The Black Google Homepage

The Black Google Homepage:
Google's homepage is black for the users from United States, United Kingdom, Ireland, Canada and Denmark to promote Earth Hour, an event that encourages energy conservation. "On Saturday, March 29, 2008, Earth Hour invites people around the world to turn off their lights for one hour – from 8:00pm to 9:00pm in their local time zone. (...) Given our company's commitment to environmental awareness and energy efficiency, we strongly support the Earth Hour campaign, and have darkened our homepage today to help spread awareness of what we hope will be a highly successful global event," explains Google in a special page created for the event. Earth Hour started last year in Sydney, but this year many cities from all over the world joined the event.


The purpose of the black homepage is not to save energy, but to raise the awareness of the world's environmental problems. Most people will be surprised to see Google's homepage so radically different and will start to wonder if it's a good idea to imitate Google's blackout. Sometimes small actions make a difference, but in this case the key is elsewhere.

Google's Asian Homepages

Google's Asian Homepages:
Google China is the third international Google site that has a new homepage, radically different from the simple homepage that became a part of Google's identity. Google China's homepage uses animations to display icons and small descriptions for Google services like: Image Search, Google News or Dao Hang.


The other two similar homepages are for Google Korea (launched on June 12, 2007) and Google Japan (launched on March 21, 2008). Google China Blog says that the three homepages were a part of bigger project meant to improve Google's interface and to adapt it to local cultures. For example, Chinese users found it difficult to navigate to other Google services, since they were listed on a different page, so Google decided to place the links more prominently on the homepage.


I liked the last paragraph from Google China's blog post (or its automatic translation, to be more exact):

The change in the Asian region in the entire Home Google is a major patron saint Google Home Marissa has given us the greatest help, and this was her first "replacement" Movement biggest supporters: "You can change as much as possible "of this so let us encourage the Google home page of this classic too bold move from the surgery. Google Home is not static, but, as she insisted to the interests of users, she is also due to the change and you change.

Google already provides an alternative to the "classic" homepage: iGoogle, but the default homepage hasn't changed too much over the years.

Restore Task Manager, Regedit and Folder Options Disabled by Virus

Restore Task Manager, Regedit and Folder Options Disabled by Virus:

Let's face it. All of us have been infected by virus before. Even if you have anti-virus installed, you can still be infected by a new or custom virus that is not recognized by your anti-virus. Sometimes after removing the virus completely from our system, you'll face new problems such as you can no longer bring up Windows Task Manager from CTRL+ALT+DEL. You get the error message saying "Task Manager has been disabled by your administrator".
Task Manager has been disabled by your administrator

You think that it's easy to fix this problem by going to Registry Editor but you can't! You get the error message "Registry editing has been disabled by your administrator".
Registry editing has been disabled by your administrator

Folder Options and even Show Hidden Files & Folder is disabled! How frustrating! Don't worry, here's how to restore your Windows Task Manager, Registry Editor, Folder Options and Show hidden files & folders.

This problem is most commonly caused by a virus called "Brontok". Brontok virus will make some changes to the system restrictions in order to hide itself from easy detection and also from easy cleaning.

Here's a free tool called Remove Restrictions Tool (RRT) which is able to re-enables all what the virus had previously disabled, and gives you back the control over your own computer.
Restore windows restrictions

Remove Restrictions Tool is able to re-enable:
- Registry Tools (regedit)
- Ctrl+Alt+Del
- Folder Options
- Show Hidden Files

Small and easy to use. Make sure you boot in to Safe Mode to use Remove Restrictions Tool (RRT). Just click on the buttons and it'll do it's job.

Download Remove Restrictions Tool (RRT)

Google Street View Gets a New Update

Google Street View Gets a New Update:
Google Street View added imagery for 13 more US cities and for the Yosemite National Park. The new cities are: Albuquerque, Anchorage, Austin, Cleveland, Fairbanks, Little Rock, Madison, Nashville, Rockford, Richmond, Spokane, St. Petersburg, Tampa. The total number of places where Street View is available has increased to 48 and it's likely that Google will add imagery from outside of the US in the near future.

Street View can now be added to any Google Maps mashup since the API supports it. "The API allows you to embed one or multiple panoramas in any location on a site and move, remove, hide and unhide them as necessary. Panoramas can also be easily integrated with the rest of the Google Maps API to allow synchronization between the map and the panorama viewer," explains James McGill, from the Maps API team. And instead of posting screenshots, you can embed the full panoramic views by clicking on "Link to this page" and copying the HTML code in your site.


View Larger Map

YouTube Shows Stats for Your Videos

YouTube Shows Stats for Your Videos:
Now you can find some basic statistical data about the videos you've uploaded to YouTube. For each of your videos, you can view a chart that shows the number of daily views and the evolution of your videos' popularity. The stats can be restricted to a continent or to a country and you can also see the countries where your videos are more popular.


"How does this help you? Well, using these metrics, you can increase your videos' view counts and improve your popularity on the site. For instance, you might learn that your videos are most popular on Wednesdays, that you have a huge following in Spain, or that new videos that play off previous content become more popular more quickly," suggests YouTube's blog.


The analytics data is really basic and doesn't include a lot of interesting information like the sites that embed your videos, the most important sources of traffic, how many people view the full video or play it again etc.


To find your video stats, go to your YouTube account and click on "About this video".

Google to Add Language Translation in Gmail

Google to Add Language Translation in Gmail:
ComputerWorld reports that Google intends to integrate its language translation service in Gmail and Google Talk. There are already bots that could facilitate an IM conversation with a person that speaks a language you don't know, but it would be much better to have the feature built in. Even if the translation is far from perfect and often incoherent, you'll understand the main ideas.

"What you need for real-time automated machine translation is large amounts of compute power, which we have, and large amounts of data, which we have. Imagine a system that can do on-the-fly translation of things like e-mail, documents and IM chat. That's a feature you can see on the horizon," said Google's Matt Glotzbach.

Apparently, Google is also developing tools for videoconferencing "to augment internal training programs and to serve as a hosted alternative to pricey videoconferencing software". Last year, Google acquired Marratech's video conferencing software.

In the past few years, Google started to preannounce features and services, but they were either released late or not released at all. We're still waiting for phone calls in Google Talk, tasks in Google Calendar, Gmail folders, Knol, Google Health.

Google Sets, the Search Engine for Lists

Google Sets, the Search Engine for Lists:
SEO by the Sea points to an interesting patent that describes how Google Sets works. Google Sets is one of the first services that were added to Google Labs and it's a cool way to find list of related terms. Google Sets is a tool that generates lists from a small number of examples by using the web as a big pool of data. You enter some items and Google Sets finds other items that tend to co-occur frequently with your examples. For example, you could enter Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Rudy Giuliani and get a list of US presidential candidates.

One particular type of information often present on the web includes lists, such as lists of restaurants, lists of automobiles, lists of names, etc. Lists may be identified in a number of different ways. For example, a list may include an ordered list or unordered list. Special tags in a HyperText Markup Language (HTML) document identify the presence of ordered and unordered lists. An ordered list commences with an <OL> tag; whereas an unordered list commences with an <UL> tag. Each item in an ordered or unordered list is preceded by an <LI> tag.

Another type of list may include a definition list. A special tag in a HTML document identifies the presence of a definition list. A definition list commences with a <DL> tag. Each item in a definition list is preceded by a <DT> tag. Yet another type of list may include document headers. Special tags in a HTML document identifies headers using <H1> through <H6> tags. Other types of lists may be presented in yet other ways. For example, a list may be presented as items in a table or as items separated by commas or tabs.

After identifying lists on the web, Google generates a probabilistic model from the examples provided by users and classifies the lists according to the model. The items are assigned weights based on the classified lists and the weights are added to form a list based on the total weights.

Colored Folders in Google Docs

Colored Folders in Google Docs:
Google Docs lets you select a color for each of your folders, a feature that has been previously available in Gmail. The color will be used to represent a folder in the sidebar and in the document list, so you can easily spot related documents.

Another new feature, this time available only for documents and presentations, empowers you to change the owner of a document. Unlike simple collaborators, the owner of a document can delete it and can restrict the access to a document for some collaborators. This page explains the difference between viewers, collaborators and owner. To become a collaborator and transfer the ownership of some of your documents, select them from Google Docs homepage and choose More actions > Changer Owner.


Judging from the source code, Google Docs will include an option to add collaborators with limited rights - they won't be able to download a document, change its settings, share it or publish it. Creating user groups with custom permissions could be an even better idea.

Google Tests Video Ads Alongside Search Results

Google Tests Video Ads Alongside Search Results:
In February, we found out that Google intends to test video ads next to search results and now we can finally see some examples. Digital Inspiration spotted an AT&T ad targeted to the query [phone], but there's also an Intel ad when you search for [laptop]। Google uses plusboxes to show that there's a video ad that complements the text and labels them with messages like: "watch commercial", "watch demonstration", "watch testimonial".

The video ad is triggered only after you click on the message and it's a small 160x140 video that uses the Google Video player। The ads are very short (around 30 seconds) and they end by displaying a clickable URL to the landing page.

Google uses the same visual elements as for the search results and user are already used to previewing YouTube videos by clicking on the small plus sign bellow the snippets. Unlike the video search results, Google doesn't include thumbnails next to video ads, but this may change in the future. Overall, the video ads from Google's search results aren't annoying, they must be explicitly selected and they offer more details that couldn't be included in the short text ad.

Google Docs Gets a Menu

Google Docs Gets a Menu:
After updating the toolbar, Google Docs replaced the tabbed interface with a traditional menu. The File menu looks cleaner and integrates the revision history, the Edit includes some of the options that are missing from the toolbar (cut/copy/paste) and also the HTML code editor. It's amazing to see that Find & Replace is still in alpha and doesn't work as advertised. The Insert menu has the same features as the homonymous tab, Format replaces the Styles dropdown, while Tools lets you select the document's language, check the spelling and read stats about the document. The Table menu was previously available as a contextual menu for tables and there's a new Share drop-down that integrates the options to share a page, publish it on the web and preview it.


Google Docs includes all the menus from Microsoft Word 2003, except for View, Window and Help, but there's enough room to add more menus in the future. The team's blog explains the changes by invoking a user study, but the truth is that most people are used to Microsoft Office's classic interface:

A while ago, our Docs User Research team worked on a "card-sort" study in which we disconnected all features in the application from the places we had put them in the UI, and asked some people what the labels and icons meant to them, and how they would group the concepts they represented. One of the things we found was that names such as File, Edit, Format, and Tools resonated as "where you might look" for certain editing features. Check spelling? Seems to fit in a "Tools" group to many people. Find and replace? People generally look for that in an "Edit" group.

These updates are only for the word processing application, as Google Spreadsheets and Presently continue to use the old interface. Having an unified interface and a set of features that work consistently in all the three applications should be a priority for Google.

PicLens, Full-Screen Slideshows for Image Sites

PicLens, Full-Screen Slideshows for Image Sites:
PicLens is a browser add-on that detaches the images from a web page and lets you explore them in interesting ways. The add-on, which is available for Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari, works for a small number of sites: image search engines and photo sharing sites, as it requires to understand the structure of a web page.


PicLens is a great way to visualize the results from Google Image Search as a never-ending list of thumbnails. Once you find an interesting photo, you can double-click on it and view it in full-screen. PicLens can also create slideshows from Google Image Search's results so you can enjoy Dali's paintings or Google's doodles.


For Picasa Web Albums, the slideshow doesn't include captions or file names, but it lets you navigate inside an album. The slideshow also works for Picasa Web's search results and it shows the images in full-screen.

Yahoo to Support OpenSocial

Yahoo to Support OpenSocial:
Yahoo seems to be all about openness lately (Open Search, support for OpenID), so the announcement that the company intends to support Google's OpenSocial initiative shouldn't surprise anyone. OpenSocial is an API for writing social applications that work across multiple sites and many social networks started to work on implementing it: MySpace, hi5, orkut. From Yahoo's blog:

Yahoo! has always been about helping users find and share information online, and we love giving our broad and loyal developer community the tools they need to keep innovating on this front. Their echo our passion for creating the best Web experience for our users.

In this same spirit, we announced today that we’ve joined forces with Google and MySpace to create the OpenSocial Foundation, and will also begin supporting the OpenSocial standard. Industry consortiums such as this often start slowly and evolve over time. So far, OpenSocial is rapidly growing and adapting, but still in the early stages. We feel that this is the right step at this stage in its evolution. It’s no longer a trial balloon — it’s for real. We are taking this opportunity to help ensure websites and developers feel confident using OpenSocial as the building blocks for their new social apps.

OpenSocial Foundation has a web site that uses the recently launched Google Sites. The foundation will make OpenSocial more neutral and closer to becoming a web standard. According to a press release, "the OpenSocial Foundation will be an independent non-profit entity with a formal intellectual property and governance framework; related assets will be assigned to the new organization by July 1, 2008. The foundation will provide transparency and operational guidelines around technology, documentation, intellectual property, and other issues related to the evolution of the OpenSocial platform."

Two weeks ago, MySpace launched a gallery for OpenSocial apps, hi5 will officially open its platform on March 31st, while orkut has delayed the launch. Hopefully, this is the first step from a bigger initiative of making social networks more open and less self-centered.

Search for iGoogle Themes

Search for iGoogle Themes:
With more than 360 themes, iGoogle should have something for everyone. From Chinese floral designs to clean green, from raspberry cakes to an yellow Escher theme, from intricate patterns to Mr. Bison's quirky days, from pink flowers to dark summers, from Studio Ghibli to the Yellow Lab Puppy, users have created great themes.


Now you can actually find some beautiful themes using the new search box: for example, searching for [dynamic], you'll find themes that change throughout the day

Expandable Google Search Box

Expandable Google Search Box:
If you entered long queries in a Google search box, you would notice that it's difficult to edit them because Google optimized the size of the box for short queries. Things have changed and now you can much bigger queries and Google will adjust the search box's size after you perform a search.

Google limits queries to 32 words, but most people don't need that many words. The average number of words in a Google query was 4 at the end of 2007.


Here's a comparison between Live Search, Yahoo Search and Google Search for the query [how do you distinguish between a 64 bit and a 32 bit operating system], one of the most popular queries that start with "how do you".

Custom Google Search

Custom Google Search:
Google has been experimenting with letting users reorder and remove search results. This may seem strange if you think that Google cares a lot about algorithmically ranking search results. The new options allow you to promote some of the results at the top of the page, hide the results you think are not relevant and add new web pages that are missing from Google's results. These changes are saved in your Google account and only influence your results. For now, the users who see the experimental feature are randomly selected.


These new personalization options can be partly recreated using a custom search engine. You can build a custom search engine for the entire web, that should include all the sites from Google's index. Every time you find web pages or web sites that are not very useful, but have good rankings, you can edit the search engine and them to the exclusion list.

To promote search results, check this option in the custom search engine's settings: "Add my Subscribed Link to this Custom Search Engine". Then create subscribed links for some of the terms you search often. Alternatively, you could use Google Spreadsheets to define a list of subscribed links. The subscribed links are also included if you use Google's standard search engine, but they're displayed after the third search result.


The custom search engine lacks the user interface options from Google's experimental feature, but it's a pretty powerful way to customize your search experience.

Useful Google Translate Addresses

Useful Google Translate Addresses:
Translate a web page:

http://www.google.com/translate_c?langpair=LANG1LANG2&u=URL

Example: http://www.google.com/translate_c?langpair=iten&u=http://www.corriere.it/ translates Corriere della Sera's homepage from Italian into English.

Translate a web page into English (the input language is detected automatically):

http://www.google.com/translate_c?langpair=en&u=URL

Example: http://www.google.com/translate_c?langpair=en&u=http://www.corriere.it/ translates Corriere della Sera's homepage from Italian into English, but without explicitly mentioning that the web page is written in Italian.

Use Google Translate as a proxy:

http://www.google.com/translate_c?langpair=LANG1LANG2&u=URL

You basically want to read the page in its initial language, but loaded from Google's servers. LANG2 should be the code for your web page's language, while LANG1 can be any supported language so that LANG1LANG2 is a valid language pair.

Example: http://www.google.com/translate_c?langpair=fren&u=http://craigslist.org shows Craigslist's home page using Google Translate as a way to bypass security restrictions.

Translate a text:

http://www.google.com/translate_t?langpair=LANG1LANG2&text=TEXT

Example: http://www.google.com/translate_t?langpair=enes&text=Hello, world! translates "Hello, world!" from English into Spanish.

Notes:

1. the language pairs are listed in this FAQ, while the language codes are included in this long list.

2. To disable Google Translate's annoying tooltips that show the original text, block this JavaScript file: http://209.85.135.104/translate_c.js, for example by adding a new rule in Adblock Plus for Firefox or by using Opera's content blocker.

Google's Design Guidelines

Google's Design Guidelines:
Jon Wiley, User Experience Designer for Google Apps, outlined some of the most important principles for designing interfaces at Google. In his presentation at the WritersUA conference, Jon listed the following guidelines:

1. Useful: focus on people - their lives, their work, their dreams.

2. Fast: every millisecond counts.

3. Simple: simplicity is powerful.

4. Engaging: engage beginners and attract experts.

5. Innovative: dare to be innovative.

6. Universal: design for the world.

7. Profitable: plan for today's and tomorrow's business.

8. Beautiful: delight the eye without distracting the mind.

9. Trustworthy: be worthy of people's trust.

10. Personable: add a human touch.

Let's see if Google's homepage respects these guidelines. It loads fast and it's pretty useful for those go to google.com. The design is very simple and has little distractions, so it's not intimidating. You don't need a manual to use Google search, but you can learn some tricks that may help you get better results. I'm not sure if Google's homepage is innovative, but many other sites copied its simplicity. Google's homepage is instantly recognizable, so it crossed the cultural barriers, even if Google had to adapt it in Korea and Japan. The profitability is a consequence of Google's focus on delivering useful ads that are contextually adequate: placing ads on the homepage would probably alienate the users. Google's homepage is spacious, elegant and has some sense of humor: "I'm feeling lucky" and the doodles add a human touch. As for trustworthiness, the straightforward design should reinforce users' perception that Google doesn't have a hidden agenda and tries to offer the best answers.

Google Analytics Benchmarks

Google Analytics Benchmarks:
Two weeks ago, Google Analytics added a new feature that lets you compare your site's traffic with average data for other similar sites. To make this feature possible, you need to enable data sharing with the benchmarking service. "Google will remove all identifiable information about your website, then combine that data with hundreds of other anonymous sites in comparable industries and report them in an aggregate form." There's also an option to enable data sharing with other Google services that will allow a better integration between Analytics, AdWords and other services.

The benchmarking data is now live and you can see it if you go to Visitors > Benchmarking (Beta). Google compares the following values for the last 30 days: visits, page views, pages/visit, bounce rate, average time on site and new visits. By default, your site is compared with other sites of similar size, but you can restrict the benchmark to general categories like: Internet, Travel, Shopping, Reference etc. Since the data is aggregated from the sites that agreed to participate in the program, it may not be representative. Google says it will add new categories once more sites will enable the data sharing option.


"When benchmarking is enabled, Google crawls the websites in the account then categorizes them by vertical and the amount of visits. The data is then made anonymous through aggregation. For sites of a similar size, a category of industry verticals can be chosen when there is a sufficient number of accounts in that category."

It's interesting to compare your site's traffic with these aggregate data as it will help you put things in perspective, but you shouldn't be disappointed if the comparison is not favorable. Each site is unique and has a different raison d'être.

Google's Broken Bookmarking Systems

Google's Broken Bookmarking Systems: Google hasn't yet launched a proper bookmarking system. Google Bookmarks was just a small extension of Search History and became more useful after the integration with Google Toolbar. Notebook lets you clip content from the web, but it's more useful for research and not for bookmarking web pages. Google Reader's shared items are limited to your subscriptions or to web sites that have feeds and they're not structured. The not-yet-officially-released Shared Stuff widget wants to unify the ways people share web pages and it's more like a meta social bookmarking service. In this guest post, Michael Searcy expresses his frustration with Google's failed attempts to develop a service for bookmarking and sharing web pages. Share Web Pages Feeds Tags Contacts Bookmark Profile Bookmarks no no no yes no yes no Reader yes yes yes yes yes no yes SharedStuff yes yes yes yes yes yes yes Notebook yes yes yes yes no yes no Like most people I want Google to add a social aspect to "Google Bookmarks". The crazy part is they already have a disassembled version of a social bookmarks network. The parts are: Bookmarks, Reader, Notebook & Shared Stuff. Bookmarks: it's great for across computer access but has no sharing, or interaction with other Google services. Reader: It is awesome. It has changed my life! I find and share more stuff with it, than with normal browsing. You can "star" items that you want to lookup later for reference, but if you want to bookmark something you have to invoke some hackery (you can open the item outside of reader and bookmark it with a toolbar shortcut, or use a Greasemonkey script which doesn't work). Another limitation not shown in the chart is that you can't share anything you are not already subscribed to. Also on a shared reader page you don't get a summary view (for people with lots of posts), you can't search and you definitely cant slice it up by tags/labels. Shared stuff: It's interesting because if you find something cool in Reader you can star it, then later when you get around to reading it again you can open it separate and bookmark it. Then if you open it from your bookmarks you can use the Email/Share toolbar item to Share it and it will Show a "star" saying its bookmarked. Other cool aspects are that you can Share through Google, share through other social networking services, email it to your low-tech friends, and you can even tag your items! You can do all that, but you can't bookmark with Google Bookmarks? You can use every bookmark service except Google. You're kidding me right? So now we can share bookmarked Items in a round about way, but we can't bookmark shared items!!! Notebook: Its nice for a web notebook/clipboard with multiple headings or "notebooks" (which is repetitive but that's what they are called) and the sharing function is nice, if your into sharing notebook type content. Then they tried to incorporate bookmarks, but they imported them and called them "Unfiled Bookmarks", which means it's a bookmark and it's not associated with a "notebook". Which is extra weird if you "move" a bookmark to a notebook. Then you get your Markbooks confused with your Booknotes and ..... Wait. This is just madness. Its just 2 different classes of labels. But you can share "notebook" class labels but not "labels". So close.

Google Translate API

Google Translate API: Google launched another AJAX API, this time for language detection and translation. The API works for the same language pairs that are available at Google Translate and lets you display the translation of a text inside your own page, without having to link to an external translation service. The translation API could be used to automatically translate some content from a web page using the browser's preferred language, to create a Greasemonkey script that translates to English the posts written in other languages, to detect if a comment is written in English before posting it and for many other things. Here's one example of use, where you can enter a text in one of the supported languages (Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Greek, Dutch, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish), Google automatically detects the language and it shows the English translation. The sample text is from Le Monde.

Google launched another AJAX API, this time for language detection and translation. The API works for the same language pairs that are available at Google Translate and lets you display the translation of a text inside your own page, without having to link to an external translation service.

The translation API could be used to automatically translate some content from a web page using the browser's preferred language, to create a Greasemonkey script that translates to English the posts written in other languages, to detect if a comment is written in English before posting it and for many other things.

Here's one example of use, where you can enter a text in one of the supported languages (Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Greek, Dutch, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish), Google automatically detects the language and it shows the English translation. The sample text is from Le Monde.

Le département de la défense américain a demandé à Google de retirer des clichés panoramiques de la base de Fort Sam, au Texas. Google Earth ou Google Street View révèlent des petits secrets que les services gouvernementaux militaires et de renseignement se passeraient bien de voir diffuser. Un événement a fait réagir le gouvernement américain : il concerne une base américaine du Texas, Fort Sam, à Houston, investie il y a une dizaine de jours par une des équipes du service Google Street View, qui permet de visiter une trentaine de villes américaines en prises de vue panoramiques. Le conducteur du véhicule spécial de Google avait simplement demandé l'autorisation d'accès à la base, qui avait été acceptée.

Keep your RAM always free

Keep your RAM always free:
Sometime when we close some program Explorer does not immediate unload DLL files from the memory.
The DLL files still resident in the memory for a while and do not let the another application to use the memory in their position.
I will guide you to unload them from the memory as fast as we close the application to make the memory always free.follow these step :

1. Navigate to start>RUN>Type regedit>OK

2.Browse the register editor to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > SOFTWARE > Microsoft > Windows > CurrentVersion > Explorer

3.Create a new DWORD Value and define its name to AlwaysUnloadDLL then enter 1 into the value box.

4.Restart your PC

DONE !!

Content Copy Protection

Content Copy Protection:
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Both services include integrated case tracking to manage your responses to multiple instances of plagiarism.

Faster Google Search on Your Mobile Phone

Faster Google Search on Your Mobile Phone:
Searching the web using a mobile phone is not always a pleasant experience. You have to open a browser, go to a search engine, wait for the page to load and type your query. Google tried to eliminate two of these steps by providing small applications that add Google's search box on the phone's home screen. This way, the search box is always at your fingertips and you won't have visit Google's homepage to type your query.

For Blackberry, the search application is included in the Google Mobile Updater, which is available at mobile.google.com. Google offers a similar search shortcut for N-series and E-series Nokia phones and for Windows Mobile phones at the same address. Google will probably expand the availability of this app to other mobile phones, although not all of them allow search boxes on the home screen. For feature phones, Opera Mini is probably the best fastest way to access Google search.

Because the search box is more accessible and it's so easy to enter your query, people search more. "When we look at the combined usage numbers for BlackBerry and Symbian versions of this plug-in, we see that users are able to get Google search results up to 40 percent faster. And, BlackBerry and Symbian users with the plug-in installed search 20 percent more than those without it," concludes Google.

"We have very much hit a watershed moment in terms of mobile Internet usage. We are seeing that mobile Internet use is in fact accelerating. The growing availability of flat-rate data plans from phone carriers instead of per-minute charges that previously discouraged Internet use, along with improved Web browsers on mobile phones as well as better-designed services from companies like Google are fueling the growth", said Google's Matt Waddell. iPhone was a great testbed for trying new interfaces and testing their impact as the Internet will slowly move to mobile phones.

Google Spreadsheets Adds Gadgets, a Directory of Features

Google Spreadsheets Adds Gadgets, a Directory of Features:
Google Spreadsheets, the most mature application from Google's online office suite, has suddenly become much better.

Now you can get email notifications when your collaborators make changes or edit some specific cells. You can also get notifications when someone submits new data using a form.

Google Spreadsheets autocompletes the value from a cell so it's much easier to enter repetitive data in a column.

If the existing features aren't enough for you, there's a new directory of gadgets that can be added to a spreadsheets and use existing data. You may remember the data visualization gadgets I found last month: they're part of this directory, which includes many other interesting gadgets. You can add interactive time series charts, Gantt charts, funnel charts, timelines, tables with filters and grouping, pivot tables, maps, search results and you can also create your own gadget that adds other missing features. As with any beginning, not all the gadgets work very well and the pivot table gadget created by Panorama doesn't seem to work at all.

To add a gadget, click on the "Insert" dropdown and select "Gadget". Each gadget can be embedded into web pages or added to iGoogle, which is extremely cool because the data is updated automatically.

Google Docs help center mentions a new visualization API connected with the new gadgets, but the documentation is not yet available. "The Gadgets-in-Docs for spreadsheets API should be used when you want to create user-facing features which are accessible from within the spreadsheet editor of Google Docs itself. This approach combines the Google Gadgets API with the Google Visualization API, to allow the developer to access data on the spreadsheet for use or presentation in practically any form they choose. Developers using this method should already be familiar with the development of Google Gadgets, and then only need to learn some basic additions provided by the Visualization API. Note that this approach currently only supports one-way interaction with the underlying spreadsheet (reading data), however, it has the advantage of enabling the publishing of gadgets created in a spreadsheet to other gadget-enabled sites, such as iGoogle."

If you find some interesting uses for the new gadgets, publish your spreadsheet and post a link in the comments.

Update:

A cool visualization gadget based on GapMinder World (you'll find in Google Docs as "motion chart")

Evaluating Google Search Quality

Evaluating Google Search Quality:
A leaked copy of Google's quality rater guidelines (PDF), used internally to evaluate the quality of search results, reveals some interesting things about Google's approach to search. "According to the document, which is dated April 2007 and at least looks legitimate, a quality rater has the job to first research and understand a specific search query – say [cell phones] –, to then look at the quality of a website returned for this query," notes Philipp Lenssen.

Queries can be navigational (the user has a single site in mind, the official homepage of a company/product), informational (searching for information), transactional (trying to obtain something: buy a product, download a video) or a combination of these categories. Depending on the query, search results can be: vital (for navigational queries with a dominant interpretation), useful (comprehensive, authoritative resources), relevant (pages that don't cover all the aspects of a query), not relevant (marginally related to the query) or off-topic.

Google thinks that there must be a connection between queries and search results in terms of generality: broad queries are best matched by broad pages, specific queries by specific pages. Search results must take into account the dominant interpretation of a query in a certain location and at a certain moment.

Spam is treated separately from search results evaluation. A web page may be spammy even if it's considered "vital" for some queries or it's very authoritative. "Webspam is the term for web pages that are designed by webmasters to trick search engine robots and direct traffic to their websites," explains Google. Web pages that include ads and scraped content from other sites, but don't bring any original information are considered spam. "When trying to decide if a page is Spam, it is helpful to ask yourself this question: If I remove the scraped (copied) content, the ads, and the links to other pages, is there anything of value left? If the answer is no, the page is probably Spam."

Explore Your Interactions with Google Reader

Explore Your Interactions with Google Reader:
Web applications track many user actions and use them for different purposes: improving the products, finding patterns, building user profiles etc. For example, Google Reader records some of your actions without providing options in the interface to access the data. Here are some addresses where you can find historical data about the items you've subscribed to (click on "View all items" to see all the posts).

* All the posts you've emailed to your contacts:http://www.google.com/reader/view/user/-/state/com.google/tracking-emailed

* All the posts you have marked as unread at some point (to keep a post unread, you need to uncheck "Mark as read" from the options bar; note that "Mark all as unread" will not maintain this state):http://www.google.com/reader/view/user/-/state/com.google/tracking-kept-unread

* All the posts you have marked as unread and are still unread (Google Reader calls them "saved items"):http://www.google.com/reader/view/user/-/state/com.google/kept-unread

* Did you click on a post's main link to go to the original location? You'll find it here:http://www.google.com/reader/view/user/-/state/com.google/tracking-item-link-used

* Did you click on a link from a post's content? The post should be included in this list:http://www.google.com/reader/view/user/-/state/com.google/tracking-body-link-used

* If you use the list view, you can find the list of posts you've actually read (or at least you have clicked on the title):http://www.google.com/reader/view/user/-/state/com.google/read

* Are Google's recommended feeds interesting? Check the list of recommended feeds you've subscribed to:http://www.google.com/reader/view/user/-/state/com.google/recommendations-subscribed

* Did you accidentally dismissed a recommended feed? You'll find it here:http://www.google.com/reader/view/user/-/state/com.google/recommendations-dismissed

Add, Edit and Delete Places in Google Maps

Add, Edit and Delete Places in Google Maps:
After adding an option to edit locations, Google Maps allows people to add places. The option seems to work only for the US and you can enter few details about the local business or the place: address, name, phone, website and category. Google promises that "once you save your place, the whole world can find your addition by searching for it within a few minutes."


To find this feature, go to Google Maps, search for an address (e.g.: Madison Ave, NY) and you'll see a new option in the left sidebar: "Can't find what you're looking for? Add a place to the map."

You can also edit the details from existing listings and even remove places from the map. Among the possible reasons why you could delete a place you can find: the listing is a duplicate, the place doesn't exist, it is permanently closed or it's not of general interest. While business listings are changed almost instantly after you edit them, they can be removed only if someone from Google accepts your removal request. Each local listing can have a status like "Added", "Edited", "Removal requested" and the changes history is available to everyone.

Until now, only business owners could add places, using Google's Local Business Center. "We gather business information from numerous websites, Yellow Pages directories, and other sources to populate Google Maps search results. If you'd like to be included, you can easily enter your information into our online Local Business Center for free. (...) Once you've submitted your business information, you'll need to verify the listing before it goes live. You can verify using a touch-tone phone, SMS, or a PIN that will be sent via regular mail to your business address. Once the listing is verified, your information will normally appear in our results within six weeks," explains Google.

It's great to trust your users, but the places added using the new feature should be verified to make sure they are real. Turning Google Maps has a lot of practical advantages and could be used to keep the geographical information up-to-date.

Don't Talk About Blogger's Comments

Don't Talk About Blogger's Comments:
(Based on a real song/movie/book.)


And you open the page and you step inside. It's an interesting post from a Blogger blog. After reading it, you want to post a comment and share your opinion, but there's no contact form. A strange link invites readers to "post a comment" and you reluctantly click on it. The link sends you to a web page from a different domain where you are supposed to enter your comment, but the comment form is too small and you can no longer see the original post unless you click on a barely visible link. For some reason, Blogger asks you to log in and it's not obvious that you can post a comment without having a Google account. Oh, and there's a difficult to read CAPTCHA you need to solve before clicking on "Publish your comment".


After all this trouble, the comment has been finally posted. Blogger forgot to auto-link your URLs, but that's no longer your problem. The big question is how to get back to the post. You want to give up and close the tab, but you notice a subtle message: "Your comment has been saved. It may take a moment for your comment to appear on the site at the original post." The last three words are linked so maybe clicking on the link will send you back to the original post.


Congratulations! You've managed to post a comment on Blogger. If this your first comment, it's likely it will also be the last one. "You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else. We are all a part of the same compost. We are the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world."

Useful Content Restrictions for Yahoo Search

Useful Content Restrictions for Yahoo Search:
Google's advanced search options are useful, but they could include ways to define more restrictions for search results. Maybe you want to find pages that mostly contain text, web pages that reference videos or include tables. Fortunately, some these features are available at Yahoo, where you can use the feature: operator.


iraq gdp feature:table - web pages that contain tables, unfortunately including layout tables


la traviata feature:audio - web pages that link to audio files (e.g.: MP3s)


michel gondry ads feature:video - web pages that link to video files (e.g.: QuickTime videos)


AJAX feature:acrobat - search results that link to PDF files


beatles feature:activex - search results that contain the object tag (e.g.: embedded YouTube videos or any other Flash object)


feature:activex site:googlesystem.blogspot.com - all the pages from this blog that include videos

You can also use the operator to remove some classes of web pages. If you want to filter web pages that use JavaScript, add -feature:script:


java -feature:script - old tutorials for Java


lagrange interpolation demo -feature:applet - interpolation demos that don't include Java applets


To find web pages that link to files with a certain extension, use the linkextension: operator. For example, linkextension:ogg bach finds web pages about Bach that link to .ogg audio files.


Yahoo has another interesting operator (depth:) that lets you define the maximum number of subdirectories from your search results' URLs. For example, a search for google tips depth:1 will include www.google.com/help/features.html because it has a single directory, but not www.techcrunch.com/2007/01/04/google-tips-pulled, which has three directories. This could be useful to find web pages that are important relatively to the structure of a web site.


The operator has a special value that lets you search only homepages: -1, as you can see in this query: flickr depth:-1.



I don't know if Yahoo's search engine is better than Google, but Yahoo inherited a lot of interesting features from AltaVista and Inktomi, two leading search engines in the '90s.