YouTube Resume

YouTube added a cool feature for those who watch long-form videos. If you're logged in, you watched at least one minute from a video that's longer than 20 minutes and there are more than 3 minutes left, then YouTube's player has a neat surprise for you: close the page and when you open it again, the player resumes where you left off watching.

It's a helpful addition, considering that not many desktop video players offer a similar feature.


Another change is that the HQ/HD flag is now sticky. Once you click on HQ or HD, YouTube will save the setting in a cookie and all the other videos will use the options, assuming that they have high-quality versions. "When you switch to view a video in high quality and lean back to enjoy the wide player experience, having to lean forward again to switch the experience back on, video after video, can be a real chore. Moving forward, your choice is sticky, meaning that when you go wide it will persist across your session."

Google Clusters Results from Forums

Google already knows if a page is part of a discussion group and it also extracts useful information like the number of posts or the date of the most recent post.

Now Google started to cluster forum threads and to show related discussions below some results. Google uses a similar technology for Google News, where news articles from more than 25,000 sources are categorized based on their similarity.


For now, this is just an experiment, so only a small percentage of Google's users will see the enhanced results.

Replace Google's Logo with a Doodle

If you like one of the many doodles used by Google to commemorate holidays and events, why not personalize Google's homepage and replace the standard logo with your favorite doodle? A Greasemonkey script created by the Google employee Tiffany Lane will help you pick a doodle from this page and make it sticky.

"By default the script will override your favorite doodle on holidays or any days with a special doodle (personally, I never want to miss a new doodle on the Google homepage). After the holiday is over, your favorite doodle will be back. However, you can change this preference so that your favorite is always shown," mentions the author.

Unfortunately, the script is quite complex and it only works in Firefox, assuming you've installed the Greasemonkey extension.


For iGoogle users, there's a gadget that lets you pick "one of the past Google holiday logos to sit atop your page, or have it cycle through them randomly".

{ via Search Engine Land }

On Browsers and Operating Systems

An interesting excerpt from "The Microsoft case: antitrust, high technology, and consumer welfare" by William Hepburn Page and John E. Lopatka, especially if you read it in light of Google's announcement that it will release a browser-centric operating system:

First, [Microsoft] included IE with Windows and required OEMs not to delete it. Second, it designed IE and Windows in such a way that it was difficult for anyone, OEMs or end users to delete it. The legality of Microsoft's contractual and technological linking of the browser and the operating system arose first in the interpretation of the 1995 consent decree and then in the 1998 case in the application of sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act. The issue in the consent decree case was whether the browser and the operating system were integrated, and therefore specifically exempt from the decree's anti-tying provisions. The Sherman Act section I issue was whether the browser was illegally tied to Windows, either contractually or by design. The Sherman Act section 2 issue was whether the technological and contractual linking of the browser and the operating system constituted illegal maintenance of a monopoly in operating systems. (...)

In his findings of fact, Judge Jackson treated Microsoft's contractual and technological bundling of IE and Windows as a single strategy to constrict the OEM channel. He first found that browsers are separate from operating systems. Consumers think of the browser as simply software that allows them to gain access to information on the Web. Some consumers want the browser provided separately from the operating system, either because they want a browser other than IE or because they do not use a browser and do not want one taking up space on the hard drive. Other operating system producers bundle a browser with their operating systems but they allow OEMs and users to delete it. Microsoft prohibits deletion even though it offers different versions of its browser separately for non-Windows operating systems.

Instead of integrating its own browser in Chrome OS, Google will build the operating system as an extension of the browser. In less than 10 years, browsers have evolved from being one of the many applications that can be installed on a computer to being an essential application that could even be used to replace a traditional operating system.

Google Docs Has an Equation Editor

Google Docs added the equation editor previously available in Knol. It's a basic LaTeX editor that's not very easy to use if you aren't familiar with LaTeX or programming.

Open a Google Docs document, click on "Insert" and select "Equation" from the menu. You can type LaTeX code or use the drop-downs to select Greek letters, fractions, integrals, functions, summations and other operators.


Google converts the code to an image using an undocumented feature of the Google Chart API. If you export the document as a Microsoft Word file or in a different format, Google Docs will only include the corresponding images.

If you know a better online LaTeX editor, tell us about it in a comment.

{ Thanks, Bogdan. }

Google Buys reCAPTCHA

reCAPTCHA seems like a perfect match for Google: it's a project that generates CAPTCHAs and uses the results to digitize books. "reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. (...) Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one."


It's no wonder that Google decided to acquire reCAPTCHA and use the service to improve Google Book Search's digitizing accuracy.

"reCAPTCHA's unique technology improves the process that converts scanned images into plain text, known as Optical Character Recognition (OCR). This technology also powers large scale text scanning projects like Google Books and Google News Archive Search. Having the text version of documents is important because plain text can be searched, easily rendered on mobile devices and displayed to visually impaired users. So we'll be applying the technology within Google not only to increase fraud and spam protection for Google products but also to improve our books and newspaper scanning process."

The service offers a simple JavaScript API that allows you to embed CAPTCHAs in any web page and many popular sites use it: Facebook, Twitter, Ticketmaster.

Google Chrome 3.0

You shouldn't read too much into Google Chrome's version numbers. Just because you can now install Google Chrome 3.0, it doesn't mean that Google wants to appear more mature than it already is. For Chrome, version numbers are just a way to highlight major milestones.

Three months after the first developer preview, Google Chrome 3.0 is out of beta and ready to replace the current stable version. Since Google updates the browser automatically, you might not even notice that you use a version that brings new features.

Even if it's one of the fastest browsers available today, Google Chrome continues to improve its performance. "We've improved by more than 150% in Javascript performance since our very first beta, and by more than 25% since the most recent stable release," mentions Google.

The new release supports themes so you can customize the browser with one of the 28 new themes. Not all of them are good-looking, but they're easy to install and you don't have to restart your browser after changing the theme.


Google Chrome 3.0 has an updated new tab page that lets you customize the pages reordering them using drag and drop, by pinning the pages you use frequently and removing the pages you no longer visit. Google simplified the page by removing the list of search boxes and the recent bookmarks.

(Tip: you can still use the previous new tab page design, by appending this flag to a Chrome shortcut: --old-new-tab-page.)


A feature you won't probably use too often, at least for now, is the support for the HTML5 video and audio tags. Like Firefox 3.5, Chrome includes video codecs that allow you to embed videos without using slow and unreliable plug-ins like Adobe Flash. You can test this feature in TinyVid.com, an experimental Ogg video uploading site, or in YouTube's HTML5 demo page, which uses an H.264 video.

One year after the first release, the numbers are impressive: "51 developer, 21 beta and 15 stable updates and 3,505 bugfixes". Google Chrome's market share is 2.84%, according to Net Applications, but the browser's impact was even more significant: Chrome set a high standard for browsers by focusing on speed, a simplified user interface and by handling web pages as if they were applications. Safari 4, as well as the the next versions of Firefox, are influenced by Google Chrome's simplicity.

In other Chrome news, the documentation for creating extensions is now available and the support for extensions is enabled by default in the dev channel. If you use the stable version of Chrome, you need to wait a little bit.

Google Fast Flip

Google Labs has been very active lately. The most recent service launched in Google Labs is Fast Flip, a visual version of Google News that encourages serendipitous discoveries.

"Fast Flip is a new reading experience that combines the best elements of print and online articles. Like a print magazine, Fast Flip lets you browse sequentially through bundles of recent news, headlines and popular topics, as well as feeds from individual top publishers. As the name suggests, flipping through content is very fast, so you can quickly look through a lot of pages until you find something interesting," explains Krishna Bharat, the man behind Google News.

The homepage shows thumbnails of the news articles and clicking on the thumbnail loads a screenshot of the article. You can't read the entire article in Google Fast Flip, so you need to visit the original source. The service shows articles from a small number of sources, including BBC News, New York Times, Newsweek and Slate.



The nice thing is that you can quickly go to the next preview by clicking on the blue right arrow or by using the right-arrow key. The service provides recommendation based on the articles you read, you email or explicitly like. There's also a mobile version optimized for iPhone and Android phones.

Bing Visual Search

Gone are the days when search engines provided mostly textual information, a list of 10 blue links that invite you to find the answers on your own. Search engines are now focused on extracting useful information from web pages and surfacing data in interesting ways.

In June, Google launched Squared, a Labs project that generates lists of entities related to your query and finds values for the associated attributes. Search for [dog breeds] and you'll find a list of breeds, suggestive images, information about the average weight and the country of origin.

Bing, Microsoft's search engine, has just launched a similar feature: visual search. It's just an early demo and it requires Siverlight, but it looks more impressive than Google Squared. Probably because Microsoft built the interface around images and used the attributes to refine the results.

"Visual Search allows you to quickly scroll through the galleries or do a one-click refinement using the quick tabs on the left, which are specifically relevant to the type of results you are browsing through," mentions Bing's blog.


Bing's visual galleries are more polished than the results generated by Google Squared, but Bing only shows galleries for a small number of queries like "popular TV shows" or "world leaders" and the information is obtained from structured data sources.

It remains to be seen if Microsoft manages to extend the visual search engine and dynamically generate results for any query. For now, you can play with the demo galleries.

Export the Locations Saved in Google Maps

Google Maps saves the most recent 100 locations typed in the search box so you can easily retrieve them. If you want to migrate to a different Google account or you'd like to view the locations in Google Earth, Bing Maps or another mapping service, you can now export the saved locations to a KML file.

In addition to exporting the locations, Google Maps also lets you import a KML file that includes a list of placemarks.


This is just one of the many Google features that prevent data "lock-in". Google has a Data Liberation team "whose singular goal is to make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products". It's a great initiative from a company that has always encouraged competition. If Blogger is no longer your platform of choice, you can migrate your data to WordPress or a different service. If Gmail is frequently down, has a poor spam filter or it's no longer your favorite webmail service, you can auto-forward your mail to a different service and fetch the existing messages using POP or IMAP.

"Many web services make it difficult to leave their services - you have to pay them for exporting your data, or jump through all sorts of technical hoops -- for example, exporting your photos one by one, versus all at once. We believe that users - not products - own their data, and should be able to quickly and easily take that data out of any product without a hassle," explains Google's public policy blog.

Further reading:

* DataLiberation.org
* Google's public policy blog
* This blog's In/Out label

Even More Recent Google Search Results

Ran Geva noticed that Google's date range restrictions have been extended and you can now find web pages indexed by Google less than one minute ago or even less than 10 seconds ago.

(Update. Google doesn't necessarily index web pages as soon as they're published, but the sites that use feeds or sitemaps are indexed pretty fast. With recent advancements like PubSubHubbub that provide real-time notifications for updates, the delay between publishing pages and finding them using Google will be further reduced.)

Click on "show options", select "past 24 hours" and tweak the URL by replacing "tbs=qdr:d" with "tbs=qdr:n" to find pages indexed in the past minute.

Example: a search for [Tiger Woods] restricted to almost real-time results.


The date restriction feature is quite flexible, but you need to know the syntax used by Google's URLs:

tbs=qdr:[name][value]

where [name] can be one of these values: s (second), n (minute), h (hour), d (day), w (week), m (month), y (year), while [value] is a number.

To find the web pages indexed less than 45 seconds ago that include the word "flu", use this URL:

http://www.google.com/search?q=flu&tbs=qdr:s45

Unfortunately, if you restrict the results to very recent web pages, Google shows a small sample and doesn't list all the results.

{ Thanks, Ran. }