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Tuesday, June 23, 2009
Google China Removes Auto-Suggest Following Gov't Anti-Porn Initiative
Fingerpointing towards Google in a report by state-controlled CCTV; the user shows how he enters [xing], later stumbling upon scantily clad people in Google Images. The search auto-completion feature on Google China's homepage was recently remov ... (more...)
Monday, June 22, 2009
Google Adds Facebook Friends to Results
I'm not sure how new this is, but when a Facebook user's profile is returned in Google's search results, you can now see the user's location (or network) and a random selection of their friends, as shown on their public profile. I'm not seeing ... (more...)
Friday, June 19, 2009
Google Product Ads Beta?
Someone who'd like to remain anonymous forwarded an email from Google, confidentially referring to a product called "Google product ads beta". From the mail: We are pleased to invite you to participate in an exciting beta program with the Google ... (more...)
Friday, June 12, 2009
How Facebook Uses Your "Skipped" Webmail Contacts
Yesterday, Facebook suggested two people to me through its "Suggestions" feature which usually includes friends of friends, co-workers and people I used to go to school with. The odd thing about these two suggestions was that although I knew both of ... (more...)
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Google Translator Toolkit
Google Translator Toolkit is a new tool being launched today to help translators organize their work and benefit from shared translations, glossaries and translation memories, the Google China Blog reports (English translation by Google). Evidence ... (more...)
Monday, June 8, 2009
Wasted PageRank Sculpting, and JavaScript Links Needing Nofollow
Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable a couple of days ago highlighted two interesting points from the SMX Advanced conference. Based on information Google's Matt Cutts offered, Barry says (but please take this with a grain of salt until Go ... (more...)
Sunday, June 7, 2009
Blind Search: Compare Search Engines and Cast Your Vote
Blind Search is the name of a site that lets you enter a search query, and then shows you three result columns where you can vote on the best one. Because you don't see where the particular results are coming from until after you vote, you will n ... (more...)
Saturday, June 6, 2009
StackOverflow's Karma Bounty, Data Dump, and Sister Sites
Karma Bounties Programming question & answers site StackOverflow.com has a system based around karma and badges, and karma acts as a kind of in-site currency. One nice extra feature are bounties. When you don't get a good answer to your qu ... (more...)
Friday, June 5, 2009
Google's Tetris Logo
Google Australia, China and some other places where it's Saturday already are displaying a special logo doodle celebrating Tetris. The alt text reads "Celebrating 25 Years of The Tetris Effect - courtesy of Tetris Holding, LLC", and the logo is l ... (more...)
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Google Squared Declares the Living Dead
Google Squared, one of Google's fun but more problem infested products, has the macabre habit of declaring random living people dead. Take the query actors, for instance, which will automatically include a column titled "Date of Death" telling yo ... (more...)
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Google Squared Is Live
Google Squared is live, and it's a lot of fun... albeit the info presented is far from always being accurate. Here's how you use it: just enter the name of a group of things, say, I entered comic book character. Google Squared then calculates for ... (more...)
Monday, June 1, 2009
Microsoft's New Try At Search Is Live
You might have heard the news of search engine Bing -- Microsoft's rebranding effort after Live failed to take over the search crown from Google -- going live. Expectedly, the web search results are often copying Google's style but are of [edit]s ... (more...)
Barcode-scanning Your Bookshelf for Google Books
Google's Matt Cutts shows how he adds books to his Google Books "My library" feature... using a below-70 bucks barcode scanner which he USB-connected to his computer. Why would you want to do that? One reason is to make your book shelf searchable ... (more...)
Friday, May 29, 2009
Google Increases White Space Around Logo on Result Pages
It looks like Google increased the margin above and below their logo on the SERPs. Anyone dares speculate why? I asked ex-Google employee and Gmail (and more) designer Kevin Fox to guess about why Google did the change, and what effect it migh ... (more...)
Thursday, May 28, 2009
A Sneak Peak at Google Wave
Over the last years the web has moved towards more real-timeness and collaboration, with plenty of online communication forms to choose from. Google now is showing off a preview of a new product, framework and protocol called Google Wave. I've not se ... (more...)
Google Apps Script: Expanding the Google Office With Your Own JavaScript
A public document footnoted with "Google Confidential" mentions Google Apps Script, a framework that looks like a kind of macro language (and more) for Google's web office. The terms of service mentions a "Trusted Tester Agreement", but Google di ... (more...)
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Google Web Elements and More Announced at Google I/O
Google at today's I/O developer conference announced Google Web Elements. Web Elements lets you simply paste a URL from a public Google spreadsheet, calendar, presentations and more, and then offers you some gadget code to paste into your site. A ... (more...)
Google Holodeck for Street View
Some of you may remember seeing screenshots of a humorous email sent by a Googler requesting a holodeck to be installed in one of the Googleplex buildings. Perhaps that wasn't such a joke after all. Anyone attending the Google I/O developer confer ... (more...)
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Translate Your Gmail Inbox Messages With a Click
This has got to be my favorite Gmail feature rolled out in the Labs: message translation. Enable it in the Labs settings, and next time you see a mail written in a language other than your own, you can hit the link reading e.g. "Translate message ... (more...)
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Google Shows Survey Questions on Some Health Searches
Google announced that they're starting to show survey questions at the bottom of a small percentage of health-related search queries. For instance, a search for headache may trigger the question: "Did you search because you or someone you know ha ... (more...)
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Screenshots of Google Squared
Update: Google Squared is live now! One of the most interesting announcements at today's Google Searchology event was Google Squared, which Google says will be appearing in their Labs later this month (apparently at www.google.com/squared). Google ... (more...)
Google Searchology 2009
Today, Google is holding a press event called Searchology, which we also saw in 2007. Their press center says that speakers "will include VP of Search Engineering, Udi Manber, and VP of Search Products and User Experience, Marissa Mayer." The who ... (more...)
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Google's Social News Gadget
Google has an iGoogle gadget called "What's Popular". If you subscribe to it and expand it on your personalized Google homepage, you'll see a social news page not unlike sites like Digg or Reddit, with up and down vote arrows. The types are split ... (more...)
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Google Profiles Onebox
Google has started to roll out integration of Google Profiles into their main results. For instance, search for tony ruscoe and scroll down to the end of the results, where you will find a pic of Tony, a brief description, and links to services l ... (more...)
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
New Google Labs Experiments: Similar Images, and Google News Timeline
Google released two experiments into their newly structured Google Labs: Similar Images, and Google News Timeline. The one release, Similar Images, is a highly useful image comparison engine. It's like Google News with an exception: some pics ... (more...)
Sunday, April 19, 2009
Google Researches New Captcha Approach In Which Users Rotate Images Upward
Google researchers released a paper [PDF] which explores a new approach to Captchas. Instead of the user entering a string of letters and numbers to prove they're not a bot -- with traditional Captchas often showing visuals that are hard to decipher ... (more...)
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Ranking Data in Google Referrer String
When a user clicks on a Google result URL, the site they end up on can check things like the user's original search query that led to that site, thanks to the referrer string. Now, for a portion of those referrer strings, the position of the result t ... (more...)
Saturday, April 11, 2009
DiggBar Pages and Google
Digg recently released a feature that frames all pages linked from Digg. Instead of linking straight to the URL of a story, they're linking to something like http://digg.com/d1npNz, and then embed an Iframe which contains the original page. This ... (more...)
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Google's Wonder Wheel Experiment, and More
Google is running an experiment in their search results, apparently shown to a portion of their users. What happens is that on the search results, say for the query comic books, a link in the top blue bar will read "Show options...". Click it, and a ... (more...)
Friday, March 20, 2009
Gmail Gets Undo
Paul Buchheit, ex-Google employee and initial guy behind Gmail, has been mentioning for quite some time how neat it would be for all apps, including Gmail, to have an Undo feature. Looks like his voice has been heard, at least for Gmail, which no ... (more...)
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