Screenshots of YouTube's New Player

YouTube tests a new version of its player that will improve the way you interact with videos and will create a cinematic experience.

The player will add a feature that was already available in Google Video: jump to any part of the video even if the video isn't fully downloaded.


For each video, you'll be able to see around ten related videos. You don't have to wait until the video ends to play a new one because they're available as thumbnails if you hover over the video. The effect is similar to the dock from Mac OS X. You can also click on the two arrows to go to the previous / next video.


The "menu" button gives you access to the embedding code or to the URL of the YouTube page that shows the video. If you click on the button, the video is smoothly minimized in the left corner and it continues to play.



Update. Here's the new player (thank you, TOMHTML):

Restrict Google Image Results to Faces, News

Google Image Search has a new feature that lets you restrict the results to some general categories. For the moment, the only categories that are available seem to be faces and news-related images, but other categories should follow.

The image results for Paris are pretty diverse, but most of them are about the French city and Paris Hilton. Now let's restrict the images to faces by adding &imgtype=face at the end of the URL: we get all kinds of images, but all of them show faces. Google uses face detection technology to select only images that contain faces and that may be the first visible result of the Neven Vision acquisition.


The restriction to news-related images seem to include only images posted to news sites like BBC or New York Times.


You can try the two restrictions in the search box below:

faces news all

{ Via Blogoscoped Forum. }

Update (June 24): The options are now available in the advanced search interface in a new section titled "content types".

Google as a Personal Assistant

Google wants to be more than a search engine that finds some pages on the web in response to a query. Google wants to become a personal assistant that organizes your information, enhances the search results based on your preferences and recommends interesting things for the future.

Eric Schmidt was quoted by Financial Times to say: "The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as 'What shall I do tomorrow?' and 'What job shall I take?' ". While the questions seem tough or too important to be answered by a search engine, Google's goal is to transform all the information gathered from your queries, actions and options into something useful. Unlike your ISP, Google allows you to use its search engine without creating an account and is transparent about your options.

Of course, a personal assistant needs to be trustworthy because you provide it with your personal information. It also needs to show up at work whenever you need it, anticipate your actions without being annoying, do background researches to answer your questions properly, prioritize information according to your interests.

Who knows, maybe in the future Google - the personal assistant - will know more about you than yourself. But it will hopefully be more subtle than the now defunct Clippy.

Creative Commons-licensed by bsimser.

Directions Without Highways in Google Maps

If you use the directions from Google Maps and you're afraid of driving on highways or you're a biker, you'll definitely like the new option to avoid highways. "When you click the Avoid Highways checkbox, the route instantly updates to one that tries very hard to stay off of interstates, motorways, and other major roadways. This may give you a much longer path, but one that you may find more suitable," explains Google LatLong Blog.

For example, if you go from Redmond to Mountain View and avoid the highways, you need 8 extra hours.

Google News to Add Videos and Social News Features?

Computerworld has an interview with Nathan Stoll, from Google News. The interviews reveals some of the philosophy of the product and possible future directions.

Google News wants to respect editors' choices in regards to the importance of a news and only one section from Google News is generated by looking at the popularity of a news. Another important idea behind Google News is showing more than one perspective for a news, and this is partially achieved by clustering related news.

Videos could enhance the way you understand a news. "To the extent that a lot of those [persectives] are in video and becoming available online, we'd certainly love to make those perspectives available and easily discoverable. With the YouTube team, working hard, it's certainly an area we'd like to make progress in."

Google also ponders the addition of features from social news sites like Digg. "We offer a most popular section on the front page of many of our editions. That popularity ranking signal is different from how the front page is ranked, which tries to reflect what editors are publishing on their sites. If we introduced a Digg-style feature, it would be more similar to that popularity metric."

What are you doing on the social news front, along the lines of sites like Digg and Slashdot?

Obviously Google has a number of products and services that touch on those types of areas. In News today we offer a number of customization and personalization features. If I was to give you themes about areas that we're working on, that would be one area in which we're very interested.

An internal document leaked from Google last year mentioned about a "radically improved [version of Google News that should allow] other news sources, and organizations and individuals mentioned in news stories to debate specific points". Google also licensed content from AFP and AP to be able to use the full text of a news.

Google Talk Gadget, Now with Emoticons

The showy Google Talk Gadget has three sets of emoticons right there, next to the input box. You know, just in case you want to express your feelings and you can't find the right words.

You can choose between three skins: rounded, rectangular and black&white emoticons. If you select a different skin, all the emoticons from the current conversation will change to the new look.


{ Thank you, Saurabh. }

Mobile Google Calendar

Google launched a mobile version for Google Calendar, available at google.com/calendar/m. To use this application, you need a mobile browser that supports XHTML, cookies and SSL (for authentication).

The features are limited to browsing the list of previous and upcoming events and adding new events using Google's natural language processor. Even if it's very basic, the mobile Google Calendar shows a link to the map of the place where the event happens, so you know how to get there. You can also select the calendars used by Google to display events.

For notifications, don't forget to register your phone from the desktop interface and to set SMS reminders for each calendar important to you.

{ via Google Blog }

Google Cross-Language Search

Google released a new tool as part of Google Translate that lets you find pages that are written in languages you don't speak. Just type a query in your native language, translates your query in other language and shows you the results from the localized version of Google in your language.


"Now, you can search for something in your own language (for example, English) and search the web in another language (for example, French). If you're looking for wine tasting events in Bordeaux while on vacation in France, just type "wine tasting events in Bordeaux" into the search box on the "Search results" tab on Google Translate. You'll then get French search results and a (machine) translation of these search results into English," explains the Google blog.

This feature is available for all the combinations of languages supported by Google and doesn't bring anything new, it just makes things easier. Here's how I searched multilingually before this feature existed:

* Go to Google Translate and translate [wine tasting events in Bordeaux] in French.

* Copy the result and paste it in the search box from Google.fr.

* Get the URL of the search results page and translate it to English.

Yahoo already has this feature for French and German, but the implementation is better: you just type your query in French or German and you will get results obtained by translating your query in other 4 languages, including English, Italian, Spanish, German/French.

Technorati's Authority

Technorati made some changes this month to show it's more than a blog search engine. "Technorati continues to grow well beyond its roots at the leading blog search engine; increasingly, we are the main aggregation point for all forms of social media on the Web, including blogs, of course, but also video, photos, audio such as podcasts and much more", noted David Sifry last month.

The site also introduced a score for each blog that measures the "authority". The pretentious name has one purpose: to cover the real meaning of the number. "Technorati Authority is the number of blogs linking to a website in the last six months. The higher the number, the more Technorati Authority the blog has," explains Technorati's blog. So each blog that links to me (no matter if it's a spam blog or Slashdot) increases my authority with 1. Imagine what would happen if Google's PageRank was proportional to the number of links to a page in the last 6 months: the top search result for most of the queries should be a page from yahoo.com or google.com, sites that would have the PageRank 100,000. It would be easy to increase your PageRank: just create a new site that links to you; it's as important as a link from New York Times. But fortunately, Google found a better way to rank web pages:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important." Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages' relative importance.

Related:
How Google Blog Search ranks results

Download US Patents as PDF

Google Patents added a button that lets you download the PDF version of a patent. The option is available from the overview page and in the sidebar, when you browse the patent. Now you don't have to rely on other sites that fetched the documents and converted them to PDF, but didn't have a very good search.

Why should you read patents, you may ask? Well, you could find interesting details about Michael Jackson's special shoes that allowed him "to lean forwardly beyond his center of gravity", the design of the Statue of Liberty or an advanced state of the art movie theater.


{ Thank you, Mark. }

Preview Documents with Docufarm

Docufarm is a Firefox extension that lets you preview online documents. Everytime you click on a link to a PDF, PostScript file, Word document or PowerPoint presentation, the file is quickly downloaded on Docufarm's servers and you can see an almost instant preview of the file. Unlike what you see from Google's cache, Docufarm preserves the original formatting of the document and shows the images included in the document. While the file is searchable, the Docufarm interface only shows images for each page of the document, so you can't copy text.

This extension is useful for a quick overview of a document because the interface doesn't make reading the document an easy job (except for the PowerPoint presentations that look very nice in the slide view).

Docufarm also lets you search for supported documents available online and the results seem to be provided by Google.


{ Thank you, Laurent. }

Gmail Doubles Maximum Attachment Size to 20 MB

Gmail upgraded the maximum attachment size from 10 MB to 20 MB. Gmail was quite forgiving and you could send more than 10 MB in some cases, but now it's possible to send at least 20 MB in one message.

Of course, few mail providers will accept a such a big message, so it's safe to send messages bigger than 10 MB to other Gmail accounts, to Yahoo Mail Plus or to other premium accounts.

It would be nice if Gmail showed a progress bar for the upload and if uploading files to Gmail was faster and more reliable. But maybe we're asking too much.


{ Thank you, Rauz. }

Hot Trends in Google Search

Google Trends has something new: a daily Zeitgeist. Google lets you see the 100 queries that had the biggest evolution in a certain day. For now, Google only shows the "hottest" queries in the US, but other countries should follow.

For each query, you can see a graph that shows the popularity of the query, related searches and the top results from Google News, Blog Search and Web Search. These results should explain why the queries are popular.

Like the old Zeitgeist, Google Hot Trends will be an archive of the most important queries. That means you can select a day from the past and see the people, the events, the questions which defined that day.

According to Reuters, "Hot Trends (...) will be refreshed several times daily, using data from millions of Google Web searches conducted up to an hour before each update".

The list for May 21 includes two very long and improbable queries:

* #26: [what did lawyer ellis rubin suggest prison inmates could donate in exchange for reduction in their sentences in 1992]

* #90: [who was the first new world explorer to take a dip in the springs of what's now hot springs arkansas]

... and is topped by Avandia, a drug prescribed to treat diabetes that was found to increase the risk of heart attacks.

Google Cracks Down on Made for AdSense Sites

JenSense reports that a lot of AdSense users who built sites with almost no original content, but full of AdSense ads, had their accounts removed.

Numerous AdSense publishers have been receiving emails from Google the past couple of days stating that their use of their AdSense account is an unsuitable business model and that accounts would be disabled as of June 1st, giving publishers about two weeks notice to prepare for the loss of the AdSense accounts... and since it seems that arbitrage publishers are the ones receiving this account disabled email, to give those publisher enough time to shut down accounts or use an alternative source for their outgoing traffic.

These users usually bought cheap keywords from AdWords and sent the visitors to their sites that also displayed ads, but for more expensive keywords. The sites didn't contain almost anything valuable, most of the time they scraped content from other sites, but they made a lot of money by tricking users.