SearchWiki Live Stream

If you're curious to see which web pages are voted in SearchWiki at the moment, add the SearchWiki Live Stream gadget to iGoogle. The canvas view shows the query that triggered each search results.


I tried to see if the gadget shows all the SearchWiki votes: I promoted a site, but it wasn't included in the live stream. Most likely, Google shows a small a sample of the SearchWiki votes.

For now, the SearchWiki live stream is the closest thing to the projection of current live search queries from Google's headquarters. Here's an excerpt from a post written by Doug Edwards, an ex-Googler.

A lot of visitors walk into the Googleplex lobby and stand mesmerized by the scrolling display of search queries crawling across the large monitor suspended over the receptionist's desk. (...) The query scroll is fascinating, though it's carefully screened for offensive terms that might clash with the wholesome decor. (...)

We talked about distributing it as a screen saver and beaming it to a live Jumbotron display in Times Square, because of its high fascination factor, but those ideas were ultimately vetoed by the founders.

Engineering did create a canned version of the scrolling queries screen that lived on a P.R. laptop for a while and it was used as a warm-up to presentations by executives at conferences, though I think Larry may finally have killed that too.

Larry never cared much for the scrolling queries screen. More than anyone, he was focused on privacy issues and alert to the currents of paranoia and information seepage that have recently come to the fore. He felt the scrolling screen could inadvertently reveal personal data, because queries could contain names or information that users would prefer to remain private (for example, "John Smith DUI arrest in Springfield" or "Mary Jones porn movie"). Moreover, it could cause people to think more about their privacy and raise unnecessary alarm over what information they were conveying with each search.

Google Acquires Gizmo5

Google confirms the acquisition of Gizmo5, a proprietary SIP soft phone. "The Gizmo5 network uses open standards for call management, Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP). However, the Gizmo5 client application is proprietary software and uses several proprietary codecs, including GIPS, iSAC, the wideband adaptive codec made popular by Skype," explains Wikipedia. Gizmo5 is "the only SIP service without PSTN-based US phone numbers that may be used with Google Voice."

"While we don't have any specific features to announce right now, Gizmo5's engineers will be joining the Google Voice team to continue improving the Google Voice and Gizmo5 experience. Current Gizmo5 users will still be able to use the service, though we will be suspending new signups for the time being, and existing users will no longer be able to sign up for a call-in number," mentions Google.

I wouldn't be surprised to see Gizmo5 morphing into a new version of Google Talk, with built-in support for Google Voice.

Better Search in Google Docs Viewer

Google's document viewer has a better search feature: you no longer have to manually locate the matches in the document. After performing a search, press Enter repeatedly to find the matches or click on the arrows placed below the search box.

The document viewer is used for the PDF files uploaded to Google Docs, for PDF/PPT/TIFF attachments in Gmail, for some PDF results in Google search and as a standalone service.


For some reason, Google Docs still doesn't index PDF files, so you can only find a file only if you know some words from its title.

Google Parental Controls: Lock SafeSearch

As previously anticipated, Google added a feature that lets you lock SafeSearch filtering. Google says that "SafeSearch screens for sites that contain explicit sexual content and deletes them from your search results".

SafeSearch could be easily disabled from Google's preferences page, so now parents have an additional safeguard: locking SafeSearch. Go to the search preferences page, click on "lock SafeSearch", log in to your Google account and wait until Google sets cookies for almost 200 domains.


"When you lock SafeSearch, two things will change. First, you'll need to enter your password to change the setting. Second, the Google search results page will be visibly different to indicate that SafeSearch is locked. Even from across the room, the colored balls give parents and teachers a clear visual cue that SafeSearch is still locked. And if you don't see them, it's quick and easy to verify and re-lock SafeSearch," explains Google.

The feature may seem clever, but it's not: you need to lock SafeSearch for all the browsers installed on your computer and for all the user accounts that might be used by your children. Another issue is that the lock can be easily disabled: just clear your browser's cookies. The colored balls are cute though, especially in a family-friendly context.

Google Latitude Alerts and Location History

Google Latitude added two new applications that make location tracking more useful: history and alerts.

Google Latitude History stores your locations and lets you visualize them on a map. You can remove some of the locations and export the history to a KML file. At the moment, you are the only one who can access your location history.

A more interesting application is Google Latitude Alerts, that "lets you receive and send alert notifications if Google Latitude friends are nearby when you're somewhere interesting or unusual. Alerts use Location History to send notifications only when they're most likely to be interesting to you and your nearby friends."

Google Latitude Alerts tries to be smart by only sending notifications when you're at an unusual location or when you're at a familiar place at an unusual time.

For some reason, enabling Google Latitude Alerts has an unexpected side-effect: "your nearby Latitude friends each receive an alert notification email that you are nearby, even if they haven't yet enabled Location Alerts. Alerts notify friends where you usually are on that day and time to explain why your location is unusual and the alert was sent."

Both applications are opt-in, so you need to explicitly enable them. Unfortunately, even if you don't enable alerts, you may still receive notifications from your friends. To disable the notifications, visit this page and click on "Opt out of notifications from friends".

{ via Google Mobile blog }

CSS Injection in Google Docs Forms

Flemming Steffensen found an undocumented trick that lets you customize a Google Docs form by injecting CSS.

Let's assume that the URL of your form is:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/embeddedform?key=0Ato1MNFt5ld1cExhRTl0c1ZMcF8zcWZJRTNPSGhLQkE

You can add some new CSS rules as a value of the f parameter:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/embeddedform?key=0Ato1MNFt5ld1cExhRTl0c1ZMcF8zcWZJRTNPSGhLQkE&f=;}body{font-size:14pt!important}.ss-q-title{color:green}

Here's the result.

The most important things to remember:

1. the value has to start with ;}
2. you need to use !important for some of the rules to override existing values
3. check the source code of the form to find the classes used by Google
4. this a trick that may no longer work in the future.

For more parameters that let you customize Google Docs forms, check this test page.

Go, Google's Programming Language

Some smart Google engineers decided that it's time to address the limitations of C and C++ by designing a new programming language: Go.

Go was born out of frustration with existing languages and environments for systems programming. Programming had become too difficult and the choice of languages was partly to blame. One had to choose either efficient compilation, efficient execution, or ease of programming; all three were not available in the same mainstream language. Programmers who could were choosing ease over safety and efficiency by moving to dynamically typed languages such as Python and JavaScript rather than C++ or, to a lesser extent, Java.

Go is an attempt to combine the ease of programming of an interpreted, dynamically typed language with the efficiency and safety of a statically typed, compiled language. It also aims to be modern, with support for networked and multicore computing. Finally, it is intended to be fast: it should take at most a few seconds to build a large executable on a single computer. To meet these goals required addressing a number of linguistic issues: an expressive but lightweight type system; concurrency and garbage collection; rigid dependency specification; and so on. These cannot be addressed well by libraries or tools; a new language was called for. [Language design FAQ]

Here's a Go program that outputs "Hello, World!":

Cheaper Google Storage

Google updated the pricing for the additional storage you can buy in Gmail and Picasa Web Albums: $0.25 per GB per year.

Storage	Price (per year)
20 GB	$5
80 GB	$20
200 GB	$50
400 GB	$100
1 TB	$256
2 TB	$512
4 TB	$1024
8 TB	$2048
16 TB	$4096

Here's some historical data:

Pricing (August 2007)

Storage	Price (per year)
6 GB	$20
25 GB	$75
100 GB	$250
250 GB	$500

Pricing (January 2009)

Storage	Price (per year)
10 GB	$20
40 GB	$75
150 GB	$250
400 GB	$500

Google says that the storage is shared between Gmail and Picasa Web Albums, but it's obvious that the additional storage will mostly be used in Google Docs, when the service morphs into Google Drive.

"While storage costs have been dropping naturally, we've also been working hard to improve our infrastructure to reduce costs even further. Today, we're dramatically lowering our prices to make extra storage more affordable. You can now buy 20 GB for only $5 a year, twice as much storage for a quarter of the old price, and enough space for more than 10,000 full resolution pictures taken with a five megapixel camera," explains Google.

If you've already purchased Google storage, there's a good news: "Your total storage will be increased according to this page at no extra cost. For example, if you had previously purchased 10 GB of Google storage, you now have 80 GB available."

I wonder how much free storage Google Drive will offer when it's released.

Show Week Numbers in Google Calendar

Google Calendar's gallery of interesting calendars lets you add some useful features: show week numbers, the day of the week, sunrise and sunset time for your location.


Some of these features should be available as options because they're difficult to find in the list of calendars and they clutter the interface.

Google's decision to remove public calendar search had a strange side effect: users can no longer find public calendars with features that are missing in Google Calendar. A post from 2007 explained how to show week numbers in Google Calendar by searching public calendars.

{ Thanks, Sean. }

Memulai Database dengan Query Analyzer

"Om Swastiastu"

Setelah kalian berhasil menginstal Microsoft SQL 2000, bukalah Query Analyzer, caranya klik Start, All Programs, Microsoft SQL Server, Query Analyzer.
Setelah kalian membuka Query Analyzer, akan muncul jendela Connect to SQL Server, jika kalian tidak berhasil dalam proses koneksi ini, maka kalian tidak bisa membuat Database, ikuti langkahnya seperti gambar dibawah ini.

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Cara Menginstall Microsoft SQL 2000

"Om Swastiastu"

Sebelum kita mempelajari Pemrograman Database atau Basis Data, tentu nya anda harus mempunyai editor nya dulu, nah disini saya menggunakan Microsoft SQL 2000 (diberikan oleh pihak kampus). Nah saya akan memberikan tutorial menginstall Microsoft SQL 2000 tersebut. Berikut ini caranya:
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Rico Blanco - Come Closer

Hai semua, anda tentunya pernah mendengarkan lagu ini dalam sebuah iklan pasta gigi di semua stasiun tv tanah air. Ingat dengan lagu iklan Close Up bukan?? Di iklan ini tampak seorang gadis meniup gelembung-gelembung udara. Kemudian gelembung itu terbang dan akhirnya mendarat di wajah seorang pria yang kemudian menghampiri gadis tersebut.

Tapi bukan mengenai gambaran dari iklannya tujuan saya menulis postingan ini. Lagu yang dimainkan pada iklan tersebutlah yang membuat saya menyukai iklan tersebut dan menulis postingan ini. Dari sana saya berusaha mencari mp3 dari potongan lagu tersebut. And finally I found the song. Jika kalian ingin mendengarkan lagunya saya akan memberikan link downloadnya di akhir postingan ini. Juga saya akan memberikan lirik lagu ini.
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Google Buys AdMob

Google acquired AdMob, a mobile ad company well-known for its innovative solutions to monetize iPhone apps and iPhone-optimized web sites. "AdMob is the world's largest mobile advertising marketplace, offering solutions for discovery, branding and monetization on the mobile web."

"Publishers and developers are increasingly searching for ways to make more money from their content in the rapidly evolving online mobile space. Google is working hard to provide those means of monetization so that mobile content can grow as quickly as we'd all like it to. AdMob accelerates this process for us with their talent and technology," explains Google. "Google currently makes a very small amount from mobile ads relative to our overall revenue, but the prospects for this space are excellent."

In the past year, Google has launched many feature that improved mobile ads: a new search ad format for iPhone and Android phones, ads for mobile apps, better AdSense ads for smartphones.

"Despite the tremendous growth in mobile usage and the substantial investment by many businesses in the space, the mobile web is still in its early stages. We believe that great mobile advertising products can encourage even more growth in the mobile ecosystem. That's what has us excited about this deal," mentions a Google blog post.

Google paid $750 million for AdMob, the third biggest Google acquisition after DoubleClick ($3.1 billion) and YouTube ($1.65 billion).

Google Docs Labs?

A Google Docs error message has an interesting suggestion: "If you are running a Google Docs experiment, turn it off."

Google Docs will probably add a Labs section with experimental features, much like Gmail Labs and Google Calendar Labs.


Here's what I'd like to see in the list of experiments: document pagination, chat sidebar in all Google Docs services, limited editing mode, integration with Google Scholar, autofilter and better conditional formatting for Google Spreadsheets.

Some of the most popular suggestions for Google Docs: drag and drop image placement, more page formatting options, mobile editing, integration with Gmail and an image editor.