Google to Launch a Microblogging Search Engine

Google prepares to launch a service that indexes and ranks content from microblogging services like Twitter. Since it's very easy to post updates and the posts are usually very short, micro-blogging services are great for live blogging, posting real-time information about an event.

Twitter's search engine has two important drawbacks: it's limited to Twitter and it sorts the results by date. While there are other search engines like Tweefind that try to sort Twitter posts by relevancy and search engines like Twingly that index multiple microblogging sites, none of them does a great job.

Much like Google Blog Search, Google's microblogging search service will sort the results by relevancy and it also be integrated with Google's web search engine: the keywords that are frequently used in recent posts will trigger a MicroBlogsearch universal search group.

Here's the description used in Google's localization service:

"Recent updates about QUERY. This is the MicroBlogsearch Universal result group header text. A Microblog is a blog with very short entries. Twitter is the popular service associated with this format."


In May, Marissa Mayer discussed the significance of Twitter for Google:

"What's really happening in Twitter is that there are a lot of clues in it in terms of what's happening that's interesting overall. It's similar to what we see in Google Trends, where people will often type what they're interested in into the search box, and we can make some predictions off of that. So we are interested in being able to offer, for example, micro-blogging and micro-messaging in our search. Particularly in Blog Search and possibly in Web Search, but we don't have any particular plans to announce."

Integrate Google Latitude with Your Google Profile

If you want to display the location from Google Latitude on your Google profile, follow these steps:

* set your location using the iGoogle gadget or the mobile application.

* enable the public location badge, by selecting "Enable and show city-level only" or "Enable and show best available location". You should be aware that your location is now publicly available and it can displayed in a variety of ways using Google's API.

* edit your profile and select "Display my Latitude location". Google mentions that "your location appears on your profile, below your name, occupation, and city where you live, as long as you've updated it on Latitude within the last 24 hours."

In other news, Google started to show rich snippets for the results from Google Profiles. Google extracts structured data about jobs from profiles.

Yet Another Mobile iGoogle

Sometimes it's very difficult to understand Google: in 2008, Google released a great iGoogle interface optimized for iPhone, but it was discontinued one year later. "We've decided to direct iPhone users to the standard mobile iGoogle page. We've found that people hit iGoogle from lots of different phones -- we want to ensure you'll all see the same version," said a Google employee in January.

The regular mobile interface is very basic and it's only able to show feeds and a small number of gadgets. The mobile iGoogle doesn't have tabs and it's optimized for WAP phones, not for today's smartphones.

Google changed its and mind and decided to release a new iGoogle version for iPhone and Android phones. "This new version is faster and easier to use. It supports tabs as well as more of your favorite gadgets, including those built by third-party developers. (...) One of our favorite new features is the in-line display of articles for feed-based gadgets. That means you can read article summaries without leaving the page. You can also rearrange gadget order or keep your favorite gadgets open for your next visit."


To see the new version, visit iGoogle.com if you have an iPhone or an Android phone and click on "Try the new Mobile iGoogle". Google doesn't let you switch to the new version, so you need to bookmark the page. If you have a different phone with a WebKit browser, try to see if this page works well: http://www.google.com/m/ig?uipref=6.

Find Creative Commons Images in Google Image Search

Google Image Search added the option to restrict the results to images that are licensed using Creative Commons, a list of flexible licenses that allow content creators to share their works with the world.

The options aren't yet available in the interface, but you can use the search box below to find images that are licensed using some of the most popular Creative Commons licenses:

Images labeled for:
Reuse
Commercial reuse
Reuse with modification
Commercial reuse with modification

The four options displayed above combine different Creative Commons license, but you can create customized searches for other combination of licenses:

* public domain images:
http://images.google.com/images?q=mountains&as_rights=cc_publicdomain

* images licensed using Creative Commons Attribution:
http://images.google.com/images?q=mountains&as_rights=cc_attribute

* images licensed using Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike:
http://images.google.com/images?q=mountains&as_rights=cc_sharealike

Last month, Yahoo Image Search added a similar feature, limited to Flickr images. "By launching the Creative Commons license search with Flickr and making it available to all our Yahoo! Image Search users, we aim to promote reusable work and to be transparent about the guidelines issued by the creator of a particular image," mentioned Yahoo's blog.

Disable Google SearchWiki

Google Search's preferences page includes the option to disable SearchWiki. Just click on the checkbox next to SearchWiki and you'll "hide the ability to share, promote, remove, comment, or add your own results".


If you like a less cluttered interface for Google's search results or you don't use SearchWiki, disable the option from the preferences page.


"SearchWiki lets you customize your Google Web Search results by ranking, removing, and adding notes to them. You'll see your changes whenever you do the same searches while signed in to your Google Account, or until you decide to undo them. You can also see how other users have tailored any given search results page with their own notes and changes," explains Google. The feature lets you personalize the search results and it's especially useful for repeated searches. Marissa Mayer says that "40% of searches on any given day are repeat searches for that user".

Visit DisneyLand Paris Using Google Street View

Disneyland Paris is the first amusement park available in Google Street View. "Last October, as the last few rays of sunlight remained high enough in the sky, Disneyland Paris opened its gates early to our Street View car to capture some of the magic at street-level. We drove up Main Street USA (outside of Paris!), through Adventureland, and around Fantasyland and even in Walt Disney Studios Park," explains Google.


This shows some important uses of Google Street View: helping tourists plan itineraries and conducting virtual field trips.

You can also view an impressive 3D model of Disneyland Paris in Google Earth. "More than 85,000 photos (450GB worth) were taken over a 20 day period for this project. The castle alone is comprised of over 354 textures derived from over 2,000 photos. (...) There are over 500 unique landscape elements that were created to make the park look as realistic as possible."


The unofficial Google Earth blog reports that Google added a lot of new 3D buildings. "Google has been slowly adding cities using an unpublished methodology where vast numbers of buildings for large areas of cities are being rendered in 3D with photorealistic textures. The photos appear to be aerial in some cases, in others they seem to be from the ground. But, they are using an at least semi-automated process judging from the cases where some buildings are not properly dressed with the photo textures."

Advanced Search Options in Picasa Web Albums

Picasa Web's search feature has been improved and you can now filter search results: choose an aspect ratio (landscape, portrait, panorama), select a size (small, medium, large or extra large), filter videos and view the files that are licensed using Creative Commons.

Just click on "show options" to enable the tool belt with advanced filters. The new options can be used to search the public photos uploaded by Picasa Web Albums users, the photos uploaded by your favorite users or your own albums.


Picasa Web Albums indexes tags, captions, album titles, album descriptions, and album locations, but many photos don't have proper metadata and they're not searchable.

If you've been using Flickr's advanced search page to find Creative Commons-licensed images, Picasa Web is another place where you can find images that can be reused or modified. For example, 81,302 from the 3,064,934 search results for [Oslo] are licensed using Creative Commons.

Manage Databases in Google Fusion Tables

Google Labs has a new service for visualizing data: Google Fusion Tables. Unlike Google Spreadsheets, the service is optimized for large data sets, so you can import tables of up to 100MB.

"The goal of Fusion Tables, as with other database systems, is to manage larger amounts of data than spreadsheets typically do. This size difference leads to a focus on a different set of functionalities. For example, Fusion Tables focuses more on bulk operations on the data (filtering, aggregation, merges). These operations are typically not necessary for smaller collections of data stored in spreadsheets. In contrast, spreadsheets preserve complete flexibility in managing data -- you can put any value you want in any cell and work carefully to format your spreadsheet to make it look nice," explains the FAQ.


You can import spreadsheets from your computer, select one from Google Spreadsheets or open a table from the gallery.


One of the samples, titled "Popular Baby Names -- 1880 to 2008", has 129,000 rows, but Fusion Tables displays 100 rows at a time. To manage a such a large amount of data, you can apply filters, show aggregates, create views that only include some of the columns.

There are many options to visualize the data: on a map or intensity map, using lines, bars, pies, scatter plots, motion charts or on a timeline. For example, you can visualize the popularity of the name "John" in the US, which has slowly declined since 1924.


To see which are the most popular male names in the US since 1990, I added two filters: year >= 1990,rank <= 3 and then I aggregated the data by male name. The bar chart shows that Michael is the most popular male name.


The service has rough edges and there aren't many options to perform computations: there's no support for SQL or GQL queries, the sorting options are limited and you can't add data using forms.

Even if it's just a pre-alpha version, Fusion Tables has built-in collaboration features: you can invite people as viewers, contributors (they are allowed to add columns, but not to edit the existing columns), collaborators or owners. Anyone who is invited can add comments to a cell or a column.

{ Thanks, Surendra. }

Google Translator Toolkit

Google Translator Toolkit is a new service that lets you translate documents by editing the translations automatically generated by Google. "Google Translator Toolkit allows human translators to work faster and more accurately, aided by technologies like Google Translate."

You can translate documents stored on your computer, web pages, Wikipedia articles and Knol articles. After importing a document, Google generates the translation, displaying it next to the original text. You can select a sentence from the original document and Google lets you edit the translation.


Google Translator Toolkit includes the collaborative features from Google Docs: you can invite other people to edit or view your translations, but the application doesn't display the collaborators that are currently editing a document.


An interesting feature is the "translation memory", a database of already-existing translations. "As you translate new sentences, we automatically search all available translation memories for previous translations similar to your new sentence. If such sentences exist, we rank and then show them to you. Comparing your translation to previous human translations improves consistency and saves you time: you can reuse previous translations or adjust them to create new, more contextually appropriate translations."

Google's service will make it easier to translate documents online, but it's also a great way to improve the quality of the machine translation service.

{ via Blogoscoped Forum }

Google Video Adds Search Options

Google Video exposes some advanced search options directly on the search results pages: click on "show options" and you can choose between three layouts (TV view, list view, grid view), pick a duration interval, sort the results by date or view only the high-quality videos.


Google has recently added a similar feature for web search results and, even though it should make the advanced search options more visible, most users will never click on "show options" to find them.