7 New Languages in Google Translate

Expect 7 new languages in Google Translate soon: Albanian (9-13 million speakers*), Estonian (1.1 million speakers), Galician (3-4 million speakers), Hungarian (15 million speakers), Maltese (around 400,000 speakers), Thai (60-65 million speakers) and Turkish (63 million speakers). Many of the comments from a previous post requested Turkish, so Google listened to the feedback.


Another change is that the English dictionary has been improved significantly and it includes synonyms, antonyms, pronunciations, detailed definitions and examples from Collins COBUILD Advanced Learner's English Dictionary.


Update (a day later): As previously announced, the new languages have been added to Google Translate.


* Source: Wikipedia.

Google Flags All Search Results as Malware

Many users report that Google started to flag all search results as malware. The problem is that Google no longer links to the search results flagged as malware and it sends users to a diagnostic page. Apparently, the bug has been fixed in about half an hour.

"This is by far the strangest thing I have ever seen on Google, but I don't know if it is happening to everyone or just me. With every search I do (as of two minutes ago), every page is marked This site may harm your computer," reported Albert Rodenius.

"Google has been acting up in extremely odd ways the last 24 hours. Right now, every single site on the web gets the message This site may harm your computer in its search result. (I never knew the Internet was that dangerous). Second, the number of server errors over the past 24 hours I've run into has been astonishing; over half my Google search queries have returned 404, long before the unsafe sites problem showed up. Now, most of the time when I click on the This site may harm your computer link, I get a server error," mentioned Greg Spira, a reader of this blog.


{ Thanks to everyone who reported the issue. Screenshot from Aris Giannakakis. }

Update: Google's blog says that "this was clearly an error, and we are very sorry for the inconvenience caused to our users. (...) Google flags search results with the message This site may harm your computer if the site is known to install malicious software in the background or otherwise surreptitiously. (...) Since each case needs to be individually researched, this list is maintained by humans, not algorithms. We periodically receive updates to that list and received one such update to release on the site this morning. Unfortunately (and here's the human error), the URL of '/' was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and '/' expands to all URLs. Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file. Since we push these updates in a staggered and rolling fashion, the errors began appearing between 6:27 a.m. and 6:40 a.m. and began disappearing between 7:10 and 7:25 a.m., so the duration of the problem for any particular user was approximately 40 minutes."

Manual Feed Updates in Google Reader

If your Google Reader subscriptions aren't up-to-date or you suspect that a blog has published posts that haven't been indexed by Google Reader, just click on "Refresh". That button usually checks if there are new posts cached by Google Reader, but when you open an individual subscription the button forces an update and loads the new posts. Alternatively, you could just press "r" to update the feed.

In the screenshot below, you can see that Google Reader loaded two new posts from VentureBeat after clicking on the "Refresh" button.


{ via Google Reader's Twitter page }

Google Web Accelerator Discontinued

Last year, Google removed the download link from Google Web Accelerator's homepage as a sign that the product is no longer supported. Web Accelerator was a Labs experiment launched in 2005 that intended to speed up web browsing by prefetching content and downloading cached web pages from Google's servers.

Google Web Accelerator uses various strategies to make your web pages load faster, including:

* Sending your page requests through Google machines dedicated to handling Google Web Accelerator traffic.
* Storing copies of frequently looked at pages to make them quickly accessible.
* Downloading only the updates if a web page has changed slightly since you last viewed it.
* Prefetching certain pages onto your computer in advance.
* Managing your Internet connection to reduce delays.
* Compressing data before sending it to your computer.

The product was designed for broadband connections and it was only available for Windows. Web Accelerator became famous for a security problem: the software transferred unencrypted cookies to Google servers, which were cached and then sent to other Web Accelerator users. Even though the issue was fixed in the next releases, Google Web Accelerator was quickly forgotten and few people noticed that it didn't work well in Firefox 3 and it blocked YouTube videos.

Instead of updating the software, Google decided to discontinue it. "Google Web Accelerator was a great experiment which provided us with a lot of material for developing future products to serve our users," explained a Google spokesperson in October 2008.


Note: you can still download Web Accelerator from Google, but the caching service no longer works.

First Official Description of GDrive

Brian Ussery noticed an interesting reference to GDrive in a file used by Google Pack. The file includes "localized information which is sent to translators".

The product category for GDrive is "online file backup and storage" and there are two lines that describe the application:

"GDrive provides reliable storage for all of your files, including photos, music and documents. GDrive allows you to access your files from anywhere, anytime, and from any device - be it from your desktop, web browser or cellular phone."


If the description is accurate, we can conclude that GDrive will provide a software that could be included in Google Pack, you'll be able to store any kind of files and you'll be able to access them from your mobile phone.

{ Thanks, Brian. }

Chrome's New Tab Page in Firefox

The latest update of Google Toolbar 5 for Firefox added the "new tab" page from Chrome. When you open a new tab, the page shows 9 thumbnails of the most frequently visited pages, recent bookmarks and pages from recently closed tabs.

Unlike the similar feature from Google Chrome, you can disable the page and you can remove the thumbnails you don't like.


The goal of "new tab" page is to present a list of pages you are likely to visit, but I'm not sure that it's actually useful. Opera's speed dial lets you pick the pages and this could be a better approach.

"The new tab page is the default starting point for all tabs - it is designed to get the user where they want to go, and is not meant to be an information resource like the user's home page; that is, the new tab page is not intended to be a destination, but rather a jumping-off point to other destinations - we strongly want to avoid cognitive load and distractions for the user, especially those creating new tabs for other purposes," explains Google.

If you like the feature from Chrome, but your main browser is Firefox, "new tab" page is now included in Google Toolbar. You can also try an extension that brings Opera's speed dial to Firefox.

{ Thanks, Hebbet. }

Chrome Ad from Google Japan

Google Japan created a small ad for Chrome, the browser that moves fast, evolves rapidly and loads pages quickly.


An example of quick patch is that the latest Chrome version spoofed Safari's user-agent to make Hotmail work properly. "Normally you think of web pages being faster to update than client-side software downloads. In this case though, Chrome updates near-weekly, much faster than Hotmail did. Another illustration that velocity and speed of iteration matter," commented Google's anti-spam guy. And probably another example that web developers ignore browsers with small market share.

Update: Check out the behind the scenes photos.

10 Good Things About Offline Gmail

Gmail's offline version is a surprisingly solid alternative to desktop mail clients. Despite the shortcomings of an initial release (attachments can't be added to messages composed offline, you can't customize which messages are downloaded, the contact manager is not available offline), there are many good things about the offline Gmail:

1. You can easily create proper shortcuts for Gmail from the settings page.


2. Now that's available offline, Gmail can truly become an application rendered by Chrome.

3. Some of the attachments are available offline and you can copy the files from Google Gears' cache.

4. Even if your Internet connection goes down, you can continue to read your messages and post replies, so you don't have to until the connection goes back up.

5. Gmail finally becomes usable if you have a slow or unreliable network connection. Enable the "flaky connection mode" and Gmail will cache your messages. "In flaky connection mode, you access the mail that's stored locally on your computer, regardless of your connection status. This makes it much faster to read and send mail, which is nice when you're on a slow or flaky connection. Your account will continue to sync in the background when it's able to do so, with no disruption to your experience."

6. Even if you have a fast Internet connection, it's faster to load data from your computer than from Google's servers, so the "flaky connection mode" is a good way to speed up Gmail.

7. Most Gmail features work even when you are offline, including themes, Gmail Labs and keyboard shortcuts.

8. You can cache messages for more than one account and switch between them.

9. The change of the online/offline status is seamless and you don't have to manually sync data.

10. This is the best implementation of an offline Google app.

Find Images that Have a Certain Size

Most image search engines offers an option to filter the results by size, but you can only choose between small, medium and large images. Google Image Search has an undocumented parameter that lets you specify the exact dimension of the results:

imagesize:WIDTHxHEIGHT.

Here's an example: [imagesize:640x480 muffin] finds 640px x 480px images related to muffins.


The operator could be useful if you need to find wallpapers for your computer, logos, illustrations for a school project or any other images that have standard sizes.

{ Thanks, Michael Garmahis. }

Offline Gmail

Adding offline support for Google services turned out to be a difficult task: even if Gears-enabled versions of Google Calendar and Gmail have been tested for more than a year, offline Gmail will be available starting from today in Gmail Labs.


What's the point of creating an offline version of Gmail when you can use mail clients like Mozilla Thunderbird or Outlook? You don't need to install additional software other than Google Gears and you can continue to use Gmail's familiar interface.

Gmail's blog explains how this feature works and which Gmail features are available offline:

"Once you turn on this feature, Gmail uses Gears to download a local cache of your mail. As long as you're connected to the network, that cache is synchronized with Gmail's servers. When you lose your connection, Gmail automatically switches to offline mode, and uses the data stored on your computer's hard drive instead of the information sent across the network. You can read messages, star and label them, and do all of the things you're used to doing while reading your webmail online. Any messages you send while offline will be placed in your outbox and automatically sent the next time Gmail detects a connection."


"And if you're on an unreliable or slow connection (like when you're "borrowing" your neighbor's wireless), you can choose to use "flaky connection mode," which is somewhere in between: it uses the local cache as if you were disconnected, but still synchronizes your mail with the server in the background."


Since this is still an experimental feature, Google chose to come up with an algorithm that decides which messages are cached locally and you can't set how many messages are downloaded.

We try to download your most recent conversations along with any conversations that seem to be important (regardless of their age). We also try not to download uninteresting conversations. This process is done heuristically and as with any heuristic can and will miss things. We'll continue to tune things up, but more importantly, we'll eventually provide a UI that will allow you to change the settings. Here's a sketch of how these messages are selected:

* Synchronization is based on the date of conversations. The system estimates a period of time to cover (at least 1 week in length) that results in approximately 10,000 messages being downloaded. For an average user, this means Gmail will end up downloading several years of mail.

* Additionally, we'll download any conversation marked with a label that contains less than 200 conversations, has at least one conversation that has been received in the last 30 days and also has at least one conversation that's outside the estimated time period. For many users, this list of labels will include Starred and Drafts.

* Finally, the system determines a list of labels to exclude conversations from being downloaded. For example, Trash and Spam are always in this list, along with any label that contains mostly unread conversations (unread count greater than 99%). So, we won't download a conversation if it contains only labels in this list. A typical Trashed message will not be downloaded, but a Trashed message that contains the label "alpha" will.

Among the most significant limitations of the offline versions: you can't add attachments to your messages, the contact manager is not accessible, the search results are limited to the local cache.


How to get this feature?

Offline Gmail will be slowly rolled out this week to the English interface of Gmail. Here's how to enable the feature:

1. Change the language of your Gmail interface to English
2. Make sure you use a browser supported by Gmail Labs and Gears: Internet Explorer 7.0+, Firefox 2.0+, Safari 3.0+, and Google Chrome. You can't use Gmail Labs in Internet Explorer 6.
3. Wait until this feature is added to your account. When you see "Offline Gmail" in Gmail Labs, enable the feature, save the changes and click on the "Offline" link that will be displayed next to your username.

Ten Years of Google (Video)

This video highlights some of the most interesting services released or acquired by Google in the past 10 years: from web search to search ads, from image search to Google News, from Gmail to iGoogle, from Google Earth to Street View, from YouTube to Android and Chrome. And these are only the first 10 years.


{ Thanks, Dom Elliott. }

GrandCentral 2.0, Almost Ready to Be Released

Jeff Huber from Google writes that "a new [GrandCentral] version on new infrastructure will be coming soon" in a comment of a story about a recent certificate error in GrandCentral.

David Pogue adds: "Everyone from GrandCentral still works on GrandCentral, and the 2.0 version is imminent. A PR guy explained to me that it's taken a year to merge the GrandCentral servers with Google's, but they're nearly done."

Jeff Hubert posts an interesting list of acquisitions and the resulting Google products, but the only surprising news is that Zingku, the mobile social network acquired by Google in 2007, was used to create Google FriendConnect:

"Writely + XL2Web + TonicSystems -> Google Docs,
Keyhole -> Google Earth/Maps,
Urchin + MeasureMap -> Google Analytics,
JotSpot -> Google Sites,
Zingku -> Google FriendConnect,
Android -> Android,
DoubleClick -> DoubleClick,
Feedburner -> AdSense for Feeds (in-process);
sorry about Dodgeball".

{ via Blogoscoped Forum }

More Signs of a Google Webdrive

The long-awaited and much-delayed GDrive is likely to be released in the near future as more pieces of its integration are revealed. Cédric Vergé noticed a change in one of the CSS files for Google Apps: there's a class named "webdrive" and an icon for the new service.


When Google released Picasa for Mac, many people wondered what's the mystery behind a menu option titled "Google Web Drive":


Last week, Tony Ruscoe found some traces of an internal Google document which mentioned an update for Google Docs, which will slowly morph into GDrive. Apparently, Google Docs will be the web interface for GDrive, while a Windows/Mac client will integrate the service with the operating system and make it easy to synchronize files.

{ Thanks, Cédric. }