A Simple Way to Specify Image Licenses

Google has recently added a Creative Commons filter in Google Image Search, but it didn't explain how to specify the license so that your images are properly identified.

The trick is to enclose the image and the license's link in a div tag and to use RDFa's about attribute to specify the resource. For example:

<div about="image.jpg">
<img src="image.jpg" alt="" />
<a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/">Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 3.0</a>
</div>

Google Reader's "Send to" Feature

Google Reader added a new feature that lets you share posts in other services: Twitter, Facebook, Digg. The feature is opt-in, so you need to go to the settings page, click on the "Send to" tab and pick your favorite services.


After selecting an item, use the keyboard shortcut Shift+T to quickly open the "send to" menu. Google Reader opens a new tab when you choose one of the "send to" options and most of the necessary information it's already pre-filled.


If your favorite service is not included in Google Reader's list, you can add it from the settings page by clicking on "Create a custom link". Here's how to add a "send to" option for Google Bookmarks.

Name: Google Bookmarks
URL: http://www.google.com/bookmarks/mark?op=edit&output=popup&bkmk=${url}&title=${title}
Icon URL: http://www.google.com/favicon.ico

And here's how to use AddToAny, a service that lets you select between many social sites.

Name: Add to Any
URL: http://www.addtoany.com/share_save?linkurl=${url}&linkname=${title}
Icon URL: http://www.addtoany.com/favicon.ico

Google Reader added two other options: you can now subscribe to sites added to your contacts' profiles and mark as read items older than a day, a week or two weeks. The second option is useful if you have a lot of unread items and you only want to read the recent news. As you probably know, Google Reader automatically marks as read the items that are older than a month and this can't be changed.

More In-Your-Face Google Ads

Barry Schwartz mentioned last week that Google tests a new position for search ads. The ads stay closer to the organic results and they're no longer next to the scrollbar. The experiment was probably successful and the change should be visible to everyone.



Google also started to show related searches below the ads and the suggestions are commercially-oriented. It's a good way to show more relevant ads and to determine the user's intention.

Some of the ads display product listings from Google Base and Google shows a thumbnail next to the list of products.


Update. Daniel Dulitz, from Google, has an interesting comment: "It would be easy to just increase revenue. What is hard is to make ads appropriately visible when you want to see them without being in your face when you don't want to see them. People are smart -- users ignore banner ads because they've proven useless over time -- so if you just make ads more visible, without regard to their utility, it's doubly self-defeating. Very tricky business."

From iPhone to G1 and Back

Andre Torrez switched to HTC Dream (also known as T-Mobile G1) after using Apple's iPhone for two years. "I've gone from absolutely loving Apple as gatekeeper to my device's software to just flat out hating it. The past few months have been a parade of sad stories of developers getting bit by app store policies, or us, the users, losing out on software that would have been great to have. Google Voice, for example, has been something I've been eagerly waiting for every since I was invited to use the service."

Switching to an Android phone wasn't a pleasant experience for Andre, who found Android apps less polished, the virtual keyboard was disappointing, while the hardware was slow.

The bright side of switching from the iPhone to an Android phone was that applications could run in the background. For example, Andre found a very useful open source application called Astrid that lets you manage your tasks.

Astrid has a feature that is not even possible on the iPhone. Using a Locale plugin, you can assign tags to task items that trigger alarms when you are in certain situations. For example, you can have a task to "buy batteries" and assign it a tag of "store". Then in Locale you connect the tag "store" with a situation in which you are near your local hardware store. Or simply maintain "home" and "work" task lists with reminders.

Here's a real example I am now using this for: I have a task called "buy muni pass" which is only available a few days before the end of the month and only from certain retailers. I walk by a place that sells them, but I always forget to buy them during the window and I usually remember when I'm nowhere near the store.

Sometimes you have to choose between a great user experience with many limitations and a less polished interface that's more open to the future. Google should invest more on improving Android's interface and on making it easier to develop great looking apps. One of the reasons why Windows Mobile isn't very popular is that Microsoft couldn't develop a compelling interface that encouraged people to use the product.

Unlike other smart phones, the iPhone made it easier to search Google, to browse the Web and to upload videos. "The iPhone OS has only 8% of global smartphone market share, but generates 43% of mobile Web requests and 65% of [web] usage", according to an AdMob report from May 2009.

Update: Andre switched back to the iPhone: "I give up. I thought it'd be fun to see what life was like on a different platform but I think I've seen more than enough on this hardware. The device is definitely too slow to get anything done and I have found myself not going to the phone when in a situation where I used to check my mail and catch up on Twitter. I stood in line at the ATM and just didn't bother."

{ via John Gruber }

On Google File System

Google File System is "a scalable distributed file system for large distributed data-intensive applications" created by Google. Initially used to store Google's search indexes and the crawling data, GFS is now mostly used to store user generated content.

ACM has an interesting interview with Sean Quinlan, who was a GFS tech lead and is now a principal engineer at Google.

Although organizations don't make a habit of exchanging file-system statistics, it's safe to assume that GFS is the largest file system in operation (in fact, that was probably true even before Google's acquisition of YouTube). Hence, even though the original architects of GFS felt they had provided adequately for at least a couple of orders of magnitude of growth, Google quickly zoomed right past that.

One thing that helped tremendously was that Google built not only the file system but also all of the applications running on top of it. While adjustments were continually made in GFS to make it more accommodating to all the new use cases, the applications themselves were also developed with the various strengths and weaknesses of GFS in mind. "Because we built everything, we were free to cheat whenever we wanted to," Gobioff neatly summarized. "We could push problems back and forth between the application space and the file-system space, and then work out accommodations between the two."

The guys who built Gmail went to a multihomed model, so if one instance of your Gmail account got stuck, you would basically just get moved to another data center. Actually, that capability was needed anyway just to ensure availability. Still, part of the motivation was that they wanted to hide the GFS problems.

{ Thanks, Daniel. }

Test Google's New Search Infrastructure

Google has been working on a new search infrastructure and you can now test it if you visit www2.sandbox.google.com. Don't expect new features or better search results, but if you find something interesting, post it in the comments.

"It's the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits "under the hood" of Google's search engine, which means that most users won't notice a difference in search results," mentions the Google Webmaster Blog.

This is the first time when Google invites users to preview a new version of its search engine, so the "invisible" changes must be significant. From my first searches, I've noticed that the results are returned twice faster and they're more recent, especially if your query is related to some recent events (e.g.: searching for FriendFeed - old Google vs new Google). Many results are irrelevant, but they're displayed mostly because they're pages from official domains: a search for Facebook returns a lot of irrelevant events from Facebook's international domains.

Results #6 - #10 from a search for [Facebook]

Google's new infrastructure doesn't deal well with proxies and redirects, so you'll see many weird results like the ones returned if you search for [google blog].

Results #8 - #10 from a search for [google blog]

Matt Cutts says that the new infrastructure is code-named Caffeine, "the update is primarily under the hood" and you can share your feedback by clicking on "Dissatisfied? Help us improve" at the bottom of the search results and mentioning "caffeine" in your message.

Test Google Caffeine at: www2.sandbox.google.com.

Contextual Google Suggestions

Google shows different search suggestions, depending on your actions. If you type some keywords in the search box, you'll usually see suggestions that start with your keywords.


After performing the search, Google will show a new type of suggestions that include your keywords, but not necessarily as a prefix. Google assumes that you're not happy with the search results and you're trying to find a query that returns better search results.