Filter and Sort Tables from Web Pages

TableTools is a Firefox extension that lets you sort, filter and export tables from any web page. After installing the extension and restarting Firefox, find a web page that includes tables (this search might help) and right-click on a table to find a lot of interesting features:

* sort a column, depending on the type of elements (text, numbers, dates)
* filter the rows of a table by selecting elements from a drop-down or by entering your search terms, like in the screenshot below. You can even enter regular expression to filter more complex patterns. After typing the query, press Enter or click outside the active input box.
* export the entire table as tab-delimited text, HTML code or just the filtered rows


This might be helpful if you want to insert some partial data from a table in a document, a site or in Google Spreadsheets, which only supports filtering using a limited gadget. For Google Spreadsheets, choose the option to copy the rows as tab-delimited text.

Google Anti-Malware Diagnostic Pages

ZDNet's security blog points to an update to Google's malware warnings. Like McAfee SiteAdvisor, now each web site has a special diagnostic page that lists answers to four questions:

1. What is the current listing status?
2. What happened when Google visited this site?
3. Has this site acted as an intermediary resulting in further distribution of malware?
4. Has this site hosted malware?

Here's, for example, the diagnostic page for google.com: http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=google.com, which lists some interesting facts.

"Of the 274621 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 4 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent. The last time Google visited this site was on 05/22/2008, and the last time suspicious content was found on this site was on 03/13/2008. Malicious software includes 4 scripting exploit(s), 4 trojan(s). Successful infection resulted in an average of 10 new processes on the target machine. Malicious software is hosted on 4 domain(s), including 58.65.239.0, truemaybe.com, abc-powers.com. 5 domain(s) appear to be functioning as intermediaries for distributing malware to visitors of this site, including xtraff.biz, x-traffic.ws, smartvideochannel.com."

Despite all of these findings, google.com is not listed as suspicious, probably because the domain is whitelisted or the suspicious content is not very significant. It's likely that the domains listed above are from Google's search results, so that means the anti-malware system doesn't respect robots.txt.

TinEye - Upload an Image and Find It on the Web

I've always thought that an image search engine should accept as an input images and list identical or similar images from the web. This is useful if you have an image, but you don't remember what it depicts or if you want to find a higher-quality version of an image.

TinEye tries to do that and the best part is that it mostly succeeds. The new image search engine, powered by Idée's technology and currently in private beta, has an index of 487 million images (Google's index is at least 12 times bigger) and manages to find identical versions of an image or alterations. According to the FAQ, "TinEye frequently returns image results with colour adjustments, added or removed text, crops, and slight rotations. TinEye can also detect images that are part of a collage or have been blended with another image."

And the FAQ doesn't lie: I uploaded a screenshot of Flickr's homepage that included a Flickr image in the top-left corner. TinEye returned 6 results: 5 of them were different versions of the featured image (including the original image hosted by Flickr) and another result showed Flickr's homepage with a different featured image.


Then I uploaded an image from my computer that shows fingers in a book scanned by Google and TinEye pointed to me to a TechCrunch article that included that image:


TinEye doesn't do a good job at ranking images, as it orders the images "by relevance i.e. how well the result image matches your query image". It can't figure out the most-likely original source of an image, so TinEye's algorithms could be combined with a traditional image search engine like Google's in order to determine the authority of each image. TinEye also doesn't recognizes faces or objects in an image, so it just looks for similar images.

How does it work then? "TinEye uses sophisticated pattern recognition algorithms to find your image on the web without the use of metadata or watermarks. TinEye instantly analyzes your query image to create a compact digital signature or 'fingerprint' for it. TinEye searches for your image on the web by comparing its fingerprint to the fingerprint of every single other image in the TinEye search index."

The search engine is in private beta, but you can request invite or watch this screencast:


{ Thanks, Life Tester. }

Print Layout in Google Docs

As anticipated in March, Google Docs has a new way of displaying documents: fixed-width page view (or print layout in Microsoft Word). Documents are more readable and look closer to the way they appear when printed. The previous mode (plain view, also called web layout in Microsoft Word) is available in the new View menu.

The OpenOffice wiki explains the advantages and disadvantages of different word processing layouts: the web layout is useful for documents that are written for presentation, is suboptimal for editing because of the long lines and acts as a final preview. "The Print Layout implements WYSIWYG and tries to come as close as possible to the printed document. However, this layout is not particularly suited for numerous use cases. In many circumstances, more specific layouts fare definitely better." In addition to the web layout and the print layout, Microsoft Word 2007 includes a full-screen view for reading documents, an outline view for creating the document's structure and a draft layout that focuses on content, not on formatting.


{ Thanks, Alexander. }

Google Sites Available Without Google Apps

As promised when the service was launched as part of Google Apps, now you can use Google Sites without having a domain. "A few months ago we launched Google Sites exclusively as part of Google Apps for companies and organizations that wanted to use the service on their own domains. Now we've made it easy for anyone to set up a website to share all types of information -- team projects, company intranets, community groups, classrooms, clubs, family updates, you name it -- in one place, for a few people, a group or the world," says Andrew Zaeske on the Google Blog.


The sites are available at: http://sites.google.com/site/SITENAME and there doesn't seem to be a limit for the number of sites you can create. You can create as many web pages as you like, but each site has a storage quota of only 100 MB.

By default, each site is public, but you can make it private in the settings or when you create it. The same as in Google Docs, you're able to invite people as collaborators or viewers, but a site can have more than one owner.

Google Sites offers the same basic customization options like Blogger (themes, layout editor) and a rich text editor similar to the one from Google Docs, except that you can also embed a small number of whitelisted objects (Google Docs documents, spreadsheets, gadgets, YouTube videos).

In addition to web pages, you can also create simple blogs, lists, file cabinets and iGoogle-like dashboards. Each page can be arranged in a hierarchy and has a revision history that allows you to revert to earlier versions of a page. Google automatically creates a sitemap and can notify you when someone makes changes to the site or to an individual page.

For now, Google Sites looks pretty basic and doesn't include all the powerful features from JotSpot, the service acquired by Google and transformed into Google Sites. But that shouldn't be surprising, if you take into account that all Google services started small and gradually became more powerful and useful. I think the future of Google Sites is to combine Google's collaborative services so you can share more documents in a single page or to create blogs the same way you create calendars, to-do lists and photo galleries.


If you find Google Sites underwhelming, there are a lot of free or paid alternatives, including PBWiki, Wetpaint, Wikia and Wikispaces. There's also a nice video from Common Craft that explains "wikis in plain English":

Future Updates for Google Image Search

At the recent "Search Factory Tour" event (slides, YouTube video), Google announced that its image search engine has received a lot of attention from users lately and it intends to dramatically improve it. People no longer use Google Image Search only to find celebrity pictures or pretty images, they started to use it to compare products, to choose vacations or visualize unfamiliar situations.


To cope with the increasing number of images from the web and to provide better answers for the new use cases, Google promised that will start to add features that use complex image analysis.


One of the new features will allow you to find similar images, given a selected image. Since it's difficult to describe pictures using words, you will be able find a a group of images that illustrate the same situation.

After adding face detection as a restriction for image search, Google prepares to expand it and actually recognize faces. This will improve the quality of results for searches that include person names. Google doesn't intend to limit image recognition to people faces: finding objects in pictures is a difficult task, but it's a reliable way to filter irrelevant pictures.

Image search engines don't use the information from EXIF tags, that could offer a lot of interesting contextual details about location, date, image quality. Google will start to add information about geolocation from digital images.


The most controversial new feature tested by Google is the addition of display ads next to image results for commercial queries. Google's previous experiments with text ads weren't very successful, so adapting the ad format to the content could be a better idea. It depends on their usefulness and their prominence: the second mock-up displayed above puts too much emphasis on the image ads. For now, Ask.com Image Search is the only important search engine for images that displays ads, but they're text-only.

If we take into account that, in addition to all these enhancements, Google developed an improved algorithm for ranking images (VisualRank), we can expect an entirely new image search engine from Google in the near future.

Google News Layer for Google Earth

There's a new layer for Google Earth that shows Google News stories related to a location. At the recent "Factory Tour of Search" event, Google explained the difficulties of automatically identifying the locations of a news story. For example, just because a news article includes "Paris" doesn't mean that the article talks about France's capital. It could be about the Texas city or Paris Hilton, so the algorithm needs to disambiguate names, identify complete addresses and determine the importance of an alleged location in a text. Google News also uses its automatically-generated clusters to validate locations and their importance to a news story.

"The launch of Google News on Google Earth is a milestone in the evolution of the geobrowser. By spatially locating the Google News' constantly updating index of stories from more than 4,500 news sources, Google Earth now shows an ever-changing world of human activity as chronicled by reporters worldwide. Zoom into areas of personal interest and peruse headlines of national, regional and, when fully zoomed in, even the most local of interest," says Brandon Badger, Product Manager of Google's Geo team.

To enable the Google Earth layer, go to the Layers sidebar, expand "Gallery" and select "Google News" from the impressive list of overlays. Another news-related layer that has been recently added to Google Earth is for New York Times, but it's likely that the news are geo-coded manually.


If you want to read news related to a location in your browser, add a local section to the personalized Google News homepage. "Adding a Local News section allows you to track news stories from and about a particular city or region. While this function is currently only available in our English language editions, we hope to add more languages and regions in the near future," explains the Google News help center.

Videos Taken Down from YouTube

YouTomb is an interesting project by MIT Free Culture that collects YouTube videos taken down because of copyright infringements. "More specifically, YouTomb continually monitors the most popular videos on YouTube for copyright-related takedowns. Any information available in the metadata is retained, including who issued the complaint and how long the video was up before takedown. The goal of the project is to identify how YouTube recognizes potential copyright violations as well as to aggregate mistakes made by the algorithm."

Since YouTube operates under Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it's obliged to take down content if it receives a notification claiming infringement from a copyright holder. In some cases, videos are wrongly taken down because YouTube is in no position to judge the validity of a claim.

According to YouTomb's stats, the companies that have recently taken down the biggest number of popular YouTube videos are: TV TOKYO, Viacom, Warner Bros, World Wrestling and other media companies. "YouTomb is currently monitoring 157340 videos, and has identified 4389 videos taken down for alleged copyright violation and 13330 videos taken down for other reasons."

{ via friendfeed/imma }

FeedBurner FeedFlare for Blogger Comments

Now that FeedBurner is owned by Google, it makes sense to integrate with other Google services. One of the most requested features, a FeedFlare that shows the number of comments for each post from a Blogger blog, has been recently added. The FeedFlare links to Blogger's (ugly) comments page so you can easily add a comment if you read the post in a feed reader. Note that the comment feed has to be enabled in Blogger's settings page.

FeedBurner offers a FeedFlare API, but you need to do some server-side coding to create dynamic FeedFlares like the one that shows the comment count.



{ Thanks, Pat Hawks. }

Google China's Homepage in Mourning

The homepages of Google China, Yahoo China and other sites turned black today to commemorate the victims of last week's devastating earthquake. "Construction workers put down their tools, drivers stopped suddenly in the street, and rescuers briefly paused in their increasingly vain search for survivors amid the rubble of China's earthquake devastation. China stopped for three minutes to mourn the estimated 50,000 people killed by the earthquake exactly one week earlier," notes The Press Association.


Google China links to a custom search engine for sites that include information about missing persons. Kai-Fu Lee, President of Google China, told Google Blogoscoped: "[Engineering lead Harry Ke] and two other engineers came up with the idea of helping people search for lost relatives or friends. Given there are... tens of thousands still trapped, and some 200,000 wounded, and many more homeless. Also, cell phone and land lines are mostly not working. Transportation is difficult because the disaster area is on mountains and valleys. So, there are many people frantically looking for lost relatives and friends."

There's also a page for offering donations that mentions "Google will donate $2 million, including $1.7 million from Google.org, to help assist in relief and rebuilding efforts". A special Google Earth layer shows recent high-resolution imagery from the areas affected by the earthquake.

{ Thanks, Matthew Chan. }

Google Health Launches

After a year and a half since the first announcement, the much-anticipated Google Health has been released at Google Factory Tour of Search. "Patients need to be able to better coordinate and manage their own health information. We believe that patients should control and own their own health information, and should be able to do so easily," said Adam Bosworth in November 2006.


Here's what you can do in Google Health:
* create a health profile with information about your health conditions, medications, allergies
* import medical records from US hospitals that use Google's APIs to make the conversion possible. Unfortunately, the list of partners is almost empty.
* read medical resources, information about diseases


* find a doctor using Google Local Search
* use other health services that integrate with Google Health and can can import your data securely and use it for different purposes: calculate the heart attack risk, print your health history or share it with doctors. According to the FAQ, "Google Health is a PHR (Personal Health Record), but it is also a bit of a different model. We believe it's not enough to offer a place where you can store, manage, and share your health information. You need to act on your health information to better manage your health needs on a daily basis. This is why we provide a directory of online health services to you. You must elect to sign up with a service and decide what level of personal data you want to share in exchange for the customized services those companies offer."

Google Health wants to become the central place where you organize your health information and share it with people or services you trust. Since this information is very sensitive, Google takes a lot of precautions by using SSL connections and a separate privacy policy that clearly states: "You control who can access your personal health information. By default, you are the only user who can view and edit your information. If you choose to, you can share your information with others."

This is a big test of trust for Google and probably the most personal service ever offered by the company. While you can also enter your credit card information in Google Checkout, your location in iGoogle or Google Maps, personal information in orkut, Blogger and YouTube, Google Health is about your existence.

"Health information is very fragmented today, and we think we can help. Google believes the Internet can help users get access to their health information and help people make more empowered and informed health decisions. People already come to Google to search for health information, so we are a natural starting point," says Google. But there's a big difference between offering general health information and storing health records, so it will be interesting to see if Google manages to convince users that this shift is beneficial to them. Google could integrate more health information in the search results, the same way Microsoft shows information from HealthVault in Live Search and lets you collect it in your account. TechCrunch says that "Google promises never to advertise on Google Health".

(Small tidbits: Google Health is one of the very few Google applications created using Google Web Toolkit and its codename seems to be Weaver.)