Notifier for Google Reader

Google Reader Watcher is a Firefox extension that monitors your feeds from Google Reader and shows alerts when there's something new to read. The extension shows the number of unread posts in the status bar (this number is only an approximation, because Google Reader doesn't count past 100 for an individual feed). If you hover over the icon, you'll see the list of feeds that have unread posts.

Another way to keep up with your Google Reader feeds is to subscribe to this feed locally (for example, using Firefox Live Bookmarks or Opera's feed reader): http://www.google.com/reader/atom/user/-/state/com.google/reading-list?n=100. Note that the n= parameter represents the number of items from the feed and can be adjusted. As expected, you need to log in before accessing the feed, because it's not public.

YouTube Launches a New Embedded Player

As previously reported, YouTube built a new player for videos embedded in blogs or other sites. The player shows a list of related videos and makes it easy to move between these videos and to find the code necessary to embed a video, without opening a new page. YouTube hopes that people will spend more time watching videos.

If you find the new player too cluttered and you want to use the old one, just append &rel=0 to the URLs from the code you have to include in your site. For example, http://www.youtube.com/v/UkguiR01gMQ should be replaced with http://www.youtube.com/v/UkguiR01gMQ&rel=0.

Garett Rogers from ZDNet thinks that YouTube prepares to include ads next to the related videos. "For the next several months, people will get very used to using the related video tool that was just introduced. As soon as it becomes second nature for users to use the tool, we should start to see sponsored results mixed with these related videos."

The new player didn't have too many fans because the related videos weren't always appropriate and sometimes they stayed in your way. "Thank goodness there's an option to turn it off, but it would be far better if it were off by default with an option to turn it on. I'm not so concerned as some other people about being presented links to potentially objectionable content (I can handle it like an adult), but having thumbnails pop up that do not disappear even if I mouse off of the video is a serious distraction and makes watching videos much less enjoyable," says a comment from YouTube's blog.

Probably as a reaction to the negative comments, the related videos are now visible only if you click on the "menu" button and at the end of the video.

Picasa2Flickr - Upload Photos from Picasa to Flickr

One of the most important advantages of Picasa Web Albums compared to Flickr is that it's easy to upload photos and to download photo albums if you use Google's photo organizer, Picasa.

Picasa2Flickr is an open source plugin for Picasa that lets you upload photos to Flickr. You can just select some photos from your albums, click on "Send to Flickr" and a small dialog will let you enter some information about your photos: tags, privacy options, the name of a set.

The plugin uses Flickr's authentication API, so you'll enter your credentials in a browser, without passing them to the application.



{ Thank you, Andrew. }

Firefox 3 Will Include Malware Protection

Mozilla intends to extend Firefox's phishing protection to include a list of sites that try to install malware. "Similar to how Firefox 2 blocks Web sites that are potentially going to try to steal your personal information, Firefox 3 will block Web sites that we believe are going to try to install malicious programs on your computer. Mozilla is coordinating with Google on this feature," says Alex Faaborg.

ComputerWorld quotes Gervase Markham, a developer for Bugzilla, who says: "What we are actually doing here is giving Google veto power over any Web page." The list of potentially harmful sites is managed by StopBadware, an organization that fights against spyware, malware, and deceptive adware. StopBadware is sponsored by Google, Lenovo and Sun.

Google already shows alerts if you try to visit a search result that may install malicious software on your computer. The feature is also included in Google Desktop, which automatically updates a list of suspicious or malicious sites from Google's servers. Firefox will probably work the same.

Other new features that will be included in Firefox 3: a unified way of storing bookmarks, history, and information about Web pages, microformat detection, private browsing, support for offline web applications. Firefox 3 should be launched at the end of the year, but you can still try the Alpha 5 version at your own risk.

{ The mockup is licensed as Creative Commons Share-Alike. }

Google's Gallery of Public Calendars

Google Calendar added a directory of public calendars, structured in 8 categories: popular, TV shows, sports, events, entertainment, miscellaneous, holidays, and Google-related. The directory contains calendars from the web indexed by Google and public calendars created with Google Calendar.

Before subscribing to a calendar you can preview its events in a big overlayed box that can't be closed unless you have a big monitor (tip: if you can't see the OK button at the bottom of the box, press Enter).

In a surprising move, Google made searching the public calendars the default option, so if you want to restrict your search to the events from your calendars, you have to click on "Search my calendars". The option to search for public events is now available as a barely-visible link in the new gallery. Instead of complicating the interface, Google Calendar should have a single search results page that shows the events from your calendars, then other related events from public calendars.

The fact that Google Calendar complicates itself unnecessarily is obvious if you look at how many options are available to add a new calendar: you can add a public calendar, or the calendar of one of your contacts, you can enter the URL or just upload it. And each option has a different place in the interface.

All in all, searching for public calendars is not too important, so it didn't deserve so much focus (it's like a new search engine that returns web sites, not web pages). The option to search for public events should be available even if you don't use Google Calendar, maybe as a OneBox in Google's main search results.





{ via Google Blogoscoped }

Persistent Queries

Google is a great search engine, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try other search engines if you can't find what you're looking for. I know, it's hard to copy the query, go to another site and paste it in the search box.

Try this search on is one of the best Greasemonkey scripts I've ever installed: it's smart enough to detect you're on a search results page (and not only for Google and other big search engines) and shows a small bar at the bottom of the page that includes links to other search engines: Yahoo, Windows Live, Ask and others. This way your query is persistent across most search engines and it's much easier to do research on a topic.

If you don't like the list of available search engines, just edit the code and add other sites. You can also set the value of the checkRef variable to true to show the bar on pages referred from search engines as well.

Ask.com's Unified Search Engine

Last year, Ask.com started to test a new prototype for its search engine: AskX. The prototype evolved, transformed into Ask3D and is now available at ask.com. Ask3D has three vertical panes:

* the search pane that includes a search box with autocomplete and a list of related searches that let you narrow down or expand your query

* the search results pane

* the right pane includes search results from specialized search engines: images, videos, music, news, blog posts or information from encyclopedias

Unlike Google's universal search that integrates different kinds of content in the main search results, Ask opted for a moderate approach: to show relevant results from other search engines in a separate sidebar. Most search engines use the right sidebar for ads, so users might ignore the new results. Another issue is that the intensive use of AJAX makes the page load slower.

More and more search engines experiment with integrated interfaces that facilitate the access to more resources without opening new pages. Google tested SearchMash, Yahoo and Microsoft have their own test beds. Yahoo modified its mobile search engine to integrate all the results in one page and Google followed.

After all, the purpose of a search engine is to find answers. Some of the answers are simple facts, others are entire paragraphs from a web page, chapters from a book, songs or inferences. The answers are everywhere: you just need a tool that understands your question and knows where to find the answers. While the way you present these answers and the scope of your foray are important, the real issue search engines need to address is that queries are just a bunch of words that rarely create meaningful entities. And Ask.com is very good at rephrasing your question to bring you on the right path, but its search results continue to be mediocre.

Transit Data in Google Maps and Google Earth

Google Maps and Google Earth started to show information about public transit for a number of cities from the US (Seattle, Portland, New York etc.) and Europe (Zurich, Paris, Manchester etc.). Worldchanging has more details about this from a Google employee:

As of today, transit icons on Google Maps are clickable in many locations around the world! Earlier in the year, we added transit icons for subway and light rail stations in major cities, but this release goes a step further and adds bus stop information for the cities we have it for. Icons for agencies that share data with us for Google Transit show additional information (in these cities, we show bus stops on the map tiles, and clicking on an icon shows line and departure information). (...)

Earlier this year we propagated data we receive from agencies participating in Google Transit into the Transportation layer in Google Earth. When an agency provides us with trace information on the paths their vehicles travel (as is the case for Portland's Tri-Met and Seattle's King County Metro) we can paint a map of their system on Google Earth.

Ads for Google Maps Mashups

Google's most popular API brought a lot of interesting mashups between data and maps, but they were not that easy to find and the developers couldn't monetize them. Google tries to fix these problems with the new mapplets, small gadgets for Google Maps. Infoworld reports that Google will allow the creators of the mapplets to include contextual ads on the maps. The ads could have special icons that distinguish them from the normap push-pins.

When the icon is passed over, information appears in the pop-up window. If the link is followed by a user on the Mapplet, "you receive a share of the revenue," giving Web site developers another way to make money for their sites. (...)

Users would be able to set a limit on the number of sponsored ads on their customized map and also turn the feature off.

Google Maps shows both ads that send you to a website and ads placed on the map, but there aren't too many ads from the second category.

Google Shows More Fresh Results

New York Times has a long article about Google's search quality team and the way they constantly improve the ranking algorithms.

"Search over the last few years has moved from Give me what I typed to Give me what I want", says Amit Singhal from Google. His team tries to find patterns in the list of queries that return bad results, obtained from other Googlers or from users. Tweaking the ranking algorithm to favor some web pages in certain conditions is difficult because the results may change in unexpected ways.

One of the most important patterns from last year was that people expected to see fresh pages for queries related to recent events. For example, a search for "Google Finance" didn't return Google's financial site many days after the launch.

Mr. Singhal introduced the freshness problem, explaining that simply changing formulas to display more new pages results in lower-quality searches much of the time. He then unveiled his team's solution: a mathematical model that tries to determine when users want new information and when they don't. (And yes, like all Google initiatives, it had a name: QDF, for "query deserves freshness.") (...)

The QDF solution revolves around determining whether a topic is "hot." If news sites or blog posts are actively writing about a topic, the model figures that it is one for which users are more likely to want current information. The model also examines Google's own stream of billions of search queries, which Mr. Singhal believes is an even better monitor of global enthusiasm about a particular subject.

The visible part of QDF is the recently launched Hot Trends site, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. For queries related to things that are suddenly popular, Google's ranking algorithms are biased towards recent web pages. You may see results from Google News inside the search results pages or a blog search OneBox at the bottom of the page. Google also seems to be crawling pages at a much faster pace and not just for popular sites that are frequently updated, like they did before. I often see some of my posts in the search results hours after they're published.