Friday, November 21, 2008
Google Now Lets You Upvote Results and Comment On Them
Google has gone live with a big change to their result pages, at least for those of you who are logged in (if you’re not seeing it yet, it may still be rolled out for your Google Account). It’s called SearchWiki, and lets you edit the position of the results you’re getting, and add comments to them. SearchWiki was in experimental stage for some time now.
Specifically, you’ll be seeing three icons accompanying results, and further options below the listing:
- Up vote: An up arrow, similar in functionality to what you may know from social sites like Reddit or Digg. Clicking it will turn the icon green and move this specific result up one position. Once upped, a down arrow appears as well, which will trigger the result to fly to the bottom of the listing. (At his blog, Ionut Alex. Chitu mentions: “[Y]our changes are available only when you repeat the query and, in some cases, for similar queries (e.g.: [google.com] in addition to [google]). That means you can’t remove a web page or a domain from all search results”.)
- Remove: An X icon, which will make the result disappear in an animated puff. It won’t be completely gone for you, though; at the bottom of the page you’ll see the note “You have removed results from this page” with an option to hide them altogether, or restore them.
- Comment: A Speech Bubble icon which lets you make a comment on the result. The comment will be public, Google disclaims. Once saved, you’ll still be able to edit or delete your comment later on. Others are now able to upvote your comment or flag it as innapropriate, like on the “All SearchWiki notes” page. (That page also serves as the next best thing to see the pure vote-based ranking.)
- Add result: The plus icon is shown below the organic results, and it lets you add any URL at all to your result page.
Now, when you change something, you won’t immediately shift around the page for others. For now Google says it’s a mere customization on your end. (You can see all your customizations in one place at the “My SearchWiki notes” page.) However, Google indicates in statements provided to Search Engine Land that they won’t completely rule out the possibility of this impacting everyone’s rankings in the future:
I asked what would happen if 10,000 people all added “Matt McGee’s Widget Page” to their own results for the phrase [widget]. “We’re always looking at user data as a signal,” [Google’s Cedric Dupont] says. And in a situation like that? “We’re not closing any doors.”
Also, once a result was upvoted, you’ll be seeing who else voted for this result, though it will only show compactly as e.g. “![[up]](/files/searchwiki/up-small.png)
9 ![[x]](/files/searchwiki/close-small.png)
11 - Picked by Rat, Mr, yinan.wu, and others.” This may add a more social feeling to search results. (Google calls it a “community” in their announcement post on this, but we need to keep in mind how diverse this group is, even when they might have stumbled upon the same pages in results.) Note this field won’t show your full email address to others, but your nickname, which you can change on your account profile page.
It’s probably also not a huge jump to imagine that Google could one day extract keywords from the comments of a particular result to aid them in their results selection for exotic queries. And as opposed to a web index, which at least in theory anyone with enough servers could build, the upvotes, hides and comment data is something Google will exclusively own thanks to their (massive) user base.
Now, all these new features come with a certain amount of clutter, naturally. Ionut in the comments remarks, “Google should provide a separate wiki mode (placing a link like ’edit search results’, ’change the results’) that adds voting buttons, commenting options.” I guess doing so wouldn’t get as many people to participate though – which for Google could decrease the valuable crowd intelligence they may tap with this move.
[Thanks Russell O., Tony and Oradzuza!]
Thursday, November 20, 2008
EtherPad
EtherPad is a collaborative, real-time text editor created by, among others, two ex-Google employees*. An EtherPad document is quickly set up without any need for registration. You can then share the URL of the document, and others who will visit that page will then be able to see, in real-time, whatever you’re typing**. This has an interesting feel to it because there’s no “security buffer” as in typical chat programs: every letter you write will be shown as you write it, including occasional errors before you fix them.
[Edit: I removed the link to the document now, but you can start your own EtherPad of course...] Please join this EtherPad to give it a try (note your IP will show to others). [Update: I’m told EtherPad allows only 8 users maximum at a time. Thanks Guruz, Rossisen and Kirby!]
Yesterday, EtherPad was temporarily down every now and then, but otherwise quite interesting to use. I only tried it for basic chat, but the creators list use cases like meeting notes, teleconferencing, drafting and editing prose, and phone interviews for developers applying for a job. The EtherPad creators write, “With EtherPad, anyone in a meeting can contribute to the notes, or watch them as they’re typed.” They also say, “For phone calls in general, EtherPad serves as both a communication channel and a shared record”.
But wait, doesn’t Google Docs already offer this functionality? The EtherPad makers think the answer is no:
Google Docs is a suite of products that do many things, from word processing to spreadsheets to document management. One thing that Google Docs does not do is real-time collaborative text editing. We think this is an important use case, so we built EtherPad with real-time collaboration as the focus.
For example, with Google Docs it takes about 5 to 15 seconds for a change to make its way from your keyboard to other people’s screens. Imagine if whiteboards or telephones had this kind of delay! In contrast, the EtherPad infrastructure is built to carry your every keystroke at the speed of light, limited only by the time it takes electrons to travel over a wire (such as an “ethernet” cable).
Also, the creators say, Google Docs doesn’t allow easy URL-based sharing of document that also can be edited, doesn’t allow undo for someone else’s changes, and won’t colorize edits by someone else. However, Google Spreadsheets, part of the Google Docs suite, does show colored cell borders (only during the time of editing, though), and it also has a document setting that allows anyone to edit without signing in, like for this document. Simlar to EtherPad, Google Spreadsheets also has a chat box next to the spreadsheet.
The company behind this product is called Appjet Inc., and EtherPad is built on top of the AppJet platform. The creators say, “We originally released AppJet as the easiest way to get a new web app online and hosted, starting with print("Hello world!"), and it has since expanded to support simple database-backed web apps. Over 2,500 apps have been built to date using the AppJet site.”
*David Greenspan, Aaron Iba, and J.D. Zamfirescu, the latter two previously at Google.
**Perhaps made possible due to the technique of Comet/ long-polling.
[Via Friendfeed/ TechCrunch.]
Update: I emailed the AppJet team some questions, and they got back with their answers.
Do you have more potential use cases than the ones [currently listed]? Could EtherPad be used for games, general chat, embedding into other sites or blogs ...?
I’m sure there are many more potential uses. Students come to mind. Today, people have been using it for chat. We’ve got reports of people writing short stories collaboratively (like the games you play as a kid where you alternate adding a word to build a narrative), and probably others we haven’t thought of.
The killer feature we use ourselves, which is why we built it originally, is for meeting notes and drafting prose. For example, we’re collaboratively writing the response to this email using etherpad right now.
Do you believe Google Docs could/ would want to catch up with you guys anytime soon in terms of things like speed and color coding? Are you worried about that?
Well, I care a lot about realtime collaboration, so if I were Google Docs, I would want to catch up. But they may have other priorities. As a user, I stil use Google Docs for some things, like opening up a word document as a web page, but it’s not really usable for realtime text sync. So I guess I see the two products as complementary right now.
Would you want to expand this into a series of tools, like spreadsheets?
Spreadsheets aren’t really on our radar right now. There’s so much that can be done with just plain text. We have one really exciting feature planned that no text editor that we know of (on the web or desktop) has ever done before, but I can’t talk about it yet :).
When did Aaron Iba, and when did J.D. Zamfirescu quit Google?
Aaron left march 2007. J.D. left october 2007.
Would it have been possible to develop EtherPad within Google (the company)?
I don’t know, I’d have to think about that more.
Google Plans to Shut Down Lively 3D World
Google announced that on December 31st they will shut down Lively, which was their 3D chat world, and somewhat of a potential competitor to Second Life. Room widgets embedded in other sites are then supposed to show an image but no more interaction, which would add Lively to the list of Google’s canceled products. Google’s post on this decision does not really give a detailed reasoning for this shut-down of a product which was just released this year, except that they’re saying “we want to ensure that we prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business.” In particular, this leaves some questions unanswered as a company could theoretically embed ads in this 3D world app.
Lively was a great-looking Google product. On the other hand from the beginning on it was riddled with regular program crashes for some users, though the situation improved over time. There were other oddities as well, like a flood of sex rooms almost kidnapping the Lively rooms directory, or custom images never quite fitting the object you’d put them on (and then being disabled altogether for a while). It was still a fun experience, with a fresh and intuitive interface that I found more beginner-friendly than Second Life. Building rooms was entertaining and casual, with features like integrating YouTube videos by pasting the video URL, leading to quickly shareable results.
Now, Google say they’ve “always been supportive of this kind of experimentation because we believe it’s the best way to create groundbreaking products that make a difference to people’s lives” but that they’ve also “always accepted that when you take these kinds of risks not every bet is going to pay off.” Google apparently made up their mind that this bet will never pay off, even if the product was only given the chance to grow for 4 months; a short time to make a good judgment on potential future success. Others feel like Lively was an odd release for Google to begin with; Andy Baio in the forum comments, “I never understood this product. It never seemed to fit Google’s worldview, and even the standalone domain and branding were weird. I wonder what the story behind it was.”
Google says current users of Lively are supposed to make “videos and screenshots” of their “hard work” to preserve some of it. They also mention that current members of the Lively team will move to other projects. In 2006, Niniane Wang, who headed the then-secret project at Google, quoted from an email a colleague sent to their team:
i realized today during the meeting that...
- if we’re working on the best project at google, and
- we’re working at the best company on the planet, then
we’re working on the Best Project in the World.
Already by now, a website by Lively users has sprung up protesting against the shutdown. On the homepage of Livelyzens.com, which is accompanied by a discussion group, the following is written:
Livelyzens are the proud and happy residents of Google Lively. Today we are saddened by Google’s decision to shutdown lively.
We are appealing through this website to keep Lively alive and will showcase all the great things about lively and why Google MUST revisit their decision.
Also, people are currently coming together in – where else – a Lively room set up for the purpose. Called “KEEP LIVELY ALIVE!”, this room plays the song “Staying Alive.” An image from South Park reads “Don’t Kill Kenny.”
[Thanks Andy and Niranjan B.!]
China Tibet Information Center Google-Advertising Its Views On Tibet
With political arrows still being shot back and forth between Beijing and Dharamsala [home of the exiled current Dalai Lama], China has been panning out its efforts to win the propaganda battle over Tibet (...)
Lately we’ve been observing lots of Google ads pointing to the China Tibet Information Center appearing in places like Youtube ... and even our Google Reader. Given the massive reach of Google’s self-serve contextual ads, this means anytime you’re viewing something related to China or more specifically Tibet anywhere on the web, that ad may appear, pointing you to http://eng.tibet.cn/ where China’s version of the Tibet story is presented. You’d think these state behemoths are totally clueless when it comes to the Internet, but clearly these guys know their stuff
[Thanks Kenneth!]
Gmail Rolls Out Themes
A couple of months ago it was mentioned here that Google’s web mail client Gmail might get themes, like a black-and-green terminal view, and the waiting time seems to be over soon – Google announced they’ve started to roll out this feature. While I don’t see it in my Gmail yet (the screenshots in this post are courtesy of Andris and Google), it’s supposed to be added to a Themes tab in your settings. Note some themes are dynamic and may change throughout different times of the day. “We’ve also done a minor facelift to Gmail’s default look,” Google adds.
[Thanks Hebbet, Manoj Nahar, Drewkadium, Andris, Leon, A., Louis V., Niranjan B. and David, with hat tip to Google OS and TechCrunch!]
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Let Me Google That For You
LetMeGoogleThatForYou.com allows you to enter any search query, then grab the resulting permalink to share it with someone else. For instance, if someone in a forum would ask “What does ’AFAIK’ stand for?”, you could (somewhat impolitely) point them to this search, which would then interactively perform a Google search for “afaik” for the visitor. (Kind of the next version of this even more impolite site... and nope, neither site is an official Google site...)
[Via Reddit.]
What Do People Search For?
Google released an app they call Search-based Keyword Tool. Google says this tool “generates keyword and landing page ideas highly relevant and specific to your website” and in doing so, “helps you identify additional advertising opportunities that aren’t currently being used in your AdWords ad campaigns.” (Google AdWords already has a keywords tool. Google says as opposed to the existing tool, this new one “generates keyword ideas based on your website, and identifies those currently not being used in your AdWords account”.)
You can enter the domain of a website, and Google then tries to return a set of search phrases that may be of relevance to your site. Next to the search query, you’ll see an approximation of the number of monthly searches for this, the level of competition, a suggested bidding price if you want to advertise in Google results using AdWords, and the target page from which the keywords were extracted. (Checking with one of my sites, the phrases listed were already showing the identified target page in the top or top 5 spots at google.com, so advertising that using AdWords would probably be redundant.)
Added to entering a domain, you can also just enter a keyword. The keyphrase “comic book" for instance returned “draft comic book confidential”, “draft comic book manager”, “draft comic book issues” and more.
Even if you’re not interested in finding specific data related to your own website, you might get something out of browsing the categories directory of this tool to find out what people search for. I’ve dropped a couple of these lists into a tabbed Google spreadsheet, for categories like computer, consumer electronics, apparel and more (in all countries, for English searches), as included above. For instance, Google says there are an average of around 1,200,000 searches per month for the query baby names, 540,000 for adobe photoshop, 280,000 for calorie counter, and 440,000 for guitar hero 3.
[Via Search Engine Land.]
Monty Python’s YouTube Channel
“For 3 years, you YouTubers have been ripping us off, taking tens of thousands of our videos and putting them up on YouTube...” Genius comedy group Monty Python (from the BBC program Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which started in 1969) now have their own official YouTube channel. The channel aims to collect better organized, higher quality videos – like of Bicycle Repairman – than what was previously posted to the site. [Via Friendfeed.]
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
If Google PageRank Could Sing
... it would probably sound like this.
[Thanks Dean!]
Google’s Life Photo Archive
Google together with Life magazine has published a photo archive of, according to Google, around 2 million photos (with around 8 million supposed to be released in the future). Many of these photos have never before been published, Google says. The actual search behind this is a regular Google image but with the parameter source:life in the query.
Colin in the forum writes “This is pretty cool to be able to browse through each decade of pictures” but notes you’re “limited to 200 results per search”. Colin adds:
Once you click on any photo result, it will load a landing page giving you more details about that photo and the chance to rate the photo with up to a 5 star rating. You can then click on the photo to view an even larger version. I hope over time they remove the 200 result limit. Otherwise you have to constantly tweak your search query to see any other photographs similar to your query. Besides photographs, they also scanned in TIME magazine covers.
As many photos are quite old, this also means many should have passed into the public domain zone, meaning you may be allowed to copy, edit, and republish that portion of the photos any way you like, including for commercial uses. Wikipedia says that “the copyright in a published work expires in all countries ... when ... The work was created and first published before January 1, 1923, or at least 95 years before January 1 of the current year, whichever is later”. However, Wikipedia also mentions some exceptions to these rules.
[Thanks Colin! Also see the official Google blog post.]
Update: On the subject of copyright, Mike Perry comments:
Keep in mind that the copyright clock starts ticking when a document or picture is published not when it is created. Google notes that many of these pictures have never been published, so the ’before 1923 is always public domain’ rule doesn’t apply to them.
A quick look at what Stephen Fishman’s The Public Domain says on unpublished works suggests we’d have to do a bit of work to figure out the copyright status. If the photographer is known and if the rights belong to him, it depends on when he died. One chart suggests if the photographer died before 1938, his unpublished photos are public domain. A chart for anonymous works or works for hire (which is what Life photos probably are) says a photo has to be before 1888 to be sure of being in the public domain.
(If you know more, your comment is appreciated.)
[Thanks Mike!]
Google Analytics for Flash
Google Analytics tracking is now available for Flash as well. “This feature is a translation of the current Google Analytics tracking code into the ActionScript 3 programming language,” the Google Analytics blog says, adding that this is a “joint collaboration” with Adobe.
[Hat tip to Elisabeth and Vinoaj at Friendfeed.]
Monday, November 17, 2008
ConsumerWatchdog.org Criticizes Certain Gmail and Chrome Features (Video)
ConsumerWatchdog released a video in which they criticize certain aspects of Google products which they consider to be privacy problems. Here are their points of focus:
- Gmail’s auto-save features, which submits unsent drafts to Google’s servers
- Chrome’s desktop shortcut feature, which removes the URL from your view
- Google’s context-targeted ad-serving in Gmail
- The inability of people sending email to Gmail users to opt-out of Google data storing
Your thoughts?
Mirror’s Edge Game Trailer
Clive Thompson at Wired says “Playing Mirror’s Edge will make you vomit.” He argues that it’s because you can see your “own” (your avatar’s) body while moving – e.g. the feet when jumping, or the hands when running. The game’s available for the PS3 and the XBox360.
[Wired link via Reddit.]
Google Advertises With Reportedly Wrong Directions
Nicholas Carlson at Silicon Alley Insider writes:
Google launched step-by-step public transportation directions for Google Maps in September. To advertise the feature, Google bought ads in New York’s subway cars.
The ads are cute. They give directions from Grand Central to Madison Square Garden.
The only problem: they’re wrong.
[Thanks Grega M.!]
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