fidzu : Google

Google went live with Knol, a platform to read and write articles on all kinds of subject. Knol was being tested privately since some time and had been pre-announced back in 2007. The address is knol.google.com, but notably not knol.com or knol.org or even googleknol.com. This project is somewhat reminiscent of Wikipedia, though there are many differences as well. You may also think of this as an alternative to creating a small info website if your aim is to cover only a single subject. When you log-in within your Google account to write an article on a subject you're familiar with, you ...

23 Jul 2008 8:36pm GMT

Knol is a new Google service created for sharing knowledge. The service has been announced in December 2007 and it's now publicly available.

While you may find some similarities between Knol and Wikipedia, it's important to notice that Knol is centered around authors. Each Knol article displays the name of its author and links to a small biography. Google even lets you verify your identity, but this only works if you live on the US.


Knol doesn't intend to become an encyclopedia, so there's no single article about a topic. An author can write about almost any topic, but it's recommended to write authoritative content.

There are three levels of collaboration in Knol:

* open collaboration (any Knol user can edit the article)
* moderate collaboration (any Knol user can suggest changes to the article - enabled by default)
* closed collaboration (only the co-authors can edit the article)

Google uses a rich-text editor borrowed from Page Creator, so it's much easier to edit knols than Wikipedia articles. Users can rate the articles, add comments and write reviews, much like for scholarly works.


By default, articles are licensed as Creative Commons Attribution, but you can change the license in the settings. It's nice to see that Google encourages the use of flexible licenses that allow content reuse.

Like in Blogger, Google provides an option to monetize your articles using Google AdSense, but the ads are displayed in a fixed position. Knol doesn't let you customize the layout of the page and you can't add JavaScript code, objects or iframes.

Search Engine Land says that Knol is a service created by Google's search quality team. "I do believe [Knol] does solve a search problem. The problem we have, unlocking what people know and bringing it online. This is another tool to help release some of this knowledge," explains Cedric Dupont, the product manager for Knol.

While Google has many other services that allow people to share their knowledge (Blogger, Google Docs, Google Sites), Knol encourages experts to make the search results better by sharing what they know. After all, Knol articles are indexed by search engines and Google promises to not give them preferential treatment.

"Your name is behind your knol, and it should reflect your unique point of view. Be succinct, but comprehensive on your topic of choice. Provide references, and display your credentials. Readers will want to know who you are and gain context on the knols you are writing." - these are some of the guidelines for writing good Knol articles.

I think that Google managed to develop a very solid service with a lot of interesting features that encourage originality (a list of web pages with similar content), a sense of ownership (your name is included even in the URL) and information accuracy (peer reviews and suggested edits).

23 Jul 2008 7:22pm GMT

The Google App Engine currently supports Python, but now Google employee and creator of blogging community LiveJournal Brad Fitzpatrick posts this bit: I'm happy to announce that the Google App Engine team has given me permission to talk about a 20% project inside Google to to add Perl support to App Engine. To be clear: I'm not a member of the App Engine team and the App Engine team is not promising to add Perl support. They're just saying that I (along with other Perl hackers here at Google) are now allowed to work on this 20% project of ours out in the open where other Perl hackers can help us out, should you be so inclined. Why is Google making this open? Turns out, according to Google, th ...

23 Jul 2008 6:46pm GMT

A few months ago we announced that we were testing a new product called Knol. Knols are authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects. Today, we're making Knol available to everyone.

The web contains vast amounts of information, but not everything worth knowing is on the web. An enormous amount of information resides in people's heads: millions of people know useful things and billions more could benefit from that knowledge. Knol will encourage these people to contribute their knowledge online and make it accessible to everyone.

23 Jul 2008 5:31pm GMT

Most feed readers let you import and export subscriptions using the OPML format. For Google Reader, you'll find this option in Settings > Import/Export.

But what happens when you need to export the feeds from a single folder so you can share them with a friend or upload them to a site? Google Reader lets you export the feeds from a folder:

http://www.google.com/reader/public/subscriptions/user/-/label/FOLDER
(you should replace FOLDER with the actual name of the folder)

Another way to share the subscriptions from a folder is to make it public and to use this link for the OPML file:

http://www.google.com/reader/public/subscriptions/user/USERID/label/FOLDER
(USERID can be obtained from the public page created by Google Reader)

This also works if someone shares with you the page of a public folder and you want to obtain the list of subscriptions from that folder. If I share with you my Googlers folder:

http://www.google.com/reader/shared/user/13577231804381328821/label/googlers

you can easily obtain the link to the corresponding OPML file by replacing shared with public/subscriptions:

http://www.google.com/reader/public/subscriptions/user/13577231804381328821/label/googlers

{ Inspired by Abhijeet M. }

23 Jul 2008 4:37pm GMT

TechCrunch reiterates the rumor that Google is about to acquire Digg. "The two companies have reportedly signed a letter of intent and are close to a deal that will bring Digg under the Google News property. The acquisition price is in the $200 million range, says one source." While I don't find too many reasons why Google would buy Digg, it's clear that Digg and Google News don't have almost anything in common.

Google hand-picked more than 4500 sources and used them to cluster news articles. The idea behind Google News was to display different perspectives on the same subject and to rank them algorithmically. Even the homepage is generated automatically, based on the editorial decisions of the publication included in Google News. Last year, when Google News added comments, the feature surprised many people: the comments could only come from "people or organizations who were actual participants in the story in question".

Digg gets the stories from users, who have to manually submit each item. To be promoted on the homepage, a story has to be voted by a sufficient number of users, who can also post comments. "Digg is democratizing digital media. As a user, you participate in determining all site content by discovering, selecting, sharing, and discussing the news, videos, and podcasts that appeal to you," explains the site. Launched as an alternative to Slashdot, Digg expanded from technology news to general news.

To integrate Google News with Digg, Google would have to radically change its news site and this is unlikely. Besides, Google News could easily add a voting system and user comments like in the recent Google search experiment, without needing a site like Digg. If Google does acquire Digg, I think it's for mining a big amount of votes and detecting patterns that could be used to improve features like "edit search results". Digg is also a good platform for experimenting with filtering information, news recommendations and could be helpful in Google's new social quests.

23 Jul 2008 2:25pm GMT

Google Maps walking directions had been spotted by some users before, and now they're being rolled out for everyone, as Search Engine Roundtable reports. Try this directions search in New York, for instance, and you'll see the "Walking" link on top activated (though this isn't just restricted to US locations, as a test search in Ge ...

22 Jul 2008 7:38pm GMT

As anticipated two weeks ago, Google Maps added walking directions. "Starting today, you can tell Google Maps that you want walking directions, and we'll try to find you a route that's direct, flat, and uses pedestrian pathways when we know about them. Just get directions as you normally would. If you're going 10 km or less (some call this 6.2 miles), we'll show you a link that you can click to get Walking directions," informs Google LatLong blog.

The feature is still in beta because Google has incomplete data about pedestrian pathways. Google Maps advises you to "use caution when walking in unfamiliar areas".

Tip. If you only see driving directions, copy the permalink of the page by clicking on "Link to this page", append &dirflg=w and paste the new URL in the address bar.


As usually with Google Maps directions, you can print them, email them, obtain a permalink that can be bookmarked or embed them in a site. Another option is to save the directions as a custom map: just click on "Link to this page", copy the link, add &output=kml at the end and then create a new map in the My Maps tab by importing the KML file.

Until recently, Ask.com offered walking directions, but the feature is no longer available because Ask.com decided to replace its mapping service with Microsoft Virtual Earth.

22 Jul 2008 7:29pm GMT

You can emulate selection boxes using HTML layers, but you may also want to provide a traditional HTML form selection box using the <select> element. If you do so, how can you spice up that form element anyway? There's a couple of things you can do. The <optgroup> element groups together and labels as set of items. A style applied to an <option> can add colors. And then there's some nice Unicode symbols, like stars (&#9733;) or checkmarks (&#10003;), which can bring a more graphical look to your selection box, too: ★ (worst) ★★ ★★★ ★ ...

22 Jul 2008 12:56pm GMT

Google started to use the Social Graph API to suggest links that can be added to your public Google Profile. If you add links to sites that are connected to other sites using FOAF or the XFN microformat, Google makes it easy to import all the links. For example, if you have an account at FriendFeed, add a link to your FriendFeed page to import the sites you shared: videos uploaded at YouTube, Google Reader shared items, del.ico.us bookmarks etc.


Google's unified profiles are slowly added to all Google services that allow user-generated content. "A Google Profile is simply how you represent yourself on Google products - it lets you tell others a bit more about who you are and what you're all about. You control what goes into your Google Profile, sharing as much (or as little) as you'd like," explains Google. For now, the profiles are displayed next to the list of shared items from Google Reader, in the Google Books library and next to the custom maps, reviews and edits from Google Maps.

{ via Blogoscoped Forum }

21 Jul 2008 10:30pm GMT

Blogger doesn't do too much to prevent comment spam. You can enable word verification and annoy your readers, moderate the comments and remove the instant feedback or disable the comments. Until recently, I didn't use any of these options and I manually deleted spam comments one by one, but this becomes excruciating when you have to delete hundreds of comments. So I enabled CAPTCHAs and made it more difficult to post comments.

If you decided that moderating comments is the best way to deal with spam, there's a new option to enable comment moderation only for old posts. I'm not sure if Blogger's default value of 14 days is the best option, but you can change it to any other number. This way your readers will be able to comment on the recent posts without moderation, while the visitors who find older posts using search engines or links from other sites will need to wait until you approve their comments.

I still think that Blogger needs better tools to filter comment spam and I'm surprised to see that Google can't come up with a real solution like Akismet. The spam filter could also be used in Google Groups, orkut and other community sites.

21 Jul 2008 7:40pm GMT

Before Google's 3D chat world Lively was released, the product was called Google Rooms. Here are some left-over screenshots that we discovered on Google's servers shortly after Lively was launched: The Google Rooms logo used in the rooms directory, showing a palm tree from the island room Selecting an avatar from the directory, which included URL references to Google's 3D Wareho ...

21 Jul 2008 10:32am GMT

I still like my last start-up idea about converting MP3 music collections to be legal and cleaning up mangled/ugly filenames. As Amazon and others start to sell MP3s, a startup could easily offer some interesting services. For example, I just saw that a new product called TuneUp will clean up your filenames, metadata, and cover [...]

21 Jul 2008 5:53am GMT

At the most recent Google earnings call, Sergey Brin said some interesting things regarding the ads from search results pages. Google tries to reduce the number of ads that are displayed and the number of queries that show ads as it improves the targeting and the ads are more effective.

We try to reduce our coverage at the same time as improving the monetization. But clearly that's not the ideal strategy indefinitely, because we don't want to end up with no ads. And in fact from a quality point of view, we now find our ads are a significant addition quality-wise to our page. They are just a very important source of information. (...) We're all the time running experiments. We run some people without any ads at all, and we know that our ads add value so we know that we're happy about having them.

Jonathan Rosenberg quoted Larry Page, who "often says that we'd be best off if we just showed one ad, the perfect ad". Showing ads that are relevant to the context makes the sponsored links section an alternative to the list of search results, but I wouldn't call some paid links "a very important source of information". Most ads try to convince people to buy a product or a service and to achieve this they may use manipulation or misleading messages.


Last year, one of Google's ad blogs tried to convince healthcare companies to promote their messages using Google ads:

Moore's film [Sicko] portrays the industry as money and marketing driven, and fails to show healthcare's interest in patient well-being and care. Sound familiar? Of course. The healthcare industry is no stranger to negative press. A drug may be a blockbuster one day and tolled as a public health concern the next. (...) Many of our clients face these issues; companies come to us hoping we can help them better manage their reputations through Get the Facts or issue management campaigns. (...) We can place text ads, video ads, and rich media ads in paid search results or in relevant websites within our ever-expanding content network. Whatever the problem, Google can act as a platform for educating the public and promoting your message.

Advertisers have an agenda and they're rarely objective. They provide facts that are difficult to verify and they rarely support their claims.


AdWords has a big list of guidelines that includes supporting competitive claims, third party verification of the claims and an accurate representation of a product, but not all the ads respect these guidelines.


In an interview from 2004, Sergey Brin said that Google's ads "aren't distracting; they're helpful. (...) We know that when people are looking for commercial things, they use the ads. They know they're ads and they know they're just commercial, yet they use them."

Did you use Google's ads as a source of information? You could check your ad history to see if the ads that attracted your attention supported their claims and offered useful information.

20 Jul 2008 9:11pm GMT

Sometimes error messages can reveal more than they were supposed to. Rahul Bansal writes about a simple trick that helps you find out if one of your Google Talk contacts is offline or uses the invisible mode. The trick takes advantage of Google's off the record feature which lets you chat with your contacts without saving the conversations in Gmail.

"Chats that have been taken off the record aren't stored in your Gmail chat history, or in the Gmail chat history of your contact. You and the person you're talking to can both see when a chat is taken off the record, and you'll be notified if off the record mode is disabled. Your off the record settings will apply whenever you chat with this person, until one of you makes a change."

Let's say you want to know if your co-worker Michael is really offline. If you start a chat when he is online and select "go off the record", none of your messages will be saved in Michael's Gmail account. That means the next time Michael appears to be offline and you send a message, there are three possibilities:

1. Michael is offline or he has blocked you: Google will display the error "Michael did not receive your chat" (Gmail Chat) or "Michael may not have received your message" (Google Talk gadget). Offline messages are sent as regular messages in Gmail, but this is not possible because the conversations between you and Michael are off the record. Michael won't receive your message.

2. Michael is invisible: you won't see any error, but Michael will receive your message.

"Now the only tricky part is finding a user online for once to set chat off the records. This doesn't seem hard as invisible status is still limited to Gmail version of Google Talk and you may be in luck if your friend uses Google Talk desktop clients/gadgets or third party IM client to chat," concludes Rahul. It's important to note that the invisible status is available in Gmail Chat, Google Talk gadget, Google Talk Labs Edition and Google Talk for iPhone, not just in Gmail Chat. Of course, your contact can always disable the "off the record" setting or block you.

20 Jul 2008 9:38am GMT

Here are some of the applications that I'm trying out right now: What applications do you like on the iPhone 3G?

19 Jul 2008 9:00pm GMT

Sometimes people think that the Google Toolbar led to Google indexing a page. Here's a recent such story, for example, which speculates how urls with the substring "mms2legacy" got indexed. Here's where I started to disagree: The reason for this [supposedly unlisted urls getting crawled --Matt], explained Ken Simpson, CEO of anti-spam company MailChannels, is that [...]

19 Jul 2008 7:30am GMT

Is this Google Reader? It's actually an iGoogle feed in canvas view, which happens to borrow Google Reader's interface. If you click on the drop-down, you can access all your Google Reader subscriptions.


Is this Gmail? It's the Gmail gadget in canvas view, but you get almost all the features available in Gmail's standard interface.


Is this Gmail Chat? It's the chat feature from Gmail integrated in iGoogle's sidebar so that you can chat with your contacts while reading your feeds, watching videos, answering your mail or checking the weather.


The new version of iGoogle, currently available for a small number of randomly-selected users and for developers, will bring together all the Google services in a single fluid interface. At some point, iGoogle was a part of an initiative called Fusion that allowed users to combine content from across the web. The next major iteration of iGoogle goes further and it lets you actually access the full content, monitor the updates and share them with your friends.

Quick tip to access the new iGoogle:
- go to google.com/ig
- paste this in the address bar:
javascript:_dlsetp('v2=1');
- to go back to the old version, paste in the address bar:
javascript:_dlsetp('v2=0');

18 Jul 2008 6:44pm GMT

Pixelisation in the forum and Ionut at the Google Operating System blog mentioned the Google Docs documents editor now has a full-screen mode (not to be confused with the older full-width page view). You'll find it in the menu View -> Full-screen mode, and hitting escape switches back to the default view. Does anyone know how to bookmark a Google Docs document so that it always opens in full-screen mode though?

18 Jul 2008 3:16pm GMT

Google announced they're aquiring Russian ads service ZAO Begun from Rambler Media for $140 million. [Thanks Pavel!]

18 Jul 2008 2:55pm GMT

One of our goals is to give everyone using Google the information they want, wherever they are, in whatever language they speak, and through whatever device they're using. A huge part of that goal is making our services available in as many languages as possible. And as I'm sure you can imagine, that isn't as easy as simply as translating a few lines of text.

Take Hebrew or Arabic, which are written from right to left. An Arabic speaker may search for [world cup football 2008] [كأس العالم 2008 لكرة القدم]. Part of the query will be written from right to left in Arabic, while the numbers will be written left to right. Sometimes the right-to-left difference can mean having to change the entire layout of a page, as with Gmail.

Or take Russian, where words change depending on their placement and role in a sentence. In Russian, for example [pizza in Moscow] is [пицца в Москве] but [pizza near Moscow] is [пицца рядом с Москвой].

Then there's the whole challenge of ensuring that results are locally relevant. While many Australians searching for [freedom] are looking for the Australian furniture chain, UK and US users are often looking for the definition of the word itself. Our search results, then, have to take into account these local differences.

Our efforts to make Google products available in as many languages as possible dates to 2001, when we started Google in Your Language, which lets volunteers translate and edit translations of Google products in their native languages.

As more and more users, advertisers, and partners interact with Google across the world, the need for local products has become even more obvious. In 2007, we undertook a company-wide initiative to increase the availability of our products in multiple languages. We picked the 40 languages read by over 98% of Internet users and got going, relying heavily on open source libraries such as ICU and other internationalization technologies to design products. Do you need web search in Chinese or AdWords online support in Spanish? Perhaps Google News in Hindi or Google Scholar in Korean? Not a problem.

Here's a taste of how far we've come.

Growth in local language versions.

• 30 in 30: Today we have more than 30 products in more than 30 languages, up from 5 products in 30 languages just a year ago.
• In 2004, we had 150 local-language versions of various products (e.g. a product local to the UK, not just the English-speaking world); today we're at more than 1500.
• From January to March of 2008, we launched 256 local-language versions of various products, compared to 55 in the same period of 2007.
• We've upgraded to Unicode 5.1 to make sure that we can handle any characters people read or write in.

The web is only useful - or utile, 便利, pożyteczny, or nyttig, depending on what language you speak - to the degree it can be accessible in your language. That's why we're so excited about how far we've come - and why we know there's still a lot of work to be done.

Posted by Mario Queiroz, Vice President, Product Management, Europe, Middle East, Africa, Latin America

18 Jul 2008 2:01pm GMT

RedWine.com, one of those ads-only websites potentially profiting through Google. Google pays domain parkers by allowing them to run a special AdSense program. Titled "Google AdSense for domains", this program now reportedly triggered a class-action lawsuit which alleges "that Google committed fraud, business code violations, and unjust enrichment by selling ads that were unlikely to generate conversions". As Information Week continues to write: According to the complaint, the "Levitte International" online ad campaign ran from June 1, 2007, through August 18, 2007, a ...

17 Jul 2008 11:26pm GMT

Last week, the ten grand prize winners for the first Google Highly Open Participation Contest, our initiative to get pre-university students involved in open source development. We were very excited to welcome these burgeoning computer scientists and their families to Silicon Valley in a celebration of their many accomplishments.

Chosen from more than 350 students worldwide, our winners created software, documentation and marketing materials for ten different open source projects, getting all this work accomplished in just over two months. For more details, including interviews with the winners and their mentors, check out the Google Open Source Blog.

Posted by Leslie Hawthorn, Program Manager - Open Source

17 Jul 2008 8:30pm GMT

If you need more space to edit your documents in Google Docs or if you want to read a document, there's now a full-screen mode that hides the menus and the toolbar. Just select View > Full-screen mode or type Ctrl-Shift-F to go into full-screen mode. Unfortunately, the same shortcut is also used by the Web Developer extension to display element information, but you can change it in the options.

Since you no longer have access to the menus, it's useful to know the keyboard shortcuts and to remember that Esc brings you back to the normal mode.


If you publish a document and you want to display it in fixed-with page view, just append &pageview=1 to the URL:
http://docs.google.com/View?docid=d0n7b3_3v1l&pageview=1

To hide the footer automatically added by Google, append &hgd=1 to the URL:
http://docs.google.com/View?docid=d0n7b3_3v1l&hgd=1

17 Jul 2008 7:21pm GMT

The new iPhone 3G camera seems to work pretty well. Here's a test shot with me, two cats, and a laptop: The iPhone 3G still doesn't work great for close-ups on very small stuff, but it seems to work well in the four to six foot range.

17 Jul 2008 6:35pm GMT

Posted by Beate List, University Programme, Zurich

A few months ago we had the great pleasure of announcing the fifth class of Anita Borg Scholars in the U.S. and our first class of Scholars in Canada. Now it's the Europeans' turn.

This scholarship program, originally established in the U.S. to honor the work of Anita Borg and to recognize outstanding young women scholars in computer science and related fields, expanded to Europe most recently. Nearly 300 undergraduate and graduate students from more than 31 countries applied for the award. Sixty-three finalists were selected; 20 women received a €5,000 scholarship for the 2008-2009 academic year. The remaining 43 finalists received a €1,000 award.

Each of the finalists visited our Engineering Centre in Zurich for our annual Scholars' Retreat, which included tech talks, career panels and social fun. All of it was a way for the young women to share experiences and come together as leaders in the computer science field.

Visit the Google Europe Anita Borg Scholarship page for more on the program. Hearty congratulations to these winners!

The 2008 Europe Anita Borg Scholars

• Cynthia Liem, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
• Despina Michael - University of Cyprus, Cyprus
  
• Dina Petri - University of Reading, UK; Aristotle University, Greece; Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain
• Inbal Talgam -Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel
• Katy Howland - University of Sussex, UK
• Kerstin Wendt - Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain
• Ksenia Rogova - Petrozavodsk State University, Russia
• Mirela Ben-Chen - Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Israel
• Nadezhda Baldina - Moscow Institute of Electronic Technology, Russia
• Olga Boronenko - University of Reading, UK; Aristotle University, Greece; Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain
• Patricia Moore - Dublin City University, Ireland
  
• Rebecca Stewart - Queen Mary, University of London, UK
• Sara Elisabeth Adams - University of Oxford, UK
• Seda Gürses - Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
• Silvia Breu - University of Cambridge, UK
• Siska Fitrianie - Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
• Stefanie Jegelka - Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tuebingen, Germany
• Svetlana Obraztsova - Steklov Institute of Mathematics, Russia
• Sylvia Rueda - University of Nottingham, UK
• Ulyana Tikhonova - Saint Petersburg State Polytechnical University, Russia

Update: Added photo.

17 Jul 2008 5:25pm GMT

It seems that this year Google's most popular web applications will work offline. After Google Reader and Google Docs, two other services will integrate with Gears. Andrew Fogg saw a preview of the integration at Google's offices and found that Gmail and Google Calendar will add offline support in approximately 6 weeks.

In the past months, Google accidentally enabled the option in Google Calendar and some users saw the dialog illustrated below: "To view and edit the next 3 months of your Google Calendar when you're not connected to the Internet, click OK."

Andrew also found out that Google will add SyncML support for Gmail contacts next month. He thinks this is "related to the sync that they worked on with Apple for 3G iPhone". SyncML is a standard for data synchronization supported by a lot of companies. "SyncML is most commonly thought of as a method to synchronize contact and calendar information between some type of handheld device and a computer (personal, or network-based service), such as between a mobile phone and a personal computer."

Update: Andrew Fogg deleted the tweets referenced in the post, but I have a screenshot.

17 Jul 2008 12:21pm GMT

What do wedding planners, gas mileage calculators and photo albums have in common? They're all examples of templates available in the Google Docs Template Gallery that Sarah Beth Eisinger (Docs Templates engineer), Grant Dasher (intern), and I built and (happily!) released today.

When researching how people use templates, we saw that lots of you create documents for all aspects of your lives. You need resumes and cover letters to look for jobs and fax cover letters and invoices to run your businesses. And of course you want to use documents in fun ways with family and friends, such as unique designs and layouts for invitation cards and calendars. Finally, everyone wants to be able to have tools that "just work": print mailing labels, track portfolio values, and manage projects without having to painstakingly create documents from scratch.

These needs inspired our new templates and gallery. We developed these in conjunction with Avery Dennison, Vertex42.com, TemplateZone, and Visa Business.

Many templates leverage the collaborative aspect of Google Docs so that several people can work on a single document online without having to email attachments back and forth. To hear the story behind two templates, watch these videos:





To get started, go directly to the template gallery or access it from the "New" menu in your document list. Templates are currently available only in English, but other languages are coming soon. They're also available to Google Apps users.


Posted by Valerie Blechar, Templates Engineer, Google Docs

(Cross-posted on the Google Docs Blog.)

17 Jul 2008 12:37am GMT

Google released a layout templates directory for Google Docs*, the application suite consisting of Google Documents, Spreadsheets and Presentations (Google's kind of web-based light-weight Word, Excel and PowerPoint). You can sort templates by target application, like Spreadsheets, or by category, like "Resumes" or "Personal Finance". Then you can look at a preview and if you like a style, hit the "Use this template" button to fill it with your own content. Google Presentations since some time had a limited amount of basic designs available, and Google Documents also offers stylesheet editing, but this new directory ...

17 Jul 2008 12:24am GMT

If you use Gmail, many Google services have access to your contacts list and you can easily add addresses using autocomplete or from a contact picker. But what happens when you need to enter an email address on a site that's not from Google? Many news sites have options to send a link to your friends and sometimes this is more convenient than loading Gmail and pasting a link to the article.

Google Contacts Autocomplete is a Greasemonkey script that brings your Gmail contacts everywhere you go on the web. When you start to type the name of your friend or his email address, the script shows a list of suggestions.


For now, the script only provides suggestions for a single email address, but I'm sure this could be easily fixed. Unlike Gmail, the script sorts the suggestions alphabetically, not by affinity.

16 Jul 2008 11:26pm GMT

It's so difficult to start with a blank document, especially when it should have a standard format. Now you can use one of the 309 templates from the new Google Docs directory as a starting point for your timesheets, resumes, invoices, photo albums or party invitations.

"A template gives you a quick start towards creating a document, spreadsheet, or presentation. Each template has boilerplate content and preset design styles that are meant to be reused. (...) You can then edit the document, replacing boilerplate text and images with your own," explains Google.


The option to use a template is available in Google Docs when you click on New > From template and the list of templates that you've recently used can be found here.

While Google doesn't explicitly offer an option to create your own templates, you can save them as regular documents and use File > Save as new copy (Copy spreadsheet) to create duplicates. If you publish a spreadsheet, append &newcopy to the URL to obtain a template link.

16 Jul 2008 10:49pm GMT

In my previous post, I introduced the philosophies behind Google ranking. As part of our effort to discuss search quality, I want to tell you more about the technologies behind our ranking. The core technology in our ranking system comes from the academic field of Information Retrieval (IR). The IR community has studied search for almost 50 years. It uses statistical signals of word salience, like word frequency, to rank pages. (See "Modern Information Retrieval: A Brief Overview" for a quick overview of IR technology.) IR gave us a solid foundation, and we have built a tremendous system on top using links, page structure, and many other such innovations.

Search in the last decade has moved from give me what I said to give me what I want. User expectations from search have rightly increased. We work hard to fulfill the expectations of each and every user, and to do that we need to better understand the pages, the queries, and our users. Over the last decade we have pushed the technologies for understanding these three components (of the search process) to completely new dimensions.

When we talk about queries at Google, we use square brackets [ ] to mark the beginning and end of queries (see "How to write queries" by Matt Cutts), a notation I will use throughout this post. (Pages and search results change frequently, so in time, some examples used here may not behave as explained.)

• Understanding pages: Over years we have invested heavily in our crawl and indexing system. As a result we have a very large and very fresh index. In addition to size and freshness, we have improved our index in other ways. One of the key technologies we have developed to understand pages is associating important concepts to a page even when they are not obvious on the page. We find the official homepage for Sprovieri Gallery in London for the Italian query [galleria sprovieri londra], even though the official page does not have either London or Londra on it. In the U.S., a user searching for [cool tech pc vancouver, wa] finds the homepage www.cooltechpc.com even though the page does not mention anywhere that they are in Vancouver, WA. Other technologies we have developed include distinctions between important and less important words in the page and the freshness of the information on the page.
  

• Understanding queries: It is critical that we understand what our users are looking for (beyond just the few words in their query). We have made several notable advances in this area including a best-in-class spelling suggestion system, an advanced synonyms system, and a very strong concept analysis system.

• Understanding users: Our work on interpreting user intent is aimed at returning results people really want, not just what they said in their query. This work starts with a world class localization system, and adds to it our advanced personalization technology, and several other great strides we have made in interpreting user intent, e.g. Universal Search.
  

Finally let me briefly mention the latest advance we have made in search: Cross Language Information Retrieval (CLIR). CLIR allows users to first discover information that is not in their language, and then using Google's translation technology, we make this information accessible. I call this advance: give me what I want in any language. A user looking for Tony Blair's biography in Russia who types the query in Russian [Тони Блэр биография] is prompted at the bottom of our results to search the English web with:

Similarly a user searching for Disney movie songs in Egypt with the query [أغاني أفلام ديزني] is prompted to search the English web. We are very excited about CLIR as it truly brings us closer to our mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

I could go on and on showing examples of state-of-the-art technology that we have developed to make our ranking system as good as it is, but the fact is that search is nowhere close to being a solved problem. Many queries still don't get satisfactory results from Google, and each such query is an opportunity to improve our ranking system. I am confident that with numerous techniques under development in our group, we will make large improvements to our ranking algorithms in the near future.

I hope my two posts about Google ranking have made it clear that we live and breathe search, and we are more passionate than ever about it. Our fervor for serving all our users worldwide is unprecedented. We pride ourselves in running a very good ranking system, and are working incredibly hard every day to make it even better.

Posted by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow

16 Jul 2008 5:53pm GMT

Here's something that made the frontpage of popular social news site Reddit.com yesterday... a submission titled "A 15 year old from South Wales used his new Visa debit card to order cigarettes, alcohol (etc.)", pointing to a page at money.co.uk allegedly from July 15th, 2008, by author Charlotte Cardingham. This sounds oddly familiar to the last "hoax news to attract backlinks" story. However, after that last incident of letting a search engine optimize ...

16 Jul 2008 11:05am GMT

Early on in my career at Google I was approached by a former professor of mine, Jamie Murphy, who was eager to give his students hands-on exposure to online marketing. Apart from delivering a great learning experience, Jamie wanted to make sure that his students would leave university with skills they could take directly into the workforce.

Together, Jamie and I recruited a panel of professors from all over the globe and came up with the Google Online Marketing Challenge. Student teams had to identify a local business with a website, but no experience of online marketing, and then were given free Google AdWords vouchers worth the equivalent of US$200. The student teams worked with the local business to set up an AdWords account and structure an online marketing campaign which would increase web traffic and sales for the local business. The teams had three weeks to run the campaign and had to submit their campaign report to a panel of international academic judges.

Today we're announcing the winners: an innovative team from the University of Western Australia who worked with an indoor rock-climbing school that scaled the heights and scooped the global prize. The winners will be whisked off to Mountain View, California for a tour of the Googleplex and meet with the creators of AdWords and other executives. To help them in their ongoing studies, each team member will also receive an Apple MacBook Pro.

There were also three regional winners, including students from Pennsylvania State University, who won in the fierce Americas field, while a team from the Universität Bern in Switzerland beat some impressive competition to win for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The Asia Pacific winners came from the Australian Graduate School of Management with a skillful campaign for a small specialty cake business (actually based in California).

These four teams were clearly deserving winners, but the enthusiasm all the students and professors showed for the challenge was inspiring. We initially expected slightly more than 1,000 students to take part, and were thrilled when c. 8,500 students from 47+ countries put their marketing skills to the test.

The success of the challenge and the positive feedback we've had from both professors and students was more than we had hoped for. As Dr. Fang Liu, who taught the winning team, notes:

"The Online Marketing Challenge offers a great opportunity for students to develop their skills and experience in online marketing. Local businesses also benefit as the AdWords campaigns have helped promote their business to a wider community. I feel absolutely thrilled that one of my student teams is the global winner."

We're delighted to have worked with professors to find a fun and innovative way to introduce online marketing into the university curriculum. And we're happy to say the Challenge will carry on next year, and we hope it will go from strength to strength. Here are more details on the Challenge and our winners.

Posted by Lee Hunter, Product Marketing Manager

16 Jul 2008 7:02am GMT

Management guru Peter Drucker noted that companies attracting the best knowledge workers will "secure the single biggest factor for competitive advantage." We and other forward-looking companies put a lot of effort into hiring such people. What are we looking for?

At the highest level, we are looking for non-routine problem-solving skills. We expect applicants to be able to solve routine problems as a matter of course. After all, that's what most education is concerned with. But the non-routine problems offer the opportunity to create competitive advantage, and solving those problems requires creative thought and tenacity.

Here's a real-life example, a challenge a team of our engineers once faced: designing a spell-checker for the Google search engine. The routine solution would be to run queries through a dictionary. The non-routine, creative solution is to use the query corrections and refinements that other users have made in the past to offer spelling suggestions for new queries. This approach enables us to correct all the words that aren't in the dictionary, helping many more users in the process.

How do we find these non-routine savants? There are many factors, of course, but we primarily look for ...

... analytical reasoning. Google is a data-driven, analytic company. When an issue arises or a decision needs to be made, we start with data. That means we can talk about what we know, instead of what we think we know.

... communication skills. Marshalling and understanding the available evidence isn't useful unless you can effectively communicate your conclusions.

... a willingness to experiment. Non-routine problems call for non-routine solutions and there is no formula for success. A well-designed experiment calls for a range of treatments, explicit control groups, and careful post-treatment analysis. Sometimes an experiment kills off a pet theory, so you need a willingness to accept the evidence even if you don't like it.

... team players. Virtually every project at Google is run by a small team. People need to work well together and perform up to the team's expectations.

... passion and leadership. This could be professional or in other life experiences: learning languages or saving forests, for example. The main thing, to paraphrase Mr. Drucker, is to be motivated by a sense of importance about what you do.

These characteristics are not just important in our business, but in every business, as well as in government, philanthropy, and academia. The challenge for the up-and-coming generation is how to acquire them. It's easy to educate for the routine, and hard to educate for the novel. Keep in mind that many required skills will change: developers today code in something called Python, but when I was in school C was all the rage. The need for reasoning, though, remains constant, so we believe in taking the most challenging courses in core disciplines: math, sciences, humanities.

And then keep on challenging yourself, because learning doesn't end with graduation. In fact, in the real world, while the answers to the odd-numbered problems are not in the back of the textbook, the tests are all open book, and your success is inexorably determined by the lessons you glean from the free market. Learning, it turns out, is a lifelong major.

Posted by Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior VP, Product Management

16 Jul 2008 12:48am GMT

The Vacationeers released sequel videos to what they call The Googling, dealing with existing Google services gone "different": Part II: Google Moon Part III: Google My Maps Part IV: Google SMS Google Maps is their original older clip, in case you haven't seen it yet. And as it's supposed to be a five-part series, there may still be one clip coming. [Via

15 Jul 2008 10:33pm GMT

The Vacationeers have some new futuristic videos that show an omniscient Google which is already a part of people's lives. After the creepy video about Google Street View, the comedy group explored some other Google services.

Google SMS can sometimes offer free dating advice:


My Maps can anticipate your actions and add placemarks in advance:


Google Moon might show some things that you aren't supposed to know, like the fact that NASA never landed on the Moon.


{ via Jess Lee }

15 Jul 2008 9:32pm GMT

Google released a well-working iGoogle gadget in which they extract text information from video content. The Elections Video Search gadget -- its standalone page can be accessed as well -- lets you search for keywords across YouTube's US politician channels, like Barack Obama's. Clicking on a result item will load the video in question into the player embedded in the widget, with the specific occurrences of the word in the video color-marked on the timeline. For instance, I searched for the word friendship

15 Jul 2008 6:04pm GMT

The Wall Street Journal writes: Google Inc. and Viacom Inc. have agreed to allow Google to anonymize YouTube visitor data before complying with a judge's order to deliver the data to Viacom as part of a broader copyright lawsuit. Google-owned YouTube announced late Monday night that the parties had agreed to allow it to substitute actual user and visitor IDs and internet protocol addresses with other unique values to help protect user privacy. Obfuscating user IDs in such consistent ways does not guarantee complete anonymity (take a look at what ha ...

15 Jul 2008 5:58pm GMT

I know what you're thinking: "Matt, I hacked my original iPhone. Now I want to share in the iPhone 3G fun, but I'm worried that something horrible will happen if I upgrade to the iPhone 3G." Buck up, fellow iPhone hacker. I'll tell you how to upgrade from your hacked Apple phone and keep all the [...]

15 Jul 2008 4:51pm GMT

Google tests an enhanced version of last year's experiment that allowed users to hide search results and to move some results at the top of the page. The new experiment adds an option to comment on a search results and to view everyone's edits.

According to the FAQ, "your comments and the webpages you add, promote, or delete, along with the user nickname for the account you're logged in with, may be viewed by other Google searchers also in the experiment." Google mentions that this is "an experimental feature served to a random selection of participants and may be available for only a few weeks".

Google explains that the motivation behind this experiment is to test if "giving searchers increased control over their search results improves the overall user experience". Google currently personalizes the list of search results using information from a user's search history, but this experiment lets you create your own list of annotated results and share it with the world.

In a recent post from Google Blog, Amit Singhal said something very interesting:

No discussion of Google's ranking would be complete without asking the common - but misguided! :) - question: "Does Google manually edit its results?" Let me just answer that with our third philosophy: no manual intervention. In our view, the web is built by people. You are the ones creating pages and linking to pages. We are using all this human contribution through our algorithms. The final ordering of the results is decided by our algorithms using the contributions of the greater Internet community, not manually by us. We believe that the subjective judgment of any individual is, well ... subjective, and information distilled by our algorithms from the vast amount of human knowledge encoded in the web pages and their links is better than individual subjectivity.

Update. Justin Hileman has more screenshots that show some other features: you can search everyone's edits and there's a list of search edits for each user. "This whole thing looks like an experiment into crowdsourced search results," concludes Justin.

Update 2. The page where you should see your search edits: http://www.google.com/reviews/w.

15 Jul 2008 8:44am GMT

Google released a demo for a speech-to-text technology that allows you to search inside a video's content. You can add an iGoogle gadget that is restricted to a small number of political videos from YouTube. Since the gadget is actually an iframe, you can also go to the original page.

"Using the gadget you can search not only the titles and descriptions of the videos, but also their spoken content. Additionally, since speech recognition tells us exactly when words are spoken in the video, you can jump right to the most relevant parts of the videos you find," explains Google.


EveryZing uses speech-to-text technology to search for audio and video across the web. The site has a separate section for YouTube videos, but the coverage is unimpressive.

15 Jul 2008 6:15am GMT

Posted by Arnaud Sahuguet and Ari Bezman, Product Managers

In this U.S. election year, what information could be more important than the candidates' own words to describe their views, actions and platforms?

Our teams have been working to develop tools to make it easier for people to track election-related information. A few months back, YouTube encouraged everyone to participate in the discussion process through the CNN/YouTube debates, Google Checkout offered an easy and fast way for individuals to make contributions to political candidates, and the Geo team created maps and layers to inform voters during elections.

Today, the Google speech team (part of Google Research) is launching the Google Elections Video Search gadget, our modest contribution to the electoral process. With the help of our speech recognition technologies, videos from YouTube's Politicians channels are automatically transcribed from speech to text and indexed. Using the gadget you can search not only the titles and descriptions of the videos, but also their spoken content. Additionally, since speech recognition tells us exactly when words are spoken in the video, you can jump right to the most relevant parts of the videos you find. Here's a look:


In addition to providing voters with election information, we also hope to find out more about how people use speech technology to search and consume videos, and to learn what works and what doesn't, to help us improve our products.

The gadget only searches videos uploaded to YouTube's Politicians channels, which include videos from Senator Obama's and Senator McCain's campaigns, as well as those from dozens of other candidates and politicians. It usually takes less than a few hours for a video to appear in the index after it has been published on YouTube. Candidates can control the videos that appear in the gadget by managing the content they upload to YouTube. While some of the transcript snippets you see may not be 100% accurate, we hope that you'll find the product useful for most purposes. Speech recognition is a difficult problem that hasn't yet been completely solved, but we're constantly working to refine our algorithms and improve the accuracy and relevance of these transcribed results.

To try it out, just visit our iGoogle gadget page. We welcome your feedback, so please feel free to leave a comment while you're there.

14 Jul 2008 11:32pm GMT

The JavaScripted SWFObject is a popular way to include Flash files. Recently, Google announced better support for crawling Flash files, and in an update they added to their original post, they now also say: For our July 1st launch, we didn't enable Flash indexing for Flash files embedded via SWFObject. We're now rolling out an update that enables support for common JavaScript techniques for embedding Flash, including SWFObject and SWFObject2. On another note, Google adds: At this time, content loaded dynamically from resource files is not indexed. We've noted this feature request from several webmasters -- ...

14 Jul 2008 8:15pm GMT

Posted by Liza Ma, Associate Product Manager

Creating content for the web is easy, but getting people to discover it can be a challenge. When we launched Google Webmaster Tools in 2006, the goal was to reach as many webmasters as possible in order to help them create more search engine-friendly sites. We wanted to help webmasters understand how their sites interact with Google, and we've introduced a number of features that help webmasters identify and fix problems with their sites that prevented visitors from reaching them. Google Webmaster Tools offers important data such as when sites were last crawled, who's linking to them, and what the most popular search terms are that drive traffic to their sites.

To further help webmasters create better sites, we're launching the Google Webmaster Tools Access Provider Program, which lets domain hosters from all over use our APIs to get their customers started with Google Webmaster Tools. It's an exciting development for us, and we look forward to helping more webmasters understand search. Read more about the program on our Webmaster Central blog.

14 Jul 2008 6:27pm GMT

Radiohead teamed up with Google to show their music video for the song "House of Cards," visualized using 3D data. Google also offers an interactive app to let you see this data (it may take some time to load but once it's done, you can play the video and pan & zoom at the same time), a Making Of, and a download of the points data as Comma Separated Values file. [Thanks Pixelisation!]

14 Jul 2008 6:02pm GMT

Yup, I'm about to do another blog post where someone says that a website is clean but it doesn't look like it to us. I did a very similar post in January 2007, and in that post I said I've checked out a quite a few "we don't have any malware" reports at this point, [...]

14 Jul 2008 4:43pm GMT

Posted by Ola Rosling, Product Manager

A few weeks ago we heard about a project Radiohead was working on. The band was making a new video, but they weren't using any cameras, just lasers and data. As you might imagine, we were intrigued.

The song is called "House of Cards," from Radiohead's recent "In Rainbows" album. In this new video, there were no cameras on set. Instead, two scanning technologies were used to capture 3D images. Geometric Informatics scanning systems produced structured light to capture 3D images at close proximity, while a Velodyne LIDAR system that uses multiple lasers was used to capture large environments such as landscapes. In the video, 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute produced all the exterior scenes.

Whether you're a music fan or a developer (or both), we agreed with the band that it would be great to give you a deeper look into how all of this was done, and even a chance to play with the data yourself, under a license that allows remixing.

You can view the video, watch a short documentary about how it was made, interact with the video in 3D, download some of the data, and download an iGoogle theme and gadget - all at http://code.google.com/radiohead.

14 Jul 2008 2:47pm GMT

If you read all the press on Friday, it sounded like a full-out iPocalypse as Apple's in-store activation of the iPhone failed, which left a bunch of people steamed. I left a Summize search for [iphone] up in my browser; there were probably 10K+ twitters on Friday that mentioned the iPhone. By afternoon I noticed that [...]

14 Jul 2008 5:03am GMT

Posted by Steve Grove, YouTube News and Politics

Through unprecedented partnerships with both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, we just debuted a video contest that will send one talented winner from each side of the aisle onto their candidate's campaign trail, and ultimately into their party's national convention in Denver or Minneapolis-St. Paul. The call to action is simple: submit a video explaining why you're a Democrat or Republican in 2008. The five most compelling and creative videos selected by each convention will be voted on by the YouTube community, who will determine the final winner.

Learn more by watching these videos from Republican Chairman Mike Duncan or Democratic Chairman Howard Dean.

These contests are a part of our larger partnership with the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. As the official providers for search and online video community, Google and YouTube are contributing a broad range of technology and services to help delegates, members of the media and interested citizens around the country to access convention events and information. And on YouTube, the two convention staffs have been busy posting videos to build buzz about the exciting events in Denver and Minneapolis-St. Paul this summer - like speeches from great moments in convention history.

So check out YouTube's Convention Headquarters and submit your video to the contest today. It's your chance to get involved in what promise to be two of the most exciting political events this summer.

11 Jul 2008 12:48pm GMT

Posted by Robert Hamilton and David Singleton, Google Mobile Team

Our first downloadable iPhone application is here. It's free, and it makes searching faster and easier. It's never as easy to type on a mobile phone as on a full keyboard and the mobile network is rarely as fast as a desktop connection. So Google Mobile App starts working as soon as you type. Smart features mean you'll get what you're looking for in fewer key presses than before. For instance, we've added the power of suggest (type "lost in" and one touch completes "lost in translation") and My Location (type "coffee" and one touch shows cafes right where you are on a map) to help you search.

We've also brought Google search to your iPhone's address book to make it easy to contact the people you call or text most often. To learn more and see a video showing the App in action, check out this post on the Google Mobile Blog.

U.S. users can get Google Mobile App right now. Tap the App Store icon on your iPhone, or open iTunes, and search for 'Google Mobile App'. (You need to have the latest iPhone software update to see it.)

10 Jul 2008 8:31pm GMT

Posted by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow

In May, Udi Manber introduced our search quality group, the group responsible for the ranking of search results. He introduced various teams within "Quality" (as we like to call the group) including Core Ranking, International Search, User Interfaces, Evaluation, Webspam, and other teams. In this post, I want to tell you more about one of these: the Core Ranking team.

Let me introduce myself. My name is Amit Singhal. I'm a Google Fellow in charge of the ranking team at Google. I've worked in the field of search for the past eighteen years, having been introduced to search in 1990 as a graduate student in computer science. In the academic world, the field of search is known as Information Retrieval (or IR). After spending a decade as an IR researcher, I came to Google in 2000, and have worked on Google ranking ever since.

Google ranking is a collection of algorithms used to find the most relevant documents for a user query. We do this for hundreds of millions of queries a day, from a collection of billions and billions of pages. These algorithms are run for every query entered into most of Google's search services. While our web search is the most used Google search service and the most widely known, the same ranking algorithms are also used - with some modifications - for other Google search services, including Images, News, YouTube, Maps, Product Search, Book Search, and more.

The most common question I get asked about Google's ranking is "how do you do it?" Of course, there is a lot that goes into building a state-of-the-art ranking system like ours, and I will delve deeper into the technology behind it in a later post. Today, I would like to briefly share the philosophies behind Google ranking:

1) Best locally relevant results served globally.
2) Keep it simple.
3) No manual intervention.

The first one is obvious. Given our passion for search, we absolutely want to make sure that every user query gets the most relevant results. We often call this the "no query left behind" principle. Whenever we return less than ideal results for any query in any language in any country - and we do (search is by no means a solved problem) - we use that as an inspiration for future improvements.

The second principle seems obvious. Isn't it the desire of all system architects to keep their systems sim