While Google Reader's new search feature has many limitations and is still far from Bloglines, there are some features that help you find a post faster.
1. You have three ways to view search results:
* snippet view, similar to the way Google displays web search results. This view helps you decide if a result is useful by showing snippets related to your query.
* expanded view, that shows the full posts. Choose this view if you want to read most search results.
* list view, which only shows the title of the post. This is useful if you want to explore a lot of search results.
2. Exact matches: put quotation marks around your search terms to get the results that include an exact phrase.
3. Wildcard: use an asterisk to replace some words in your query. This only works for exact matches. Include an asterisk for each word you want to replace.
For example: "has * * * new features" matches: "has just announced several new features", "has recently added two new features", "has released a few new features".
4. Negative searches: if you want all the posts that contain [book search] but don't include [Google], search for [book search -Google].
5. You can bookmark searches. Google Reader doesn't offer an option to save searches, but if you find yourself repeating the same searches, bookmark them. The latest Google Reader update added transparent URLs so you can use the Back button or bookmark pages.
Example: http://www.google.com/reader/view/#search/myquery
6. Search using the keyboard:
/ - add focus to the search box
Tab - choose a folder or a feed to restrict your search
Enter - instead of clicking the Search button, press Enter
Alternate between the three views: 1 (expanded view), 2 (list view), 3 (snippet view).
To select the first search result, press j. Then you can go to the next result (j) or the previous result (k).
Press Enter to read the full post and go back to the search results by pressing Enter again.
7. View a search result in its original context: make sure that the result is active and press v or middle-click on the title. This will open a new tab/window with the blog post or news article.
8. You can search other people's shared items and public folders. Assuming you know the numeric ID of a user, do a search in your shared items and replace your ID with another ID:
http://www.google.com/reader/view/#search/query
//user%2FIDNUMBER%2Fstate%2Fcom.google%2Fbroadcast
Example: here's a search for [Microsoft] in Robert Scoble's shared items.
9. Because Google Reader is not yet able to rank results by relevancy, a good way to make sure you'll find a post in six months is to star it. When you want to retrieve an important post, restrict the search results to the starred items first.
Microsoft Launches Translation Service
Microsoft launched a service for automatic translation called Windows Live Translator. The site lets you translate a text limited to 500 words or a web page from English to German, Dutch, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Russian.
Microsoft uses Systran to produce most of the translations, but also offers an option to translate computer-related texts using a machine translation system developed in-house. Microsoft's translation technology has been used to translate technical materials, including MSDN Library.
"Recent research in Machine Translation (MT) has focused on data-driven systems. Such systems are self-customizing in the sense that they can learn the translations of terminology and even stylistic phrasing from already translated materials. Microsoft Research MT (MSR-MT) system is such a data-driven system, and it has been customized to translate Microsoft technical materials through the automatic processing of hundreds of thousands of sentences from Microsoft product documentation and support articles, together with their corresponding translations."
Microsoft intends to integrate this service into Live Search and provide a feature already available in other search engines for a long time. Windows Live Translator's presentation is extremely interesting: the default view shows the original page and the translation side by side in two vertical frames. If you hover over a sentence in one of the pages, the sentence is highlighted in both pages. If you scroll in one of the pages, the other page performs the same action. This is an interesting approach especially for those who speak both languages fairly well or want to learn a new language. Unfortunately, it's difficult to read a page that requires to scroll horizontally.
Google also has a translation service powered by Systran. The translations are identical to the ones returned by Babel Fish, but they're different from Windows Live's translations, so Microsoft might use an updated version of Systran's software.
Google developed a machine translation system that's available to the public for only three languages: Arabic, Chinese and Russian. To expand these systems to other languages, it's important to have a lot of parallel texts. "Rather than argue about whether this algorithm is better than that algorithm, all you have to do is get ten times more training data. And now all of a sudden, the worst algorithm is performing better than the best algorithm on less training data," explained Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google.
While machine translation is not yet a replacement for human translation in most cases, it's a great way to get the approximate gist of a text in a foreign language. One of the most important problems is that machine translation doesn't always produce coherent phrases and doesn't understand the subtleties of language, so don't use it to translate poetry or to send important emails.
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