/images cute cats
or
/img cute cats
The "command line" at the bottom of the page is barely noticeable and saves you one click and one page load, assuming you search from your browser's search box and you don't have Google Image Search as an option.
A Command Line for Searching Google
If you use a lot of command line tools and you'd like one for searching Google, this site could be an option. You won't get an application that runs in the command line, but a search box that follows you wherever you go and lets you enter arguments that specify the type of search and the query. For example, to find images of cute cats, you'll need to type:
/images cute cats
or
/img cute cats
The "command line" at the bottom of the page is barely noticeable and saves you one click and one page load, assuming you search from your browser's search box and you don't have Google Image Search as an option.
/images cute cats
or
/img cute cats
The "command line" at the bottom of the page is barely noticeable and saves you one click and one page load, assuming you search from your browser's search box and you don't have Google Image Search as an option.
AdSense Has a New Homepage and Moves to Google Accounts
Google AdSense has a new homepage that looks the same as Google AdWords homepage and offers more information about the service.
The old homepage, still available here:
The new homepage:
The redesign also reflects that AdSense started to migrate users to Google Accounts. "When you log into your account, you may be greeted by a screen (...) asking you to upgrade your login to a Google Account. If you like the email address you're already using, in most cases you'll be able to upgrade it to a Google Account and keep the same login and password. However, if you use another email address for other Google products like Gmail and Picasaweb, you already have a Google Account and you can finally use the same login for AdSense."
Google AdSense was launched almost four years ago, when Google didn't have an integrated authentication system and most of the services didn't require registration.
The old homepage, still available here:
The new homepage:
The redesign also reflects that AdSense started to migrate users to Google Accounts. "When you log into your account, you may be greeted by a screen (...) asking you to upgrade your login to a Google Account. If you like the email address you're already using, in most cases you'll be able to upgrade it to a Google Account and keep the same login and password. However, if you use another email address for other Google products like Gmail and Picasaweb, you already have a Google Account and you can finally use the same login for AdSense."
Google AdSense was launched almost four years ago, when Google didn't have an integrated authentication system and most of the services didn't require registration.
Google Gadgets Offered as Rich Media Ads
In February, Google started to test an interesting ad for Gmail that was actually a Google gadget. Now MediaPost reports that Google will allow everyone to advertise in the content network using gadgets. "Although Google executives revealed the beta during a marketing summit for the auto industry, the Gadget Ads will be available to all ad categories by this summer's planned launch."
The gadgets can already be added to iGoogle, Google Desktop and any web page. Their main advantage is they're interactive and content-rich, while being easy to code. Google offers libraries that let you get data from feeds, add tabs, drag & drop and localize a gadget.
Google will host the gadgets ads and offer the option to run the ads with CPC or CPM pricing. Using the integration with Google Analytics, advertisers will be able to measure the performance of each feature of the gadget.
Nial Kennedy says that Google strives to offer more options for advertisers and publishers. "By the end of 2007 Google will offer its traditional text link advertising, display advertising, and interactive gadgets to its huge network of advertisers. AdSense publishers can select the interactive marketing unit that best suits their need, and the Google bidding system can select the most profitable ad content."
The gadgets can already be added to iGoogle, Google Desktop and any web page. Their main advantage is they're interactive and content-rich, while being easy to code. Google offers libraries that let you get data from feeds, add tabs, drag & drop and localize a gadget.
Google will host the gadgets ads and offer the option to run the ads with CPC or CPM pricing. Using the integration with Google Analytics, advertisers will be able to measure the performance of each feature of the gadget.
Nial Kennedy says that Google strives to offer more options for advertisers and publishers. "By the end of 2007 Google will offer its traditional text link advertising, display advertising, and interactive gadgets to its huge network of advertisers. AdSense publishers can select the interactive marketing unit that best suits their need, and the Google bidding system can select the most profitable ad content."
Google Tech Talks Showcase
Dion Almaer created an interface for browsing Google Tech Talks, a series of presentations and conversations about interesting topics that happen at Googleplex.
"One of the great parts of working at Google is that every day there are tech talks that I really want to listen too. More than I can spend the time to actually see. Last week I talked about Philip Wadler of Monad / Generics / general functional fame. Yesterday, Linus showed us his strong opinions. Next week, G. LaForge is in to chat about Groovy. This is a strong subset of the great talks. We record these talks, and place them on Google Video for anyone to see. This is great content, and most don't know it exists," writes Dion on his blog.
Another good think about the tech talks is that most of them have closed captions, so you can search inside them, not only in the description.
Related:
Google Tech Talks @ Google Video
"One of the great parts of working at Google is that every day there are tech talks that I really want to listen too. More than I can spend the time to actually see. Last week I talked about Philip Wadler of Monad / Generics / general functional fame. Yesterday, Linus showed us his strong opinions. Next week, G. LaForge is in to chat about Groovy. This is a strong subset of the great talks. We record these talks, and place them on Google Video for anyone to see. This is great content, and most don't know it exists," writes Dion on his blog.
Another good think about the tech talks is that most of them have closed captions, so you can search inside them, not only in the description.
Related:
Google Tech Talks @ Google Video
Google Scholar Added to Google's Homepage
There's a new link to Google Scholar in the list of services from the "more" box. Google's search engines for scholarly papers was available on the homepage only if you visited Google from your school.
Google Scholar includes a big list of scientific publications and some of them aren't available in Google's main index. "Google Scholar covers peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts, and other scholarly literature from all broad areas of research. You'll find works from a wide variety of academic publishers and professional societies, as well as scholarly articles available across the web."
Google Scholar includes a big list of scientific publications and some of them aren't available in Google's main index. "Google Scholar covers peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, abstracts, and other scholarly literature from all broad areas of research. You'll find works from a wide variety of academic publishers and professional societies, as well as scholarly articles available across the web."
Share Documents on Mailing Lists
Google Docs improved the way you share your documents with other people. Now you can send invitations to mailing lists, but only 200 people can sign in to the document. Another limitation is that only 10 people can edit the document at the same time. Only 50 people can edit a spreadsheet simultaneously, but there's no limit for the number of people you are allowed to share the spreadsheet.
If you select "Invitations may be used by anyone" when you share a file, the same invitation can be used multiple times. For example, each group from Yahoo or Google Groups has an email address for posting messages (Google Groups displays it at the bottom of the group's homepage).
There's a new file format for exporting documents: plain text, especially useful if you use Google Docs to edit code collaboratively.
For Hebrew and Arabic documents and spreadsheets, you can make the page text align right-to-left in the settings.
If you select "Invitations may be used by anyone" when you share a file, the same invitation can be used multiple times. For example, each group from Yahoo or Google Groups has an email address for posting messages (Google Groups displays it at the bottom of the group's homepage).
There's a new file format for exporting documents: plain text, especially useful if you use Google Docs to edit code collaboratively.
For Hebrew and Arabic documents and spreadsheets, you can make the page text align right-to-left in the settings.
Upcoming Gmail Features
Gmail's translation messages include a lot of references to features that were tested and might be released to the public. Among them:
* Skip spam classifier as an action for a filter.
* Information about your login: "This account is open in N other locations", "Last account activity".
* Attach inline images.
* View attached images as a slideshow.
* Multi-user conversations in Gmail Chat.
* Integration with AIM in Gmail Chat.
{ Via Google Blogoscoped. }
* Skip spam classifier as an action for a filter.
* Information about your login: "This account is open in N other locations", "Last account activity".
* Attach inline images.
* View attached images as a slideshow.
* Multi-user conversations in Gmail Chat.
* Integration with AIM in Gmail Chat.
{ Via Google Blogoscoped. }
Monitor Network Connections
URL Snooper is a free Windows software that lets you monitor your network connections and see the addresses of all the files that are downloaded to your computer and all the addresses from HTML files.
The program was created to identify the URLs of audio/video streams. "Many links to streaming audio and video that you come across on the web are hidden behind JavaScript or ActiveX scripts. Because of this, it is sometimes very difficult to figure out the actual URLs that correspond to the streams being played."
But the software is also useful if you want to see the files downloaded by a program you've just installed. Or if you're wondering why Google Desktop needs an Internet connection. You can see in the screenshot above that Google Desktop connects to google.com to read a list of localized domains, the files for the Safe Browsing feature and to download information necessary for the gadgets (weather, news, etc.).
The program was created to identify the URLs of audio/video streams. "Many links to streaming audio and video that you come across on the web are hidden behind JavaScript or ActiveX scripts. Because of this, it is sometimes very difficult to figure out the actual URLs that correspond to the streams being played."
But the software is also useful if you want to see the files downloaded by a program you've just installed. Or if you're wondering why Google Desktop needs an Internet connection. You can see in the screenshot above that Google Desktop connects to google.com to read a list of localized domains, the files for the Safe Browsing feature and to download information necessary for the gadgets (weather, news, etc.).
Better Notifications in Google Calendar
The beautiful Google Calendar has a better way of managing reminders. Now you can set reminders for individual events, even if they aren't on your primary calendar.
For each calendar, you can set what notifications you want: pop-up window inside Google Calendar, email, SMS, or a combination of all of these. Just click on the arrow next to each calendar from the left sidebar and select "Notifications", then add up to 5 event reminders. In order to receive SMS messages, you need verify your phone number first.
But if you have special events that require a different kind of reminder, you can set it when you create an event in the Options section.
For each calendar, you can set what notifications you want: pop-up window inside Google Calendar, email, SMS, or a combination of all of these. Just click on the arrow next to each calendar from the left sidebar and select "Notifications", then add up to 5 event reminders. In order to receive SMS messages, you need verify your phone number first.
But if you have special events that require a different kind of reminder, you can set it when you create an event in the Options section.
Yahoo's Web Messenger
In March, Google introduced an online version of Google Talk that extends the limited features previously available in Gmail. Yahoo didn't want to give yet another competitive advantage to Google, so they integrated the IM into Yahoo Mail and now offer a standalone version of Yahoo Messenger for the web.
Like Google Talk gadget, it's built in Flash, each conversation opens in a new tab inside the same window, you can find a contact and see his status. Yahoo's web messenger saves all your conversations and makes the history searchable from the same interface. Google Talk saves your conversations from any client, but the history is only available in Gmail.
While Google Talk's gadget is compact and can live inside your personalized homepage, in a new window or in your browser's sidebar, the new Yahoo Messenger for the web adopts the Meebo style of occupying and entire page. If you don't trust third-party clients like Meebo and most of your friends use Yahoo Messenger or Windows Live Messenger, the new interface can be useful when the desktop client is not installed or is blocked.
Like Google Talk gadget, it's built in Flash, each conversation opens in a new tab inside the same window, you can find a contact and see his status. Yahoo's web messenger saves all your conversations and makes the history searchable from the same interface. Google Talk saves your conversations from any client, but the history is only available in Gmail.
While Google Talk's gadget is compact and can live inside your personalized homepage, in a new window or in your browser's sidebar, the new Yahoo Messenger for the web adopts the Meebo style of occupying and entire page. If you don't trust third-party clients like Meebo and most of your friends use Yahoo Messenger or Windows Live Messenger, the new interface can be useful when the desktop client is not installed or is blocked.
Yahoo Lets You Delimit Unimportant Content From a Page
I wrote last year a post about content separation that suggested a way to separate the main content of a page from other content that's not very interesting. Most of the elements of a template (navigation, footer etc.) could confuse search engines into thinking a page talks about something else than it does. As a result, a page could end up ranking well for unrelated queries and not so well for the right queries.
As a solution for this problem, Yahoo introduces a 'robots-nocontent' class that can be added to any HTML tag.
"This tag is really about our crawler focusing on the main content of your page and targeting the right pages on your site for specific search queries. Since a particular source is limited to the number of times it appears in the top ten, it's important that the proper matching and targeting occur in order to increase both the traffic as well as the conversion on your site. It also improves the abstracts for your pages in results by omitting unrelated text from search result summaries.
To do this, webmasters can now mark parts of a page with a 'robots-nocontent' tag which will indicate to our crawler what parts of a page are unrelated to the main content and are only useful for visitors. We won't use the terms contained in these special tagged sections as information for finding the page or for the abstract in the search results."
While this could be useful to reduce the importance of unrelated parts of your site (like AdSense's section targeting), I can't stop wondering if this isn't the search engine's job. For example, Google can detect the navigation links from a page (you can notice this if you use the mobile version), but I don't think it minimizes the importance of the keywords used in that area.
As a solution for this problem, Yahoo introduces a 'robots-nocontent' class that can be added to any HTML tag.
"This tag is really about our crawler focusing on the main content of your page and targeting the right pages on your site for specific search queries. Since a particular source is limited to the number of times it appears in the top ten, it's important that the proper matching and targeting occur in order to increase both the traffic as well as the conversion on your site. It also improves the abstracts for your pages in results by omitting unrelated text from search result summaries.
To do this, webmasters can now mark parts of a page with a 'robots-nocontent' tag which will indicate to our crawler what parts of a page are unrelated to the main content and are only useful for visitors. We won't use the terms contained in these special tagged sections as information for finding the page or for the abstract in the search results."
While this could be useful to reduce the importance of unrelated parts of your site (like AdSense's section targeting), I can't stop wondering if this isn't the search engine's job. For example, Google can detect the navigation links from a page (you can notice this if you use the mobile version), but I don't think it minimizes the importance of the keywords used in that area.
Export All Your Documents from Google Docs
Google Docs & Spreadsheets doesn't provide you a way to export all your files at once. But if you use Firefox, there's a Greasemonkey script that creates a page with links to downloadable versions of your documents and spreadsheets.
You need two extensions: Greasemonkey and DownThemAll, probably the best download manager for Firefox (or other extension that downloads all the files linked from a page). After installing the extensions and restarting the browser, add this script and go to Google Docs. You'll see a new link at the top of the page: Download and a drop-down from which you can choose the format for the exported files. Then right-click and select DownThemAll, check "All files", choose the output folder and click on "Start". If some of the files fail to download, select them and click "Resume" in the download window.
Related:
Batch upload files to Google Docs
{ Via Blogoscoped Forum }
You need two extensions: Greasemonkey and DownThemAll, probably the best download manager for Firefox (or other extension that downloads all the files linked from a page). After installing the extensions and restarting the browser, add this script and go to Google Docs. You'll see a new link at the top of the page: Download and a drop-down from which you can choose the format for the exported files. Then right-click and select DownThemAll, check "All files", choose the output folder and click on "Start". If some of the files fail to download, select them and click "Resume" in the download window.
Related:
Batch upload files to Google Docs
{ Via Blogoscoped Forum }
Who's Watching This YouTube Video?
YouTube has a cool new feature in their labs. It's called Active Sharing and it lets you see other users that have enabled the feature and watch the same video as you. If you click on the username, you can see the profile and the last six videos they watched. This can be deactivated at any time, but it's pretty useful if you want to discover people who collect cool videos and subscribe to their channels.
In case it crossed your mind to use Active Sharing to track the videos watched by someone, YouTube says you can't. "YouTube respects your privacy. This information only shows to other YouTube users for 30 minutes, so get busy and show off your good taste!"
April 2007 Recap: Towards a More Personalized Google
In April, Google launched a Mac version for Google Desktop and a directory assistance service. Google also made its biggest acquisition: an advertising company called DoubleClick that will help Google increase its footprint in display advertising.
Google also bought Tonic Systems, a small company focused on creating PowerPoint tools in Java, and announced the addition of a presentation web application to Google Docs. Google Spreadsheets finally added charts, although you can't import or export files that include charts yet, and Google Docs is closer to a wiki system.
The concept of personalization was pushed further by expanding the search history to all the visited web pages and by showing more recommendations as a benefit of the privacy trade-off. Google Personalized Homepage became iGoogle and added new features that could transform it into a social network.
Google Search started to include results from Google News, Open Office documents get the same treatment as Microsoft Office files, and there are new experimental layouts that might replace the current interface of Google.
Read more:
All the posts from April
Google also bought Tonic Systems, a small company focused on creating PowerPoint tools in Java, and announced the addition of a presentation web application to Google Docs. Google Spreadsheets finally added charts, although you can't import or export files that include charts yet, and Google Docs is closer to a wiki system.
The concept of personalization was pushed further by expanding the search history to all the visited web pages and by showing more recommendations as a benefit of the privacy trade-off. Google Personalized Homepage became iGoogle and added new features that could transform it into a social network.
Google Search started to include results from Google News, Open Office documents get the same treatment as Microsoft Office files, and there are new experimental layouts that might replace the current interface of Google.
Read more:
All the posts from April
iGoogle Gadget Maker
As reported by Google Blogoscoped, Google Personalized Homepage will be rebranded as iGoogle and will let you build your own gadgets using wizards. The gadgets are very simple and are more like containers for things that matter to you: photos, videos, events.
"Once the gadget is created, you can invite other people to view & use the gadget, and make it publicly available for other people to view & use it." So whatever you choose to add to a gadget will be visible to the people you invited.
The wizards let you enter the settings for seven new gadget templates:
1. Photo album - add up to 7 photos that can be rotated.
2. GoogleGram - enter seven greeting messages.
3. Daily Me - type what you are doing.
4. Countdown - count the days until a special event.
5. Simple list - you can use it as a ToDo list, shopping list.
6. YouTube videos - up to 10 videos.
7. Freeform gadget - add an image and some text.
The gadgets are a way of staying in touch with your friends: if one of your Gmail contacts creates gadgets you'll be able to see them in a new section of iGoogle called "My Community".
"Once the gadget is created, you can invite other people to view & use the gadget, and make it publicly available for other people to view & use it." So whatever you choose to add to a gadget will be visible to the people you invited.
The wizards let you enter the settings for seven new gadget templates:
1. Photo album - add up to 7 photos that can be rotated.
2. GoogleGram - enter seven greeting messages.
3. Daily Me - type what you are doing.
4. Countdown - count the days until a special event.
5. Simple list - you can use it as a ToDo list, shopping list.
6. YouTube videos - up to 10 videos.
7. Freeform gadget - add an image and some text.
The gadgets are a way of staying in touch with your friends: if one of your Gmail contacts creates gadgets you'll be able to see them in a new section of iGoogle called "My Community".
Strange Suggestions in Google Blog Search
Google's blog search engine has a bug that shows weird suggestions for your query in the seventh page of results. While you can't see the weird "did you mean" for every query, I got the message for two different queries.
One of the suggestions was:
"Elena Dementieva" (naked| scandal| divorce| separated| cancel| lawsuit| police| injured)
As you probably know, | is an alternative way of entering the boolean operator OR that triggers all the results which contain at least one of the keywords separated by the operator. But this suggestion is most likely a bug because is completely unrelated to the query and very few people use advanced operators.
One of the suggestions was:
"Elena Dementieva" (naked| scandal| divorce| separated| cancel| lawsuit| police| injured)
As you probably know, | is an alternative way of entering the boolean operator OR that triggers all the results which contain at least one of the keywords separated by the operator. But this suggestion is most likely a bug because is completely unrelated to the query and very few people use advanced operators.
Visualize AIM Conversations in Google Earth
AIM, AOL's instant messenger, is more open every day. AIM host team (whatever that means) created two kml files that let you visualize interesting real-time information about AIM users in Google Earth.
One of visualization displays all the conversations started in the last minute as connections between two or more cities. The other one shows the most popular AIM users. By looking at the map, you'll notice that Germany is the only European country where AIM is really popular.
One of visualization displays all the conversations started in the last minute as connections between two or more cities. The other one shows the most popular AIM users. By looking at the map, you'll notice that Germany is the only European country where AIM is really popular.
Share Big Files Fast
You'd think that all these communications tools that ask you to move your files online make it easy to move big files too. I've recently had to send an archive that had around 100 MB to a group of people. If I wanted to send the file to a single person, an instant messenger like Google Talk or Yahoo Messenger would've been a good option. I initially thought that BitTorrent is a good idea, but that works well for a big group that connects at the same time (though Pando is a nice client based on BitTorrent).
So file hosting had to work. Unfortunately there are many options and most of them are bad: they require to register, they have traffic limitations or they're slow. Here are some of the best file hosting solutions I've found:
mihd.net - they promise to let you upload files up to 2 GB (they lowered the limit to 200 MB temporarily), the site has a lot of text ads, but the download speed is very good (at least 100 KB/s) and there aren't hourly download limitations. The files are deleted depending on their file size: for 100 MB, they're deleted 45 days after the last download.
DivShare lets you upload files smaller than 200 MB, but they're never deleted. You also get some basic stats and previews for images, MP3s and videos.
MediaFire has a very nice interface and lets you upload files up to 100 MB without any limitation. The download speed is almost as good as for mihd.net and they even scan your files for viruses.
I ended up using mihd, although the other two sites are also very good. If you know something better that doesn't require registration, software and has very few or no limitations, I'm all ears.
So file hosting had to work. Unfortunately there are many options and most of them are bad: they require to register, they have traffic limitations or they're slow. Here are some of the best file hosting solutions I've found:
mihd.net - they promise to let you upload files up to 2 GB (they lowered the limit to 200 MB temporarily), the site has a lot of text ads, but the download speed is very good (at least 100 KB/s) and there aren't hourly download limitations. The files are deleted depending on their file size: for 100 MB, they're deleted 45 days after the last download.
DivShare lets you upload files smaller than 200 MB, but they're never deleted. You also get some basic stats and previews for images, MP3s and videos.
MediaFire has a very nice interface and lets you upload files up to 100 MB without any limitation. The download speed is almost as good as for mihd.net and they even scan your files for viruses.
I ended up using mihd, although the other two sites are also very good. If you know something better that doesn't require registration, software and has very few or no limitations, I'm all ears.
Collecting Imagery for Google Earth
Mark Aubin, co-founder of Keyhole (the product known these days as Google Earth), provides some details about the process of collecting satellite imagery. Google has many data providers and the imagery is updated at least every three years.
Most people are surprised to learn that we have more than one source for our imagery. We collect it via airplane and satellite, but also just about any way you can imagine getting a camera above the Earth's surface: hot air balloons, model airplanes – even kites. The traditional aerial survey involves mounting a special gyroscopic, stabilized camera in the belly of an airplane and flying it at an elevation of between 15,000 feet and 30,000 feet, depending on the resolution of imagery you're interested in. As the plane takes a predefined route over the desired area, it forms a series of parallel lines with about 40 percent overlap between lines and 60 percent overlap in the direction of flight. This overlap of images is what provides us with enough detail to remove distortions caused by the varying shape of the Earth's surface.
The next step is processing the imagery. We scan the film using scanners capable of over 1800 DPI (dots per inch) or 14 microns. Then we take the digital imagery through a series of stages such as color balancing and warping to produce the final mosaic for the entire area.
We update the imagery as quickly as we can collect and process it, then add layers of information – things like country and state borders and the names of roads, schools, and parks - to make it more useful. This information comes from multiple sources: commercial providers, local government agencies, public domain collections, private individuals, national and even international governments. Right now, Google Earth has hundreds of terabytes of geographic data, and it's growing larger every day.
Use Google Desktop's Gadgets Outside the Sidebar
Google Desktop's sidebar is nice, but it takes an important part of your screen. Of course, you can disable the "always on top" option, but then you have to minimize all the applications (Windows+M) to see the sidebar.
A better option is to undock the gadgets from the sidebar and move them to the desktop. To do that, right-click on each gadget and select "Undock from sidebar" or drag them to the desktop. Then minimize the sidebar by clicking on the small button from the top of the sidebar.
You'll see a new search box in the taskbar, an option to reopen the sidebar, and a gadgets menu that lets you bring back a certain gadget or all of them.
An easier way to see all the gadgets when they're covered by other applications is to press Shift twice. Press the same combination again and they'll disappear.
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