Don't Talk About Blogger's Comments

(Based on a real song/movie/book.)

And you open the page and you step inside. It's an interesting post from a Blogger blog. After reading it, you want to post a comment and share your opinion, but there's no contact form. A strange link invites readers to "post a comment" and you reluctantly click on it. The link sends you to a web page from a different domain where you are supposed to enter your comment, but the comment form is too small and you can no longer see the original post unless you click on a barely visible link. For some reason, Blogger asks you to log in and it's not obvious that you can post a comment without having a Google account. Oh, and there's a difficult to read CAPTCHA you need to solve before clicking on "Publish your comment".

After all this trouble, the comment has been finally posted. Blogger forgot to auto-link your URLs, but that's no longer your problem. The big question is how to get back to the post. You want to give up and close the tab, but you notice a subtle message: "Your comment has been saved. It may take a moment for your comment to appear on the site at the original post." The last three words are linked so maybe clicking on the link will send you back to the original post.

Congratulations! You've managed to post a comment on Blogger. If this your first comment, it's likely it will also be the last one. "You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We are all a part of the same compost. We are the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world."

Useful Content Restrictions for Yahoo Search

Google's advanced search options are useful, but they could include ways to define more restrictions for search results. Maybe you want to find pages that mostly contain text, web pages that reference videos or include tables. Fortunately, some these features are available at Yahoo, where you can use the feature: operator.

iraq gdp feature:table - web pages that contain tables, unfortunately including layout tables

la traviata feature:audio - web pages that link to audio files (e.g.: MP3s)

michel gondry ads feature:video - web pages that link to video files (e.g.: QuickTime videos)

AJAX feature:acrobat - search results that link to PDF files

beatles feature:activex - search results that contain the object tag (e.g.: embedded YouTube videos or any other Flash object)

feature:activex site:googlesystem.blogspot.com - all the pages from this blog that include videos

You can also use the operator to remove some classes of web pages. If you want to filter web pages that use JavaScript, add -feature:script:

java -feature:script - old tutorials for Java

lagrange interpolation demo -feature:applet - interpolation demos that don't include Java applets

To find web pages that link to files with a certain extension, use the linkextension: operator. For example, linkextension:ogg bach finds web pages about Bach that link to .ogg audio files.

Yahoo has another interesting operator (depth:) that lets you define the maximum number of subdirectories from your search results' URLs. For example, a search for google tips depth:1 will include www.google.com/help/features.html because it has a single directory, but not www.techcrunch.com/2007/01/04/google-tips-pulled, which has three directories. This could be useful to find web pages that are important relatively to the structure of a web site.

The operator has a special value that lets you search only homepages: -1, as you can see in this query: flickr depth:-1.

Find the sites related to Flickr that don't have a link from yahoo.com

I don't know if Yahoo's search engine is better than Google, but Yahoo inherited a lot of interesting features from AltaVista and Inktomi, two leading search engines in the '90s.

Related:
More Yahoo Search tips

Watch YouTube Videos in Higher Quality

YouTube has formally announced that it started to re-encode its videos in higher quality. "You may have noticed that we're now giving you the option of watching some YouTube videos in higher quality. We're making these streams available on certain videos, based upon the source file uploaded to us, and over time you'll find a greater percentage of the library is available to view in higher quality."

Two weeks ago, we learned about a trick that triggers the higher quality videos, if they're available: append &fmt=18 or &fmt=6 to a YouTube URL. Now you can choose the higher quality as a default option by going to your YouTube account settings and changing the video playback quality to "I have a fast connection. Always play higher-quality video when it's available."


The new setting is equivalent to appending &fmt=6 to the URL and you get 448 x 336 FLV1 videos with audio encoded at a sample rate of 44100 Hz, up from 320 x 240 FLV1 videos with audio encoded at 22050 Hz.

YouTube's philosophy seems to be about making sure that most people can watch videos, even if they have slow Internet connections.

YouTube's Embedded Player Has Been Updated

YouTube removed the overlayed logo from its embedded player and added the branding to the small menu button, similar to Google Video.

The old player:


The new player:


I'm not sure if this is a new feature, but YouTube's embedded player supports keyboard shortcuts. Once the player has focus, you can press:

* space to pause the video and then resume it

* the right arrow to fast forward

* the left arrow to replay the video

* the up/down arrows to adjust volume.

Traffic Stats for Your Google Documents

My wish to have traffic stats for user generated content hosted by Google is partly fulfilled. Google Docs has a new option to track published documents using Google Analytics. You need to go to the Settings page, enable the tracking option and add a Google Analytics profile ID. It's not clear whether you need to create a new profile or use an existing one, but both options might work.


After publishing a document, you'll see a small message: "Tracking visitor traffic with Google Analytics."


The screenshot below shows the source code of a published document: the first Google Analytics tracking code is used by Google, while the second tracking code is associated with your account.


The other hosted Google service that allows you to add Google Analytics code is Project Hosting. It's also easy to add the tracking code if you develop iGoogle gadgets.

{ via Blogoscoped Forum }

Update: The option is no longer available in the settings, but even when it was available you couldn't use it because the Analytics code was broken. Hopefully, Google will fix the problem soon.

Google Docs to Add a Menu and Print Layout

The new toolbar from Google Docs is just a part of a bigger redesign. Apparently, Google Docs will replace the tabs with a traditional menu and will switch to a "print layout", the default view in Microsoft Word. It's not clear whether Google Docs will also add pagination, but I don't see the point of adding a print layout without actually showing pages.


The slightly-edited screenshot is from a presentation that shows some of the tools used by Google employees, who have access to not-yet-released versions of Google's products. Philipp Lenssen describes some of Google's internal tools, while Brian Ussery has more details about the presentation.

YouTube's Updated API Offers More Flexibility

YouTube updated its API to include some major new features that will help it become an even more interesting solution for publishers and social networks.

The first important addition is the support for authentication, which now allows users to upload videos, edit metadata, post comments, rate videos from other sites or from desktop applications. That means someone could create a better interface for YouTube and leverage the existing users and their data.

Another useful API lets you control an embedded YouTube player using JavaScript or ActionScript. As this example shows, you can pause a video, skip to a certain frame, change the volume using some simple code. YouTube no longer restricts you to use their player: the chromeless player lets you add personalized controls, menus, but you can't remove the branding.

YouTube mentions that the API's intent is for non-commercial use, but you can utilize it to "show YouTube content on an ad-enabled blog or website that is not comprised solely or substantially of YouTube video content". Read the terms of service for more details.

Age Verification at Google Korea

As anticipated last year, Google Korea started to comply with the local laws and asks for age verification if your search contains words that could trigger adult websites. Google hopes to increase its presence in a country where the local search engine Naver is much more popular, so it adapted the homepage and added fresh results from blogs and news sites in the right sidebar to match Naver's universal search. South Korea is the most wired nation in the world and "ninety percent of homes connect to cheap, high-speed broadband".

Users get filtered results for the sensitive queries and a message asks users to prove they have more than 19 years to see the unfiltered results. According to Google Translate, an approximate translation of the message is: "Information networks and information protection, such as promoting the use of the laws and regulations by the Youth Protection Act under the age of 19 except for the result has been harmful to the youth. All users are over the age of 19, you can see the results."


To verify the age, users have to enter the name and the social security number. Apparently, this information is not saved on Google's servers and the result of this verification can be saved to a Google account.


Most other sites that operate in South Korea use age verification, but it's not clear if Google can create a connection between the identity of a user and his future queries. According to Wikipedia, "South Korea is in ONI's substantial category but is not on RSF's internet enemy list. South Korea has banned at least 31 sites considered sympathetic to North Korea through the use of IP blocking. In 2007, numerous bloggers were censored and their posts deleted by police for expressing criticism of, or even support for, presidential candidates."

{ via Flickr }

Less Approximate Google Searches

Google doesn't have too much information to return search results so it tries to make the most of it. By expanding the query with other related words, Google's search results are more comprehensive. For example, if you search for [photo frame], Google will also find pages that include [photo frames] or mention PhotoFrame, a plug-in for Photoshop.

In some cases, the query expansion removes the original intention of a query. If you replace "blogger" with "blog" in [blogger profile images], the query no longer includes the most important keyword.


To force Google not to change your keyword, add a plus (+) in front of the keyword. Instead of searching for [blogger profile images], you'll use this query: [+blogger profile images]. Alternatively, you could use quotes even for a single keyword: ["blogger" profile images] or add a plus after your keyword: [blogger+ profile images].

If you want to make a query fuzzier, use the synonymous operator (~): a search for [google earth ~images] will include results that contain "imagery", a more appropriate word than "images" for describing Google Earth's satellite pictures.

Depending on your query, Google uses something intermediary between + and ~, by including web pages that contain synonymous or different morphological forms for some of the keywords, but you can explicitly define the importance of your keywords. Use + for the most important keywords that should never be modified or ignored and ~ for general keywords that could be replaced with something more specific.

Google Sitelinks Using Traffic Stats?

Google's automatically-generated sitelinks are not always useful and sometimes they look very weird. According to Google, sitelinks are displayed below some sites in the search results and they "are meant to help users navigate your site. Our systems analyze the link structure of your site to find shortcuts that will save users time and allow them to quickly find the information they're looking for."


The first sitelink for blogger.com uses the following anchor text: "Thomas déjeune 1" and sends you to this broken link: http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=XXXXXX. The second sitelink uses "Diseño" ("design" in Spanish) to send you to another broken link: http://beta.blogger.com/rearrange, used by the most recent version of Blogger to access the layout editing page. These two links have a lot of things in common: they use strange anchor texts, they link to pages only accessible when you're logged in and anonymize the personal information (the blog ID).


The first sitelink for Google Toolbar is a link to a page that shows up in a single context: after you install Google Toolbar 4 for Internet Explorer.


Most of orkut's sitelinks are pages inaccessible without authentication and the most popular feature of Google's social network is the scrapbook.

These examples could indicate that Google started to use traffic statistics, probably gathered from Google Analytics, Google Toolbar users or from third-parties. In a patent that describes the sitelinks, Google mentions the toolbar as one way to acquire traffic data.

In one implementation, assume that users have downloaded/installed a toolbar on their respective clients that facilitates web searches on a search engine, such as search engine system. In this case, the toolbar may include software code that instructs a client to send hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) requests to server for each web page that client accesses. [The front end] may use the information in the HTTP request to identify the particular web page and web site associated with the web page that client has accessed. Alternatively, [the front end] may receive similar data when clients click on links provided by search engine system.

More Spam Originating from Gmail

The email security vendor MessageLabs published a report about the increasing number of spam messages originating from Gmail. "Analysis of spam shows that 4.6 percent of all spam originates from Web mail-based services and the proportion of spam from Gmail increased two-fold from 1.3 percent in January to 2.6 percent in February, mainly promoting adult-oriented websites. Yahoo! Mail was the most abused Web mail service responsible for sending 88.7 percent of all Web mail-based spam."


Spammers create accounts at free mail services like Yahoo Mail or Gmail, but to make the process more efficient, they need to automatize it. The major challenge is that most web mail providers use CAPTCHAs ("Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart") and they are difficult to solve automatically. Last month, Websense Security Labs discovered that spammers managed to create bots that automatically sign up for new Gmail accounts with a success rate of 20%.

We discovered that the CAPTCHA breaking process for Gmail is sophisticated when compared to the Live Mail CAPTCHA break up which was reported in our recent blogs. It is observed that two separate hosts active on same domain are contacted during the entire process. These two hosts work collaboratively during the CAPTCHA break process. Unlike Live Mail CAPTCHA breaking, which involved just one botted host doing the entire job (signing up, filling in details, getting the CAPTCHA request), the Gmail signing process involves two botted hosts (or CAPTCHA breaking hosts).

Jeff Atwood thinks that "there's simply too much money to be made in email spam for the commercial CAPTCHA algorithms, regardless of how good they may be, to survive forever." He suggests to diversify the tests and use more difficult tasks like distinguishing dogs from cats or solving failed OCR inputs, but making the test more complicated will frustrate users.

Update: there's a program called Jiffy Gmail Creator that promises to automatically create Gmail accounts. "Normally, the average amount of time it takes to create a GMail account on a fast connection is approximately 4 minutes. With this software you can create a single account in under 10 seconds, and 10 accounts in under 2 minutes. Obviously this saves you loads of time," explains the site (I think you need less than a minute to create a Gmail account manually). The program costs $57, but I'm sure it's not the only one.

Delete Your Blog?

Delete Your Blog?

This will permanently delete your blog including all your posts. You can create another blog at this address using the Google Account you're currently logged in with, however, we can't restore your posts once you choose to delete your blog.

It's so easy to delete a Blogger blog: the delete button is easily accessible from the settings page and there's only one confirmation dialog. After you delete the blog, all the posts and comments disappear, but the blog's address instantly becomes available.

If you want delete a Gmail account, it's much more complicated. Google asks your password and it doesn't delete the account instantly. What's more, the address can't be reused and you won't be able to retrieve your messages.

For Google, deleting a blog is infinitely less important than deleting an email address, even though they're both ways to communicate with someone. Deleting a blog has many more side-effects for a bigger audience: broken links, broken hearts, less relevant search results, an entire context that disappears.

The Idea Behind "Can Google Hear Me"

You might remember the crazy story behind CanGoogleHearMe.com: Aaron Stanton had a great idea he couldn't bring to life and he decided to pitch it to Google. Last year, he created a site to share his story and managed to convince Google to hear his idea. Since then, a lot of things have happened, other companies became interested in his project and he created a prototype, with a small team of developers.

After more than a year, the idea has been finally unveiled: "a system for matching users to books based on a full-text analysis of writing style". The system analyzes a book to determine some characteristics: pacing, density, action, description, dialog and finds similar books by comparing these characteristics. These values can be calculated for each scene from the book and they generate a graph that briefly characterizes the book.

Do you like Stephen King's It, but thought it was too long? The technology behind BookLamp allows you to find books that are written with a similar tone, tense, perspective, action level, description level, and dialog level, while at the same time allowing you to specify details like... half the length. It's impervious to outside influences - like advertising - that impact socially driven recommendation systems, and isn't reliant on a large user base to work.

The video below includes more details about this idea and its potential uses:


You can go to BookLamp.org to create an account and see the prototype, which only has information for a small number of science-fiction books. Whether Google will use this in Book Search or Amazon will use it to improve its book recommendation system, that's still an open question.

Salesforce to Integrate with Google Apps?

Last week, Tony Ruscoe found an interesting reference to Salesforce in a CSS file used by Google Apps. According to the company, "Salesforce.com is the worldwide leader in on-demand customer relationship management (CRM) services. More companies trust their vital customer and sales data to salesforce.com than any other on-demand CRM company in the world."

Other people found references to Google products in Salesforce's applications: a button to compose a message in Gmail and a button for Google Docs, so the integration is probably in the final stages. "Openness is a virtue – the best CRM and the best online productivity suite are lined up for a deep integration", thinks Steve Andersen.

In June 2007, Google signed a partnership with Salesforce to include Google AdWords in its applications, but Wall Street Journal speculated that the result "could be a Web-based offering that integrates some of Google's online services such as email and instant-messaging with those of Salesforce.com, whose customer-relationship management tools help salespeople track their accounts." Maybe this year Wall Street Journal's prediction comes true.