Google's Special Snippets for Price Comparison Sites

Google added a new option for customizing search results snippets. If you want to buy a product and you're interested to find a good price, click on "Show options" to enable the search options sidebar and select "Prices from the page".


Google will show the same search results, but price comparison sites like PriceGrabber, Shopping.com, Shopzilla will include a message above the snippet: "This site aggregates prices from multiple stores". Snippets have a different formatting: a list of products and the corresponding prices.


The feature would be more useful if Google allowed you to restrict the results to price comparison sites and if the results were better formatted, for example sorted by price. It's also surprising to see that Google doesn't integrate the results from it's own price comparison site, Google Product Search.

What Do You Expect from Google Chrome OS?

I've asked some time ago the readers of this blog what they expect from Google Chrome OS, an open-source operating system built around Google Chrome, that will be released later this year. Here are some of their answers:

Integration with Google Accounts

"I believe Google accounts will be used to login to Chrome OS. Kinda whereever you go, you can use your Google account username/password to login. I hope it will use local disk to store frequently accessed file and sync it to Docs like Dropbox."

It should work offline

"There would have to be some kind of offline credential caching so you can log on even when you are not connected to the network."

Instant boot

"The thing I need with Google Chrome OS is instant bootup. I want something where I open up my laptop and the screen turns on and puts a web browser in my face."

It should be fast

"I just want to get rid of infinite waiting for load up. When I turn on my computer, half the times is just to open a web browser, a media player and an instant messaging program. I don't want to have to wait AGES for all sorts of background programs and services to load up."

Built-in desktop search

"I like the desktop search element of Google Desktop: it's a good way to access my files, e-mails and web history quickly. That should be included in Chrome OS. And there should be an offline cache of everything, so that I can still see read web pages I've visited even when offline."

In sync

"Syncing is important these days. Not just bookmarks, but passwords, and "user states" so you can pick up on another machine almost where you leave off on one. I would be able to start working on a document on my desktop machine and then switch to my laptop and hit the road, confident that when i open the document authoring app I'll be right where I left off."

Invisible

"Google ChromeOS should save screen real estate. On smaller devices like netbooks, you need to conserve as much screen real estate as possible."

Use applications without installing them

"Even if storage memory is cheaper now than ever, mobile phones, netbooks, etc. will benefit of avoiding to install software specific for each use on the physical memory and maintaining it "in the cloud". Sites should have the capability (and maybe a standard protocol) to communicate each other with the browser as a medium (avoiding the download and following upload of the object), user should have the capability to chose the service that he wants to subscribe to (eventually choosing it from an online appstore-like site), the OS should be able to recommend new and interesting service to subscribe to the user based on information collected (with his permission) about his behaviour."

Run Windows applications

"I want to run Windows programs, as well as games. I want Chrome OS to be able to do everything a normal computer can do! That way I can get ditch Windows and get Chrome OS for (hopefully) free!"

Don't forget the hardware!

"Driver support for a wide range of mobile hardware -> platform hardware combination. I'm particularly interested in WiMax support on an ARM processor."

So people want a fast operating system that loads instantly, doesn't use too many resources, saves your data online so you can continue your work from another computer and it keeps the data in sync, works offline, uses applications without installing them, runs Windows applications and it's compatible with many combinations of hardware.

What do you expect from Google Chrome OS?

Google Translate Equilibrium

A fun way to use machine translation services is to start with a text, translate it in a different language and then translate the result in the original language. Translation Party extends this idea by repeating the translation until the text is no longer modified. The service uses Google Translate's API and it translates English texts into Japanese and then back in English.


{ via Waxy Links }

Social iGoogle Tested in Australia

The main reason for one of the most hated Google redesigns, the famous iGoogle update from 2008, was to transform gadgets into social web applications. The visible changes didn't make the upgrade compelling, since most users only saw a sidebar that took away some space from an already crowded homepage. Some gadgets could be maximized in a canvas view to display even more information, but not many gadgets used this opportunity in a meaningful way.


Google didn't offer an option to switch back to the classic iGoogle interface, but you can still find it if you go to http://www.google.com/ig?hl=all and in some local versions of iGoogle.

The second step of the iGoogle update is to make it more social by converting iGoogle into an OpenSocial container. That means you'll be able to add to iGoogle applications that are already available in social networks like MySpace, Orkut, LinkedIn. The main problem is that iGoogle is not a social network and the "friendship" concept is vague in the GoogleLand.

Google Australia announces that the local version of iGoogle has already added the social features:

"Starting this week, we're rolling out some new social gadgets for iGoogle to all Australian users. Not only can you continue to do all the things you love to do on your homepage, but you now have the option to share all kinds of information, play games and collaborate with your friends too. (...) Your current gadgets will continue to work normally and you don't have to take advantage of the social gadgets if you decide it doesn't fit your interest. But by adding and enabling social gadgets, you'll be able to have an even deeper, interactive experience with your gadgets when you share them with friends."

But who are these Google friends? The answer is pretty simple: the contacts from the built-in Friends group.

"Friends is a group to help you organize your contacts. You can move contacts in and out of this group at any time, and this is the only group of people who can see your updates and with whom you can share social gadgets and social gadget activities. Similarly, you can see someone else's updates or social gadget activities only if they have included you in their Friends group."

For Google, friendship is a one-way concept. You don't have to invite other people to become your friends: just add them to the built-in Friends group and they'll be able "to see what you share or do in social gadgets through the gadgets themselves, or through a new feed of information called Updates, a way to see what your friends are doing on iGoogle".

An example of social-enabled gadget is "Social Photos", which shows the latest photos uploaded to Picasa Web and Flickr by your friends.


Other examples include: the "Timeline" gadget, that lets you share what you are doing and see your friends' status messages on a timeline; puzzles and games like NY Times Crossword, chess, trivia; collaborative gadgets like ToDo List.

The features will be rolled out this week at iGoogle Australia, but you can also try them in the iGoogle Developer Sandbox. Developers can find more about iGoogle's social gadgets by visiting this page.

Google Chrome Themes Gallery

Google Chrome's themes gallery is now available and you can select one of the 28 themes if you install Google Chrome 3.0 Beta, Google Chrome 3.0 Developer Preview or if you have a recent Chromium build.




Installing a theme isn't a smooth process: you download a .crx file, then Google Chrome loads theme and offers the option to go back to the default theme. You can't preview themes before installing theme and there's no interface for managing themes. The only way to uninstall themes, extensions and to reload themes is by typing chrome://extensions/ in the address bar.

(Update: Alexandro Jimenez says that chrome://extensions/ is buggy and a Chrome developer mentions that "you're not meant to use chrome://extensions/ to manage themes". I'll continue to use it until Chrome adds a theme manager.)


For now, the gallery only includes themes created by Google, but you'll be able to create your own theme and upload it to the gallery in the near future. Check how you can create a theme for Google Chrome.

Bonus themes. There are two sample themes that aren't included in the gallery: Camo and Snowflakes, one of the best Chrome themes.

Google Chrome's Browser Sync

Google Browser Sync, the Firefox extension that synchronized your bookmarks, cookies, passwords and sessions across multiple computers, is about to be resurrected in Google Chrome.


Google works on a feature that will initially synchronize bookmarks, but it will be extended to additional data types.

"To make this sync infrastructure scale to millions of users, we decided to leverage existing XMPP-based Google Talk servers to give us "push" semantics, rather than only depending on periodically polling for updates. This means when a change occurs on one Google Chrome client, a part of the infrastructure effectively sends a tiny XMPP message, like a chat message, to other actively connected clients telling them to sync," mentions a Google document.

The feature will not be limited to Google's sync service. "When we fully land the sync code (hopefully in the coming few weeks), developers will certainly be able to pass in an alternate sync server address via a command line flag and use that to develop their own sync server," says Idan Avraham.

Ars Technica thinks that the sync service is related to Google's plans to release a browser-centric operating system, but I still find it intriguing that Google decided to discontinue Browser Sync, instead of improving it and making it available to other browsers. After all, not everyone will use Firefox, Google Chrome or Google Chrome OS and the seamless synchronization of browser data between all your computers and mobile phones will make you feel at home, no matter what computer you're using.

Synchronizing user data will certainly become a standard feature in all browsers, but it would be useful to build a service that synchronizes data between multiple browsers. Opera is the first major browser that added a sync service for both the desktop software and Opera Mini, while Mozilla Weave is a prototype of a future Firefox feature.

Inside Google Street View

Google has updated the articles about Google Street View with more information. Google explains how it intitially used vans to capture images, but they were later replaced by cars and tricycles.

{ photo licensed as Creative Commons By-NC by Andrew Dickson }

"Our current platforms include nine directional cameras for the 360° views, a GPS unit for positioning and laser range scanners. We design and engineer the Street View platforms to be simple and require minimal manufacturing resources. This approach facilitates the ability to be up and running in a short period of time and allows us to quickly scale and get our vehicles on the road around the world."

There's also a list of locations in which Google's Street View cars are operating, but it's limited to three countries: Canada, Germany and Switzerland.

{ via Google LatLong }

Knol's Equation Editor

Knol, Google's knowledge sharing service launched last year, has improved with a lot of new features that have gone unnoticed: collections, templates, categories, Google Analytics integration, review scorecards.

A recent feature added to Knol is a basic equation editor that uses the LaTeX markup language. "This markup language beautifully aligns, sizes and indents mathmatical symbols after they are expressed using a combination of standard letters, words and punctuation characters. The typical LaTeX equation is difficult to read until it is rendered by the typesetting engine that produces an image with the right size, layout and margins that you would expect to see in the equation if it were written in a book. Even though LaTeX can be used to format and markup entire documents, we only support the subset of the LaTeX language that is used to describe mathematical equations and expect that you'll use the standard Knol editor to handle formatting for the rest of your document."


The equation editor is not very user-friendly, so it's a good idea to be familiar with LaTeX, but it will hopefully be improved and added to other Google services, like Google Docs.