Articles
Friday, November 6, 2009
Dan Siroker: CarrotSticks, Google Chrome, and Obama
Dan Siroker is the founder of kid's learning games site CarrotSticks.com. Before that, he was involved with the Obama campaign transition as deputy new media director; prior to that, Dan was a product manager for Google Chrome. This email inte ... (more...)
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Google Social Search Live
Google now lets you opt in to the Social Search feature they recently announced. Google explains, "If there's relevant web content written by people in your social circle, it will automatically show up at the bottom of your search results under a ... (more...)
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
New: Google Sidewiki
Google Sidewiki is an app you can install for Firefox and Internet Explorer as part of the Google Toolbar. It lets you discuss any webpage out there with others -- by adding messages in a side bar displayed on a given page. If you're not a toolbar fa ... (more...)
Google Chrome Frame: A Canvas (and More) Plugin for Internet Explorer
Oh sweet: Google released a plug-in for Internet Explorer which brings Canvas and a couple of other things (like Chrome's fast JavaScript engine) to Internet Explorer. It's named Google Chrome Frame, and the "couple of other things" could act lik ... (more...)
Friday, September 18, 2009
When Google Gets Musical
Here in China I'm amazed by the Google Music site... I can search for all kinds of bands and musicians and get their albums, with songs fully playable in an easy interface (songs playable in China only, that is!). The scope of featured artists doesn' ... (more...)
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Google Acquires reCAPTCHA
Google has just announced that it's acquired reCAPTCHA, the company that not only helps to reduce spam, but also helps to digitize books by improving Optical Character Recognition technology through the use of CAPTCHAs. As Wikipedia explains, ... (more...)
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Google's Data Liberation Site
Google is emphasizing their proclaimed goal to let you easily import and export your Google data when moving services via a new site -- DataLiberation.org*. The mission statement from the Data Liberation Front -- named after a Monty Python skit a ... (more...)
Google Fast Flip Lets You Quickly Browse News Pages
Google's latest Labs experiment is called Fast Flip. Opening the site you'll be presented with snapshot images of articles from lots of different news sites. You can then scroll through these snapshots or click on any snapshot to be taken to a la ... (more...)
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Google Promoting Social iGoogle Gadgets
Google is currently pushing social gadgets via a link from their homepage. The promo reads "New! Post updates and play games with friends on iGoogle", and points to a special page listing gadgets with social features -- like multiplayer games or ... (more...)
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Ron Talks About Building a Video Site for Kids... and Clashing With the Laws of YouTube
Ron is the creator of Totlol.com, a site for kids and their parents which uses the YouTube API. When he sent me the pointer I blogged about it, and his approach inspired a site of mine, and Ron and I had been periodically emailing since then. On ... (more...)
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Google Lets You Preview Their Search Infrastructure Update
Google announced that they're opening up a new results infrastructure for testing. You can view it at www2.sandbox.google.com, and give feedback on differences to normal web search by clicking the "Dissatisfied" link at the bottom (you are supposed t ... (more...)
Friday, July 24, 2009
Not All Of Google May Be Available In Your Country
The name is "world wide web", but it's not always. What are some of Google's services that will only work in one country, or a limited set of countries? (Unless perhaps you route around the block -- geolocation by IP, as it's often implemented, i ... (more...)
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Google Korea With Dropdown Search Menu
The Google Korea homepage, already different from Google.com for some time, is now showing a dropdown search navigation menu to the left of the search box. Translated it reads All Search - Image - News - Map - Dictionary - Blog - Shopping - Video ... (more...)
Monday, July 13, 2009
Microsoft Announcing Web-Based Office
A web-based Word As rumored before, details are now surfacing that Microsoft is planning to release a suite of web based office tools for MS Office 2010 (the thing they probably should have done with "Windows Live" some years ago). For instance, ... (more...)
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Google Announced Their Operating System: Chrome OS
Google announced an open source OS called Google Chrome Operating System. Google's aim seems to make this a lightweight operating system that has a browser running web apps at its core. Many web apps being Google's of course, or at least, that's ... (more...)
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...)
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