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A Simple Way to Refine Searches

In many cases, finding some information using a search engine is an iterative process: you type a query, study the results and then you adjust your keywords. Sometimes your query is too ambiguous and you need to clarify its meaning by adding or subtracting keywords.

Xippee is a plug-in that makes it easy to refine your query using words from the search results pages. Let's say that you want to find some news about the Chrome game and you search for [Chrome]. Most of the results are related to Google's recently-released browser, so you can just select "Google", click on the "-" button and you'll get the results for [Chrome -Google].

Xippee works in Internet Explorer 7, Firefox, Opera, Safari and you can use it in Google, Yahoo and Live Search.

Sergey Brin Launches Personal Blog

The most outgoing Google co-founder, Sergey Brin, launched a personal blog at too.blogspot.com. "While Google is a play on googol, too is a play on the much smaller number - two. It also means in addition, as this blog reflects my life outside of work," explains Sergey Brin.

The first blog post is somber: Sergey discovered that he has a "higher chance of developing Parkinson's in [his] lifetime than the average person".

My mother had always been haunted by Parkinson's because her aunt had suffered from it. I had often reasoned with her that since Parkinson's is not hereditary (there is not a strong correlation of Parkinson's incidence among close relatives), she had little to fear.

In 2004, my wife, Anne, introduced me to her future cofounders in 23andMe as they were studying the genetics of Parkinson's Disease. As with my mother's fear, I was skeptical about the study. I reasoned that if there was much to be learned about Parkinson's in the genome, there would have to be a high percentage of inherited cases. In fact, I appeared to be right in that this particular study did not bear immediate fruit. (...)

So, when my wife asked me to look up G2019S in my raw data (23andMe scientists had had the forethought to include it on their chip), I viewed it mostly as entertainment. But, of course, I learned something very important to me -- I carry the G2019S mutation and when my mother checked her account, she saw she carries it too.

The exact implications of this are not entirely clear. Early studies tend to have small samples with various selection biases. Nonetheless it is clear that I have a markedly higher chance of developing Parkinson's in my lifetime than the average person. In fact, it is somewhere between 20% to 80% depending on the study and how you measure.

{ via Bradley Horowitz }

Popular Names for iGoogle Tabs

iGoogle has a very cool feature that populates tabs with gadgets and feeds just by entering a title. When you create a tab, there's an option called "I'm feeling lucky. Automatically add stuff based on the tab name".

To make things even easier, iGoogle started to suggest popular names sorted by the number of users. There are 227,300 users that have tab named "Lifestyle", 3,725,200 users that named a tab "Music" and 21,070,090 users that couldn't find a better name than "Home".

Here's the top 10 for English:

1. Home - 21,070,090 users
2. News - 6,755,900
3. Games - 4,103,500
4. Entertainment - 4,002,300
5. Music - 3,725,200
6. Humor - 3,712,500
7. Sports - 3,667,300
8. Technology - 3,016,700
9. Cooking - 2,203,700
10. Politics - 2,170,700
.....
?. Name this tab - 490,000

and the top 10 for French:

1. Accueil - 1,757,000 (Home)
2. Actualités - 590,100 (News)
3. Dictionnaire - 375,100 (Dictionary)
4. Google - 371,300
5. Musique - 346,100 (Music)
6. Jeux - 297,800 (Games)
7. Informatique - 291,600 (IT)
8. Photos - 282,700
9. Culture - 242,600
10. Radio - 237,700

For other languages, use this URL:
http://www.google.com/ig/mtjson?hl=LANG_CODE&q=
and replace LANG_CODE with a language code supported by iGoogle.

The iGoogle Experiment

iGoogle Developer Blog announces developers that the experimental version of iGoogle is a success and that more users will be a part of the experiment.

"It's been a few weeks since I've provided an update on the status of the canvas view launch. Our experiments with a small percentage of users have been going well, and we've been making some small changes and adjustments based on user feedback (such as reducing the width of the left nav). In the next few weeks we plan on ramping up the number of US English users with the canvas view."

Canvas view is one of the features from a major update for iGoogle that will bring support for OpenSocial gadgets, activity streams and more social apps. The trouble is that Google randomly selected a list of users to join the experiment, without providing a way to opt-out*. Most people didn't understand the implications of the update and only noticed the new design (the horizontal tabs have been replaced by a vertical menu), the missing functionality (you can't move a gadget to a different tab) and the broken gadgets (Gmail's canvas view displays the messages inside iGoogle, but it doesn't have a reply button).

Some people complained in iGoogle's discussion board, but Google didn't admit its mistake and continued to expand the experiment. Here's an interesting comment from a user:

"Your methodology is very heavy-handed. I am a retired executive from the old-days of computing (IBM and the BUNCH). We could never have imagined changing the interface of our customer's tools without asking permission. In many cases, we would have to support old versions of software for years after we thought we had newer and better products, just because our customers had gotten used to the way the old versions worked and had modified their habits to accommodate us. It would be considered the highest form of arrogance to force changes on them without their permission. Part of the wrath you are hearing from your users is because of your methodology, and the fact that it's way too hard to give you feedback."

Things have changed and web applications update much faster, often without providing an option to revert to a previous version. But it's extremely arrogant to replace a working version of a popular application like iGoogle with an unfinished version, without providing a way to opt-out. iGoogle was supposed to be a personalized Google homepage, a place where you can choose your favorite gadgets, feeds, themes.

When Flickr started to test a new interface for the dashboard, it placed a small link: "Would you like to try a new version of this page?". FriendFeed used a different address to test a new design and improve it based on the feedback. Gmail still links to the "classic" version to test how many people are satisfied with the new one. But iGoogle decided to try a different path and many unhappy users migrated to My Yahoo, Netvibes or other similar services.

"Our experiments with a small percentage of users have been going well, and we've been making some small changes and adjustments based on user feedback (such as reducing the width of the left nav). In the next few weeks we plan on ramping up the number of US English users with the canvas view."

* Some users managed to revert to the classic interface by going to google.com/ig and pasting in the address bar:
javascript:_dlsetp('v2=0')

Street View and Walking Directions in Google Maps Mobile

The latest version of Google Maps for mobile phones brings two popular features that were only available in the desktop version: Street View and walking directions. You can download the application by visiting www.google.com/gmm from a supported mobile phone.

Street View is integrated in the local search results and you can see Street View imagery next to each step from driving or walking directions.

I tried to install the new version, but Google Maps linked to GMM 2.2.0, an earlier version launched in June.

Update. Here are the direct links for Google Maps 2.3.1:

* Java-enabled phones: http://google.com/gmm/apps/v2.3.1/L1/gmaps-231-m2_L1.jar

* BlackBerry: http://google.com/gmm/apps/v2.3.1/L1/BlackBerry-43/gmaps-231-bb-43_L1.jar

* the native versions for Windows Mobile and Symbian haven't been updated

Google Should Learn About Contacts APIs

Garett Rogers noticed a new option in the chat widget from the experimental iGoogle: invite friends to Google Talk. Unlike the similar feature from Gmail, iGoogle provides a simple way to import your contacts from Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, AIM and send mass invitations. The problem is that Google asks the username and password for a third-party email account, instead of using the APIs provided by Yahoo and Microsoft.

Google explains that it doesn't keep your username and password, but it's a really bad practice to teach your users to type their credentials on third-party sites. "Big internet companies stand to lose the most from widespread abuse of the anti-pattern, because they're the ones most likely to be targeted by phishers," says Simon Willison.

It's ironic that Google has a Contacts Data API and the introductory blog post has the following message:

"Have you ever been on a web-site that asked you for your Google username and password so that it can import your Gmail contact list? Did you think twice before giving out that information, hoping the web-site would not use it to access your credit card information stored with Google Checkout? Now you don't have to! We're happy to announce the availability of our Google Contacts Data API that gives programmatic access to your contact list. (...) We hope that APIs like this one mean you will never have to give out your username and password to other sites again. Please encourage all sites you use to switch to this API for accessing your Google contact data."

Flickr heard Google's message and it uses the contacts API to import the address book from Gmail. This way, Flickr doesn't have access to your password and it can only use a small portion of the data stored in your Google Account.

The First Android Phone Will Be Launched Next Week

HTC Dream, the first mobile device that uses Android will be introduced on September 23 by T-Mobile at a press conference in New York. "HTC says it expects to ship 600,000 to 700,000 units of the smart phone, dubbed the Dream, this year," according to Wall Street Journal.

The phone will be available at the end of October, but you can see a demo from Google Developer Day in London.

Andy Rubin, Google's director of mobile platforms, is aware that the first Android-powered mobile phone is very important for the public perception. "If we come out with a dud, people will go, 'Well, that was a waste of time'". Reuters reports that the device will ship with a beta version of the Android application marketplace and Google will not make money from selling applications. "We made a strategic decision not to revenue share with the developers. We will basically pass through any revenue to the carrier or the developer."

{ via Information Week }

Google Audio Indexing

Google's efforts to improve video search by using speech recognition technology started to become visible in July, when Google launched a gadget for searching inside the political speeches from YouTube. The gadget has been expanded into a new service called GAudi (Google Audio Indexing), which is now available at Google Labs.

"Google Audio Indexing is a new technology from Google that allows users to better search and watch videos from various YouTube channels. It uses speech technology to find spoken words inside videos and lets the user jump to the right portion of the video where these words are spoken. (...) Political videos and election materials are a special case of broadcast news content, a domain that has received a lot of academic and industry attention and is known to perform well," explains the FAQ.

The interface is attractive because you can find all the mentions of your keywords and go directly to the appropriate sequence. And if you find an interesting video, there's another search box that lets you search inside that video.

Google's technology is far from being perfect, so you'll find many mistakes. In the video "Barack Obama on the 40th Anniversary of the Prague Spring", "Czechoslovakia" is incorrectly detected as "tech also but there", "free" is replaced by "forty" and there are many other mistakes.

{ Thanks, Kevin and Pat. }

Gmail's Forgotten Attachment Detector

Gmail Labs added two new experimental features: a "Mark as Read" button and a very basic script that warns if you write about attaching documents but you forget to actually attach them.

The attachment detector couldn't recognize patterns like "I attached a file", "Check the attached file", but it worked when using: "I've attached..." and "I have attached". Greasemonkey scripts like Gmail attachment reminder find their way in Gmail Labs and you no longer need to use Firefox or install a certain extension to use them.

{ Thanks, Carlos. }

Better Performance in Google Desktop 5.8

Google Desktop announces that the latest release focuses on performance and that's a great thing, considering that many users call Google Desktop a memory hog.

Google Desktop 5.8 improves the memory usage during startup, has a faster shutdown and detects the gadgets that slow down your computer. "To reduce memory usage, increase stability and reduce memory fragmentation, we reduced the number of different processes that Google Desktop runs, and we now recycle some of our processes frequently."

The blog post doesn't mention the biggest performance improvement: Google Desktop's main feature, indexing the files from your computer, is no longer enabled by default. In Windows Vista, Google uses the index created by Microsoft's desktop search service. If you want to enable Google Desktop's index, you need to select "Enable Enhanced Content Indexing" when you install the software or in the options page.

Enable additional features by using Google Desktop's index:

* Backup and view previous versions of your documents
* Search your web history, Gmail, and more
* View thumbnail previews of your images, videos, and web history

Google Desktop's wording makes you think that the "enhanced content indexing" is an advanced feature, when it should be the main feature of the software.

If you do enable desktop search, the initial indexing is much faster and the overall performance has been improved.

10 Videos About Google

Even if Google has been founded 10 years as a company, there aren't too many great videos about Google's history. I compiled a list of 10 videos: interviews with Google's co-founders, press events, an interesting documentary and some highlights from Googleplex.

1. "Charlie Rose" (PBS, July 2001) - a conversation with Larry Page (Google's CEO at that time) and Sergey Brin.

2. "60 Minutes" (CBS, 2005) - transcript. "To this day, Google has still never run a TV commercial. Their popularity has spread literally by word of mouth around the world, as people everywhere search for everything under the sun."

3. "Sergey Brin and Larry Page: Inside the Google machine" (TED conferences, 2004)

4. "Google - Behind the Screen" (Ijsbrand van Veelen, 2006). The documentary asks interesting questions like "How can you convince people that Google isn't a Big Brother company?", "What happens if a search engine becomes dominant?", but the answers from Google's executives aren't always convincing.

5. "Sergey Brin Speaks with UC Berkeley Class" (2005) - 40 minutes about Wikipedia, search engines, China, desktop software and more.

6. "Google Factory Tour" (a press event from 2005) - 340 minutes

7. "Googling the Googlers' DNA: A Demonstration of the 23andMe Personal Genome" (2008). Anne Wojcicki reveals interesting details about Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt - skip to minute 27.

8. "Marissa Mayer at Stanford University" (2006) - Marissa Mayer's 9 Notions of Innovation

9. "The Science and Art of User Experience at Google" (2006) - Jen Fitzpatrick

10. "Working at Google" (2008) - interviews with Google employees and images from Googleplex.

Google Chrome, a Shell for the Web

"In the long term, we think of Chromium as a tabbed window manager or shell for the web rather than a browser application. We avoid putting things into our UI in the same way you would hope that Apple and Microsoft would avoid putting things into the standard window frames of applications on their operating systems. The tab is our equivalent of a desktop application's title bar; the frame containing the tabs is a convenient mechanism for managing groups of those applications. In future, there may be other tab types that do not host the normal browser toolbar," explains a document about Chrome's user experience.

This philosophical shift might explain why there are few interface distractions and the browser is barely visible. Google Chrome is built for web applications that have their own menus, keyword shortcuts and status bars.

Chrome comes with intelligent defaults to minimize the interaction with the browser. The settings dialog doesn't include many options available in other browsers and the team hopes to "reduce the number of options further". The lack of customization is not a good news for advanced users, but normal users might appreciate the simplicity of the interface.

"The heck with more features, is Safari 3 faster, more stable, less memory-hungry and more compatible on the web at large? That's what I want to see in each release," commented Peter Kasting on an article from 2006 about Safari 3. Peter Kasting is now an engineer in the Google Chrome team.