Sync Your Mobile Phone with Google Calendar

Google Calendar has recently launched a mobile version that lets you add events and see your agenda, but if you already use your phone's built-in calendar, you want a way to keep the offline and the online calendars in sync.

GooSync is a free option that works without installing any application (over-the-air). You just set up an account, give GooSync access to your Google Calendar and configure your phone to work with GooSync. GooSync works with mobile devices that support SyncML, and these include Blackberries, most Nokia phones, many Sony Ericsson phones and others. For Palm or Windows Mobile phones you'll have to install a Sync ML client, which is not free.

Besides synchronizing the events, GooSync tries to keep the reminders in sync. Because Google Calendar has some predefined intervals for reminders, this will not work if you define custom reminders for your phone's events. The service's main limitations are that "you are only able to synchronize your primary Google Calendar and you are limited to a sync window of 7 days past and 30 days future of the current date," but if you pay a subscription these limitations are removed.

If you don't mind installing a Java app and synchronizing your calendar manually, then GCalSync is for you. The software is open-source, doesn't have GooSync's limitations regarding the sync intervals and it works pretty well in a wider array of phones. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be developed anymore.

For Windows Mobile phones, you could try OggSync, which is compatible with Outlook, it lets you define an interval for synchronization and supports over-the-air and/or cradle sync. Like in GCalSync or the free version of GooSync, you can only synchronize the main calendar, unless you pay for a yearly subscription.

Another Windows Mobile solution is SyncMyCal, which lets you synchronize all your calendar, but the date range selection is limited to 3 days. The paid version of SyncMyCal is much more affordable than OggSync as there's no yearly subscription.

	GooSync	GCalSync	OggSync	SyncMyCal
Price	Free / $39.79 per year	Free	Free / $29.95 per year	Free / $25
Supported phones	Phones that support Sync ML	Phones that run Java apps	Windows Mobile	Windows Mobile
Software	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Configurable sync window	Paid version	Yes	Yes	Paid version
Scheduled synchronization	Yes	No	Paid version	Paid version
Multi calendar	Paid version	No	Paid version	Yes
Reminders	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
Recurring events	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Google Hosted Domains	Yes	?	Yes	Yes

Here's also a comparison of the number of blog posts that mention the sync tools, according to BlogPulse (April-June 2007):

Google Numbers & Facts

Some facts about Google, from the Press Day event that took place in Paris this week, captured by Tony Ruscoe.

Search

* When Google started we indexed 25,000 web pages - today we index billions. Each time we index the web it's grown by 10 to 25%.

* As the web grows, search becomes more important. It's like a library - the bigger the library, the more important the index.

* 20 to 25% of Google queries have never been searched before.

* Google's PageRank algorithm uses more than 200 signals to determine the rank of a website.

* iGoogle was our fastest growing product last year (2006). People have personalized their iGoogle homepages with over 10,000 free gadgets.


Languages

* The Google Book Search index includes books in over 90 languages.

* Google's machine translation service is available in 12 languages.

* Google operates in 112 languages including Breton, Reto-Romanic, Catalan, Kurdish, Frisian and Gaelic.

* Universities in Rwanda, Kenya, Japan, Egypt, Ireland, the Ukraine, Michigan and Arizona are all using Google Apps for Education.


Corporate culture

* In 2007 Google gave free bicycles to all its employees in Europe.

* Google's San Francisco shuttle bus service is the biggest of any company in the area. One shared car provides as much transportation as 20 privately owned cars.

* Google has the largest corporate solar panel installation in the US.


Revenue

* Of the $10.6bn Google generated in revenue last year, $3bn was handed back to our publishing partners through AdSense.

* In the first quarter of this year Google generated over $1bn in revenues from our partners.

Search for Google Custom Search Engines

Google launched an interesting way to search for custom search engines created using Google Co-op: a Google Base structured search that only includes the most popular search engines. The cool thing is that you can restrict the results based on the search engine's name, language, its description, the most popular queries or the number of sites that are included. "If you're interested in finding a search engine to contribute to, search specifically for search engines that allow volunteers. For instance, if you're most interested in non-profit organizations, search only for non-profit search engines," suggests the CSE Blog.


Google Base has a very powerful search interface and it would be nice to see it in other products like Blog search, Gmail or Google Calendar. When you perform a search or select an option, Google Base will only show the options that are available in the current state and that's useful to dynamically build a complex query.

Google Talk Gadget Adds Multi-User Chats

Google Talk Gadget added support group chat. Just click on the "Group Chat" button when you are in a conversation, and you can invite other people to join your discussion. Unfortunately, this feature is not available in any other client, so if you invite someone who uses Google Talk for Windows, Gmail Chat or other Jabber client, he'll get a link to the web version of Google Talk.



The Windows client seems to be neglected this year, but I bet we'll see a major new release in the coming weeks that will add all the new features from the web version, phone calls and more.

Translate Words with Google's Bilingual Dictionaries

Google has a powerful translation tool that lets you translate a web page or a text, but that's not very useful if you only need to translate a word or an expression. Without entering a context, Google shows the most plausible translation, but a word can have multiple translations.

To overcome this problem, Google launched a bilingual dictionary that lets you enter an English word and get the translations in French, German, Italian, Spanish and Korean or enter a word in of those 5 languages and get the English translation.

Google also shows related phrases, but it would be nice to see more contexts. "Some of these related phrases will show idiomatic usages of the word or short phrase that you entered, while others will be examples of your word or short phrase being used in its literal meaning."

If you enter a word in one of the supported languages, but you don't know the language, Google offers some options at the bottom of the page.

Google Toolbar also has a feature that lets you translate English words on a web page into another language by hovering your mouse cursor over a word, while Google's define: operator gives you access to definitions from all over the Web.


{ Thank you, Zack. }

Opera Mini 4: Get the Full Picture of a Web Page

Opera launched a new version of its free mobile browser: Opera Mini 4, currently in beta. One of the coolest new features is that the browser renders the page almost the same as a desktop browser, so you'll be able to see the web page at a glance. But because the screen of your mobile phone is very small you can't actually read anything: that's why you need to select an area of the page and zoom in. Opera Mini is smart enough to detect the most important part of the page and automatically selects that part.

There's even a small cursor that changes when you hover over a link and moves your position so you can actually read the text.

To try it, go to mini.opera.com/beta on your mobile phone and download the browser or test it on your computer (JAVA required).


One thing I don't link about Opera Mini 4 is that it's much slower than the previous version, but hopefully Opera will improve the performance until the browser gets out of beta.

Opera compared it with iPhone's Safari browser, but, as you can see in this video, iPhone's transitions are much smoother and there are multiple levels of zoom.

Share a Tab from Your iGoogle Page

Google's personalized homepage finally added the option to share a tab. If you click on the arrow next to the title of the active tab, you'll see three options: rename, delete and share. Google doesn't provide you a direct link, but it asks you to enter the email addresses of the persons you want to share that tab with.


The email contains a link that includes the URLs of all the gadgets from that tab. If you click on that link, you'll get a page that lets you add all the gadgets or only some of them to a new tab in your iGoogle page. Here's, for example, the link to my iGoogle tab about Google.

Google could generate a similar link for all your feeds and gadgets that could be used to backup your iGoogle page. After all, it's just a list of links.

Rate Local Businesses in Google Maps

Now you can add reviews and rate local businesses in Google Maps. Until today, Google crawled sites like Yelp and included their reviews.

"Don't forget that Google Maps indexes a tremendous variety of businesses, and in a number of countries. Tell the world all about your favorite (or least favorite) doctors and dentists, hotels, bakeries, hardware stores, salons, pet spas, auto mechanics, plumbers, and more," recommend Google Lat Long Blog.

Just find a local business, click on "more info" and then find a link that says "write a review". Your review must be at least 100 characters, it will go live instantly, but it's placed after the bottom of the page.

YouTube Goes International

At the unexciting Google Press Day, an event that took place in Paris, YouTube announced 9 localized versions for: Brazil, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Poland, Spain and UK. The sites will have localized interface and content. YouTube has "various major content partners, like the BBC, France 24, the Spanish Antena 3 and Cuatro TV, as well as football clubs, and non-profit organizations like Greenpeace."

YouTube hopes to expand its audience and to take some market share from video sites that are successful in some of these countries, like DailyMotion in France.

Google to Launch More Linux Applications

Google already has two applications that work in Linux: Picasa and Google Earth, but that's not enough for a company that uses Linux a lot. In a presentation [PDF] from Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, Google announced they'll release important Linux desktop applications this year. Some of them will be open source and they'll try to support most main distributions.

Google's applications that aren't available for Linux users include: Google Talk, Google Desktop, SketchUp, Web Accelerator.


{ via Phoronix.com }

Get Fresh Search Results from Google

Google has an option in the advanced search page that lets you restrict the results to pages from the last 3 months, 6 months or a year. Until now, the date was the last time when Google indexed a page. Because this doesn't mean too much and Google crawls the pages pretty fast, it was changed to the date of the first indexing.


As you can see when you search for "Google Maps", the results are still ranked by relevancy, but you won't find (too many) pages that already existed three months ago.


Unfortunately Google doesn't offer a way to define other intervals (at least not in the standard interface), but you can use the daterange operator (daterange:startdate-enddate, where startdate and enddate are Julian dates). This form does the conversion between the Gregorian date and the Julian date for you (based on some code from U.S. Naval Observatory):



{ via Matt Cutts }

Search Results that Enhance a Text

Google has an interesting patent that describes the philosophy behind Google AJAX Search API (also known as user-distributed search), a way to bring the search results to the user.

In an increasingly networked world, users frequently use online sources to create and exchange information. Email, instant messaging (IM), message boards, websites, and blogs are all existing communication technologies through which users can create and distribute content to other users. Frequently, in creating such content, a user may wish to reference other online information sources. For example, a user authoring an email may use a browser to navigate to a web page that the user would like to reference in the email, copy the link (e.g., the uniform resource locator (URL)) from the browser to a "clipboard," and then paste the link from the clipboard into the email. In this manner, the user can create an email message that contains links that are accessible by an eventual reader of the email.

Search engines are a popular tool through which users enter a search query describing information of interest and receive back documents or links to documents that relate to the search query. Frequently, when "researching" content for an email message, IM message, message board post, website post, or blog post, the user may perform one or more searches using one or more search engines to locate online documents relevant to the content. The user may then copy a link into the document using the above-described method of copying and pasting a link to the document. This process for annotating user created content can be tedious, difficult to perform for average users, and often results in textual links in the final content that can be difficult to read.

The patent suggests implementing a sidebar that lets you perform searches and easily include the results in the post or message. Another interesting idea is to show implicit search results based on what you type.

Instead of waiting for a user to provide a search query, the UDS may automatically generate search queries based on, for example, entity recognition techniques performed using the content entered by the user. (..) Entity recognition techniques are generally known in the art, and may include, for example, techniques designed to recognize entities such as products, places, organizations, or any other entities that tend to be subjects of searches. The entity recognition techniques can be based on linguistic grammar models or statistical models. In one possible implementation, the entity recognition techniques may be particularly adopted to locate terms that correspond to commercial products or terms that define an address, such as a postal address. In other possible implementations, the entity recognition techniques may be particularly biased to locate terms that are associated with a profile of the user, such as profile explicitly generated by the user (e.g., by the user filling out a questionnaire) or a profile automatically generated for the user, such as a profile based on the user's search history or based on documents created by the user.

This could be the first step towards a rich text editor smart enough to suggest relevant information for what you write and to auto-complete recurrent titles, names or ideas. One of the best existent applications for user-distributed search is Linkify, a bookmarklet that lets you place links in a text box using navigational queries.

{via SEO by the Sea}