Google's Context-Sensitive Spell Checker

Spell checkers aren't usually very smart: they highlight words that aren't in a dictionary and suggest a list of similar words. Even if they take into account words that aren't included in dictionaries and they deal with plurals and verb tenses, most spell checkers can't find words that are used incorrectly in a context.

Wikipedia includes as an example: "Their coming too sea if its reel", a phrase that has 5 spelling mistakes, even though all the words can be found in the dictionary. If you enter this text in Gmail's editor and click on "Check spelling", Gmail won't find any error. Type the same text in Google's search box, and you'll get a "did you mean" message that suggests to search for "Their coming to see if its real". As you can see, Google's search box has a better spell checker than Gmail since it doesn't rely on a dictionary, it uses a huge amount of searches to determine what are the most probable sequences of words that follow a certain pattern. Unfortunately, the spell checker available at Google.com is optimized for searches, which are usually short, so you can't use it to spell check an email message or a blog post.


Google Wave, the service demoed yesterday at Google I/O, includes a context-sensitive spell checker that highlights errors as you type. Google uses the language models built for Google Translate to find words that don't belong in a certain context.

Play Games in Google Talk

Google released a realtime gadgets API for Google Talk that's especially useful if you want to play games with your friends.

"gadgets.realtime and the APIs built on top of it allow gadget developers to write applications that communicate asynchronously with another endpoint, whether that endpoint is another instance of the application (on another machine, or in another browser, for example), the container hosting the gadget, or an application hosted in the cloud. The obvious application of these APIs is 1:1 gaming -- at its most basic a Tic-Tac-Toe game between two users. However there are many other more complex (and arguably -- depending on your thoughts about games -- more interesting) scenarios that these APIs enable; for instance, a chat application that translates text as participants type it, or a shared whiteboard, or an application that lets a couple choose the best flight for their upcoming vacation."

For now, the APIs are only available in a developer sandbox, which includes a special interface of Gmail Chat. Here's how you can play chess with one of your friends:

* Go to the sandbox and send this link to your friend: http://talkgadget.google.com/talkgadget/sandbox .

* When your friend started to use Gmail Chat's sandbox, click on "Options", select "Start application", paste the following address:
http://code.google.com/apis/talk/examples/chess.xml
and press Enter.


If you don't know how to play chess, try two other applications:

* a very simple rock-paper-scissors game:
http://code.google.com/apis/talk/examples/rps.xml

* an automatic translation application:
http://code.google.com/apis/talk/examples/interpreter.xml

{ via Google Talk Blog. Thanks, Niranjan. }

Google Wave

Google Wave is a new communication service previewed today at Google I/O. "A wave is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more."

The service seems to combine Gmail and Google Docs into an interesting free-form workspace that could be used to write documents collaboratively, plan events, play games or discuss a recent news.


Google Wave has been designed by the founders of Where 2 Tech, a start-up acquired by Google to create a cutting-edge mapping service, which later became Google Maps.

"Back in early 2004, Google took an interest in a tiny mapping startup called Where 2 Tech, founded by my brother Jens and me. We were excited to join Google and help create what would become Google Maps. But we also started thinking about what might come next for us after maps. As always, Jens came up with the answer: communication. He pointed out that two of the most spectacular successes in digital communication, email and instant messaging, were originally designed in the '60s to imitate analog formats — email mimicked snail mail, and IM mimicked phone calls. Since then, so many different forms of communication had been invented — blogs, wikis, collaborative documents, etc. — and computers and networks had dramatically improved. So Jens proposed a new communications model that presumed all these advances as a starting point; I was immediately sold," explains Lars Rasmussen.

"In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It's concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content -- it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use "playback" to rewind the wave to see how it evolved."

You can see some screenshots of the service and find some details about the API that could be used to extend the service and the Wave protocol that allows anyone to run a "wave" server. Google promises that Google Wave will be available later this year.

Customize Google Using Server-Side Scripts

Google's services have a lot of powerful features, but they can't offer all the options requested by users. A popular way to customize Google services is using Greasemonkey scripts: some of the most popular scripts are included in Firefox extensions like Customize Google or Better Gmail. While user scripts can help you tweak Google features, they need to be installed on each browser you use and they can be easily be rendered useless after Google changes the code.

A different approach to extend Gmail's functionality was Gmail Labs, which allowed you to pick add-ons that are dynamically integrated in Gmail. Depending on the Gmail add-ons that you select, you'll run one of the many possible customized versions of Gmail. For now, only Gmail engineers add Google Labs features.

I'm sure that many Greasemonkey users would like to add upload a script to Gmail or Google Docs so that it's saved on Google's servers and it no longer requires Greasemonkey. Ideally, the script should use Google APIs instead of manipulating the DOM directly.

Google Scripts is answer to this problem, it's a way to extend the functionality offered by services like Google Docs, Gmail or Google Calendar.

With scripts, you can:

* Create your own custom spreadsheet functions
* Automate repetitive tasks (e.g. process responses to Google Docs forms)
* Link multiple Google products together (e.g. send emails or schedule Calendar events from a list of addresses in a Spreadsheet)
* Customize existing Google products (e.g. add custom buttons or menus to run your own scripts)

The scripts help you add macros to a Google spreadsheet by writing some JavaScript code in Google's script editor. "Google Apps Script provides the ability to automate a variety spreadsheet actions, such as reading and changing values in cells and ranges, changing formats and formulas, and creating custom functions," explains Jonathan Rochelle.


But the feature goes beyond spreadsheet macros. "Users write scripts in JavaScript using libraries designed to provide a powerful interface with Google products. If you already are a JavaScript developer, a key difference is that scripts run on Google Servers instead of user browsers. As a result, direct operations on the client-side DOM are not supported, although some restricted functionality is provided. Your code executes server-side, and operates on the Google products you've coded for."


For now, Google Scripts is not publicly available, but you can apply to become a tester if you have a Google Apps account.


{ via Google Blogoscoped }

Google Tennis OneBox

Google has a new OneBox that shows the latest results from Roland Garros, an important tennis tournament held in Paris. If you search for [roland garros] or [tennis], Google shows some recent results, but it's probably a better idea to search for a player's name.


This is not the only sports-related Google OneBox: you can also find results from football (or soccer), the National Hockey League (NHL), National Basketball Association (NBA), Major League Baseball (MLB), cricket, NASCAR or Formula 1.


{ Merci, Jean-Noël. }

Google Friend Connect Adds Global Conversations

Web Elements is Google's new one-stop shop for services that can be embedded into any web page without requiring coding skills. You can embed maps, search results, calendars, news, spreadsheets, presentations, YouTube channels, but all of these features were already available in similar formats.

Friend Connect added an interesting web element for global conversations. "A global conversation is a conversation that takes place on several web site simultaneously. You can tell that you are looking at a global conversation because it says "Global conversation - learn more" underneath the title of the conversation. When you post to a global conversation, such as "mandolins", the post not only shows up on the web site where you posted it, but it also shows up on any site that chooses to embed the conversation, now or in the future."


So you can create an ad-hoc chat room that can be embedded in any web page that will continue the conversation. Friend Connect comes with an authentication system that doesn't require creating a new account, an option to use existing profiles, threaded comments, basic spam filtering, comment translation and other useful features.

Extending Google Chrome

One of the presentations from the first day of Google I/O was about Google Chrome's extension system. There aren't many improvements since the last post about Chrome extensions, but the presentation explains some of the advantages of Google's system:

* extensions are collections of web pages that use HTML, JavaScript, CSS, so they're not difficult to write
* you don't need to restart the browser after installing an extension
* the extensions are updated automatically, so you'll always have the most recent version
* Chrome's extensions will work in any future version of the browser. Developers don't need to update their extensions when a new version of Chrome is released.
* Chrome will run extensions in separate processes: one process for each extension.


You can already write some simple extensions that add new options to the browser, but the interface is pretty limited and the APIs don't expose all the features that are available in Chrome.

To try some Chrome extensions, follow the instructions from this post, but they only work if you install a developer build. You can also install Cleeki, an extension that brings IE8's accelerators to Chrome, AdSweep, an ad blocker without UI, and a PageRank checker.

{ via Chromium blog }

Google Enhances Snippets with Thumbnails

After extracting a lot of interesting information from web pages (dates, locations, author names), Google experiments with displaying the number of images embedded in a web page and a list of thumbnails above the snippet. Patrick Altoft posted a screenshot that shows a search result which includes 17 images, but only 9 of them were picked by Google.


The feature is not available for everyone, but if it's launched, I suspect that Google will only show the enhanced snippet for pages that embed a lot of images.

A similar feature is available if you click on "search options" and select "images from the page", like in this search for [mouse]. Google will show at most 2 thumbnails next to each search result. Thumbnails "can help you quickly identify whether the page is relevant to your search term. For example, if you see an image of a furry little critter when you search for [mouse], you can probably deduce that the page isn't talking about computer equipment," explains Google's help center.

Bing, Live Search's New Interface

Microsoft's search engine didn't manage to become successful, despite of its many improvements, rebrandings and promotions. Nielsen reported that Live Search's US market share in the US was 9.9%, while Hitwise reported that the most commonly searched terms on Live Search are "Google" and "Yahoo".

Microsoft has many new distribution deals for Live Search, but the main problem is to have a product that's good enough to keep the new users. The next iteration of Live Search, that will be publicly available soon, integrates PowerSet's technology to offer an enhanced view for Wikipedia pages, shows only the top result for many navigational queries and an automatically generated menu of related searches. The service saves a list of recent searches and displays them in the left sidebar, next to the search refinements.

Live Search's new homepage

For navigational queries, only the top result is displayed. In some cases, you'll also see a customer service phone number (but not if you're searching for "google").

Live Search shows the top results for related queries on the same page. If you search for "audi a4", you'll also get results for "audi a4 repair", "audi a4 used", "audi a4 reviews" etc.

When you mouse over a search result, Live Search shows a longer snippet and more related pages

The enhanced view for Wikipedia pages isn't very exciting, unlike the similar feature from PowerSet

Unfortunately, I didn't see any improvements in ranking search results, so the only thing that's changed is the user interface. Live Search's interface is closer to an encyclopedia page, but I'm not sure if overloading users with information is the solution to offering better results.

AdAge suggests that Live Search will have a catchier name: Bing and Microsoft will pay $80 million for promoting the search engine. "People with knowledge of the planned push said the ads won't go after Google, or Yahoo for that matter, by name. Instead, they'll focus on planting the idea that today's search engines don't work as well as consumers previously thought by asking them whether search (aka Google) really solves their problems. That, Microsoft is hoping, will give consumers a reason to consider switching search engines, which, of course, is one of Bing's biggest challenges."

New features rarely bring more users to a search engine, even if they're useful and innovative. People want a search engine that constantly offers good search results, not just for popular searches or for a few hand-picked queries.

Update (June 1st): The new interface is now available at bing.com. As I already mentioned, there's no significant improvement in ranking the results, so Bing is Live Search with a new interface and a new way to display the same poor results.