Google Docs Lives to Share the Words

Mike Riversdale wrote the best article I've read about Google Docs. "Google Docs ... so what - the ONE reason why you should care" doesn't talk only about Google Docs, it's also about Zoho, wikis or any other tool that lets you write, collaborate and share your documents. It outlines the major difference between Google Docs and office suites like Microsoft Office or OpenOffice: Google Docs is built for a connected environment.

Documents (PC-based I'm thinking) are fundamentally about "one person". The document you edit looks lovingly into your eyes proclaiming ever lasting love just for you. If someone else tries to muscle in on this close(d) relationship they will get told to go away, I am with someone else.

Of course the words inside the document want to be loved by all and to love all. They force the document to dump one person and love another in a serial monogamy type of way. The document that was only for you will quite easily tell you to go away as they are now in a one-on-one relationship with someone else...

This issue - words love all / documents love one at a time - is a fundamental issue that many have tried to solve using any number of clever means. We've had software attempting to mediate the differences - every electronic document management (EDMS) system you've battled against lives this category. We've had consultants claiming to solve it via changes in work practices - 'workflow" and the bottlenecks they employ.

The most common way employed by everyone ever is ... copy the document. The words love this - they can love more and more people, more words can join them as they spread around the network - you can put in your words, I can add my words, Stevens from Accounts can remove the words he doesn't want - the words are out there, they love to be free and are loving all.

But once set free they're bloody near impossible to reign back in, for a start where the frig are they - out there in the wilds of the electronic world running free is all well and good until some poor sod has to try and reign them in. (...)

Google Docs doesn't live in the 'document' world. Oh it has similar naming conventions, it uses all the jargon that we're used to and it pretends to be a document ... but it's not because it comes from the 'words' world view. It knows that the words you're gonna edit are, 99.9% of the time, going to want to be loved by many more than you. And being on the Web they know that the world of connected people at your fingertips is massive. Not only is there the list of attractive people in your contacts list but there is everyone with an internet connection!

Google Docs lives to share the words:

* knows that words want to be shared and that's why you've typed them.
* its world view knows/understands its connected environment
* its capabilities are built to use this environment

{ Text licensed as Creative Commons. }

Google Me (The Movie)

"Egosurfing (also called vanity searching, egosearching, egogoogling, autogoogling, self-googling, or simply Googling yourself) is the practice of searching for one's own given name, surname, full name, pseudonym, or screen name on a popular search engine, to see what results appear." (Wikipedia)

"It all started when I Googled my name," says Jim Killeen, described by Washington Post as a "failed Los Angeles actor". "At 38 he was unmarried, no children. The movie stardom for which he'd left Detroit had never materialized; he'd eventually launched a business providing chair massages in poker halls for a dollar a minute. It was surprisingly lucrative but (perhaps not surprisingly) unfulfilling."

In search of his own identity, Jim decided to meet other people who share his name and to find their stories. Google was the most accessible way to find other Jim Killeens from all over the world: a cop from New York, a priest from Ireland, an engineer, a swinger. Google Me (The Movie) is a 96 minutes documentary that describes his cathartic journey. The full video is available for a limited timed at YouTube.

Google Me is an invitation to rediscover yourself by listening to other people's stories. If you can't watch the whole movie, the first 10 minutes are very special.


{ Thank you, Steve Hemmerstoffer. }

New in Google Docs: Insert Videos, Edit CSS

There are so many updates at Google Docs, that you'll need many hours to explore them and start to use them.

You can now access your browser's contextual menu by pressing Shift while right-clicking. This might be useful if you want to search the text from a document online or to use other features included in your browser.

If you don't want to convert a document to PDF and print the generated file, the option to print the document as a web page is back in the File menu. For simple documents, this should be a better option.

For better customization, Google Docs lets you define CSS styles for your documents: Edit > Edit CSS. Those who know CSS will find it faster to define styles and use them in the HTML code. The most important limitation is that you can't use images that are not hosted by Google Docs in your CSS rules. This page shows you how to add watermarks, repeating backgrounds, styled headers, image borders using CSS.


Presentations can now include videos, obviously only from YouTube, but at least you can find videos directly from Google Presently. "Videos can help you make a point, command the attention of your audience, or even add humor to your presentation," points out Google Docs Blog. Unfortunately, when you export your presentations as PPT, YouTube videos are replaced with still frames.

To write some text that might guide you while presenting, use the new speaker notes feature. "These notes will be visible to you and your viewers in presentation mode or when you print your slides."


Google Docs Blog also mentions that everyone who uses the English interface should be able to view and edit documents offline. "When we first announced offline access several weeks ago, it was limited to viewing and editing word processing documents. Now, we've added view-only offline access to spreadsheets and presentations as well."

Update at Google Product Search

The service formerly known as Froogle, Google Product Search, has received one of the most importance updates since it was launched, back in 2002. For some queries like [cell phone] or [scanner], Google detects identical products that are available in multiple online stores and lets you compare prices, read reviews and technical specifications on a single page. Until now, Google Product Search linked directly to the online store's web page and didn't include product reviews or detailed information about a product, like you can still see if you search for [barney].



Other comparison shopping sites like Shopzilla, MSN Shopping and Yahoo Shopping already have this feature and are more established destinations for finding products online. It's interesting that even Froogle used to include price comparison for an individual product, but the feature has been removed at some point. A mobile version of the site still waits for an update and Google Base needs more visibility.

Google Annoyances

While there are a lot of things to love about Google, some strange annoyances manage to balance the situation. Here are 10 annoyances that are in need for a fix:

1. Every time you go to www.google.com/analytics/, Google Analytics asks you to enter your password, even if you are already logged in. One workaround is to bookmark https://www.google.com/analytics/home/.

2. "New features!". Google's products are updated pretty frequently, but sometimes they show this message for months, even if the features are no longer new. Some pathological examples: Google Calendar and Picasa Web Albums.

3. The inconsistent navigation bar. There's no consistency here: some of the links send you to search results, other links send you to homepages. Some of the pages open in a new tab/window, other pages open in the same tab/window. The list of links is different, depending on the current service, and the ordering is not predictable.

4. Search results with tracking code. Because Google needs to track the search results you click on in order to add them to Web History, it replaces their addresses with redirects like: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=1&url=... That means you can no longer right click on the link and copy the location. Some workarounds: disable Web History, log out or use this Greasemonkey script.

5. Google Updater. An annoying and intrusive way to install Google software, without providing an alternative for people who like the classic installer.

6. Set Google as my default search and notify me of changes. Every Google software has the mission to make Google your default search option in Internet Explorer (it's already the default option in other browsers), but also to install a notifier that warns you when other software tries to change the default search engine. Usually, the option can be disabled, but Google's wording is vague.

7. Blogger comments. It's hard to create something worse than Blogger's comments: they open in a new page with a different layout, the first option is to log in with a Google account, there's no spam filtering etc.

8. Posting a message at Google Groups. It usually takes one minute for your post to appear on the site, but Google should show it instantly.

9. When you translate a web page, Google Translate shows the original text in a bubble. Google's JavaScript code interferes with other web pages' code and the result is usually terrible. Another downside is that you can't copy the text from a translated web page. One workaround would be to block the JavaScript file, but it keeps changing its address.

10. Google Video has the worst advanced search page. If you search for something and click on "advanced search", your query is lost. The page doesn't put the focus on the first input box and pressing Enter has no effect.

11. Click on a broken link for a Blogger blog and Google is glad to inform you that "the blog you were looking for was not found". Pretty bad for an error message that should've been helpful.

Did you find other Google annoyances?

A Radio Interview with Marissa Mayer

(Hopefully fair-use thumbnail of a photo)
from Marissa Mayer's public album

KQED FM hosted one of the most interesting interviews with Marissa Mayer, Vice President for Search Products & User Experience at Google. Some tidbits:

- because of the limited environments where you are able to search and because of the small number of options to express your searches, you search less often than you should. For example, you can't find web pages that describe an idea and you can't speak to a search engine.

- the goal for Google Street View is to find what something looks like (e.g.: the door to a museum).

- Google could make $80-200 million/year by adding ads to Image Search, but people would use the product less.

- Google shows fewer ads to make them more relevant and more meaningful to users.

- Google builds products for a broad audience of users, so the products have to be simple and easy to use.

- the ad targeting in Gmail works by finding the most relevant words from a message and then listing ads that are related to those words.

- Larry Page and Sergey Brin read some studies that showed it's good to have around 25% of the technical workforce women to get a balanced environment and managed to maintain this proportion inside Google.

- Google does a small amount of outsourcing for testing and user interface design.

- the median age for Google's employees generally follows the average between Larry's age and Sergey's age.

- 80% of the calls to GOOG-411 return satisfactory results.

- there are more than a million of books in Google Book Search and the average number of pages for a book is 300, so Book Search has a similar index with Google's index from 2000.

- no plans for building a desktop operating systems.

- the public version of Google Health will be launched shortly.

The interview can be downloaded as an MP3 (24 MB) or listened using the player below (52 minutes):

YouTube Suggest

The always surprising video sharing service acquired by Google in October 2006 is constantly improving its search features and borrows many tricks from its parent company. The latest enhancement is an auto-complete feature that shows query suggestions as you start typing characters in the search box. You'll notice the obvious similarity between this feature and Google Suggest, a project that is about to finally graduate from Google Labs. YouTube Suggest has its own list of queries obtained from YouTube users, so it should offer decent suggestions.

"By suggesting more refined searches up front, Google Suggest can make your searches more convenient and efficient by keeping you from having to reformulate your query. Google Suggest might offer suggestions that you will find novel or intriguing," explains Google in an interesting FAQ.


The feature is enabled by default, but you can disable it in the "Settings". For now, YouTube Suggest seems to be live only for international sites like YouTube UK and only if you search from the homepage, but it should be available at YouTube's main site in the near future.

To get the suggestions, YouTube uses this simple JSON call:

http://suggestqueries.google.com/complete/search? hl=en&ds=yt&json=t&jsonp=callbackfunction&q=QUERY

where ds=yt defines the search's scope (YouTube), while q=QUERY includes the characters typed by the user. A similar URL is used by Google News to suggest news sources in advanced search, so we can expect an API for query suggestions:

http://news.google.com/complete/search? hl=en&ds=ns&js=true&q=QUERY

This URL works as well:

http://suggestqueries.google.com/complete/search? hl=en&ds=ns&json=t&jsonp=callbackfunction&q=QUERY


YouTube constantly experiments with new features and most of them are related to the way people navigate the site or discover new videos. A recent experiment added a search box below the list of related videos so that people can search and see the search results while watching a video. The only problem was that you couldn't add the results to the Quicklist in order to build dynamic playlists.

Update (May 16): YouTube Suggest is now live at youtube.com.

The Informational Distance Between Cities

Information Aesthetics points to an interesting visualization of the "informational" relation between cities. Two cities are "informationally" related if they are often mentioned together, so the visualization uses the number of Google results to approximate the distance:

Gdistance(w₁,w₂) = (#(w₁)+#(w₂)) / (#(w₁+" and "+w₂)+#(w₂+" and "+w₁)),
where #(w) is the number of Google search results for the query w enclosed in quotes.

This approximation could be improved by replacing "and" with "*", so that the words aren't necessarily separated by the conjunction "and". The Google distance is multiplied with the physical distance between cities to increase the connection between cities that are far away.

Among the cities that have a small "informational" distance: London and New York, Tokio and Sydney, London and Singapore City.

Another way you can use the number of Google results is to calculate the mindshare of a word or name within a domain. If you divide the number of search results for [nokia mobile phone] by the number of results for [mobile phone] you can find Nokia's Googleshare within the mobile space.

Kai-Fu Lee on Cloud Computing

John Breslin highlights some interesting ideas from Kai-Fu Lee's keynote about cloud competing presented at the 17th International World Wide Web Conference (Kai-Fu Lee is the president of Google China from July 2005). He mentions six properties of cloud computing from Google's perspective:

1. User centric. "If data is all stored in the Cloud - images, messages, whatever - once you're connected to the Cloud, any new PC or mobile device that can access your data becomes yours. Not only is the data yours, but you can share it with others."

2. Task centric. "The applications of the past - spreadsheets, e-mail, calendar - are becoming modules, and can be composed and laid out in a task-specific manner. (...) Google considers communication to be a task" and that's the reason why Gmail integrates a chat feature for instant communication.

3. Powerful. "Having lots of computers in the Cloud means that it can do things that your PC cannot do. For example, Google Search is faster than searching in Windows or Outlook or Word" because a Google query hits at least 1000 machines.

4. Accessible. Having your data in the cloud means you can instantly get more information from different repositories - Google's universal search is one example of simultaneous search. "Traditional web page search does IR / TF-IDF / page rank stuff pretty well on the Web at large, but if you want to do a specific type of search, for restaurants, images, etc., web search isn't necessarily the best option. It's difficult for most people to get to the right vertical search page in the first place, since they usually can't remember where to go. Universal search is basically a single search that will access all of these vertical searches."

5. Intelligent. "Data mining and massive data analysis are required to give some intelligence to the masses of data available (massive data storage + massive data analysis = Google Intelligence)."

6. Programmable. "For fault tolerance, Google uses GFS or distributed disk storage. Every piece of data is replicated three times. If one machine dies, a master redistributes the data to a new server. There are around 200 clusters (some with over 5 PB of disk space on 500 machines). The Big Table is used for distributed memory. The largest cells in the Big Table are 700 TB, spread over 2000 machines. MapReduce is the solution for new programming paradigms. It cuts a trillion records into a thousand parts on a thousand machines. Each machine will then load a billion records and will run the same program over these records, and then the results are recombined. While in 2005, there were some 72,000 jobs being run on MapReduce, in 2007, there were two million jobs (use seems to be increasing exponentially)." This recent video has more information about Google's infrastructure.

Kai-Fu Lee thinks that outsourcing IT to a "trusted shop" like Google is the key to make using a computer simple and safe. "Entrepreneurs should have new opportunities with this paradigm shift, being freed from monopoly-dominated markets as more cloud-based companies evolve that are powered by open technologies."

There's a shift from the computer to the user, from applications to tasks, from isolated data to data that can be accessed anywhere and shared with anyone.

"Cloud computing liberates the user from having to remember where the data is, enables the user to access information anywhere once created, and makes services fast and powerful through essentially infinite information and computing. People are using cloud services to find, share, create, and organize information. People are also using cloud services to shop, bank, communicate, socialize. By using cloud computing, these capabilities will be accessible not only on PCs but also telephones, automobiles, televisions, and appliances. (...) Google is committed to help bring about the era of cloud computing, which we believe will facilitate services that are convenient, easy-to-learn, people-centric, scalable, and device-ready," mentions Kai-Fu Lee in the abstract.

Google Search REST API

More than one year after Google discontinued the SOAP Search API, it finally got a proper replacement. The AJAX Search API can now be used from any Web application, not just in JavaScript. The other two Google AJAX APIs for feeds and translations were updated for non-AJAX use, as well.

"For Flash developers, and those developers that have a need to access the AJAX Search API from other Non-Javascript environments, the API exposes a simple RESTful interface. In all cases, the method supported is GET and the response format is a JSON encoded result set with embedded status codes."

"Using the APIs from your Flash or Server Side framework couldn't be simpler. If you know how to make an http request, and how to process a JSON response, you are in business," says Mark Lucovsky. Here's a simple example for web search:
http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/web?v=1.0&q=Earth%20Day

There are some differences between the old SOAP API and the REST one.

PROs:
- the new API doesn't require a key
- there's no limitation for the number of queries
- it's much easier to use
- you can use the REST API for web search, but also for image search, news search, video search, local search, blog search and book search.

CONs:
- you need to send "a valid and accurate http referer header"
- you can only get up to 8 results in a single call and you can't go beyond the first 32 results
- the terms of use are pretty restrictive: for example, you need to attribute the results to Google and you are not allowed to change the order of search results.

It's interesting to notice that Yahoo's search APIs are more developer-friendly and, although they require an application ID and have some usage limitations (5,000 queries per IP per day), they offer more features and they are more flexible, by also including XML output. Another important difference is that Yahoo doesn't require "a valid and accurate http referer header".

Philipp Lenssen suggests that it's much easier to just screenscrape the results, but search engines could change their code or block your requests.

Update. Check this excellent interview with Mark Lucovsky, who mentions that the API has been available for almost two years, but it wasn't officially documented:

So When Do We Get Folders in Gmail?

- OK, I followed your advice and switched to Gmail. It's great, but when do we get folders in Gmail?

- Gmail already has something similar to folders: labels. The main difference between folders and labels is that you can add more labels to a message.

- Oh, I see, but I don't think it's very useful to add a message to more folders. I mean, labels.

- You could create labels to categorize your mail and some of the messages will certainly fit in more than one category.

- It doesn't work. I created a label for "Invitations" and I added the label to one of my messages, but it's still there in the inbox.

- That's because "inbox" is also a label and adding another label doesn't remove the other ones.

- So now I have to click on "Delete" to remove the message from my inbox, right?

- No, to remove a message from the inbox, click on "Archive".

- I thought "Archive" compresses my messages to save space.

- I'm sure that Google stores your email efficiently.

- Thanks for your help. Now I know how to use folders in Gmail. I select the message, click on "Archive" and then... Hey, wait a minute! My message has disappeared!

- You can still find it in "All Mail", one of the sections bellow Gmail's logo. "All Mail" includes all the messages, except those from the trash or flagged as spam.

- That's too complicated! So when do we get folders in Gmail?

Google's New Social Network: iGoogle

The Google-owned social network orkut, while extremely popular in Brazil and India, has failed to find similar success in the US. With the launch of OpenSocial, an API for writing social gadgets, it was clear that iGoogle will play an important role in Google's second attempt to socialize. After all, OpenSocial applications are iGoogle gadgets with a social component.

Following orkut's model, iGoogle opened a sandbox for developers who write OpenSocial gadgets. The sandbox is probably a test for the next iteration of iGoogle: the personalized homepage turned into a social network. "The integration of OpenSocial with gadgets gives you an opportunity to enhance your content for users by incorporating social features. For example, a books gadget could display what a user's friends are reading, allow users to request to borrow books from friends' libraries, and show users books that their friends recently rated. As users share content with their friends, your gadget will naturally build a broad audience for distributing content and driving traffic," explains the new developer site for iGoogle gadgets.

iGoogle has tens of million of users, 50% of the users are from the US and it was one of the fastest growing Google products in 2006 and 2007. It's also the homepage for many Google users who want to personalize their experience by adding a theme and fresh information from the web. The new social component will not affect all the gadgets, so you'll still have gadgets for mail, weather or news, but some of the gadgets could share information with your friends. There's also a new canvas view that will show an expanded version of the gadgets, an integration with Google profiles and a newsfeed that shows your friends' recent activities.

Hopefully, the social component of iGoogle won't be too prominently promoted and people will be able to continue using the personalized homepage without dealing with friend invitations and viral gadgets. iGoogle will try to be the social connection between Google services, but this is a difficult mission for Google, a company that has never managed to build a successful social site.

Related:
iGoogle Gadget Maker
Google intends to integrate its social applications
Google to open up its social platform

Recent Searches To Influence Google's Results

Danny Sullivan reported earlier this month that Google will start to personalize search results based on the previous query. "For example, if someone were to search for [spain] and then [travel] after that, BOTH the ads and the organic results will be altered to take the previous query into account. To some degree, it will be as if the second query was for [spain travel]." According to some code from Google's sites, Google will use not just the previous query, but a list of recent queries.


Until now, Google personalized the results based on the search history only for users that were logged in and enabled the Web History service. Google created a profile from your search history and used it to disambiguate your queries and slightly alter the rankings for pages that were likely to match your interests.

The new signal for personalizing results (recent searches) should work without having to log in and could influence the results in a different way. In many cases, people constantly refine their queries by adding or removing keywords, but Google and other search engines don't use all these refinements to improve the results in real time. By connecting the related searches from a session, Google will understand more from what you intend to find and should deliver better results.

While search history disambiguates general queries, the list of recent searches connects the failed attempts to find an answer for a complex query and creates a more detailed description of your intentions. Search history could be Google's long-term memory and the recent queries could build the working memory.

Google search patterns (from "Searching for the mind of the searcher" [PDF], by Daniel Russell)

Google Phishing Warning

After flagging search results that distribute malware, Google will also show warnings for web pages used for phishing. Most of these pages are active one or two days before they are taken down by hosting providers, but some of them could be indexed by search engines. While the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera have anti-phishing protection, a new security layer still have some usefulness.

"Warning - phishing (web forgery) suspected. The site you are trying to visit has been identified as a forgery, intended to trick you into disclosing financial, personal or other sensitive information," mentions the page displayed by Google instead of the search result.


Google also has a Safe Browsing API "that enables client applications to check URLs against Google's constantly updated blacklists of suspected phishing and malware pages." The API is used by Firefox and Google Desktop.

Search for Mapped Web Pages in Google Maps

Google Maps added the map view available at Google Experimental Search. Google extracts the most important locations from web pages and lets you see the search results on a map. To restrict your search to web pages, you need to click on "Show search options" and select "Mapped web pages" from the new drop-down. Google displays the most relevant web pages that include locations from your current map view, but you can change the location in your query using the operators near or in: for example, [Beethoven near Germany] or [Beethoven in Europe].

This is an entire new way to search the web by changing the focus from general information to geographical information. You could use it to search for people, companies, organizations, events, traditional food or anything that could be connected to a location.

Web pages include a lot of useful information that isn't properly used by search engines: addresses, phone numbers, dates, opinions, characteristics, quotes, examples. All of these could be used to create connections between people and some important dates, between products and people's opinion about them, between concepts and examples. Web search engines could answer to complex queries like "the general opinion about iPhone in the first week after its launch" by using the information available on the web and cleverly extracting attributes and connections.