Google Sets Will Be Shut Down

Google Sets, one of my favorite Google Labs experiments, will be shut down on September 5, just like Google Squared. Launched in 2002, Google Sets is the only experiment from the early days of Google Labs that's still available, even though it hasn't graduated.



The great thing about Google Sets is that it only did one thing and did it very well: automatically generating lists from a few examples. Google Sets used the explicit and implicit lists from the pages indexed by Google and tried to find the lists that were relevant to the examples entered by users. For example, you could enter "Honda" and "Toyota" and Google Sets returned a long list of car brands.







The patent filed in 2003 explains that, at that time, there wasn't any "mechanism for quickly and efficiently generating lists of items given one or more example". Web pages included a lot of lists: some of them were created using special HTML tags (<ul>, <ol>, document headers), others used tables, while most of them were items separated by commas or tabs. The patent was filed by Simon Tong, a researcher who contributed to Google's ranking algorithm, designed AdSense's targeting algorithm and Gmail's spam detection's learning algorithm, and Jeff Dean, who designed Google's crawling, indexing, and query serving systems, BigTable and MapReduce, the initial version of Google's advertising serving system and a lot more.



Google Sets was the building block for Google Squared, a service that generated lists and information about the items. If you type "dogs" in Google Squared, you'll see a list of dog breeds, related images, descriptions, the size and the country of origin. The list of dog breeds is now also displayed at the bottom of Google's results page for [dogs]. The attributes aren't yet available in Google Search, but this feature will probably added in the future.





While Google Sets and Google Squared will no longer be available, they're still used in Google Search to better understand the content of a page and to provide lists of related searches.

Creating a Google Account Requires to Enter Your Birthday

Last year, I reported that creating a Google account requires entering your birthday if you are in the US. It seems that this requirement is no longer limited to the US and changing your location can't be used as a workaround.





If you're younger than 13 years old and you enter your real birthday, you'll see this message: "Google could not create your account. In order to have a Google Account, you must meet certain age requirements. To learn more about online child safety, visit the Federal Trade Commission's website."





Children's Online Privacy Protection Act makes it difficult to collect personal information from children under 13, so that's probably the reason why Google decided to prevent these users to create an account. For example, Google would have to "obtain verifiable parental consent from the child's parent." That's not the case when your school created a Google Apps account for you, since the school has to obtain parental consent.



It's interesting that you can't edit your birthday from your account and that Google deletes the accounts of the children under 13, unless they provide a way to show that the birthday is incorrect. From Google's FAQ:

You can re-enable your account by following our instructions to confirm that you are old enough to have a Google Account. You will see these instructions when you attempt to sign back in to your account. We currently offer two ways to confirm your age:



1. Sending in a signed form via mail or fax with a copy of your current, government-issued ID showing your date of birth, or

2. Performing a small transaction ($0.30 USD) on a valid credit card.

Creating a Google account is more and more complicated. Sometimes Google will ask to enter your phone number in order to confirm that you're actually a human (and not a bot) and now you also need to enter your birthday. Some services require to create a Google Profile and if you want to use Google+, you need to use your real name or "the name your friends, family or co-workers usually call you". If something goes wrong, you'll have to prove that it's your name.



{ Thanks, Herin. }

Lists in Google Snippets

I've mentioned two weeks ago that Google started to label pages that include search results. For some of these pages, Google's snippets now use lists, so you can distinguish between separate items. These snippets are twice as big as the regular snippets (4 lines vs 2 lines) and they include useful information like prices or dates.





Sometimes Google is confused and shows similar snippets for blogs, especially if homepages look like search results pages.





Google's snippets usually include one or more excerpts from the page that include some of your keywords and are separated by ellipses.



Update: It's official. "If a search result consists mostly of a structured list, like a table or series of bullets, we'll show a list of three relevant rows or items underneath the result in a bulleted format. The snippet will also show an approximate count of the total number of rows or items on the page," explains Google.

Short URLs, Back in Google Maps

After a brief disappearance, short URLs are back in Google Maps. This was one of the most popular experiment from Google Maps Labs and it's now a standard feature. Just click the link button next to the search box and click the "short URL" checkbox. The new short URLs use g.co, a domain recently acquired by Google. All the URLs that start with "http://g.co" send you to Google domains, while http://goo.gl/ continues to be a public URL shortener.





Google Maps is the service that generates very long URLs with many unnecessary parameters, so the short URLs are useful not just for posting a Twitter message or sending a text message, but also for writing an email, a comment on a blog post or for adding a Google Maps URL to a document. Google Maps also needs to automatically change the URL from the address bar, so that you don't have to use the permalink button.



{ via Google LatLong }

Music Rich Snippets in Google Search

Last week, Google announced a new flavor of rich snippets, this time for music pages. At that time, I couldn't see the new snippets, but now they should be available for everyone.





"With this new feature, site owners can mark up their pages using the newly created music markup spec on schema.org, and search results for that site may start displaying song information in the snippet so that users know that there are songs or samples there for them to listen to. Several initial partners have implemented the music markup on their sites, including MySpace, Rhapsody and ReverbNation," explained Google.



The new rich snippets include links to music pages that could be found by visiting the search result, but it's faster to bypass the search result and start to play a song. It's important to mention that the songs aren't played on Google's results pages, so you still need to go to a different page. You'll only see the music rich snippets when your query includes the name of an artist, a song or an album.



Google also shows rich snippets for events, profile pages, recipes, videos, reviews and products. "With rich snippets, webmasters with sites containing structured content—such as review sites or business listings—can label their content to make it clear that each labeled piece of text represents a certain type of data: for example, a restaurant name, an address, or a rating."



At some point, Google will make structured data searchable and it will be a lot easier to refine results. Recipe search already lets you do that and it's pretty useful.