Google has finally added street level imagery for some of the biggest cities from Germany: Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Munich and 16 other cities. Unfortunately, many of the images are blurred because of privacy concerns. According to Spiegel, the launch has been delayed for several years.
In contrast to other countries, the launch of Street View was met with considerable resistance from politicians and privacy protection advocates in Germany, including the country's consumer protection minister, Isle Aigner of the conservative Christian Social Union, who criticized the service as an incursion on people's privacy. (... )
As was widely expected, one doesn't have to look very far in Street View to find homes that have been blurred out. Prior to the introduction of the service, more than 244,000 households in the first 20 cities to be placed online submitted requests to have their homes blurred out. Google claims the figure represents only 3 percent of households. (...)
Nevertheless, there are considerable obstructed images in the German version of Street View. In any instance where an apartment renter asked to have their flat pixilated, Google blurred out the entire building they live in. Data protection authorities believe that up to a million households across the country have been blurred out by the company.
Google Chrome's comic book was a great way to introduce to the world a new browser, but not everyone knew what's an URL or a web app. "20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web" is a guidebook created by the Google Chrome team that tries to address this issue by explaining complicated terms like "Internet", "cloud computing", "JavaScript", "HTML5", "cookies", "URL", "IP address" using illustrations and real life analogies. Here's an example:
"An IP address is a series of numbers that tells us where a particular device is on the Internet network, be it the google.com server or your computer. It's a bit like mom's phone number: just as the phone number tells an operator which house to route a call to so it reaches your mom, an IP address tells your computer which other device on the Internet to communicate with — to send data to and get data from."
The guidebook is actually a great example of an HTML5 web application that works offline and Google recommends to read it in "Chrome or any up-to-date, HTML5-compliant modern browser". Most of the examples from the book are about Google Chrome and that's what makes it look like a Chrome ad.
2010 is the year when Google made the most significant changes to the Google search interface. After many years of improving the underlying search technology without too many obvious changes, Google felt that it has to morph Google search into a modern web application.
Today, Google's search engine has a lot of features that clutter the interface and advanced search features that can't be disabled. The focus has shifted from simplicity to interactivity. Google tries to anticipate your query after typing a few characters, you can filter the results by clicking on an option from the sidebar and you can even preview the results using annotated screenshots.
Until a few years ago, Google tried to find the best search results for your query. Now it helps you find the best query for your search. Google shows search suggestions, automatically corrects typos, ignores words from your query and fetches the list of search results as you type a query. Google search is now a web app that empowers users to adjust the results and to make decisions. It's not a decision search engine, it's just a search engine that lets you decide what are the best results.
Google's results are already personalized using signals like location or search history, but that's no longer enough to sift through billions of search results. The search box can't always capture user intent, so Google had to find ways to extend the search box to the entire search results page.
"As people get more sophisticated at search they are coming to us to solve more complex problems. To stay on top of this, we have spent a lot of time looking at how we can better understand the wide range of information that's on the web and quickly connect people to just the nuggets they need at that moment," explained a Google blog post from 2009 that announced the search options sidebar.
Google is all about reducing the friction of entering a query. You no longer have to "feel lucky" when you type something in the search box because the results are displayed instantly and you can quickly adjust them. Google's results don't have to be perfect because you can customize them until they're perfect for you.
There's one Google doodle that captures the essence of Google's transformation from a simple search engine to an interactive web app. It was used to promote Google Instant, but it's probably the best summary of this post:
Until today, the mobile version of Google was only useful if you wanted to read a document or download some of your files. From now on, documents will no longer be read-only. If you have a phone or a tablet that runs Android 2.2+ or iOS 3.0+ and the Google Docs interface language is set to English, you'll be able edit documents from your mobile device and the best thing is that you don't need to install a new application.
"It's easy to get started: visit docs.google.com in a browser on a supported device, and select the document you want to edit. Then, when you're viewing it, press the Edit button to switch to the mobile editor," suggests Google.
I couldn't find the Edit button, but that's because the new features aren't yet available to everyone. Google promises that the mobile editor will be rolled out in the next few days and you won't have to buy an iPad or a Samsung Galaxy Tab to use it because it will also work on an iPhone or an Android phone that runs Froyo.
Unfortunately, the mobile editor will only work for documents created using the new document editor. It's difficult to understand why Google couldn't find a way to convert the documents created using the old editor to the new format.
This is a really strange bug. If you use Google to search for [android], [android market] or [android phone] from an Android phone, you won't get any result. Google only shows ads related to your query and a standard message: "Your search did not match any documents".
It's not clear if this is an Android bug or a Google search bug, but it's certainly not an Easter egg. If you don't have an Android phone, try this page to use the Android-optimized interface.
Update: it seems that the same bug affects Google's iPhone interface and there are many other queries that don't return any result. "When signed into the mobile site, I see some search results, but not for all queries. I'm on a Nexus One. In the classic interface, everything works fine," says a Google user. "I'm having the same issue on an iPhone 4. No results for super common terms, but images and location searches are unaffected," confirms another user.
Google's free navigation software is now available in Australia and New Zealand. "Google Maps Navigation is a feature of Google Maps for Mobile that provides voice-guided turn by turn directions in real time. That means that instead of printing out your directions in advance, or having your co-pilot read aloud from list of directions, you can use your Android smartphone to guide you there directly," explains Google. To use this feature you need a smartphone that runs Android 1.6 or a more recent version of Android.
At the moment, Google Maps Navigation is available in 17 countries, but this number will increase when Google starts to use its own mapping data in other countries. As Greg Sterling points out, "at some point during the course of the past couple of years, perhaps catalyzed by the shock of Nokia's roughly $8 billion acquisition of Navteq, Google decided it needed to 'own' maps top to bottom. Since that time the company has been making a systematic effort to collect and improve the base data for this highly strategic product. That's partly what Street View driving is about: getting roads and other data for Maps (and now Navigation) in addition to imagery and WiFi hotspot locations."
One of the most useful Google Suggest features missing from Google Instant was the Web History integration. Google Suggest used to show a list of previously typed searches if you were logged in to a Google account, so you could quickly select the query without having to type it again.
This feature is back in Google Instant and it hasn't changed too much. You'll still see up to 3 suggestions from your Web History, but the "Remove" link is more visible and personalized suggestions have a different color.
Unfortunately, Google's implementation is not great because it shows too many suggestions from your Web History and your previously typed searches are very likely to become predictions. For example, if you've searched for [Microsoft Tellme] two days ago and you now start to type "micros", Google will display the results for [Microsoft Tellme].
Yahoo launched a new service that shows information about the volume of searches, popular queries and demographic information about users. It's called Yahoo Clues and it's similar to Google Trends and Google Insights for Search. Unlike Google's services, Yahoo Clues is limited to the US and it only shows information for the past 30 days.
"With Yahoo Clues, you can discover and compare trending information for search terms of interest to you, or explore popular trending search terms on Yahoo. You can see search volume charts, demographic graphs, maps, or even related searches specific to a demographic group. We're also experimenting with an interesting feature called Search Flow, which offers a unique look at people's search patterns and the next most probable search term people try after searching for a query," informs Yahoo.
For example, if you compare the queries [Google Buzz] and [Google Reader], you'll notice that Google Reader is much more popular than Google Buzz, it's not very popular with teens, but it's very popular with women, which is rather peculiar.
Bagi para programmer yang menyukai Ubuntu, kali ini saya akan memberikan tips menarik yang pasti kalian suka. Tips menarik ini khusus berikan untuk para programmer web. Tentu saja para programmer web tidak luput melakukan koding dengan PHP. Nah, untuk meng-compile file PHP tersebut, kita membutuhkan XAMPP Control Panel. Jika kalian belum mempunyai XAMPP Control Panel, silahkan download dan install XAMPP Linux disini. Jika sudah, silahkan ikuti petunjuk disini untuk menaruh file PHP kalian di folder htdocs.
Pertama, kalian harus mengkompresi folder tempat kalian menyimpan file PHP. Caranya klik kanan foldernya, lalu pilih Compress, setelah itu, pilih format .tar.gz. Selanjutnya, pindahkan file hasil kompresi ke folder Home kalian. Kemudian masuklah ke Terminal.
Ingin menggunakan XAMPP Control Panel di Ubuntu 10.10? Kali ini saya akan memberikan tips, cara menginstall XAMPP Control Panel di Ubuntu 10.10. Disini saya tidak hanya akan menjelaskan mengenai cara menginstallnya, tetapi cara menjalankan XAMPP juga. Versi dari XAMPP yang akan saya install disini adalah xampp-linux-1.7.3a.tar.gz. Langkah awal, silahkan download terlebih dahulu file XAMPP tersebut di situs resmi XAMPP. Untuk lebih jelasnya, silahkan ikuti petunjuk dibawah ini:
Setelah kalian selesai mendownload XAMPP, taruh file hasil download di folder "Home/(nama_user)". Setelah itu, buka Terminal, caranya klik menu Application -> Accessories -> Terminal. Kemudian login sebagai root, caranya ketikkan perintah berikut di terminal.
If you frequently make a mistake when you type a word in Google Docs, you can now ask Google to automatically correct the mistake for you. Right-click on the word, select "AutoCorrect" and pick the most appropriate correction.
After almost two years of waiting, Google Voice's iPhone app has been finally approved in the App Store. It looks much better than the HTML5 web app and you can enable push notifications for voicemail and text messages.
Google Voice for iPhone doesn't beat the Android app because it doesn't integrate with the standard phone app, doesn't synchronize the inbox and doesn't offer advanced options for notifications, but that's because iOS has many limitations.
Google says that the application requires iOS 3.1 or a more recent version of Apple's mobile operating system. Google Voice is still limited to the US, but you no longer need an invitation to use it. Hopefully, Google will add support for the VoIP service from Gmail in a future update.
Google tests a way to monetize Goggles, the mobile application for visual search. "A year ago, Google introduced a smartphone application that lets users take photos of objects and get search results in return. The company will take that capability into the world of marketing with an experiment allowing five [US] brands to use the application in their promotional materials". Here are the five brands that are part of the experiment: Buick, Delta, Diageo, Disney and T-Mobile.
Android and iPhone users in the US will be able to scan the magazine ads for Buick Regal, T-Mobile G2 and the movie posters for Disney's "Tron: Legacy" to find more information from the official sites.
Michael Slinger, Google's head of mobile search advertising sales in North America, says that "it's a learning experiment for us more than an opportunity to make money," but it could be another reason to use Google Goggles.
Google launched a new service called Hotpot that promises to improve local search results using recommendations from your friends. "With Hotpot, we're making local search results for places on Google more personal, relevant and trustworthy," explains Google.
To get useful recommendations, you first need to share your ratings with your friends, but Hotpot's main problem is that it's not connected to any social network. When you first visit the service, Google asks you to enter a nickname for Google Places and to send invitations to some of your Gmail contacts. You're creating a new contacts group in a standalone application, instead of using an existing list of friends.
Google Hotpot is mostly useful when you try to find a place using Google's local search engine. Google personalizes the results by promoting the local businesses recommended by your friends.
Unfortunately, Hotpot is a completely unnecessary service, considering that you could already review places and that the reviews were already public. Google Maps was one of the first Google services that integrated with Google Profiles, so sharing your ratings with your friends was the obvious next step. Google Reader did that in 2007, but many users were unhappy because their favorite posts were automatically shared with Google Talk contacts and some of those contacts were automatically added by Google. Two years later, Google Buzz made the same mistake by automatically subscribing users to the list of Google Talk friends.
Google will never develop successful social services until users are able to create a list of friends that could be used in multiple services. To avoid the backslash from the Google Buzz launch, Google Hotpot asks you to manually add friends, but maintaining separate lists of friends is cumbersome.
Google has recently removed three useful options from the advanced search sidebar. You can longer restrict the results to shopping-related pages or remove shopping sites from the results.
Another option that has been removed is page previews, which displayed a longer snippet and a thumbnail for each search result. This feature has been replaced by Instant Preview, but you can no longer see all the thumbnails next to the search results.
When Google launched the sidebar, back in May 2009, it was the first time when powerful features like restricting the results to recent pages didn't require to visit the advanced search page. "We think of the Search Options panel as a tool belt that gives you new ways to interact with Google Search, and we plan to fill it with more innovative and useful features in the future."
Bagi IT lovers sekalian yang menyukai sistem operasi gratis seperti Ubuntu, dan kalian ingin memaksimalkan kinerja Ubuntu, pasti kalian ingin menginstall software penting di Ubuntu. Misalkan saja, Netbeans IDE, Packet Tracer atau yang lainnya. Nah, saya sendiri telah menginstall kedua software tersebut. Dan kali ini, saya akan memberikan tutorial bagaimana cara menginstall Packet Tracer 5.3 di Ubuntu 10.10. Disini saya hanya akan memberikan cara menginstall Packet Tracer dengan nama file PacketTracer53_i386_installer-deb.bin. Jadi jika kalian mendownload file Packet Tracer 5.3 dengan format .tar.gz, maka kalian tidak akan menemukan cara menginstallnya disini.
Untuk memulai, pertama silahkan kalian download dulu Packet Tracer pada link http://195.148.217.80/Public/Cisco/Programs/PacketTracer/Linux/Ubuntu/. Silahkan pilih dan download file PacketTracer53_i386_installer-deb.bin. Ketika proses download telah selesai, taruh file hasil download di folder Home kalian. Kemudian bukalah terminal untuk memulai menginstall Packet Tracer. Caranya Application -> Accessories -> Terminal.
