Google News Visualizations

Besides the standard Google News page, there are other ways to explore the news automatically clustered and ranked by Google.

The image version of Google News shows pictures related to the most important news and lets you explore a gallery of images that illustrate a news. This is a great way to find the key elements from a news at a glance, without even reading the text.


Newsmap is a brilliant visualization for the headlines that reflects the importance of a news. Everything is displayed in a single page that is automatically updated. "Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator. A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator."



Google News Cloud displays the most important keywords from today's news in a tag cloud. When you hover over a keyword, other related keywords are highlighted.


Google Trends checks how frequently a word was mentioned in the article indexed by Google News. The results are displayed at the bottom of a chart in the "news reference volume" section.

Buzztracker shows the relation between news and locations. Every day you can see the top cities mentioned in the news on a map. There's also an archive that goes back to 2004. Baghdad, Washington, Gaza, New York seem to be the most frequently mentioned cities.

An interesting way to explore the evolution of a person, company, idea or event is to use the timeline view from Google News Archive. Even if most articles require paid subscriptions, the snippets provided by Google are really helpful.

On Google's Navigational Bar

Google's current navigation bar was added in May as a solution for the growing list of Google products that lacked visibility and were difficult to find. The bar added a drop-down that includes less popular services like Reader and Patent Search, while replacing the famous More page. It was placed at the top of the page, detaching it from the search box, as you can see in the screenshot below.


Google's bar has two configurations that depend on the context:
* a search mode (visible in most services and on the homepage) - shows the most important search services
* an apps mode (you can see it in Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Picasa Web and Groups) - shows the most popular web apps for communication and collaboration

Because the space is limited, Google can't afford to include too many links, so here's the structure of a bar:
- 5 links that point to the most important services of the current mode (search or apps). If the active service is included among those services, the link is replaced with a bold text.
- a transitional link to the most popular service of the inactive configuration (Web search or Gmail).
- a drop-down that lists the other 14 services alphabetically.

If the services don't have descriptive names, the bar includes alternative titles: "Photos" for Picasa Web Albums and "Documents" for Google Docs.

It's interesting to note that Google includes 11 search services, 8 apps and Google Labs (it's not clear whether Google Groups is more important for search or for its community features).

While Google's selection is mostly based on the popularity of its services, users may want to see different configurations. Let's say my favorite Google services are: Blog search, Scholar, Blogger, Google Reader, YouTube and Google Project Hosting. That means I always have to click on the "more" link or even to search for YouTube and Project Hosting, because they're not included.

What I'd like to see is an option to choose the services that are displayed in the navigation bar and a task-oriented search box that will look like the Quick Search Box from Google Desktop and is already partially implemented at Google Code. The search box should have auto-complete and should let you search for product names, descriptions and important tasks for each service. For example, you could enter: [compose mail] or [contacts] for Gmail, [create event] or [agenda] for Calendar, [upload document] for Google Docs, [referrals] or [stats] for Analytics etc. The results should prioritize the services you used the most and Google should send you directly to the right page (Gmail's contact page, for example).

To facilitate the discovery of features, the task-based search box could be added to each service and act as a humanized command line that doesn't require you to know parameters and command names.

Read Wikipedia Articles Offline

Ajaxian talks about an interesting way to use Google Gears for sites that don't necessarily integrate with Google's toolkit for offline applications: inject code using Greasemonkey. An article shows how you can save a number of Wikipedia articles for offline use, without depending on your browser's cache.

Sites with a lot of static information -- Wikipedia, any API documentation, web-based email -- would be great to be able to use when no internet connection is available. But what if you're a user that always has an internet connection? Then adding Gears to a site doesn't do much, right? Wrong. Imagine your favorite website is now stored on your computer, and it syncs whenever there's altered content. Whenever you look at the site, your browser is grabbing everything straight from your hard drive. Did you just make a search for your best friend on Facebook? Don't wait 5 seconds the next time that search runs, have the results immediately! Meanwhile, save the webmasters' precious bandwidth/server power!

Here's the Greasemonkey script for Wikipedia (requires Firefox + Gresemonkey + Gears). For each Wikipedia article you want to save, click on "cache page" and the script will save the text and the images. It would be nice to make it work with any site.

I'm Feeling Lucky

Google's homepage in 1998

The "I'm Feeling Lucky" button is one of the very few things that stand out on Google's minimalistic homepage. It automatically takes you to the first search result and it's helpful for navigational queries, when there's a single good result (e.g.: [Yahoo Mail], [download Opera]). The option was included in a slightly altered manner in Google Toolbar and Firefox: browse by name instead of typing URLs in the address bar.

I'm Feeling Lucky:
http://google.com/search?btnI=1&q=yahoo+mail

Browse by Name:
http://google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=mail
http://google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&gfns=1&q=yahoo+mail

Marketplace found more about "I'm Feeling Lucky" and its meaning.

"The reason it's called 'I'm Feeling Lucky,' is of course that's a pretty damn ambitious goal. I mean to get the exact right one thing without even giving you a list of choices, and so you have to feel a little bit lucky if you're going to try that with one go," tried to explain Sergey Brin.

"You know Larry and Sergey had the view, and I certainly share it, that it's possible just to become too dry, too corporate, too much about making money. And you know what I think is really delightful about Google and about the "I'm Feeling Lucky," is that they remind you that the people here have personality and that they have interests and that there is real people," said Marissa Mayer.

Even if only 1% from Google's searches bypass the search results page and go straight to the top result, Google will keep the strange button on the homepage as it has become a part of its brand. Probably the last time someone told you to click the button was to show you a Google Bomb: Go to Google, type in "miserable failure" and then press the "I'm feeling lucky" button (don't try, it won't work anymore). Or maybe you've seen the button in Picasa or iGoogle.

Jeff Atwood from Coding Horror thinks that the button is Google's number one UI mistake: "I understand this was a clever little joke in the early days of Google-- hey, look at us, we're a search engine that actually works! -- but is it really necessary to carry this clever little joke forward ten years and display it on the monitors of millions of web users every day? We get it already. Google is awesomely effective."

"I'm Feeling Lucky" boxers (limited edition)

Google will remove the button when you won't have to feel lucky to get the best results every time and when the list of links will be replaced with an actual answer.

{ via Valleywag }

The Irony Behind an Image Search Result

Google's image search engine has always returned many strange results, but universal search made this problem more visible. For some queries, Google shows three images at the top (or at the bottom) of the main search results pages. One of these queries is [RSS icon], which should obviously return the orange icon for feeds. But it also returns something else...


The irony is that the inappropriate picture was included in a post from 2005 that criticized Google's image search engine. Here's the full post [contains a bigger version of the image]:

I wanted to add an RSS icon to my blog, so I turned to the trusty Google images search: RSS. And what do I get. Certainly not the little orange RSS box (though if this really was the RSS icon, maybe people other than serious geeks would use the technology).

This goes to show that Google image search hasn't improved so much since then. Just because a page contains "RSS icon" twice in the neighborhood of an image doesn't mean the image shows an RSS icon.

{ via Digg }

Customize the Background of a Google Presentation

The first update for Google Presentations doesn't include the export to PowerPoint format, as one might expected. Instead we get some minor improvements for managing and customizing the slides.

Now you can select more than one slide at a time: press Ctrl while selecting disparate slides and Shift for continous selections. The slides can be moved using drag&drop and copied by selecting the options from the contextual menu.


While there's still no option for custom themes, you can change the background by uploading an image or selecting a color. Right-click on a slide and select "Change theme". Google recommends to use 800x600 images or at least images with an aspect ratio of 4:3.


For the end, here's a simple way to import a PPT attachment from Gmail to Google Docs: right-click on the "View as slideshow" link, copy the link location, paste it in the address bar and replace "disp=vgp&view=att" with "disp=attd&view=wtatt". When Google Presentations becomes more powerful, this tip will probably be unnecessary.

Jaiku, Android and Google's Mobile Ads

Last month when Google bought Jaiku, people wondered why Google preferred the micro-blogging service to Twitter, which is much more popular. Jonathan Mulholland thinks that the answer lies in Jaiku's unique ability to combine micro-blogging with user's location.

"An integral part of the service is a client application for Symbian S60 platform mobile phones. The client uses location APIs within S60 devices to triangulate the handset (and the users) location based on nearby cellular network towers. The Jaiku client was in fact originally conceived as a 'status aware address book', and as such integrates into compatible S60 phones to the extent that it also shares the phones (and again the users) status availability ( - General, In Meeting, Outdoor etc)."

Because his mobile phone is able to broadcast the location automatically (even if it's not very precise), the user posts more than a message. The text can be connected to his location and create a list of preferences for each place you frequently visit.

"Google + Jaiku is not a million miles away from being able to push appropriate advertising to individuals based on their profile, their location and their availability. Imagine walking down the high street and having your mobile phone pop up with a Google notification telling you that Heroes DVD box sets were 20% off at HMV today, or that a new Indian restaurant had just opened in that part of town. (...) It seems obvious that Jaiku is destined to become an integral part of the Android platform over the next year," thinks Jonathan Mulholland.

Android includes an API for location-based services that allows "software to obtain the phone's current location. This includes location obtained from the Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite constellation, but it's not limited to that."

Google already offers local targeting for ads, but this could be much more useful when you're using a mobile phone. And if the ads are truly relevant and unintrusive (maybe as a part of a more complex service of local recommendations), people might actually like them.

Edit Locations in Google Maps

Google Maps has a new feature that lets you fix inaccurate addresses for local businesses, even if you're not the owner. You just have to click on "edit" in the info window and choose a new location. If you move the marker more than 200 meters away, the change will need to be reviewed before going live. There's also a history of previous changes and an option to go back to the original location.

"You might be worried about people monkeying with markers. Fear not, we've thought of that. Whenever you find a recently-moved address or business, you'll see a "Show original" link you can click to see where the marker was originally. If it's in the wrong place, just move it to the right one," explains Google LatLong Blog.

This also works for locations of addresses and landmarks, but only in the US, Australia and New Zealand. More about the new feature here.

Simple Bookmarks

As you browse the web, you find interesting web pages or just useful information that may help you later on. For some web pages you may want to get alerts if there's any change in the future, for others you're happy with the static content.

It would be nice to have a simple option for all these actions. You could just bookmark a page and choose from a list of options:

* save content (you could save the entire page or just some clips)
* get updates (dynamically create gadgets by selecting some information from a page that is likely to change - weather, news; subscribe to feeds or to newsletters; get all the changes of a page)
* share with others

The bookmarking application could be integrated with your web history (that could be saved locally or online), could determine the web sites you visit frequently and automatically bookmark them. From your bookmarks and clips, you could create web pages and share them with other people.

The simple bookmarks could combine in a single interface Google Bookmarks, Shared Stuff, Google Notebook, Google Alerts, iGoogle, Dapper and other applications.

Filter Messages from a Mailing List in Gmail

The new version of Gmail makes it easier to create filters for mailing list. If you select "filter messages like this" when you read a message from a mailing list, Gmail will filter the right messages using the listid: operator, that corresponds to the List-ID header. For example, listid:googlepress.googlegroups.com is the best way to find messages sent from the Google Press group. You should create filters that automatically label these messages, archive them or mark them as read.


Gmail also has a clever way to handle mail sent to a list you are subscribed to: it bypasses the inbox, but it's still available in Sent Mail or in other views. When you set a vacation responder, it won't be sent to mailing lists. If you don't want to read the next replies from a thread, you can ignore them by clicking on "Mute" in the "More actions" menu: all the replies will be archived.

{ Thanks, Hernan. }