers will be able to choose the "demographic, daypart and channel and pay only for actual impressions delivered".
I was complaining in a post from January that Google Pack could be a very cool package if it had an API that allows it to check a wide variety of software for updates. Google Pack only includes Google's software and a small list of other free applications like Firefox, Adobe Reader, RealPlayer.
Filehippo, one of the best sites where you can download high-quality software, launched Update Checker, a small utility that scans your computer for installed software and displays a list of updates. While the software doesn't require installation, it doesn't check for updates periodically and must be manually launched. Another inconvenient is that you have to manually download and install the updates.
The software is in beta, so it wouldn't surprise if it adds these features in the next versions.
Google Spreadsheets has an interesting advantage over Microsoft Excel and other desktop applications: you can publish a spreadsheet and always have the latest version on the web without manually republishing it. Because Google Spreadsheets has an API, you can use the spreadsheet as an easy-to-update structured file always available on the web, as an input for web applications.
Pamela Fox wrote a post on Google Maps Blog that details how to create a map from a Google Spreadsheet that contains geographical information.
First you need to build a spreadsheet that has a header and a list of locations described by title, latitude, longitude. There's a nice batch geocoder that uses Google Maps API and can help you build your spreadsheet: copy the generated text in a text file and import it in Google Spreadsheets.
Once you have the spreadsheet, you need to create the connection with Google Maps. There are three ways to do that:
The simple way. This page requires to modify the URL and add the key parameter from the spreadsheet. That's all: no customization, the spreadsheet must have fixed column names, no embedding option.
Almost as simple. This wizard lets you customize the map and embed it in your site.
EMI Music announced it will make "all of its digital repertoire available at a much higher sound quality than existing downloads and free of digital rights management (DRM) restrictions."
"EMI expects that consumers will be able to purchase higher quality DRM-free downloads from a variety of digital music stores within the coming weeks, with each retailer choosing whether to sell downloads in AAC, WMA, MP3 or other unprotected formats of their choice. Music fans will be able to purchase higher quality DRM-free digital music for personal use, and listen to it on a wide range of digital music players and music-enabled phones."
Apple iTunes is the first music store that includes DRM-free songs from EMI, priced at $1.29, compared to $0.99 for the crippled songs. The new songs will have a much better quality (256 Kbps, double from the existing downloads).
Most files downloaded from Apple's music store come with Apple's DRM - called FairPlay. Songs are encoded using FairPlay-encrypted 128 kbit/s AAC streams in an MP4 wrapper and have limitations like: * number of machines allowed to use purchased music within 24 hours: 5 * only iPod and a small number of Motorola phones can play the files.
In February, Apple's CEO, Steve Jobs, wrote an insightful essay about music and DRM in which he tried to convince music companies that DRM is a bad idea.
Since Apple does not own or control any music itself, it must license the rights to distribute music from others, primarily the "big four" music companies: Universal, Sony BMG, Warner and EMI. These four companies control the distribution of over 70% of the world's music. When Apple approached these companies to license their music to distribute legally over the Internet, they were extremely cautious and required Apple to protect their music from being illegally copied. The solution was to create a DRM system, which envelopes each song purchased from the iTunes store in special and secret software so that it cannot be played on unauthorized devices. (...)
Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven't worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music.
You probably know that Google employees are called Googlers. Well, new Googlers are called Nooglers.
Steve Yegge posted some fragments from the diary of the first days of working at Google, back in 2005.
The first morning we got badged, and through a minor communications mishap, I wound up with an expression that looks exactly as if they'd said: "one... two... ack, there's a tarantula on your crotch! *click*" HR has assured me that I can go get another picture taken if I want. Unfortunately, today I am, for lack of a better word, fat. As in, obese from eating waaaaaay too much on my first day. Bloated. Stuffed. I almost yakked yesterday, actually. They didn't prepare me adequately for the experience of being surrounded by yummy free food. I had approximately the same reaction as the kids when they first got to Willy Wonka's. "Everything's edible, even the staircase!" is I think what Willy said. Roughly. And that's how it feels here at Google HQ.
I'm sitting in a temp office with a temp office mate. Both of us are heading up to Kirkland next week, aka the Land Where Everyone Appears to be from Microsoft. My office has a big window, and outside the window there's a printer with a red bull on it that says "Bull". It's a popular printer, and people come by all the time and peer at us while they rifle through their print jobs. We're a regular Noogler Zoo, me and my officemate. We have another officemate, a ghost, who evidently never arrived. His big yellow welcome balloons are mostly deflated, their smiles wrinkled into expressions of concern or balloony dismay. We hope he's OK, wherever he is.
Anothr is an instant messaging robot that sends alerts with the latest from your favorites blogs and news sites. It works with Google Talk and Skype, and the only thing you have to do is to add the bot as a contact (for Google Talk and other Jabber clients, the email address is anothr@gmail.com). Then you'll see a list of available commands, but the most important thing is how to add the feeds: you can either type the address of each site individually or type "opml" and then upload your OPML (most feed readers offer the option to export your subscriptions as an OPML file; if they don't, there must be some hacks to make this possible).
The default interval for receiving updates is 10 minutes, but you can change it by typing "timer [number of minutes]".
Google realized that paper is the best medium to read email, so they'll roll out a new feature called Gmail Paper that lets you archive an email to paper with one click. You'll get the paper messages in 2-4 business days and, best of all, the service is free.
"The cost of postage is offset with the help of relevant, targeted, unobtrusive advertisements, which will appear on the back of your Gmail Paper prints in red, bold, 36 pt Helvetica. No pop-ups, no flashy animations—these are physically impossible in the paper medium."
Google also considered the environment issues and the "Gmail Paper is made out of 96% post-consumer organic soybean sputum, and thus, actually helps the environment".
Related: Gmail to Fax (unlike Gmail Paper, this one is real)
"The Internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material." - Ted Stevens, US Senator (more about the quote)
Today Google fulfills Mr. Stevens' expectations and releases Google TiSP, "a free in-home wireless broadband service that delivers online connectivity via users' plumbing systems. The Toilet Internet Service Provider (TiSP) project is a self-installed, ad-supported online service that will be offered entirely free to any consumer with a WiFi-capable PC and a toilet connected to a local municipal sewage system."
If you sign up for the package, you'll get a kit that includes "a spindle of fiber-optic cable, a TiSP wireless router, installation CD and setup guide. Home installation is a simple matter of GFlushing the fiber-optic cable down to the nearest TiSP Access Node, then plugging the other end into the network port of your Google-provided TiSP wireless router."
The price you'll have to pay is installing a special version of Google Toolbar that analyzes your outpoot. "To offset the cost of providing the TiSP service, we use information gathered by discreet DNA sequencing of your personal bodily output to display online ads that are contextually relevant to your culinary preferences, current health status and likelihood of developing particular medical conditions going forward."
Google provides all the details of the installation, but it also offers professional help: "an army of factory-trained, sub-contracted nanobots from the TiSP Access Node. The nanobots travel with exhilarating nano-speed through the sewer system and into your home to perform the installation service, which should be complete within 15 minutes."
Unfortunately, it's only available in the US and Canada, but it's a clever way to bring free WiFi to every home in the world. After all, the infrastructure is already there.
