Friday, December 16, 2005
Christmas Lights Search
I guess we’ll be seeing a lot more of those in the future. Search for Christmas Lights in the US (or with Google Web Accelerator), and you’ll see a special icon surrounding the advertisement on the results page, as David Hergert points out in the forum.
Update: Searching for “Dreidel” returns candles decoration, Brian S. notes.
Microsoft Asks: Was This Useful?
![[Was this information useful? Choices: Yes]](/files/yes-helpful.jpg)
This button on an official Microsoft help page on Internet Explorer 7 should get a prize for positive thinking. [Via DPNeal in the forum.]
Googlers’ Blogs
Here are all the blogs by Google employees in one place with an easy-to-remember domain name (I’ve something similar, but not quite as nicely ordered).
AdSense Holiday Gift
Google is sending out a holiday gift to its most successful AdSense publishers. It contains stuff like a Google-branded wireless mini mouse, a USB hub, or a headset. Search Engine Roundtable has a photo. [Thanks Telendro.]
Homepage API Runs in Quirks Mode
Google is known for disregarding W3C Doctypes and such, but this time, they could render user content different as well by doing so. The Google Homepage API runs external content (from people outside Google Inc) in an inline frame. However, the page they’re creating based on the user script misses a Doctype – and thus will force the browser (like Firefox, or Internet Explorer) to run in a “quirks mode.” This will make the browser run in a rendering mode where it supports older bugs for reasons of being downwards-compatible to badly written HTML, instead of using more modern and standardized features. (For example, in Internet Explorer this would make your CSS classes case-insensitive, and it might also change how an element’s padding is calculated.)
A workaround right now is to simply just link to your page, which Google allows you to do. You will then not be able to use some of the APIs functionality (like its nice fetch function), but you will be able to run your code in Standards Compliant mode.
Pandora Custom Radio
Caleb points to Pandora, which lets you provide your favorite artists... to then create a customized web radio station for you with similar music!
Libjingle
Google releases Libjingle, a set of components “to interoperate with Google Talk’s peer-to-peer and voice calling capabilities.” [Via Slashdot.]
Google Funding New Lab
Google, Microsoft and others are funding a new lab.
Other Searches Widget
Caleb uploaded an “alternative searches” Google Homepage API widget to Google Base. Just copy the Google Base URL to your personalized homepage’s content. The widget allows you to directly search blogs, books, Google Scholar, Google Answers and more.
In the meantime, Google didn’t accept any of the submissions to its Homepage content directory so far. There seems to be the need for an alternative directory for easier submissions, and more variety...
Gmail Mobile
Google’s Gmail is now available in a mobile phone optimized version. You can find it at m.gmail.com. I tried this with two different browsers on my phone (Nokia 6600 with Opera and the Nokia default browser), but all it did was return an error in one browser, crash the other... and Google’s mobile help didn’t provide answers. I cross-checked accessing other sites, and they worked fine. Does anyone get this to work? If so, which phone and browser are you using? [Thanks Travis Harris, Henrique G., Caleb E., Brinke Guthrie, and Tom Lech.]
Update: I found a list of supported phones. Mine isn’t on them. It looks like Google’s approach to “mobile” is slightly screwed – any decent HTML page works on my browsers, why shouldn’t Gmail?
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