Related Searches, at the Top of Google's Results Page

It's always difficult to show good results for general terms, that's why search engines suggest refinements to precisely define what you want to find. Yahoo displays them both at the top and at the bottom of the page, while Ask has an entire sidebar for search suggestions. Clusty aggregates results from other search engines and clusters them dynamically.

Google was more conservative and placed the related searches at the bottom of the page and sometimes in the middle of the page as an "inline revision", but now it started to show the queries at the top of the page. Usually the related searches add one or two words that disambiguate the query. They're also useful as a guidance if you don't know too much about a certain domain and you want to explore it.

From all the search engines, Ask.com is the most courageous because it offers a wide variety of suggestions while typing your query, so it can drastically improve the quality of your search query. In many cases, all you need to obtain great search results is a well-chosen query and these suggestions, obtained from other users that manually refine the queries, are helpful.

Google OS Tab for Your iGoogle Page

Google has improved the way you can share iGoogle tabs with your friends. Now you can also share the settings, so a weather gadget will keep the information about locations, zip codes and temperature scale.

Here's a Google OS tab that contains some of the most popular Google gadgets grouped in three columns:

- navigation and search (links to the most important Google services and to your bookmarks, a gadget for searching the web)

- news (the top Google News and your feeds from Google Reader)

- communication (Gmail, Google Calendar, to-do items and Google Docs)

This tab remembers some of the changes I've made to the gadgets: I removed some Google services from the list of links, I added a custom section to the Google News gadget and disabled local search in Google Mini Search.


To share a tab, you need to click on the small arrow next to its name, select "Share this tab" and enter a list of friends. If you only want to get the URL that lets you share the tab, you can enter your email address. The changes aren't reflected in the iGoogle pages that contain your shared tab, so make sure everything is in the right place before sharing the gadgets.

August 2007 Recap: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

This month Google didn't release its presentation tool, didn't launch any new version for Google Talk and JotSpot is still outside Google Apps. But what did Google do in August?

Mapping
Google launched a new version of Google Earth that lets you explore the sky and also includes a "hidden" flight simulator. Google Maps made it easier to embed maps into your site without knowing JavaScript. Four new cities from the US were added to Google Street View.

Communication
Gmail added the option to pay for more storage and started to share this additional storage with Picasa Web Albums. Gmail is now the top webmail service with the least amount of free storage. orkut suffered a small redesign and it's not ugly anymore.

Search
Google News had a lot of updates this month: the addition of comments from persons involved in a story, videos hosted by YouTube and articles from news agencies like AP that will be hosted by Google. Google indexes web pages faster than ever and gives more options to find fresh web pages.

Video
Google Video closes the video store and concentrates on advertising-supported solutions. YouTube experiments with overlay video ads for premium content.

This month we also found out that the internationalization of Google search has interesting side-effects, Google Browser is already here, Google Docs has a lot of interesting uses and organizing data is a difficult task.

Tip of the month: use Google Reader to power your blogroll.

Google Earth Easter Egg: Flight Simulator

Apparently, the latest version of Google Earth has an easter egg: a flight simulator. It's not quite like Microsoft Flight Simulator, but it's a promising start.

How to see this feature. Make sure you have Google Earth 4.2. Open the application, click on the globe and then press Ctrl+Alt+A. You should see this dialog that lets you choose one of the two aircrafts (F16 "Viper" and SR22) and an airport.


Here's the initial view from London Heathrow Airport:


... and here's a nice view from Kathmandu:



To fly, you need to read this list of keyboard shortcuts, but you can also use a mouse or a joystick. "To disable or enable mouse controls, left click (single click on a Mac). Once mouse controls are active, the pointer shape changes to a cross on your screen."

Marco Gallotta, who found this feature, has some tricks: "Moving on though, you can get a quick start by holding Page Up for a few seconds to increase to maximum thrust (thrust meter is the left bar of the lower-left meters). Once you've accelerated to a sufficient velocity use the arrow keys to take-off. The keys are in reverse as one would expect with any flight simulator, so use the down arrow to take-off. When you've gained enough altitude then stabalise the aircraft to a straight flight path. It can be rather tricky to get the hang of as the controls are quite sensitive."

This easter egg could become a standard feature in the next versions of Google Earth and it will bring even more fun to the application.

Google News Starts to Host Content

Adding comments and videos hosted by YouTube were a clear signal that Google News starts to become more aggressive and wants to go beyond the comfortable status of being a news aggregator.

(source: Hitwise. The market share for news & media sites, based on US Internet usage for the the week ending August 25, 2007)

As a results of its partnerships with important news agencies like AFP and Associated Press, Google News will host original content from these sources.

"Our goal has always been to offer users as many different perspectives on a story from as many different sources as possible, which is why we include thousands of sources from around the world in Google News. However, if many of those stories are actually the exact same article, it can end up burying those different perspectives. (...) By removing duplicate articles from our results, we'll be able to surface even more stories and viewpoints from journalists and publishers from around the world. (...) Because the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, UK Press Association and the Canadian Press don't have a consumer website where they publish their content, they have not been able to benefit from the traffic that Google News drives to other publishers. As a result, we're hosting it on Google News," explains the Google News Blog.

It's unclear whether Google will monetize the hosted content or will add new features that let users interact with news. What's clear is that today is a turning point for Google News that could bring more users and less friends from the press.

Google News was created as a tool that clusters related stories so you can read different perspectives on the same event. Unlike Yahoo News, Google News doesn't have editors: the homepage and all the other sections are generated algorithmically. Until this month, the site didn't host original content, so you could only find headlines, snippets and thumbnails from articles. To read the entire article, you had to go to a different site. Google was sued by many news organizations, including AFP, for copyright infringement and some of them won.

Example of article hosted by Google News:


Related:
The history of Google News

Google as a Bank

The Economist compares Google with a bank that stores and manages a lot of information (some of it, personal information).

"Google is often compared to Microsoft (another enemy, incidentally); but its evolution is actually closer to that of the banking industry. Just as financial institutions grew to become repositories of people's money, and thus guardians of private information about their finances, Google is now turning into a custodian of a far wider and more intimate range of information about individuals. Yes, this applies also to rivals such as Yahoo! and Microsoft. But Google, through the sheer speed with which it accumulates the treasure of information, will be the one to test the limits of what society can tolerate." (my emphasis)

As with any bank, you need to trust it, to make sure it has transparent policies, that it serves your interests and it doesn't have "hidden costs". Your ISP, your doctor, your employee, your bank - all have a lot of personal information about you and some of it could migrate to online services like Google Health, Google Checkout, Google Web History or Google Web Accelerator. The worst thing that can happen to Google is losing the trust of its users, so Google has another incentive to not betray peoples, besides the mythical "Don't be evil" corporate motto.

The Economist thinks that Google should find the right balance between users' privacy and storing personal data indefinitely. Google already does a good job at explaining the consequences of your actions and how could some options affect your privacy, but it would be nice to expand the Web History to a big personal center that shows all the information Google has about you and provides ways to remove or export some of the information.

"Google in effect controls a dial that, as it sells ever more services to you, could move in two directions. Set to one side, Google could voluntarily destroy very quickly any user data that it collects. That would assure privacy, but it would limit Google's profits from selling to advertisers information about what you are doing, and make those services less useful. If the dial is set to the other side and Google hangs on to the information, the services will be more useful, but some dreadful intrusions into privacy could occur. The answer, as with banks in the past, must lie somewhere in the middle; and the right point for the dial is likely to change, as circumstances change."

{ The second photo illustration: "At last!", licensed as Creative Commons. }

Related:
Google as a personal assistant
Google, Behind the Screen (documentary)

Embed Multiple Google Calendars

Google Calendar will improve the feature that lets you embed calendars in a site, by adding the option to include multiple calendars, giving you more control regarding the display and the size and adding a week view.

You can embed a calendar by clicking on the small arrow next to its name in the left sidebar, selecting "Calendar settings" and then clicking on the blue "HTML" button. A configuration tool will generate the code.

Google slowly rolls out this update, so you may still see the old version that lets you embed only a single calendar at a time.


{ Thank you, Nick Chirchirillo. }

Update (Sept. 6): the feature is live.

Easy Way to Find Recent Web Pages

Now that Google indexes pages extremely fast and saves the date of the first indexing, it would be nice to have more options for restricting search results to a date range. Google only provided three options in the advanced search: see all the pages last updated in the past 3, 6 or 12 months and a difficult-to-use operator (daterange).

The advanced search page has been updated and it shows four more options: find the web pages first indexed in the past day, week, month or in the past 2 months.


If you remove all the uninteresting parameters from the search URL, you'll find that as_qdr is responsible for date restrictions. For example, here's how to restrict a search for [China] to pages first seen by Google's crawler in the past 24 hours:

http://www.google.com/search?q=china&as_qdr=d

Note that you'll only find new web pages and not pages that were updated in the past 24 hours. That means you won't find homepages from popular sites or other frequently-updated pages. If the date range is small, you'll mostly find news and blog posts.

The nice thing is that you can change the value of as_qdr to custom intervals. Here are all the possible values of the as_qdr parameter:

d[number] - past number of days (e.g.: d10)
w[number] - past number of weeks
y[number] - past number of years

For example, http://www.google.com/search?q=china&as_qdr=d10 lets you search for pages that contain "China" and were created in the past 10 days.


A finer control (hours) and an option to sort the results by date would make this feature almost perfect.

Google Gadgets that Talk to Each Other

You could say that widgets (or gadgets, as Google likes to call them) are small applications that bring together a lot of information relevant to you. Now what if these gadgets would communicate with each other by sending small messages? PubSub is a new beta feature available at iGoogle. You won't find too many gadgets that use this feature, at least for now.

"PubSub allows multiple gadgets on the same page to send and receive data from each other. In other words, you can now build a gadget that communicates back and forth with one another. This introduces a brand new concept and strategy involved when writing gadgets. Information is no longer constrained to fit inside a single gadget. Instead, you can now split up various pieces of information amongst multiple gadgets and allow them to communicate with each other to paint a bigger picture. Gadgets now have the ability to be more closely integrated with one another and present a network of information to users."

This works if you add at least two gadgets, so it makes sense to create an entire tab with interactive gadgets (here's a sample tab). For example, you could have a gadget that includes a search box and other gadgets that show search results from different sources. Or another gadget could collect events (new email, new event, breaking news) and cleverly organize them based on your preferences.

"PubSub is a new framework which allows 'publisher' gadgets on iGoogle to communicate changes to 'subscriber' gadgets that have declared interest in those changes. This is currently available only on iGoogle and publisher/subscriber gadgets must be on the same page."

If you intend to write gadgets that use this new feature, read the documentation. How would you this framework?

Two Ways to Watch the Same YouTube Video

It's very interesting to see the differences between two (almost) identical videos available on YouTube. The first one was uploaded by Universal Music, the owner of the distribution rights, and is displayed using a new YouTube player in the new interface, available as an option for most other videos. Next to the video there's an AdSense banner and the video can't be embedded ("embedding disabled by request).


The second video was uploaded by a normal YouTube user, is displayed using the old player, the new interface is an option, there's no ad next to the video and you're able to embed the video into your site.


The first video has more than 14 million views, while the second one only has 378,000. I'll leave the comments to you.

New Context Menus in Google Docs

Google Docs added context menus to the document manager. Now you can right-click on a file or anywhere else inside the application and choose one of the appropriate actions. The new menu has an artificial look and is extremely long if you right-click on a document. Maybe Google Docs will add other views that allow easier selection of multiple documents.

Menu #1: right-click anywhere inside the application. The menu duplicates the existing toolbar.


Menu #2: a special case is the menu for folders, which erroneously includes the option "Add to folder".


Menu #3: right-click on a file. The menu shows all the actions corresponding to the type of file you selected. The only options left out are: new file/folder and upload.


If you use Firefox and see the standard context menu, go to Tools/Options, select the Content tab, click on the Advanced button next to the JavaScript option and check "(Allow scripts to) disable or replace context menus".

Among the new features that should be included in the next versions are: table of contents, integration of Webster Dictionary and Encyclopedia Britannica, the option to search the web for selected text and exporting documents as MP3 using text-to-speech technology.

The Quality of Google Book Search

Paul Duguid wrote an interesting article about Google Book Search in which he analyzed the quality of the indexed editions and the search results by doing a search for Lawrence Sterne's "Tristram Shandy", a novel from the 18th century. Mr. Duguid noticed that the Harvard edition of the book had many quality problems and some text wasn't scanned properly. Google Book Search doesn't distinguish between the volumes of a book, so it's difficult to realize that the Stanford edition is actually the second volume of the book.

Google may or may not be sucking the air out of other digitization projects, but like Project Gutenberg before, it is certainly sucking better–forgotten versions of classic texts from justified oblivion and presenting them as the first choice to readers. (...) The Google Books Project is no doubt an important, in many ways invaluable, project. It is also, on the brief evidence given here, a highly problematic one. Relying on the power of its search tools, Google has ignored elemental metadata, such as volume numbers. The quality of its scanning (and so we may presume its searching) is at times completely inadequate. The editions offered (by search or by sale) are, at best, regrettable. Curiously, this suggests to me that it may be Google's technicians, and not librarians, who are the great romanticisers of the book. Google Books takes books as a storehouse of wisdom to be opened up with new tools. They fail to see what librarians know: books can be obtuse, obdurate, even obnoxious things. As a group, they don't submit equally to a standard shelf, a standard scanner, or a standard ontology.

Patrick Leary, the author of the article Googling the Victorians (PDF), has a pragmatical response, as seen on O'Reilly Radar:

Mass digitization is all about trade-offs. All mass digitizing programs compromise textual accuracy and bibliographical meta-data so that they can afford to include many more texts at a reasonable cost in money and time. All texts in mass digitization collections are corrupt to some degree. Everything else being equal, the more limited the number of texts included in a digital collection, the more care can be lavished on each text. Assessing the balance of value involved in this trade-off, I think, is one of the main places where we part company. You conclude, on the basis of your inspection of these two volumes, that the corruption of texts like Tristram Shandy makes Google Books a "highly problematic" way of getting at the meanings of the books it includes. By contrast, while acknowledging how unfortunate are some of the problems you mention, I believe that the sheer scale of the project and the power of its search function together far outweigh these "problematic" elements.

When scanning and indexing millions of books, it's difficult to assess the quality of each edition. Google Book Search's main goal is to let you discover books you can borrow or buy later on. But Google could add an option to rate the quality of each digitized book or build algorithms that detect flaws or differences between editions. So the next time you do a search for Tristram Shandy, all the editions are clustered and the best one comes up first.

Internationalization and Google Search Results

Google has always tried to be accessible: the search interface is available in more than 100 languages, the results are modified based on your location, the interface is simple and universally accessible.

If you don't live in the United States, you noticed that google.com automatically redirects to your local domain, that shows messages in your language and custom-tailored results for your location. This is especially noticeable if you live in a country that doesn't have an important Internet presence and you see unimportant pages getting high rankings just because they happen to be written in your language.

Monomo Blog compares two local versions: the British Google and the German Google and notices important differences:

"Let’s say you search for something technical, like a certain Javascript Library - the pattern that the German portal displays more sites in German persists - but from a quality point of view the differences can be stark (the number of German speaking sites against English speaking ones surprisingly matters!). It seems that the priority of the guessed native language, overrules other aspects like relevance in quite a dramatic fashion. It is quite possible that you’ll never find a particular reference on the German Portal which features on the first result page on the British portal."

Google offers options to translate search results in your language, but only for a small number of languages. The cross-language search interface, which lets you search web pages written in foreign languages, is still an experiment. But until Google manages to translate all the web pages to a universal language and let you find any information available on the web, regardless of the language it was written in, Google could at least ask you the languages you know or you are comfortable with.

Meanwhile, if you want to use the standard version of Google, click on "Google.com in English" at the bottom of any Google homepage or type google.com/ncr in your address bar. Google's cookie will save your preference, so the next time you go to google.com you won't be redirected to the local version. Google also offers the option to search for web pages written in a certain language or from a certain country (advanced search) and you can see the search results from another location by adding the gl parameter to the URL (for example: http://google.com/search?q=bank&gl=us shows the results from the US).


I don't use Google's localized versions because they're often not in sync with the original version, the translation is not very good and sometimes difficult to understand, the product is not fully localized (the help center is still in English) and the overall quality is significantly inferior. But in the case of search results, you also miss important information and find more spammy or irrelevant search results.

Monomo also thinks about the cultural implications:

"Now of course there is a whole bunch of well meant arguments which make the case for regionally optimised search results, but what are the implications? Surely if a whole culture or an language area (...) are constantly served fairly reduced differing information by the quasi monopolist, the knowledge base of that area will start to differ."

So even if it's important to tailor some search results to the user's location, language or interests, that doesn't mean you should sacrifice the quality of the results and lower user's expectations.

YouTube Launches New API

YouTube migrated its API from REST/XML-RPC to Google Data so you can use the same package for accessing different Google services. The new API provides read-only access to user profiles, videos uploaded or bookmarked by a user, subscriptions, video comments, related videos, playlists, search results. And because the default output is Atom feeds, you can use the API to subscribe to a lot interesting data. Here are some examples of feeds that help you track a user's activity:

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/users/username/uploads - videos uploaded by username

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/users/username/favorites - videos bookmarked by username

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/users/username/playlists - playlists created by username

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/users/username/subscriptions - username's subscriptions

Some useful parameters for the feeds:

?max-results=50: the maximum number of items from a feed (by default, a feed includes only 25 items).

?alt=rss or ?alt=json: change the output format to RSS feeds or to JavaScript code (JSON) that can be easily used from web applications.

?vq=query: use this parameter to create a filter for a feed. Obtain only the videos that contain your query in the metadata (title, tags, description).

?orderby={updated, viewCount, rating, relevance}: sort the items from feed by upload date, number of views, rating or relevance.

Example of a feed:

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/users/google/uploads?
vq="google+maps"&orderby=viewCount (the videos about Google Maps uploaded by Google, sorted by popularity)

These feeds can also be used in applications like Miro to export your videos from YouTube.

{via YouTube API Blog}

FlashEarth Comes to Google Earth

You've probably heard about FlashEarth, the site that lets you compare the satellite imagery offered by Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, Microsoft Virtual Earth, Ask.com and more. Now you can use FlashEarth directly from Google Earth thanks to a layer created by Barry Hunter. "As you move around the globe a little white arrow follows you around, simple click it to get an approximation of the current view in FlashEarth in a popup balloon."

This could be useful if Google Earth doesn't have a very good coverage of a certain area or you just want to see the same image from a different perspective.

Gmail's Collaborative Video

The wait is over. Google launched an interesting challenge last month: "Help us imagine how an email message travels around the world."

"A few of us on the Gmail team came up with an idea to stitch together a bunch of video clips that all share one element: someone hands the Gmail M-velope in from the left of the screen, and hands it off to the right. Put them all together, and they form one long chain of hand-offs," detailed the Gmail Blog. The number of responses was impressive: more than 1,000 videos that included Gmail's M-velope logo. Google selected some of the best videos, edited them and created a final video that showcases some of the most important values behind Gmail: creativity, collaboration and fun.

Connect to Google Talk on Your Mobile Phone

Until Google Talk releases a mobile version (or anything else), there's a simple way to chat with your friends from the mobile phone. eBuddy, an all-in-one web messenger similar to meebo, has recently started to support Google Talk. eBuddy has a mobile version available at m.ebuddy.com that can be used to chat with your contacts from Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Google and MySpace.

The interface is very simple, but it's optimized for the small mobile screens by displaying the messages in the reverse order. The web page refreshes every 20 seconds to automatically display the new messages.

While eBuddy promises it doesn't store your usernames and passwords, you should only use the service if you think it's trustworthy. There are many other ways to access Google Talk on your mobile phone, but this one doesn't require to install an application. iPhone users should rejoice.

Google Facebook App

Google made a lovely app for Facebook that lets you search the web and share the results with your friends. Your queries are automatically included in Facebook's mini-feed, so your web history can be shared with your friends. There's also a page that showcases popular results found by other Facebook users.

The application has been created using Google's AJAX Search API, the only search API still supported by Google.


At the moment, Google only uses your web history to personalize search results. Maybe in the future you'll be able to share some parts of your logs with your friends (for example, your bookmarks) and obtain better search results by using information from the profiles of your contacts. Yahoo tried to do this with MyWeb 2.0, but failed.

With the release of MyWeb 2.0, Yahoo has added an extensive array of new features focused on community-based searching and sharing of information. "It basically enables people to tap into each other's personal web by searching their trust network of friends," said Eckart Walther, vice president, product management, Yahoo. (...)

Yahoo has also developed a new relevance algorithm called "MyRank" for MyWeb 2.0. "It's a new search engine that we wrote that can search across thousands of nodes and millions of pages in a trust network," said Walther. Unlike PageRank and other link analysis techniques used by general-purpose search engines, MyRank is designed to ferret out clues to relevance based on the pages you and your community have saved to MyWeb 2.0.

Find This Place in Google Maps

PlaceSpotting is a site that lets you create and solve riddles using Google Maps. Your task is to find a certain location on the map with the help of a satellite image and some hints. The problem is that you can only drag and zoom the map, there's no search box that lets you enter the name of a country or an address. Fortunately, you don't need to find the exact location: the latitude and longitude can be partial matches.

If you have no idea how to solve the riddle, the copyright information from the satellite image is sometimes pretty useful. For example, in the screenshot below one of the companies that provided the imagery is Dütschler, from Switzerland. You can also use the information from the three hints to find the city. The source code of the page also contains some interesting data from Google Maps API, but that's usually called cheating.

Bloglines Upgrades to Stay in the Game

Bloglines, still a popular web-based feed reader, launched a beta version that puts it in line with more recent applications like Google Reader. If Google's feed reader was heavily inspired by Bloglines, it's time for Bloglines to add some features from Google Reader.

The most important change is that Bloglines doesn't use the old-fashioned frames and loads new data using AJAX. Bloglines offers three views:

* quick view (similar to Google Reader's list view) that only shows the titles

* full view (corresponding to Google Reader's expanded view) which also displays the content of the feed posts. Unlike the old version of Bloglines, the posts are marked as read only if you scroll down to read them.

* 3-pane view (screenshot above). This is similar to the way desktop email clients like Outlook or Thunderbird display mail, but it doesn't provide a good experience if you read long posts.

The quick view brings an interesting idea: grouping the feeds from a folder and automatically creating pages like the ones from iGoogle, Netvibes, Pageflakes. Bloglines even lets you create a start page with your favorite feeds.


But the most useful new feature is feed management using drag-and-drop. Now you can easily move feeds from one folder to another one without opening a new page or going to the settings.

Bloglines doesn't want to stop here: they promise to add other features like sharing feeds and the option to create a link blog. "Since this is a Beta, some features and functionality will be missing. Bloglines is very powerful, so it'll take some time to get all your features into the new redesign. The full-featured original Bloglines (considered by many to be the best feed reader on the market) will continue to be available, and Bloglines subscribers can use both sites to access their subscriptions and compare experiences," explains Bloglines.

Bloglines has many features not available in Google Reader (like search, notifier, recommendations, email subscriptions, public profiles), but the main reason people started to migrate to other feed readers was the interface. Here's what Gina Trapani from Lifehacker wrote in a post from last year:

"I'm not exactly an easily-offended aesthete, but Bloglines' design made me wince from the get-go. It's just plain ugly. The color (which I took pains to change with the Bloglines teal-killer Greasemonkey script) , the font, the boxiness of it all - and after awhile a design you don't like starts to drag on you, becomes work to look at and use."

Google Lets You Remove People from Street View

Because of the potential privacy problems, Google decided to change the policy for removing faces and license plate numbers from the Google Maps Street View imagery. According to CNET, "anyone can alert the company and have an image of a license plate or a recognizable face removed, not just the owner of the face or car".

Marissa Mayer said that Google changed the policy 10 days after the product's launch, but didn't announce it. "We looked at it and we thought that's really silly because that's not the point of this product. The purpose is to show what the stores look like, what houses look like. If someone says, 'Hey, there's a face here,' ... it doesn't matter whose face it is."

A car accident in San Bruno, California, via Street View Sightings.

Google Maps help center continous to be vague about this: "Street View contains imagery of public property, which is no different than what you might see driving down the street. Imagery of this kind is available in a wide variety of formats for cities all around the world. That said, we understand that Street View imagery may contain objectionable content. If you've seen content like this, please see our help article on how to report inappropriate images." Basically, you have to click on "Street view help" link next to the image, select "Report inappropriate image" and fill out a form.

The street view images could be even more useful if they didn't contain people, cars or other transient objects. People passing by don't define a place, they just happen to be there. Because Google and Immersive Media take a lot of photos from a single place, it's not very difficult to detect the overlays. There's even a free software that allows you to remove tourists from photos.

So one should expect that Google will automatically remove people and cars from the images. Maybe, at some point, Google will also offer an API that lets you add objects created with SketchUp or other 3D modeling software and integrate the imagery in Google Earth.